Category: culture

Congressional fan fiction is real, it’s glorious, and it might be reshaping our political world.

The way schools choose to redesign themselves to protect students from shootings will determine how schools look, and how well students can learn in them, for decades to come.

An economic downturn in 2008 shuttered numerous publications and further marginalized people of color in an already minimally integrated industry. But in the 90’s and early-aughts, multicultural publications flourished, providing an alternative model for journalism that bears remembering.

When a promising student left a neighborhood full of heroin for the University of Pennsylvania, it should have been a moving story. But what does an at-risk student actually need to thrive — or even just to survive?

The working homeless exist in a modern purgatory.

Is tech disrupting spirituality, or is spirituality finally disrupting tech?

Do you want reliable California breaks with reliable California crowds, or are you ready to take your chances in frigid Irish water where you’ll share waves with no one else?

For a brief period in the 1960s, the Afro-Brazilian author of the memoir “Child of the Dark” was one of the most well-known writers in the world.

An elegy and reading list for Toni Morrison, the Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who died Monday, August 5, 2019.

How Southern California’s rich and famous tried to cheat to get their kids into college.

Our inherited biases about who should write what live deeper than most of us realize or want to acknowledge.

Forest mismanagement, political corruption, and PG&E’s corporate culture created a highly combustible situation.

Siri Hustvedt’s “Memories of the Future” is a fitting book for the #MeToo moment, which is as much about justice and reparations as it is about understanding the logic of memory.

You never stop learning how to read — probably because you also never stop forgetting how to read.

The Kingdom of Heaven, borne out of blood

How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America, and what is the ecological cost?

If America collapses, some see that as an opportunity to reboot society. They say they have God on their side.

When LaVoy Finicum was shot by law enforcement, the anti-government movement called him a martyr. That message is spreading.

When a bomb exploded in a tiny desert town, there was no doubt who did it. But no one could understand why.

What a 19th-century scammer can teach us about women, lying, and economic boom-and-bust cycles

An anthropologist on a return visit to a remote village in Papua New Guinea learns that all the village’s young men are terribly wounded.

Filipinos are reckoning with their presidents’ violent approach to the drug trade.

One hundred summers ago, black Chicagoans were terrorized by whites during the Red Summer. Poet Eve Ewing talks about reaching out to her neighbors across time in “1919.”

Amber Scorah talks about committing the one unforgiveable sin: believing, then not believing.

Why do people — mostly men — want to throw axes and dress like lumberjacks?

A journalist who reported on the accusations long before they went viral wonders, “What kind of profession am I in, where stories have no logical reason for unfolding?”

One woman quits coloring her gray hair and investigates the human and environmental costs of this contentious female beauty standard.

For one woman, holding her employer accountable meant painting the story of her rape on a billboard above a busy LA freeway.

Cersei Lannister could have been a great antihero, but she was on the wrong show.

One ex-priest shows how the clergy lies at the root of the Catholic Church’s problems.