This week, we’re sharing stories from Rahima Nasa, Roxane Gay, Jessica Camille Aguirre, Lucy Grove-Jones, and Jen Doll.
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1. A Killing at Donkey Creek
Rahima Nasa | ProPublica | April 26, 2018 | 16 minutes (4,131 words)
Jimmy Smith-Kramer, a former high school basketball star and a member of the Quinault Indian Nation in Taholah, Washington, was only 20 years old when James Walker mowed him down with his pickup truck. Was it a hate crime? Investigators aren’t sure.
2. What Fullness Is
Roxane Gay | Medium | April 24, 2018 | 18 minutes (4,588 words)
Roxane Gay on getting weight reduction surgery.
3. Bolivia’s Quest to Spread the Gospel of Coca
Jessica Camille Aguirre | Guernica Magazine | April 16, 2018 | 20 minutes (5,165 words)
Long before cocaine became nose candy for white executives and Brazilian party boys, it was a sacred leaf. Andean people chew it. They drink it as tea. Now Bolivia is trying to market this indigenous stimulant in everything from cosmetics to sodas, and their president wants the world to know that coca leaf is not the same as cocaine. Will the world listen?
4. Expecting
Lucy Grove-Jones | Silence Killed the Dinosaurs | April 17, 2018 | 16 minutes (4,036 words)
“At family gatherings people handed me glasses of wine, and I drank them. I ate soft cheese and deli meats. I lived the life of non-pregnant Lucy, knowing all the time that I was pregnant Lucy and everything around me was wrong.”
5. Where Spring Breaks Eternal
Jen Doll | Topic | April 24, 2018 | 20 minutes (5,062 words)
Jen Doll and photographer Eva O’Leary venture to the Lani Kai Island Resort in Fort Meyers Beach, Florida — a hotel known for choosing to host a seemingly never-ending stream of spring breakers to uncover how they not only survive, but manage to embrace the drunken debauchery of the spring break set — within reason, of course.
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