An essay examining women’s long-standing conditioning away from owning and expressing anger, instead often sublimating their rage in sadness, which has historically been more acceptable.
Sari Botton
Changing My Mind About Pig’s Feet and Cornrows
In this personal essay, Dara Lurie reflects on what she discovered about her own racism while living for ten months at a state-run home for disadvantaged children.
What Are You?
A personal essay in which Valerie Vande Panne writes about learning why she never quite passed as white growing up, despite allegedly being the product of two caucasian parents. She recalls being questioned all her life about her racial and cultural identity; finally learning through a DNA test that her father wasn’t who she thought […]
Fast or Slow: What’s the Best Way to Die?
Sometimes death takes a torturously slow, scenic route.
You Are What You Hear
A personal essay in which Pauline Campos writes about trying to forget the harsh words she heard about her body as a child, and to avoid passing along her body shame to her young daughter.
How Coming Out Made Me Whole: High Maintenance’s Katja Blichfeld Tells Her Story
In this as-told-to personal essay, High Maintenance Katja Blichfeld speaks about the vital importance — and difficulty, particularly after being raised evangelical — of coming out as gay this past year, and ending her marriage to her collaborator.
Katja Blichfeld Gets What She Wants
A profile of Katja Blichfeld, the co-creator of HBO’s High Maintenance, in the wake of her coming out as a lesbian, and the amicable end of her marriage to Ben Sinclair — her collaborator on the show, and its star.
A Life Worth Ending
In this reported personal essay, Michael Wolff writes about watching his mother “dwindle” painfully between life and death — not well enough to live on her own in her final years, without tremendous intervention from her family and doctors, but not sick enough to just quickly die. He makes a convincing case against the medical establishment’s […]
My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion
A reported, scientific essay in which physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee considers the body’s proclivity for homeostasis, which kept his elderly father’s failing body alive for longer than seemed to make sense, after he had begun failing, and falling.
How Are There Still Beauty Pageants When Feminists Have Been Protesting Them for 50 Years?
Roxane Gay considers the lasting impact of protests against the Miss America Pageant that took place half a century ago.
