And where, ever since, I have been trying to find perfection again.

Even though perfection seemed impossibly out of reach, I told myself it was pretty simple: just follow the recipe. How hard could it possibly be? Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, gather the ingredients, follow the steps.

But nothing about my kitchen was built for this recipe.

When I went looking for all-purpose flour, I found rice flour, potato starch, wheat flour, everything but the one thing I needed. I asked my mother where it was, and I watched her crawl into the depths of a cabinet I hadn’t known existed, tucked into a corner of the kitchen I’d never dared to cross. She emerged only after unloading thirteen bags of dry ingredients onto the counter, every label written in Korean. Finally, triumphantly she handed me a bag.

All-purpose jeon flour.

Flour for the savory pancakes she fried, meat and vegetables bound in batter. I furrowed my eyebrows. How was I supposed to use this?

“Is there something wrong? Why can’t you use this flour?” my mother asked.

I bit my tongue. I gave up and went to bed. Maybe the cookies would be perfect another day.

Another day came, so I went to the supermarket. At home I had only eggs, unsalted butter, salt, and granulated sugar, so I bought everything else: the flour, more butter, brown sugar, vanilla, and chocolate chips. My mother trailed behind me, holding up a three-pack of Chips Ahoy!.

“Why don’t you buy this instead? Isn’t it easier anyway? It probably tastes just as good.”

I interrupted her before she could finish. Homemade is better, I said. It’s different. It’s perfect. I reminded myself, again, that she just didn’t understand.

The butter was the next thing to defeat me. Every recipe insists the butter must soften to room-temperature—non-negotiable, because soft butter folds into the sugar smoothly and keeps you from biting down on gritty granules in an otherwise flawless cookie. But when I came home from school, I found that my mother had returned the butter to the fridge. I scoured the internet for how to soften it faster. Google gave me three options.

Option A: Microwave your butter.

I don’t have a microwave.

Option B: Use a double boiler.

Option C: Use your oven for approximately 2 minutes.

Both options B and C felt like more effort than they were worth, mine and the electricity’s both. I stood there wondering why we didn’t have a microwave, deciding it must matter somehow to Korean cooking, some logic I couldn’t see. Then I abandoned the whole idea again. Maybe the cookies would be better another day.

Then, finally, came the day that felt like the day—the one where everything would go exactly as it should. No interruptions. No substitutions. Just perfect. I rolled up my sleeves. I creamed the softened butter with the sugar until it turned light and airy. I cracked each egg into a small bowl first, checking for shells, then poured them in one by one. I sifted the dry ingredients and folded them slowly into the wet. I added the chocolate chips and watched the dough glisten before I covered it and set it in the fridge to chill. When it was ready, I weighed each portion—16.3 grams exactly, no more, no less—and spaced the balls precisely two inches apart. I baked them and watched through the oven door as they spread, edges going gold, centers puffing. When the timer dinged, I pulled the tray out and breathed in the warmth and the sweetness. I let them cool, just for a moment. Then I picked one up and took a bite.

It was, I think, perfect. And it changed nothing.

That is the part no recipe warns you about. The cookie did not recreate my first cookie. It didn’t summon the idyllic afternoon it belonged to, or carry me back to my best friend’s house, where cookies and milk were an ordinary after-school snack. It didn’t erase the memory of eating chapssal dduk, chewy rice cakes from the Korean grocery store, dense with beans and nuts, after school instead, wondering why it never felt the same. It didn’t smooth the way my mother stumbles through her English, her eyes darting to me to translate, while my best friend’s mom asked in perfect, effortless English whether I wanted more. It didn’t turn our home into that other home, the one that was perfectly, quintessentially, all-around American, the one that felt normal. Even a perfect cookie, I finally understood, would never be the cookie.

Before I could even swallow, my mother shuffled into the kitchen carrying a bag from the Korean grocery store. She smiled and asked if I wanted some chapssal dduk. I said no too quickly. I heard the sharpness in my own voice and the small pause it left in hers. I pursed my lips and stared at her leaning against the doorframe, and the kitchen went quiet, so quiet the humming oven seemed to stop. I bit my tongue, put my head down, and piled more cookies onto my plate. Save some for your brother, she said. I didn’t look up. I just nodded, and when I was sure she had gone, I got up for milk.

But before I left the kitchen, I paused. I opened the bag she had left on the counter, and I carefully placed a single chapssal dduk on my plate, right beside my cookies.

It was not our conflict, but by mid-March it had become impossible to separate from our lives. Schools moving online, and high-pitched safety alerts shrieking from our phones. Daily ballistic missile counts from the Ministry of Defense. Drone interceptions overhead. Explosions rattling our windows. The scream of fighter jets patrolling the sky. Threats issued online in ALL-CAPS. The bombing of a nuclear plant in Iran resulted in a counterstrike against the one in Abu Dhabi. A tweet proclaiming the end of a civilization.

