A native Kansan returns home to find that the broken promises of commodity agriculture have destroyed a way of life.
Editor’s Pick
Posted inEditor's Pick
Paulette Jordan is Running for Governor. Who Will Follow Her?
Anne Helen Petersen profiles former state representative Paulette Jordan in her bid to capture the Democratic nomination for governor of Idaho. A member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, Jordan could be the first country’s Native American governor and Idaho’s first Democrat to hold the office since 1995.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
Chasing Drinks with Lies, and Lies with Drinks
Katie MacBride recalls her last days using alcohol before getting sober.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Who Killed Tolstoy?
If literature is the news that stays news, then it’s always a good time to revist Elif Batuman’s first book, The Possessed, about the people obsessed with Russia’s great authors. In this selection, Batuman gets a travel grant as a college student to investigate whether Leo Tolstoy was murdered. She examines his life for clues. She […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Killing at Donkey Creek
Jimmy Smith-Kramer, a former high school basketball star and a member of the Quinault Indian Nation in Taholah, Washington, was only 20 years old when James Walker mowed him down with his pickup truck. Was it a hate crime? Investigators aren’t sure.
Posted inEditor's Pick
In the Place Where Prince Lived
A writer and a photographer visited the places Prince lived in his native Minneapolis, making a pilgrimage along what might be called The Purple Trail.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Hot Wet Goobers
Peanuts are essential to baseball games school lunches, state fairs, and even prison commissaries: the fascinating, sometimes ugly, history of the world’s favorite ground nut.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Barbra Streisand’s Singular Women
Mayukh Sen looks back at Barbra Streisand’s career as an actress, director and producer — shedding light on the sexist double standards in Hollywood that have led to her being portrayed as “difficult” for the kinds of demands and expectations her male counterparts are never called into question for.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Lynching’s Long Shadow
The story of Elwood Higginbothom, a sharecropper and possible labor activist lynched in Oxford, Mississippi in 1935, is told to his descendants for the first time.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Where Spring Breaks Eternal
Jen Doll and photographer Eva O’Leary venture to the Lani Kai Island Resort in Fort Meyers Beach, Florida — a hotel known for choosing to host a seemingly never-ending stream of spring breakers to uncover how they not only survive, but manage to embrace the drunken debauchery of the spring break set — within reason, […]