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A beautiful story about a friendship.

So much for assurances that harsh interrogation techniques used by the United States at Guantanamo Bay and in secret CIA prisons around the world wouldn’t cause lasting harm. New York Times reporters interviewed over 100 former detainees for this article on the never-ending psychological torment many of them live with years later.

Waylon Jenning’s famous country music lyric “Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” can be adapted to the tune of classical music prodigies, too.

An educated nation is an empowered nation. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor details the place of public education in the founding fathers’ vision of American democracy to argue that, even though their vision ignored African-Americans and women, we would benefit from thinking of education as a larger public good, not just an individual economic one.

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict –- and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong.

A profile of the American writer and author, whose fiction helped transform the mainstream.

“Moms Mabley? She was a very good friend of mine. We used to go to the Theresa Hotel, Frank’s Restaurant, and Johnny Walker’s—that was the one black gay bar, uptown. Billie Holiday used to come there, and Lionel Hampton, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan. Everything was accepted. You were just another freak, barking along.”

The aftermath of a miscarriage, immediate and raw: “It was an animal sadness born of the worst kind of disappointed expectation. The future stretched out before us, one torturous minute at a time. The sadness lived in me as an ache in my stomach, and it’s with me still.”

Casey Schwartz spent years using Adderall, the stimulant and A.D.H.D. drug, to get through college, grad school, and the start of a career. Then she tried to stop.

Essayist Chloe Caldwell on the “sisters” we choose for ourselves, and her close relationship with her surrogate younger sister, Cheryl Strayed’s daughter Bobbi.