Seyward Darby

Sometimes the question was if. Usually, though, it was when. Debra said that she would kill herself before she lost herself completely. She would wait for as long as she could because she did not want to die, but she wouldn’t wait too long.

“I call it my asymptote of success,” she tells me, while I wonder what such a word could possibly mean. “An asymptote,” she explains as if she were the coolest college professor ever, “is a curve that comes close to the line. It’s infinitesimally close but never actually crosses the line. That’s sometimes how I […]

Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.

At Choke Hole—with its flesh overflow and swollen muscles, its ocean creatures and bodybuilder acrobats, its penguins and cockroaches, its green goblins and Silly String snot—the rest of the world’s body binaries, gender-presentation standards, and requirements for glamour go out the window.

Most gun stores face no legal requirements to secure the weapons they sell. This sets them apart from other businesses that deal in dangerous products, such as pharmacies and explosives makers. Thieves have taken notice. Tracking stolen firearms through the black market, from gun-store thefts to crime scenes.

Outside the ring, Nelson is, in the words of her friend and fellow boxer Tyrieshia Douglas, “a nice churchy lady.” She spends half an hour each day reading and discussing Bible verses with her longtime boyfriend. She’s a hugger, a baby nuzzler, a bestower of silly nicknames. Then she enters the ring and something terrifying […]

These Boston high school valedictorians set off to change the world. But good grades only got them so far.

As the cost of the lifesaving medication skyrockets, some desperate diabetics are rationing — and risking their lives. Was Alec Raeshawn Smith one of them?

If there’s one clear moral to adduce from the horrifically prostrate coverage of the Trump movement’s white-nationalist profile in the mainstream press, it’s that the white-dominated media simply doesn’t care about changing in any meaningful way.