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Meredith ap Robert

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Americans are the frog in the pot: The Obama years, and what could have been

It’s hard to believe that twenty years have come and gone since Barack Obama burst onto the national scene. It’s been twenty-one years, actually, since Obama’s speech at the 2004 DNC. This was the rousing speech that effectively introduced Barack Obama, “a skinny kid with a funny name,” and his audacious hope.

August 21, 2025
Rites of passage: Calvin “Panel” remarks from 2009

In 2009, I was invited to speak on a panel of queer students at Calvin University. The annual event, known simply as “Panel” amongst LGBTQ students on campus, was almost a rite of passage for us: a way to show that you’d dutifully wrestled with your identity, and had come out the other side jaded,…

July 21, 2025
History from the cheap seats: Paris 2024

We arrived in Paris the night before the July 7 legislative elections. So much effort had been invested in the Olympic Games, but now, faced with the possibility of the far right coming in first place, the city was boarding up, unsure of what the night would hold.

July 10, 2025
Nostalgia: The good, the bad—and the children’s literature

Over the past couple years, I’ve revisited a few nostalgic favorites from my childhood. It all started in a used book shop in Nova Scotia, where I stumbled across Nancy Bond’s A String in the Harp. Honestly, it let me down a bit. The dialogue felt inauthentic, staged, and horribly adult. I still enjoyed it,…

June 24, 2025
I support Palestine because I’m queer, not in spite of it

Maybe you’ve seen the meme: Queers for Palestine is like chickens for KFC. Join me as I take on some of the arguments that the LGBTQ community should be pro-Israel. For me, I’m pro-ceasefire, pro-peace, and pro-Palestine because I’m queer, not in spite of it.

June 12, 2025
Americans are the frog in the pot, part I: Grand Rapids

Grand Rapids is a weird place to call home. Today it’s all breweries and hipsters and weed dispensaries and overpriced apartments. But growing up, it was Bland Rapids. A place so boring and unimaginative that corporations would come to town to trial new products. If the straight-laced, God-fearing people of Grand Rapids, Michigan, will buy…

June 4, 2025
Thoughts from the 60th Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies

The 60th Annual International Conference on Medieval Studies. It all comes down to an awful lot of hurry to talk about some very old texts. But that’s America. An insistent drum whose beating makes you forget the pounding of your pulse, the rhythm of your breath, and cadence of the seasons.

May 27, 2025
Toronto Pearson, Terminal 3, the A Gates

In an airport that welcomes 50 million people every year, I’ve found a quiet corner. Tables empty. Outlets free. Plenty of seats at the bar. Just workless workers and captains of industry, keeping one another company in a world that’s waiting, between resignation and rebellion, for whatever’s next.

May 16, 2025
True or false?

I was 17. I should have been thinking about my summer plans, college in the fall. Instead, I found myself in my senior Bible class, staring down the gates of hell.

March 28, 2025
The failures of social media

Every day, when I open Facebook or Instagram, I’m bombarded by reels of muscular, shirtless men thrusting their pelvises and shaking their asses. Despite relentlessly clicking “see less like this,” nothing changes. But I can’t delete my account, because absence from social media means erasing myself. Are we trapped?

March 2, 2025

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