The more immediate question was what any of this meant for us. My wife and I have lived in Dubai for nearly 20 years. We have built our careers and have raised our 11 and 13 yr old children here. We didn’t want to leave, but we also didn’t want to be unable to leave if things deteriorated. I found myself reading everything obsessively. News articles, flight tracking websites, munitions analyses, drone specifications, interceptor costs and social media threads. Each promised clarity, but none delivered. Every conversation with friends seemed to begin the same way, with no explicit mention of its subject: “What are you guys thinking?”

“The UAE is our home,” one said. “We’re staying.”

I admired their certainty, which made me feel guilty for even considering the alternative. But once you allowed yourself to contemplate leaving, the questions multiplied. We were entirely dependent on air-conditioning; what if the power plants were bombed? What about the desalination plants that provided our drinking water in a country where there is no fresh water? Or the airport, potentially our only exit? How much risk was reasonable? How would we know when that line had been crossed? Friends looked at the same information and reached different conclusions. Some left immediately. Some stayed and bought Starlink subscriptions. Some returned just as others were leaving. We debated endlessly without finding an answer.

For me, uncertainty felt harder to manage than the fear of being struck by a missile or debris. That kind of fear seems straightforward. Because you don’t control the source of it, it also seems easy to dismiss, like the fear of being struck while crossing the road. In my case, uncertainty had disguised itself as research and the promise of optionality.

We did have options. Escape is a privilege. My wife and I have financial resources and flexible jobs. The four of us have passports that allow us to travel. Hundreds of millions of people currently living through wars don’t have these luxuries. We could leave. But even that raised questions. We are an Indian and Pakistani family, so a reflexive retreat to our familial homelands was not possible given those countries’ hostile visa rules. As US citizens, we could have gone to America, but it felt emotionally distant and the time difference would have made online schooling for the kids difficult.

Dubai is the closest we have come to building a home. We didn’t want to leave. But the question became less about whether it was safe enough to stay and more about whether we would still be able to leave if it wasn’t. One evening, my wife and I were talking at the dining table after the kids had gone to bed, scrolling again through the latest updates. We had done this every night for days. Finally she looked up with the energy that comes from being on the verge of clarity. “What are we actually waiting for?” We looked at each other and realized, almost without saying it, that we had our answer. We packed quickly, boarded our dog while we considered a more permanent decision, booked an Airbnb in Bangkok for a month and bought return flights good for three months.

Why Bangkok? The city had a reputation for delicious food, seemed relatively easy to navigate, had plenty of long-stay apartments and an airline that had direct flights to the places we needed to be for work. More importantly, it was distant enough from the war to provide some peace of mind. Upon arrival, the war disappeared from view. Our new city had its own concerns. Families gathered by the building’s swimming pool. Food stalls opened in the evening as office workers hurried home. A few days in, I slid open the balcony door to let in some fresh air and heard a familiar whoosh. My body reacted before I did. I tightened and scanned the sky for the trails I had become accustomed to seeing over Dubai. It took another second to realize I was hearing one of the Bangkok metro trains pull into a nearby station. A few sparrows continued wheeling in the sky. I felt the tension leave my body almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Soon, that muscle memory also faded. My obsession with tracking the news abated. Clarity seemed less relevant. Our days took on a rough shape. Lunch at home and dinner out. The owner of a tucked-away, cash-only restaurant remembered the prawn pad thai and lemongrass chicken salad we had ordered the first time. During our third Muay Thai boxing lesson at a nearby gym, one of the regulars completed her sparring sequence with a series of thwacks that left us staring enviously at her flexibility and strength. Later, she removed her gloves, unrolled her hand wraps and looked over at us noobs with a smile. “You bring your kids for boxing. Very good!” It was nothing really, an opening to a conversation, but it was a kindness that moved me more than I expected.

Bangkok began to feel less like a waiting room than a place where life was being lived, however temporarily. I realized, because it had been taken away, that I had been missing the rhythm of home.

Home is a place, but it is also things and people. The sofa that remembers your shape. The tree you watered for ten years, now shading the patio. Waving to your barber when you see him in the grocery store. More than anything, home is the absence of uncertainty about tomorrow. The shortcut to the gym to beat traffic. The kind of salad you’ll eat for lunch. The weekend activities for the kids that you’ve divided with your wife. Knowing how to shampoo your sofa after the dog soiled it. Remove all that, and even a comfortable life feels untethered.

After just two weeks, a ceasefire was announced. The kids’ schools wrote to say they’d reopen in person. This time the decision required remarkably little consideration. To have the kids back in school with their friends was too strong a pull. There was a flight. We wanted to be on it.

