Dear Lego™,
I am writing to ask you to reconsider your decision not to allow my custom-designed set, "Legal Justice League," to compete in the Lego™ Ideas contest.
I was disappointed to receive word on March 5 that the set would not be eligible for Lego™ Ideas. As you are no doubt aware, official arbiters deemed the entry in violation of the contest's prohibition on "politics and political symbols, campaigns, or movements," and I was sent a form email with no further guidance as to the specific offense.
In the wake of this response, I did as your notice suggested and shared the project on social media. Frankly, I was ready for that to be the end of the story. How incredibly wrong I turned out to be.
Immediately after I posted about my set, I began receiving questions about...
Lifestyle
Dear Superintendent Ed Hightower:
It's me, Melissa.
I know it's not easy helping teachers to help students navigate the emotionally-charged events that unfolded in Ferguson. And it's not like there is a ready-made curriculum for racial justice. One Alabama teacher has already shown how misunderstanding how to teach Ferguson can go horribly, horribly wrong. But it is crucial that you make the effort.
Because the classroom is exactly the space where young people should be examining their assumptions, exchanging ideas, and engaging in democratic deliberation over the complicated questions of race invoked by the events in Ferguson. Fortunately, Twitter has already provided teachers with a great headstart with the #FergusonSyllabus hashtag.
Educators around the country are using...
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Dear Mayor Michael Bloomberg,
I'm sure you don't have to be reminded that your time as mayor of the greatest city in the world is coming to an end. You've formed your Super PAC, and I'm curious to see what you'll do next. There's still much unfinished business in La Gran Manzana, and I don't underestimate your ability to successfully manage post-Sandy recovery while taking bold steps for the future during your final months in office.
It seems clear from your actions and statements over the past decade that you have a keen sense of history — including how to make it. You seem to recognize that in a 21st-century world of dynamic global cities, the business of New York is to build and rebuild. Few mayors will leave as large a physical imprint as you have with the transformation of the...
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Dear Nicki Minaj,
I own AllHipHop.com which has been historically uber supportive of the rapper Nicki Minaj.
That's YOU, homie! When I say historically, we can take it all the way back to when you had to stand in line to get into parties or those grimy underground videos you once pumped out on the streets. You know, that period of time before Lil Wayne and Young Money.
Along the way, something changed. This isn't the change everybody wants to talk about though. No hate there. AllHipHop had published an old image for some reason or another some years ago. You remember the one of you licking a lollipop and evoking the now-classic image of Lil Kim in all of her crotchiness? Of course you remember your version of that image, because you asked us to take it down through a member of...
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To the NSA Worker Monitoring My Search History
Let me explain myself before you find anything that crazy – not in the "I'm guilty" kind of way, but in the "clearly there's a mix up" way.
I'm a writer. A crime writer, to be specific. A crime writer who has to do some crazy research sometimes. Call it a problem of the digital age: for someone like me, college student, stricken with laziness, the library just isn't the number one destination for answering the little questions, like how to remove fingerprints from a dead body.
That "can you kill someone with a dumbbell" search really was nothing more than commonplace goggling to give the central murder for my book some authenticity. It's going to be one of those cases where the murder occurs in the heat of the moment, and the killer...
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Dear Professor Pattison
We write to express our concerns regarding the new "opt out" policy on lecture recording that is being piloted across the University this semester. Our concerns are both pedagogical and ethical. In this letter we present these concerns for the University's consideration.
The University has identified student retention as a significant problem. There is already significant evidence that lecture recording has a negative impact on student attendance. The pilot "opt out" policy, which seeks to universalise lecture recordings, will only compound this trend. Student attendance at lectures and issues of student retention are related. The University should be developing policies that engage the students more with university life, not providing opportunities for them...
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Dear Lord Mayor,
Writing recently on the matter of Inclusive Capitalism you have said:
"If too many people remain or become marginalised, they are less likely to be enfranchised, empowered and effective as workers and citizens, rendering them unable to make an economic contribution at best, and resulting in civil unrest at worst. Everything a firm does from the very top to the very bottom should demonstrate on a daily basis our desire to see a stronger, better evolution of capitalism."
You have asked "Who will challenge traditional thinking, if we only have people like us in our teams? "
Today, we live in an age of information where ideas are exchanged freely by many of those pursuing social change. One source of this exchange is Wikipedia where you will find "Inclusive...
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Dear Dr. Killeen,
As executive officers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we would like to congratulate you on your new position. We look forward to working with you to keep the University of Illinois at the forefront of public research institutions of higher learning. We also recognize, however, that you will be taking the helm of the university at an especially difficult and crucial point in its history. We would therefore like to take this opportunity to address the particular challenges presented by recent events on our own campus and steps that you might take to help in healing divisions and moving both UIUC and the entire university system forward.
The recent words and actions of senior officials in connection with the decision to revoke an offer of a tenured...
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Dear Colleagues
It is difficult for me to express the depth of my feelings about the heroic actions of our country during World War II. Our veterans and our allies prevented the extermination of my people.
I often wonder what my life would have been like had I lived in another country or another time; being Jewish, I could have lived a life of horror and helplessness. I am safe and free because of the spirit that moved this country to act. That spirit is best expressed in the founding documents of our nation, an immovable commitment to liberty and human dignity, a willingness to shed our blood when those rights are threatened.
It is with this in mind that I write to address recent concerns regarding the new framework for the College Board's AP® U.S. History course.
I want to...
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Dear President Obama:
Columbus Day was made a federal holiday in 1934, when Native American nations and communities had little voice to protest the celebration of the onset of colonization and genocide in the Western Hemisphere.
In the era of global decolonization of the second half of the 20th century, Native Americans remained colonized. Columbus Day is a metaphor and painful symbol of that traumatic past, although the United States did not become an independent republic until nearly three centuries after Columbus's first voyage. None of Columbus's voyages touched the continental territory now claimed by the US. Yet, the United States soon affirmed that a 15th century Papal Bull, known as the "Doctrine of Discovery," applied to the Indigenous nations of North America. This remains...
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