Krista Stevens

Joshua Schulte was once employed making cyberweapons for the CIA. Feeling wronged by the agency after a dispute with a colleague, he allegedly retaliated by releasing troves of secret data on WikiLeaks, exposing US hacking methods and assets. When the FBI investigated him, they discovered that Schulte had some deep dark secrets of his own. […]

If you’re in the orchestra and the conductor give you “the look,” what does it mean? What does it mean when the musicians won’t make eye contact with the conductor? Ariane Todes investigates, in this piece at Classical Music. Eye contact between musicians isn’t a necessary condition for great music. Conductors have other means to […]

A son left behind after his father’s suicide reflects on the life choices he’s made in an attempt to understand and considers how his father’s death has shaped not only him as a person but also his approach to life and parenthood. Because of his illness, my father lost control of his body. But by […]

Annie Sand suggests that for us to understand others’ pain and communicate our own, we need to create some new metaphors based on our individual perception and experience.

At Granta, Amy Key recounts intentionally avoiding romantic love, thinking it the best way to avoid getting hurt. She concludes that depriving herself of intimate relationships has caused its own form of harm. Absence of romantic love in my life has created its own awkward space in me. Like a corner of a room you […]

Boots O’Neal is up before dawn nearly every day, to do what he loves: to jump on the back of a horse and work as a cowboy at the Four Sixes Ranch. What makes Boots stand out from the average wrangler? He’s 89 years old. That he’s been able to do it for so long […]

Did you know that The White House has an official record collection, last expanded in 1981? The White House record library “is a treasure, and people need to know about it,” Chuldenko says. “We need to update this. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

On the “biological vibrance” of glaciers and what we stand to lose in the face of climate change. Wolverines refrigerate kills in summer snow patches. Spiders prowl on glaciers, bears play on them, moss grows on them. More than 5,000 meters into the thin air of the Andes, the white-winged diuca finch weaves cozy nests […]

Fowzia Karimi moved from Oakland, California to Denton, Texas in 2014, deep in grief following the death of her mother. In Texas she found an unexpected, pervasive warmth and kindness among the community, one that not only helped her to navigate the “vast foggy wilderness” of grief, but also to face her own cancer diagnosis […]

At Astra Magazine, Leslie Jamison examines her love-hate relationship with daydreaming. Imagining a life in which I don’t daydream means imagining the death of a part of myself that I hate—but it’s also a part of me that keeps me alive.