The moment we landed in Dubai, the preceding weeks dissolved. Without the daily tempo of tit-for-tat strikes, the psychological miasma that had occupied so much mental space just wasn’t there. Ordinary life reabsorbed us with unthinking force. Walking the dog down the familiar back streets, jogging under a blue sky at the beach, buying locally grown blueberries. A tree on our boundary wall had been overgrown for months, its roots cracking through the stone tiles in our garden. I spoke to our neighbor about trimming it. “Just give me some notice so I can take the lights off the branches,” she said. I ordered replacement tiles. I remember being elated at the ordinariness of the conversation, with its implicit investment in a tomorrow.

Unsurprisingly, the war has stopped and restarted several times since we returned. Here on the edge of the conflict, I understand positions may shift, and the uncertainty will continue. But I also realize that logging missile interceptions or speculating endlessly on how the war will unfold is irrelevant.

Uncertainty rarely resolves itself definitively. It tricks us into believing that a little more research, one more article, one more expert conversation, one more week will reveal the perfect path forward. Yet the future will never be clear. The place we call home may shift depending on citizenship, careers, climate change or persecution. These are factors over which we have little control. We choose to live anyway, and inevitably, without us noticing, life recreates its ordinary rhythm.

Then, from the back, a graduate student asked a devastating question: “How am I supposed to build a life in the face of this news? Where do I find hope?”

I find myself thinking of her as the headlines once again turn apocalyptic, with a new threat looming. The public resignation of Jacob Coxon, a former researcher with Anthropic, over his fears about AI’s fast-growing genocidal superpowers, has sparked a much-needed call for an industry-wide slowdown.

It’s past time for more robust regulation of AI companies, and I applaud the whistleblowers calling for it. Meanwhile, we average citizens are left reeling. How are we to live in the face of these novel apocalyptic visions? How do we make our grocery lists and take our kids to school while knowing that AI could be planning a highly-coordinated global drone attack or designing a lethal infectious virus within the decade? Where do we find hope?

Back in 1982, during the thick of the Cold War, when the apocalyptic flavor of the day was the threat of nuclear annihilation, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton published a seminal paper: “Beyond Psychic Numbing: A Call to Awareness.” In it, he named the human tendency to numb out in the face of absurdity. We repress our knowledge that everyone we love might imminently be bombed into radioactive rubble so that we can tend to the dinner, the tantrum, the deadline. This is practical and necessary and sensible. It is also spiritually corrosive, not to mention politically ineffectual. The existential threat still exists; we have simply turned away.

I raise this not to cast any blame. I myself behave this way, every day. I, too, have exigencies: classes to prep, papers to grade, dinners to make, bills to pay. I have a whole repertoire of numbing strategies, many of them at my literal fingertips. (I’m looking at you, iPhone.) I raise it because I want to become more aware of how I tend to numb out, so that I can resist it. And, crucially, because I need your help.

Yes, you, dear reader. You there, phone in hand, perched, just like me, on the dizzying spin of this aching earth. I need you to help me imagine this latest existential threat, to feel the way it quickens my blood, prickles my skin, and swells tidally within me. I need you to help me sit with the feeling, to keep me from numbing it away.

Why? Because it is this willingness to fully imagine the threat—to feel it in our bodies—that allows us to connect with one another in our shared feeling, and through that connection, to act.

Lifton concludes his paper by calling the cultural moment “desperate but hopeful.” Awareness of the nuclear threat was blossoming, and with it a movement toward disarmament. Energized by Dr. Randall Forsberg’s “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race,” and goaded by authors like Jonathan Schell, who published a series of urgent essays in the New Yorker, people spoke out in city councils, places of worship, public housing, labor unions, and town meetings. And they organized. A million people demonstrated at the UN’s Special Session on Disarmament just a few months before Lifton’s article published—the largest disarmament protest in U.S. history. It took a groundswell—a wave of action spurred by deep human feeling—to pull the U.S. and the Soviet Union back from the brink.

We are at a similar moment now, only the deadlocked powers are the U.S. and China. But awareness is alive and growing. People are pushing back against the massive data center build-out. As of May 2026, at least 430 local opposition groups across 40 states had sprouted up—a sevenfold increase since December. And this activism is already producing results: since 2024, more than 170 billion dollars in data center investment across 20 U.S. states has been blocked, stalled, or canceled. Even more encouraging: data center opposition bridges political divides. A recent Pew Research survey found concern about AI outranks excitement among most Americans.

