This week we’re sharing stories by Caity Weaver, Matthew Desmond, Chris J. Rice, Kent Russell, and Rafe Bartholomew.

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1. Dwayne Johnson for President!

Caity Weaver | GQ | May 10, 2017 | 21 minutes (5,419 words)

A profile that will leave you smiling. Caity Weaver spends time with the most lovable man in Hollywood — his secret gyms, his desire to keep you properly hydrated, his rare ability to remember everything about you — and his possible next quest: a run for president.

2. How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality

Matthew Desmond | The New York Times | May 9, 2017 | 28 minutes (7,000 words)

Matthew Desmond, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Evicted, tells a dramatic tale of economics and survival through the mortgage-interest deduction, the benefit which encourages homeownership through tax deduction. Few people would consider this an entitlement—or the middle and upper class families that benefit from it as being “on the dole”—but that is precisely what it is. And those who benefit the least are the lower class who can’t afford homes and the middle class with modest mortgages.

3. Decades After Foster Care, I Found My Long-Lost Brother

Chris J. Rice | Catapult | May 9, 2017 | 14 minutes (3,584 words)

A personal essay by Chris J. Rice about finding the brother who was only a year old when she ran away from their abusive mother at 14. Like her brother, Rice wound up in foster care. Through higher education, she found her way to a better life, but didn’t emerge unscathed. Riddled with survivor guilt, she apologizes to her brother, who assures her she wouldn’t have been able to prevail over their mother and save him, even if she had stayed.

4. Fighting With Their Fists to Put a Period in a Basket

Kent Russell | n+1 | May 5, 2017 | 16 minutes (4,055 words)

“Hockey has no reason for being. Rather, hockey’s one of those things that give reason to being.”

5. The McSorley Poet

Rafe Bartholomew | Hazlitt | May 8, 2017 | 22 minutes (5,555 words)

Rafe Bartholomew tells the story of his father — Geoffrey Bartholomew — who felt that his addiction to alcohol and his bartending job at famed McSorley’s in New York City had prevented him from achieving the dream of becoming a writer. Bartholomew quit the booze, but not the bar and wrote a self-published manuscript of poetry: The McSorley Poems: Voices from New York City’s Oldest Pub. In this poignant story of ambition, regrets, fathers, and sons, Rafe recounts how Bartholomew found his voice by mining the humanity of the “Unsorted Regulars, Misfits, Liars, Heroes & Psychos” who frequented the bar.