For my third and final civic issues blog post, I am going to step away from the courtroom, and into the holding cells. I would like to discuss the problem of incarceration before conviction found in the United States’ pre-trial jailing system, and more specifically, how cash bail connects one’s access to freedom to their […]
Stacked Juries Disrupt Justice
To those who don’t know, I plan for the overarching theme of my civic issue blogs to be struggles faced by defendants in the United States criminal justice system. Continuing on from my last blog post on the crises in public defenders’ offices across the country, I want to discuss and analyze the issue of […]
The Public Defense System is Broken
For my first civic issue blog, I would like to talk about the ongoing struggles public defenders face in the United States. Though this is an issue with little publicity, it stood out to me because of its inherently civic nature, connection to government and the constitution, and sweeping effects on other areas of the […]
It Was All a Dream | The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Hey everyone! For this week’s blog post, I am going to discuss The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber. One of the reasons I want to talk about The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is its accessibility to all of you guys, as it is a notably short story available for free online. […]
The Bond of Brothers | Sonny’s Blues
Hi everyone! I’m going to pick up this week’s blog post by continuing our discussion about Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin. The focus of this week’s blog post is the name-sake character of the story, Sonny, and how his brotherly relationship with the narrator is directly intertwined with the events that take place in the […]
James Baldwin’s Harlem | Sonny’s Blues
Hey everyone! I wanted to let you guys know that moving forward, I will be dedicating more of my posts to classic short stories instead of longer novels. I love short stories because they can pack so much impact into so few pages, and they are accessible to so many more people. That means that […]
The Best Short Story Ever? | Brooksmith
For this week’s blog post I want to talk about one of my favorite classic short stories that you probably haven’t read, but I love. I love this short story so much that I wrote an entire essay about it in high school by my own choosing. Analyzing the themes of this book was one […]
The Infamous Iago | Othello
The next work of literature I’m going to discuss on Too Long Didn’t Read is a Shakespeare classic: Othello. From the infamous Iago to the symbolic handkerchief, the lines of Othello were by far the most captivating of any Shakespeare play I had to read in high school. In today’s blog post particularly, I want […]
Macon Dead and Pilate | Song of Solomon
This week’s blog post will mirror last week’s topic, as I’ll still be discussing the significance of names in Song of Solomon. However, instead of discussing how names empower individuals and communities, I will discuss how names can also disempower and isolate people. Toni Morrison’s novel is the perfect piece of literature to discuss these […]
Milkman and Not Doctor Street | Song of Solomon
In high school, there were very few books I enjoyed reading front to back. It was almost a foregone conclusion that at some point the novel assigned to my classmates and I would start to drag. One of the only exceptions to this pattern was Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the plot […]