Editor’s Pick

Last February, a Washington Redskins executives said on a team talk show that 70 different high schools across the country share the NFL franchise’s controversial name. University of Maryland journalism graduate student Kelyn Soong did a little fact checking.

Fifty years ago, a microbiologist named Leonard Hayflick developed a strain of cells named WI-38 from the lungs of an aborted fetus. The strain of cells have been used to produce life-savings vaccines worldwide, but have also had a history riddled with controversy: “The cells have played ‘a very critical role in studying cellular senescence,’ […]

The writer embeds with the Hotshots, an elite group of wilderness firefighters, for a season: “At 11 P.M., the crew hooks over the top of the spot and starts building line down the eastern flank and back toward the creek. Rojas is mowing through the brush when a flare-up sends a wash of embers overhead. […]

[NSFW] A look back at Bruce Lee’s early career and the making of Enter the Dragon. (One of Lee’s costars, Jim Kelly, died Saturday at age 67): “Enter the Dragon struck a responsive chord across the globe. Made for a minuscule $850,000, it would gross $90 million worldwide in 1973 and go on to earn […]

The writer remembers her mother and the garden she loved: “At the height of summer my mother would clip the most luxurious marigolds that she had successfully grown from seed, handfuls of intense yellow bobbing in the hot wind, reaching above her waist. She’d dip them in wax so that they would outlast the season, […]

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 The New Yorker, Autostraddle, Rookie, and The Believer.

After serving two tours in Iraq and returning to civilian life in 2006, the writer decides to embed as a journalist in Afghanistan seven years later: “We humped the three kilometers back to the school. It was early afternoon and there was plenty of light left, so we loaded our packs into two ANA trucks […]

The writer recalls working at a scandal-ridden theme park, and meets with other former workers to investigate his own memories: “Matt and I laughed—a shameful admission. You know those hysterical giggles you get when a situation is so absurd, shocking, or terrifying that they’re more a form of damage control? The laughter boils up your […]

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Damien Echols spent 18 years on death row as part of the “West Memphis Three” before being freed in 2011. He’s now adjusting to domestic life in Salem, Mass.: “Lucia Coale and her husband, Ed Schutte, found out about their new neighbors back in September, not long after Davis and Echols had signed the papers […]