Awareness is rising, and with it, hope. The AI-pocalypse is not inevitable. Not if we speak out, organize, and—soon—vote. We the people still have the power to elect representatives who believe in AI regulation, and to hold them accountable for instituting change. We can still pull back from this particular brink. But to do it, we need to resist numbness’ siren call and allow ourselves to really imagine, in a physical, bone-and-blood way, the disaster we want to avoid. Not all the time. Not even most of the time. But enough of the time to keep ourselves from looking away.

“This issue,” concluded Lifton in 1982, referring to nuclear proliferation, “is deadly serious, but our call is not a grim one. It is a call to life.” A call, in other words, to the fullness of fellow human feeling. It’s emotional and spiritual work, as much as it is political. And it requires support—from loved ones, friends, communities.

I’ll do it if you will, dear reader. Let’s live fully, together.

Within a year of joining the organization, she had me attending Monday night community Bible study at Central Dallas Church (an early partnership with the Church of the Incarnation) and teaching a dance class for girls in Roseland Homes. She didn’t coerce me or hover; she simply invited me and walked alongside me in loving community.  My experience with Marva mirrors countless stories of many community members and friends.  It’s just who she is. Marva’s impact on the organization and the people was so important that Larry wrote an entire chapter about her in his first book, The Wealth of the Poor.  

 Due to a loss of funding, we stopped managing the Roseland Community Center and programs and had to transition Central Dallas Church out of our programs. Marva’s leadership, community organizing, and deep relationships were key in forging a partnership with the Church of Incarnation that led to integral collaboration and support for programming at Roseland and Central Dallas Church.  

Marva taught me how to walk my talk better, to be in genuine community, and to respect people’s unique journeys. I am the better because of her, and so is the City of Dallas. 

Where are you from, and how does that influence the work you do? 

I’m from Phoenix, AZ. I worked in finance and human resources for years for about 25-26 years.  I’ve always worked with people- in finance, people had needs, but I enjoyed the HR work more because I was really impacting people’s lives.  

When did you work at CitySquare, and what was your role? 

I started in the summer of 1995. I went there for services. My husband had just passed away, and my daughter, Ronyell, was a little girl.  Larry met us at the stairs and asked if Ronyell could go to a camp they were holding. I said I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know much about him or the organization.  But we talked, and I let her go to camp- she loved it. 

And then one day I asked him, ” How do you run this place? Do you use volunteers? He said yes and asked me more about my background. I started volunteering at the Food Pantry. Larry and Janet Morrison- Lane, who was the director of the Food Pantry at the time, were away at a conference and left me to oversee the pantry; they didn’t know what to expect upon returning.  I’d reorganized the pantry so well they offered me a job. And that’s kind of how I started. He just met me where I was. He didn’t know that I had just lost my husband, had just gotten out of the hospital with tuberculosis, and had just had a lot going on.  I should have gone back to Phoenix, but I didn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t now.  

My first official role was in the Food Pantry.  I was managing the food pantry, when a dear co-worker and friend, Dan Umphress, told Larry that my calling was with families and not in the food pantry.  He was right.  My calling wasn’t the food pantry, but that was part of my journey. That was when I started working in Roseland in 1999.  We had a summer camp there, and I was doing community outreach- going door to door, and I met amazing women who were battling addiction, terminal illness, and so much.   We added programs in Roseland in response to the community’s requests and needs, such as a food pantry, an award-winning medical clinic, parenting and education programs, and a women’s self-care program named Ladies Oxygen that is still going today. We also ended up managing the Roseland Community Center.   

Why did you work at CitySquare? 

I think for me, it met a need I had in my life at that time. I needed to be taken care of. I will say this about Larry: he valued Black women. He thought we brought something to the table, and that always impressed me. Over the years, I knew I could’ve worked somewhere else, but I loved what I was doing. I love building relationships. I like meeting people where they are and having programs that meet their needs. I also love it when people pay it forward and come back to help somebody else. We always valued that at Central Dallas Ministries/CitySquare. 

What made CitySquare special to you? 

All of the staff, all the Central Dallas Church members, and all the families I’ve met along the way on my journey with Central Dallas Ministries /CitySquare.  Everyone had different gifts, but we all worked out of the gift of love, the gift of faith, and the gift of non-judgment. 

What is the legacy of your contributions to CitySquare? 

My legacy is loving people where they are, creating an atmosphere of trust, and knowing it’s okay to fail and pick yourself back up. 

What are you doing now? 

I volunteered at Incarnation Place before my role was formalized in 2012.  I now serve as the Director of Outreach at Incarnation Place, where I continue to serve the Roseland Community and the members of the Central Dallas Church.

It is an exceedingly popular theme this year – and it’s not surprising. For kids, archaeology is the perfect combination of hands-on, material based exploration combined with a detective story trying to puzzle together a picture of the past from bits of stones, bones, and pottery. It speaks to children’s innate curiosity about the world and their place in it. Add LEGOs to the mix and you clearly have a winning combo.

