Seyward Darby

In the wake of a nationwide surge of anti-Asian hate crimes, writer Bonnie Tsui reflects on the resiliency of Chinatowns: Chinatown is a place of contradiction. It serves as scapegoat and sanctuary. The first Chinatowns were ghettos for male Chinese laborers, who were forced to live among, and yet apart from, whites; Chinese women were […]

A generation of Europeans is now returning to Sri Lanka, a country from which they were adopted as children, to search for their birth mothers. What they learn about their families, and themselves, has deep consequences: A shady network of hospital employees, court clerks, lawyers and social workers lubricated the baby pipeline to the West. […]

Esteemed journalist and activist Barbara Ehrenreich died Sept. 1, at the age of 81. A prolific author, Ehrenreich wrote seminal books and essays about economic inequality, feminism, and many other topics. But among her most celebrated works is a deeply personal one, which she wrote after being diagnosed with breast cancer: I could take my […]

A writer meditates on loving and loathing some of the country’s most common public spaces — except are they really public? Were they ever? The mall is “ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing,” the design critic Alexandra Lange notes in the introduction to her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside […]

Was Yellowstone’s deadliest wolf hunt in 100 years an inside job? Ryan Devereaux investigates: “I friggin’ watched that thing, and it’s not a wolf hunt,” Ralph told me. “It’s killing is what it is.” Much of that killing, Ralph said, was orchestrated by a crew of around 20 locals he recognized from Gardiner, Emigrant, and […]

Earlier this year, journalist Martin Kuz spent five weeks in Ukraine, both as a reporter covering Russia’s invasion of his late father’s homeland and as a son hoping to better understand the forces that shaped his father’s life. He returned to Sacramento — home to the largest concentration of Ukrainian immigrants in the United States […]

A writer tells the story of teaching English to asylum-seekers in Rome, and meditates on the different “grammars” a person must learn when they’ve fled their home in search of a new life: The guys understood what, where, how, and when. But why, the word itself, stopped us dead. Not every language has its equivalent. (Italian, French, and Arabic use […]

A winding essay on food, fatherhood, body image, and one of the most famous movie stars in the world: There are many options available if you want to watch a supercut of Brad Pitt eating. They range from three-minute collections of the obvious clips to the more satisfying 20-minute epics that trace his consumption across […]

He grew up speaking a language of the enslaved on the shores of Pin Point, Georgia. He would become the most powerful Black man in America, using the astonishing power vested in a Supreme Court justice to hold back his own people. Now he sits atop an activist right-wing court poised to undo the progressivism […]