Blog Posts

The last time I was on Miami’s Brickell Avenue Bridge, it was midnight. Hurricane Katrina was lashing the city with crushing wind and stinging rain. Nonetheless, my Video Music Award colleagues and I thought it a lark to stand defiantly mid-span, leaning into the gale drunk like teenagers. Some five years later, I was mid-span…

Union Station, Washington, DC. Amtrak Gate K. Passengers on Northeast Regional 178 are packed together struggling to board. Everyone is exhausted, weary of long lines, hung over, and eager to get home from the Inauguration. A quiet voice squeaks above the fray. “Ellen McQuarry? Ellen McQuarry?” Seconds later, further down the queue, another rings out,…

I am wedged between a mass of angry, frustrated and anxious Presidential Youth Ball attendees and a phalanx of Police and Secret Service in the Washington, DC, Hilton. With the ballroom at capacity, and POTUS on his way, the men in black are immovable. I reluctantly pull out every item I possess in my defense,…

Let other people write about yesterday’s other big first; without diminishing the historical significance of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first-ever African-American president, race wasn’t what reduced me to a sobbing mess. President Barack Obama’s inaugural address was the first time in my life I felt like a politician was speaking to me. It was…

I violated the cardinal rule of journalism on Sunday. I began an interview by squealing like a schoolgirl, “I’m a huge fan!” Oh well; I am. I’ve been huge fan of Shepard Fairey for years. I noticed his Obey Giant stencils and posters almost immediately upon moving to New York City in 1995. And I…

I haven’t stepped foot in a high school in years. And for good reason; they’re large, generic, often sterile and sometimes impenetrable institutions — to say nothing of their inordinately soul-crushing social pressures. Fitting, then, that I should return to high school today — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — for a general civics lesson…