Turns out it’s not just kids who love archaeology. Documentaries, TV series, and movies on archaeology or archaeological themes are popular. Hardly a week goes by without news of some archaeological discovery making international headlines, like about the giant statues on Rapa Nui or the complex domestication history of cats. Archaeology sells.

People also spend their time and money on exploring archaeology. Archaeotourism – visiting archaeological sites and museums on vacation – is popular. The Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt attracted more than 15 million visitors last year. In the US, many of the most famous archaeological sites are in or around national parks, such as Mesa Verde National Park, that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors a year despite their more remote locations.

Why does archaeology resonate with so many of us? Perhaps partly because it taps into our inner child – our joy of discovery. But it also provides us with a unique perspective on the world and ourselves. Archaeology amplifies the voices and lives of normal people – not just the victors or rulers. Through the fragmented items people left behind, archaeologists reconstruct real people’s lives. We uncover the food they ate; the houses they built, the art they created; the toys, games, and instruments they played. We see how they cared for their sick and injured; honored their ancestors; prayed to their gods; and laid their loved ones to rest. We recreate their worlds, politics, economies, and rituals from the traces they left us. And with all of this, we see other ways of living; other ways of interacting; and other ways of organizing societies that often feel very strange and distant from our own today.

Despite this distance, they teach us that although their lives are finite, they can still be felt today, even if only through a piece of pottery with a fingerprint, or a portrait of a person from 30,000 years ago carved into mammoth ivory. Ideas that changed the world like the wheel; ancient cities that emerged and eventually abandoned; political institutions that rose and fell; all of these show us that humans are always changing and adapting. Archaeology provides us with so many examples of different ways of living, surviving, and thriving, as well as responses to challenges of political instability, climate change, and warfare.

Many news stories today challenge our humanity – they show us the worst of us, our politicians, our worlds. Archaeology speaks to the breadths and depths of our humanity, our understanding of interconnectedness of the people and the earth we inhabit. We can marvel at the ingenuity and courage of colonizing the Pacific, navigating areas of open sea the size of north America with low tech but complex knowledge of seafaring and astronomy; and we cringe at the brutality of a mass grave from 6200 years ago, where an entire village of women, men, and children were murdered. We bend our brains to imagine worlds very different from our own – while knowing that they are not figments of imagination but that they once existed, as we do now. Sometimes it reminds us to be grateful for living in our current time and place.

This cultural heritage is worth protecting, studying, and supporting. Funding cuts to the National Science Foundation, National Park Service, and other federal agencies have already curtailed archaeological research worldwide and eliminated hundreds of archaeology jobs, leaving U.S. heritage unprotected. Without this stewardship, cultural heritage in the US is at grave risk; so too is our ability to conduct research elsewhere and train new generations of archaeologists.

Archaeology may never cure cancer – although it does provide insight into the evolution of many diseases and the human body that help other researchers understand these pathogens better. It may also not develop new technologies – although it can play a role in creating more humane and ethical AI technologies. It enriches our understanding of the planet, our species, and ourselves, and challenges us to address current environmental issues in novel (or ancient) ways. While funding has always only been a tiny drop in the overall research funding bucket (0.06% of NSF’s overall budget in 2023), private foundations can’t make up the difference – we need to fight to reinstate funding to our federal grant agencies, research institutions, and universities.

Archaeology reminds us that fragile lives can leave enduring legacies. It demands humility, highlights our humanity, and inspires all of us – not just this year’s First League LEGO teams – “to uncover the past to discover the future”. Let’s not let it fade away.

Please find below a summary of our conversation.

Where are you from and how does that impact the work you do?

I was born and raised in Lubbock, TX. Lubbock really helped me understand what having a community did because I was actually raised in a community where everybody took care of their neighbors. Like, we really knew our teachers because we lived in the community with them. It was beautiful, because if somebody was sick, my grandmother made some stew or something else, and we took it to them.  This formed my concept of caring for each other and ensuring we all have what we need.

When did you work at CitySquare, and what was your role?

I was volunteering at Central Dallas Church, where we were members, and Larry told me he needed help starting an adult education program in Roseland Homes and at our health clinic on Peak St.   I was working for Aetna, and the work at Central Dallas Church was a welcome change from corporate.  Two to three years after that, the funding ended for that program, and I thought I was going to go find another job. Larry said there are two attorneys, John Greenan and Ken Koonce, who wanted to start a public interest law firm within Central Dallas Ministries, and asked if I wanted to join them.  I said of course.  I became a paralegal, learned all I could and worked at our law firm for five years.  During that time, Larry decided we really needed to focus on housing now that we had hunger, health, and law and other community programs.  He and John Greenan started meeting with Dallas Housing Authority and other housing leaders.  John asked me if I wanted to join him in the housing work and I worked with the CDC as the Director of Projects through 2012.  We started with smaller apartment buildings that housed youth in our TRAC program. We all learned as we worked alongside the community, and that led us to take on larger projects like CityWalk at Akard, The Cottages, LoneStar Gas Lofts, and more.

