A graduate student working on a paper on the sad history of black education in South Africa reached out to me after reading my first book, “It’s a Black-White Thing.” Among her questions:

“How do we move forward without having the past always present?”

Susurrthump. That’s the sound of the holidays.

On a single day, two stories I wrote received very different reactions.

I visited a VA hospital. And came away with some lessons in collaboration and creativity that should be kept in mind as America seeks to improve care for its vets.

After writing “Home of the Brave,” I concluded I would have to have the audacity of a veteran who has seen war to imagine a world at peace.

Dalton Trumbo’s genius was helping us to visualize what wars really mean, and to understand it will take courage and imagination to end them.

By setting “Oklahoma” in an African-American town for his Denver Center for the Performing Arts production, artistic director Chris Coleman makes the show even more deeply American.

Miles Lagoze, a former combat cameraman in Afghanistan, says he initially tried to make a conventional documentary, with interviews and a narrator to explain things.

Then he realized there was much that he had seen and recorded that he couldn’t explain.

So, he made the unruly, raw and compelling “Combat Obscura,” a glimpse through a lens darkly of the boredom, bravado and blood of war. It was screened at Denver’s DocuWest Film and Music Festival on September 22, 2018. After watching his movie, I joined Miles for a Q-and-A about war and storytelling.