Catherine Cusick

Composer Nico Muhly writes about his primary goal: “to create a piece of art that is better than the same amount of silence.”

In 2002, developers made a deal with the people of Elwood, Illinois: they’d bring high-paying jobs in the growing warehousing and logistics industry to the centrally-located town in exchange for two decades of tax abatement. Seventeen years later, temp agencies in the region are flourishing, but full-time jobs are few and far between. Meanwhile, tens of […]

Lauren Hough recounts a decade of bizarre, bittersweet, and dangerous jobs she was assigned while working as a cable tech in the Virginia suburbs.

Lucrative placements within coveted search ranks on Amazon’s Marketplace are incentivizing sellers to do whatever it takes to undercut each other — not by competing on price or quality, but by creatively sabotaging the listing above theirs. Bad actors plant obviously fraudulent five-star reviews on popular listings to trigger penalties, or set rivals’ products on fire to frame them […]

Tax evaders, rejoice: the Internal Revenue Service may not have enough resources to come after the vast majority of those offshore bank accounts. It also doesn’t have enough resources to investigate white collar crime, curb suspicious corporate activity, shore up the nation’s rising budget deficit, or answer tens of millions of law-abiding taxpayers’ questions. And now, just […]

How Frances Jalet, one of the first women to graduate from Columbia Law School, and Fred Cruz, the first inmate to write a lawsuit on toilet paper that went all the way to the Supreme Court, teamed up to take on the Texas Department of Corrections for unconstitutional punishments and brutality.

After acting in practically every other movie for the last twenty years, Michael Peña still isn’t sure what to say when he has to talk about himself. He’d rather talk about his family, golf, and Latinx representation in Hollywood.

When the director of her MFA writing program advises her not to pursue a part-time job to help pay the bills, Katie Prout starts visiting the local food bank out of necessity.