Why did you work at CitySquare?

I was working in the small-business market for Aetna, and I just knew there was more for me to do professionally.  Central Dallas Ministries was an excellent opportunity to do something I was already doing as a volunteer. I loved working with my mom and with the community.  I learned as much as I contributed, if not more. My first office was in the clinic, and I got to work alongside these amazing doctors, and every day was different.  I loved that Larry became like family to us and that he was never afraid to take on new challenges, encouraging me to do the same.

What made CitySquare special to you?

My mom taught me to leave things better than you found them. I loved that we all felt that way at CItySquare.  The neighbors and community members were as invested in me as I was in them.  That exchange and relationship we had with them was and is special. I still have relationships with staff and community members who have become family. I also better understood how to help address systemic barriers.  I loved that we could provide supportive services to neighbors taking a GED class or living in one of our properties.  Providing comprehensive services was so important.  I took all of those lessons from Central Dallas Ministries/CitySquare as I worked with my mom in the YES program for youth, and we founded Tapestry, a non-profit dedicated to breaking the cycle of domestic violence.

What is the legacy of your contributions to CitySquare?

One of my main contributions over the years was activating gifts in people that they didn’t know they had or giving them space to lean into their gifts. I also walked in faith and worked with so many unknowns in all of my roles. Of course, part of my legacy is our housing projects, like CityWalk, and the community we built with neighbors, volunteers, partners, and board members over the years.

What are you doing now?

I live in Seattle now and work as a Housing Developer with Homestead Community Land Trust. I love that I get to continue much of the work I did at Central Dallas Ministries and CitySquare in Dallas, partnering with community members and local churches throughout Seattle as we bring new affordable housing solutions to the area.

Though it is certainly not life and death, a parallel confusion is evident in discerning what is real and what is fabricated from news and social media to homework that is completed with little or more than a little help from AI. As a parent and university professor, the confrontation of truth vs. fake is nearly constant.

I grew up in Mumbai/Bombay, India where guns were not plentiful except on Bollywood screens. Parents could send their children on play dates without worrying about whether the adults in the house had guns.

Here in the U.S., it is different. Plentiful daily gun violence belied the use of guns for protection.  Guns made mass shootings –where more than four people are shot –entirely possible and probable. In the U.S., there were nearly 340 mass shootings from South Carolina to Minnesota to Mississippi.

But beyond the encounters between a police officer and an individual out in the streets, a doorbell ring is taken to be a home invasion and one can never be sure who has a gun and who does not. We are suspicious of each other and have to overcome more than shyness to build community.

In the age of AI, one can never be sure what is real and what is fake, what is disinformation and what is truth. To be sure, mortality is not at stake with the ubiquitous AI use, but the future is.

In schools and colleges, the rise of large language models (LLMs) is making essay writing a breeze with just a prompt. I have struggled with assessing how much a student has written is their own work.  Now that the first semester of the year is half completed, it is critical to examine how to deal effectively with AI use before more knowledge learning is lost.

It is necessary to treat LLMs as new ways of accessing the digital world, replacing search engines, much like the calculators replaced the slide rules.  A 2025 study of more than 12,000 high school and college students shows that 97% of the students use AI in their assignments. It should be noted that not all use of AI is cheating.

As in other domains, we are using AI to solve problems created by AI. It is possible to run the term papers through various plagiarism-detection software and decide to set the checking software at the level of a phrase or of a sentence, or at the level of an inarticulately paraphrased but correctly cited scientific paper. Then, assessing if say a plagiarism score of 10% (on some hastily defined scale) is sufficient to initiate punitive actions. There is little guidance from college administrators or the developers of such software packages.

Perhaps developers are waiting for the real-world training instructors inadvertently provide to improve their packages. Perhaps in less than a year, they will post data with confidence intervals based on the behavioral patterns of students and teachers.

To be fair, cheating has always been prevalent in schools and colleges. And, instead of bribing a classmate to write your essay, you need only write a prompt in ChatGPT.  As always, it is up to the instructor to decide how much thought, agony and learning went into a term paper.

But we lose something when we begin each encounter with a stranger or read the first lines of an essay from a place of suspicion. Instructors wonder if the student did really write this, how much came from them and how much was an LLM, and more importantly, do the students understand what they have written.

