This week, we’re sharing stories from Donna Minkowitz, Stephen Rodrick, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Nadia Berenstein, and Shanna Baker.
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1. How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story
Donna Minkowitz | Village Voice | June 20, 2018 | 16 minutes (4,019 words)
Journalist Donna Minkowitz apologizes 25 years after breaking the story of Brandon Teena, transgender murder victim and subject of the film Boys Don’t Cry. Retroactively realizing it was “the most insensitive and inaccurate piece of journalism I have ever written,” Minkowitz examines what she sees now as her own internalized homophobia and ignorance of trans issues.
2. The Trouble With Johnny Depp
Stephen Rodrick | Rolling Stone | June 21, 2018 | 41 minutes (10,398 words)
“Multimillion-dollar lawsuits, a haze of booze and hash, a marriage gone very wrong, and a lifestyle he can’t afford – inside the trials of Johnny Depp.”
3. A Theory of Animals
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio | Jezebel | June 19, 2018 | 8 minutes (2,240 words)
“They are determined to get rid of us, and we can no longer rely on our community’s miraculous evolution alone to protect us. We cannot expend all our energy every day just to survive, just to see another morning, like a desert animal.”
4. A Brief History of Soy Milk, the Future Food of Yesterday
Nadia Berenstein | Serious Eats | June 21, 2018 | 13 minutes (3,323 words)
“We live in a golden age of milks.”
5. The Future of Castro’s Crocs
Shanna Baker | Hakai Magazine | June 19, 2018 | 13 minutes (3,414 words)
Shanna Baker reports on the ongoing bid to preserve C. rhombifer, the breed of Cuban crocodile beloved of Fidel Castro, who was known to send living and embalmed versions of the animal to allies around the world. The Cuban croc is endangered, not only due to shrinking habitat, but also to hybridization as its gene pool gets polluted by natural encounters with the bigger, shyer American crocodile.
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