Michael Bettencourt: Essays

This is a selection of essays spanning three decades of musings, observations, analyses and—occasionally, rarely—something like wisdom. Each essay is also downloadable as a PDF and is offered under the Creative Commons Share-Alike License. Printed volumes of these can also be purchased in the Bookstore.

• Corvid Mug: Crows and coffee are potent and protective.
• Housing Rage: “Sin techos”: without roofs, Spanish for the homeless. An outrage in any language.
• Eros on the Escalator: In a moment’s glance on a gliding path, a whole roundelay of emotion can be sung through.
• El Dorado: There’s gold in them thar Palisades.
• The Fire Next Time: Perhaps we should rename James Baldwin’s iconic work The Fire All The Time because his voice still rings pure.
• Civil War and Sorrow: Think upon Sparky. If Sparky can be cared for, then all can be cared for.
• Catwrangling: Head ’em up, move ’em out!
• Re(De)Funding Social Media: Let’s create some financial pain points for the companies and their users.
• Masking: The human face has the best productions values. What happens when you cut off two-thirds of it?
• COVID Reading: I thought re-reading The Plague by Albert Camus would be a perfect fit for our quarantine times. It wasn’t.
• Why defend religious beliefs?: God or country.
• Death of a Fish: The ebb of a life.
• Niggerized: Definition—“unsafe and unprotected, subjected to unjustified violence, and hated.”
• Pronouning: What is it really standing in for?
• When the Police Came to Our Classroom: This is not a story about Sting.