Category: Editor’s Pick
The homogenizing force of globalization means that a shopping center in Budapest doesn’t look all that different from one central Turin, or York, or Cleveland. Is “Eastern Europe” as an idea disappearing? Try Jacob Mikanowski’s essay in the LA Review of Books for some suggestions (and some objections).
Mark MacKinnon tells the story of Naief Abazid — who, at the urging of some older boys, graffitied a school wall on a lark in Daraa, Syria, at age 14. The “writing on the wall” enraged Syria’s Baathist dictatorship, and became the source of ignition in the Syrian war.
At Mother Jones, Julia Lurie reports on a rising trend: death by opioid withdrawal in jail. Read about how addict shame and silence, jail short-staffing, scant medical equipment, and a general apathy toward inmates make a deadly combination.
Lizzie Presser reports on the Dickensian treatment of Filipino workers aboard Carnival Cruise Line ships — where the routine involves 12 and 14-hour days, seven days a week for paltry pay and zero overtime — just to be able to provide better lives for families they rarely get to see.
Journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire traveled to the heart of DeVos-land — the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan — to learn more about Betsy DeVos and her family’s life-long attempt to dismantle the “nanny state.”
Ada Calhoun writes, in Elle, about a weekend getaway with her husband to the kind of “romantic” Poconos resort she used to see advertised on television as a kid. Could a couple of nights away from their kid and all the post-election news — not to mention sleeping on a bed beneath a mirrored ceiling, […]
Michael Friscolanti reports on the 14 everyday Canadians who — galvanized by the sickening image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi face-down on the beach — banded together to sponsor a family of Syrian refugees whose names they did not know, in a bid to “do what’s right. To do something.”
Adrian Daub’s fascinating essay in the LA Review of Books on the Stephen King classic IT — now 30 years old — reveals that the real horror of IT wasn’t Pennywise the supernatural clown, but our own, entirely human ability to forget the horrors of the past.
At The Weeklings, Khirad Siddiqui reflects on wearing a hijab at age 13, as a young woman in Plano, Texas. She discovered “affirmation and reassurance” in the writings of Malcolm X, an American Muslim who too felt that his “peers failed to understand him as a complete and multifaceted human being.”
When writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Matt Black traveled through California, Ohio, and Maine to labor alongside the working poor, t hey found lots of things they expected — long hours, low pay, financial uncertainty — and one thing th ey didn’t: hope.
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