Editor’s Pick

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. This week’s picks include stories from Christianity Today, The Rumpus, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rookie.

Taking the fight against child hunger on the road: “The driver’s name was Rick Bible, and his 66-mile route through the hills of Greene County marked the government’s latest attempt to solve a rise in childhood hunger that had been worsening for seven consecutive years. “Congress had tried to address it mostly by spending a […]

The writer visits West, Texas, the town where he grew up, and talks to residents who experienced the fertilizer plant explosion that destroyed its surrounding area on April 17, 2013: “Less than a minute later, he saw a bright flash and heard a deep boom. ‘I thought I was imagining this, but others saw it, […]

Organizers, demonstrators, and speakers remember one of the most significant political rallies in U.S. history: “Rachelle Horowitz “A. Philip Randolph gave a speech that is just ignored too much. He gave the speech for jobs and economic rights, and he did it with incredible power. Then my heart was in my mouth for John Lewis, […]

Behind the scenes of a live mermaid show in Weeki Wachee Springs State Park in Orlando, Fla.: “I sat down next to Crystal Videgar on a bench in front of a mirror that ran along one wall. She wore a black fishnet stocking pulled down over her face, which she used to create a scale […]

S.I. Newhouse’s contentious appointment of Robert Gottlieb as the editor of The New Yorker in 1987, and what Gottlieb did to bring the magazine into a new era: “Orlean was an early Gottlieb-era hire. ‘She came in off the street,’ said McGrath, her Talk of the Town editor (though, she noted, Gottlieb was often her […]

On the origins of The Great Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s desire to “be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived”: “In October 1922, Fitzgerald moved his family (Zelda plus their two-year-old daughter, Scottie) to Great Neck, Long Island and over the next 18 months ‘my novel’ acquired a Midwestern background, a poor […]

Grief counselors at Archbishop Moeller High School, an all-boys school, work with teens who have lost loved ones: “Phillip begins to speak even more in this session. He says his father died of heart failure which was a result of quadriplegia. The death was not expected, he says, but it was not a surprise. He […]

Last week, the below YouTube video resurfaced on Twitter to remind me about everything I loved, and still love, about Mr. Rogers. It’s a clip from the 1997 Daytime Emmys, where Fred McFeely Rogers accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award:

Jason Everman was kicked out of both Nirvana and Soundgarden, before the bands went on to sell millions of albums. He then decided to do something completely different: “So in 1993, while living in a group house in San Francisco with the guys in Mindfunk, Everman slipped out to meet with recruiters; the Army offered […]