“Among migrants, homo sapiens is king.” — Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration

Climate change has always been a major motivating factor behind changes in human migration. However, the last few years have seen a backlash against climate migrants among the planet’s more advanced states, and the march of global warming and climate change will certainly exacerbate this issue. In fact, according to the widely circulated estimate by Oxford researcher and environmentalist Norman Myers, some 200 million human beings may be migrating to avoid severe climate change by 2050. Some estimates even place that number as high as 1 billion.

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The Daily Beast reported yesterday that in May 2018, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz may have paid for the sexual services of a teenager, when he sent his friend Joel Greenberg $900 via Venmo. It seems since payments made on Venmo are public by default, reporters were able to piece together that Greenberg then passed on three payments the next day to three different women with amounts also totaling $900.

Gaetz isn’t the first person to have his alleged vices showcased for all to see via this Venmo feature, just the most famous. And it may end up contributing to his…

When you highlight the fact that crime is lower among the immigrant population—including undocumented immigrants—in the United States than in the general population, someone eventually pipes up to ask, “Then why are there so many immigrants in federal prison?”

This question hopes to serve as a “gotcha” moment. It’s calculated to provoke the fear that, if so many immigrants are in federal prison, they must be more likely to be violent criminals, mass murders and drug traffickers, etcetera. Arguably, it’s an attempt to make infamous Trump’s “murderers and rapists” slur more palatable by gussying it up as a statistic.

One of the most frustrating things about interacting with transphobic people is how frankly sanctimonious they can be about their behavior. However unexamined their beliefs may be, they often express those beliefs in the tone of someone who is taking the high road, who exudes a sort of justified moral superiority, who simply defends legitimate social and moral norms—even as they are being confronted for denigrating transgender people. It’s a neatly working self-defense mechanism because it enables such people to feel self righteous about the misinformation or even the venom they’re deploying, even as their beliefs remain unexamined.

I have…

It was March 2nd with COVID-19 still boiling across the great state of Texas, and Governor Greg Abbott proclaimed that he was reopening the state. No more mask mandates. “EVERYTHING” would open again at 100% capacity. Then, almost immediately after the telling Texas to return to normal, Abbott hastened to blame immigrants for the spread of the virus.

On Twitter the next day, he claimed, “The Biden Administration is recklessly releasing hundreds of illegal immigrants who have COVID into Texas communities. The Biden Admin. must IMMEDIATELY end this callous act that exposes Texans & Americans to COVID.”

NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro posted a tweet this past week, which resonated with many of us. A year into this COVID-19 pandemic, she asked, “We all have #TheMoment when we knew things were going to be different. Where were you and what were you thinking a year ago?” A remarkable cascade of touching and emotional stories followed—all the more humanized when you could see familiar figures and friends responding to her question.

Lulu’s prompt certainly struck me because as a street photographer, I spent much of the first few months of the pandemic photographing everything on long walks to keep…

To hear it these past few months, a hardy band of patriots have been fording a stream of free speech oppression unleashed by some of our better known social media platforms in these United States, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. They’ve cast themselves much as Emanuel Leutze cast our first President in his 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware: They are strong, forward-looking, resolute in their determination to forge a path for “free speech” among all the chattering social media channels of the 21st century. They’re cornering the market by creating platforms, which cater to those who truly care…