Can you imagine being a young musician and having your sister call you in crisis and tell you to destroy your guitar because “The Taliban’s hands are capable of killing you for your art?” Nasrin Nawa described pleading with her sister to do this very thing in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post on August 16th, the day after the Taliban took Kabul, and in a podcast also on the Washington Post.
Nasrin, who is a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had fled Afghanistan days before without her sister, who is also a journalist, or any family. As I listened to her describe her nightmare escape and her fears for her sister, it just broke my heart. I was already working on hyperdrive with friends around the world in an attempt to get a mutual friend and his family out of hiding, into the airport in Kabul, and onto a plane before the August 31st deadline.
I’m a first-generation, 17-year-old Black American who grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn neighborhood made famous by Jay-Z.
Given that brief biography, perhaps you’d assume that I’m a Black Lives Matter slogan-chanting, capitalism-chastising teen activist. Or that I’m an at-risk youth, destined for dropping out or incarceration.
You’d be wrong on both counts.
I'm a religious Christian and political conservative with an after-school job as a dishwasher at Panera: three things that, if we’re to believe the statistics about Gen Z, make me an outlier.
Welcome to El Salvador, where the pupusas are warm and the bitcoin is tender.
Today, the Central American nation will become the first sovereign state to make bitcoin “legal tender,” meaning it’s now an official currency alongside the US dollar. In theory, El Salvadorans can now pay for anything—a haircut, house, or even taxes—using bitcoin.