Carolyn Wells

“Homophobia is a reality I faced firsthand growing up, which has led to my complicated relationship with my hometown, its people, and its broader culture. When I moved to Austin, I wanted to strip myself of all that and do away with both the perception and the reality of my upbringing. But every other weekend […]

“Gary noticed that she was “liking” his Facebook posts about bees and messaged her to ask if she’d be interested in helping him. She was, and things went so well that they were married in 2017. Now she manages their honey and home-building businesses. They had a surge in rebuilding demand after Hurricane Michael, and […]

“The BBC has confirmed at least 30 people died that night – by far the worst migrant tragedy ever recorded in the Channel.”

“I’m here to discover more about the area’s past and present — feet first, in the case of this coasteering trip near the hill-hidden hamlet of Maidencombe — on a journey from the ancient city of Exeter to the Jurassic Coast, via the pub-dotted ports of the Exe Estuary.”

“I was a ‘success story,’ and an extremely likable one. I’m very conscious that my story is the palatable kind of poor-person story. There’s no doubt in my mind that people paid more attention to it because I am white, hold a bachelor’s degree, and even though my parents grew up poor, I was raised […]

“Mina’s final interview at the U.S. Embassy was scheduled for August 31, 2021, and she hoped that, when Joe Biden took office, he would delay the withdrawal to insure Afghans like her a safe way out of the country. Instead, he set a withdrawal deadline of September 11th. ‘Biden was every Afghan’s hope,’ Faqeer wrote […]

“It was a week until he was scheduled to be executed, and I’d visited him to ask about his plea for prison officials to let his Baptist pastor lay a hand on him as he died. He answered my questions about his faith and whether he feared death, but what he really wanted to tell me […]

“The religion of the internet posits questions like, ‘what’s the harm in believing?’ and ‘why shouldn’t I be prepared for the worst?’ The deeper you go, the harder those questions are to answer.”

“I took his calls for a while, but then, like everyone else, started ignoring him. Even as his alcoholism grew worse, no one did what my mom kept threatening to do: stage an ­intervention. We were all too hopeful, maybe. Too stupid, probably. Uneducated about the disease, definitely.”