There are some dire warnings of the use of AI. As recent research shows it can result in, “The erosion of trust, the hollowing-out of the student–teacher relationship, and the further commodification of learning threaten to precipitate a legitimation crisis for the academy itself.”

One solution may be to go old school on this one and use pen and paper in class.  And also to really get to know the students IRL.

Separated based on race in U-Hauls,
they waited hours for their captors
to release them, no due process,
no access to lawyers, detained
without constitutional rights
in a land known for freedom,

our city under siege.

Where are you from, and how does that impact the work that you do
I was born in San Diego, CA. But when I was 4, right before kindergarten, my parents moved us to the tiny, tiny island of Guam because my parents were ministers in the Christian Church. I lived in Guam for the formative years of childhood. I moved back to the mainland United States in the middle of my junior year of high school. Guam is a tiny little place where everybody knows everybody. I think the total population of Guam when I was there was about 100,000 people. So yeah, and it’s 30 miles long and 8 miles wide. So it’s like a small town, right? If somebody grew up in a small town, they would very much understand the sort of upbringing I had, where you know or are related to everyone. You definitely know everyone’s business, and that comes with good and bad. It’s nice to always have a guy for a thing like a mechanic, a baker, or whatever you need, but it has drawbacks. I think that growing up as a young black girl, and a child of ministers, in a place where I could actually count the number of other black people on my fingers and toes that I knew and was surrounded by, definitely shaped my life and the work that I do today. It helped me to see systems, power, and community, and what it meant to have your needs met or not to have them met.

When did you work at CitySquare, and what was your role?

I was there from 2010 to 2012, and my role was Manager of Donor Relations. My role was really about helping to elevate the voice of the organization to the people who could help fund the work we were doing, to humanize the work for our donors, and implore them to move from empathy to action.

Why did you work at CitySquare?

Right before I came over to City Square, I was at Habitat for Humanity, and I had been with the North Texas Food Bank. So I always knew of CitySquare because they were a pantry of the North Texas Food Bank, and similar to Habitat, they were working on housing as well.  CitySquare had a very poignant and unapologetic focus on social justice, and I didn’t see a lot of other nonprofits being so stark and so 10 toes down at that time. I was like, these people are about that life, and I think these are my people. And I believe these things too. And I feel like at that period of time, right after the recession and those early 2010s, I personally felt that nonprofits were so sanitized in the language. We are so focused on the feel-good, nicey, nice, goody two-shoes aspect of what people had known nonprofits for. And people still thought of nonprofits as charity, not as justice work. And I think because my parents were ministers, it instilled a deep belief that justice has to be both systemic and personal.

What made CitySquare special to you?

Right before I came to CitySquare, I had been going through a process of deconstructing both my faith and my political beliefs. It really affirmed my awakening. I had already been starting to have it, but that awakening of deconstructing what I was taught about democracy, equity, and who deserves help. It underscored that for me in ways that I had finally found a group of people where I knew I wasn’t crazy. I was surrounded at CitySquare by people from case managers to community members and donors to Larry, who all challenged me to think more deeply, to act more boldly, and to stay rooted in proximity and community. That time helped shape my political, moral, and professional identity in really lasting ways that I’ve tried to explain to people, and I have ended up just saying you had to have been there. Sometimes there are just people and moments and a convergence in life that is so special that you cannot remake it. And I’ve never once again found a place like CitySquare and don’t know that I ever will. And that’s okay because I received so much from it.

What is the legacy of your contributions to CitySquare?

We were in a growth period when I was there, and I love that I got to bring so many people into the work of CitySquare. We had a development team of four, and then we grew to, I think, at max, to like a team of 12, and we just all happened to be women. This group of women got to shape how CitySquare told its story. We were fundraising and communications, shaping the story told externally to funders, policymakers, and the broader public. I’ve always been a storyteller, so I have my degrees in Communications, and I’ve always wanted to do that work. I’m so proud of the campaigns that we launched, the annual reports we did, and the events we erected. I always tell people that I knew about Cory Booker back when he was the Mayor of Newark, and we brought him to the prayer breakfast, and you all think you’re hip to something. I was like, we’ve been knowing. I hope that I left behind a legacy of using communications and storytelling, not just for marketing, not just for fundraising, but as a tool for justice and truth-telling.

What are you doing now?

So many things. My day job, the jobby job, as I call it, is Executive Vice President at Edelman, the world’s largest communications firm. I teach marketing and change management at Cal State East Bay. I write for MSNBC and Fast Company, and I am a newly minted author (Please check out her book, The Price of Nice, available on October 28, 2025), and I’m a mom too. And so I am still doing the work of justice. It looks a little different today, but similar to what I feel like my legacy contribution to CitySquare was, using truth-telling and storytelling as a tool for justice and for collective awareness and understanding is still what I get to do today. 

The event was created in 1945 and, for me, became intensely personal in 2011.

On a spring morning that year, I hopped on my bike to visit the farmer’s market, setting off to find asparagus and whatever chance might bring. What chance brought that day was a spill off my bike and a blow to my head (a head that wore no helmet), resulting in a coup-contrecoup that caused a seizure and sent blood gushing from my nose and ears. I woke up in the hospital a few days later and slowly processed that I had been comatose.

For a period following an emergency craniectomy, there was no clear indication that I would ever wake up. With assistance, I was able to sit up and begin the first steps of recovery from traumatic brain injury.

During that recovery, I had to resign from the university where I had worked for 12 years, leaving behind professional initiatives I had launched, managed and grown. I re-learned how to climb stairs and drive. I changed the state I lived in, and I profoundly changed my life. The road to recovery is long. I am on it still.

For some time, the disabling effects of my injury were obvious. I moved and spoke slowly. Severed nerves caused hearing loss in my left ear that makes me an annoying dinner table companion if I am seated to your right. Nerve damage also resulted in loss of a piece of my vision in my left eye. I can no longer pluck a baseball out of the air if it is tossed at me from my left side. My sense of balance was severely impacted. I have a limited ability to stand on one leg. I am left-handed, and my right brain injury decreased the strength and coordination of my dominant hand. My already imperfect penmanship became almost illegible.

These long-term impacts of my injury are losses when compared to my abilities before the accident. But they are disabilities that would have been invisible or negligible in my return to work, where, for instance, I am rarely required to stand on one leg. We encounter such disabilities every day without registering that we do.

In my classrooms, on the first day, I tell the students that I may not see a raised hand on my left and that they should help each other out and call my attention to their classmates who are signaling willingness to participate. They do, and often some of them will, in response, point out their own blind spots or difficulties hearing.

Prior to my accident, I pioneered developments in digitization and in the creation of online information resources. I was an important voice in the development of academic library publishing. And, as this month seeks to acknowledge, I have continued to make substantial contributions to the workplace. I helped scholars realize the potential of sharing their scholarship widely and in innovative formats. I have educated hundreds of librarians, and I now direct the No. 1 ranked library and information science master’s degree program in the United States. I have authored several articles and published two books. All of this has been accomplished despite, or perhaps because of, my non-obvious disabilities.

Shortly after my accident, my then-employer’s risk management office looked at the scores of my cognitive tests and deemed that my executive function was too impaired for me to successfully do my job. When the Social Security administration denied my disability claim (as it tends to do for traumatic brain injury sufferers), it suggested that I could be gainfully employed as a newspaper clipper. But I was apparently not able to run an academic library or a university press.

The opportunities for which National Disability Employment Awareness Month advocates were not available to me.

In 2013, I was hired in a faculty position at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. My salary and my record of scholarship and teaching would indicate to many people that I am normally capable now. Colleagues and collaborators who do not know about my medical history are taken by surprise when I describe my injury and the extent of its impact on my abilities.

During recovery, I had a successful cranioplasty, but my excised skull flap had spent so much time in a freezer waiting to be reunited with my skull that it warped and will never sit flush. I have a permanent indentation that my then-elementary-school son cheerfully described as “Like a cheerio bowl in the head.” To convey the gravity of my injury to a new acquaintance, I sometimes put their hand on the dent in my head, now helpfully covered by hair. There are winces and small gasps in response, but mostly people say, “I never would have known.”

I am normal. I am disabled. Aren’t we all?

Several of the medical professionals with whom I worked with throughout my recovery _— a group of people whose intelligence and dedication are an extraordinary gift to those they serve — told me that I was a miracle.

My emergency neurosurgeon told my family that she had never seen a brain so damaged. I am a teaching case for the emergency orthopedic surgeon who patched together my broken clavicle and shattered elbow despite skepticism from his colleagues that I would ever be functional enough to use them. He shows his students a picture of me, playing with one of my children, and tells the students it’s always best to assume recovery.

Another doctor, who questioned whether my treatment was worth the investment, given the extent of damage, called me over for a celebratory photograph when, two years later, she realized I had just beaten her in a neighborhood 5k race.

My story isn’t meant to downplay the damage caused by traumatic brain injury and its lasting impact. I am asking that we not measure our abilities or those of others against some yardstick of normalcy that simply doesn’t exist.

In keeping with the aims of this month, I urge all of us to respect the limitations of those we work with, and, more importantly, recognize their potential. All of them. All of us.

I was, and I am badly broken. A broken miracle. We all are. We need opportunities, in the workplace and in the world, to demonstrate that.