Paul Mason ballooned to 980 lbs. eating to forget childhood abuse and horrific loneliness. Mason lost 700 lbs. after bariatric surgery and discovers that, despite the experiences now available to him with newfound mobility, happiness remains elusive; dramatic weight loss does nothing to treat the underlying depression and emotional trauma that caused him to eat […]
Editor’s Pick
Posted inEditor's Pick
Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael, and an Epic Hollywood Mistake
The roads in Hollywood are paved with failed projects. The New Yorker‘s 1970s film critic helped produce one of them, more proof that what goes into making blockbusters is often more interesting than what gets made.
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Housekeepers Versus Harvard: Feminism for the Age of Trump
In 2013, the same year that Harvard Business School alum Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In, which encouraged women to tell their employers exactly what they needed in the workplace, the sixty housekeepers of the HBS-owned Boston-Cambridge DoubleTree Suites presented their unionization petition to their manager.
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Women in Power
Mary Beard’s epic essay on women in power “from Medusa to Merkel” takes aim at representations of power throughout history, and how the definitions of authority, expertise, and knowledge have long excluded women.
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Chrissy Teigen Opens Up for the First Time About Her Postpartum Depression
A confessional personal essay by Chrissy Teigen. The model, television host, and cookbook author comes out about the postpartum depression she’s been living with since Luna, her daughter with husband John Legend, was born last year.
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Sanctuary
After nearly thirty years building a life in Arizona, one man of Mexican descent takes refuge in a Phoenix church that’s part of the New Sanctuary Movement, which offers protection to undocumented migrants threatened by deportation. Quitting his job, not seeing his children, limited travel ─ this is what it looks like to live in fear of losing everything.
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‘9 to 5’ Turns 35, and It’s Still Radical Today
An interview with Patricia Resnick, who wrote the original screenplay for the painfully-still-relevant 1980 office comedy featuring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin. It ran in December 2015 on the 35th anniversary of the film’s release. Still relevant and radical in 2017.
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Uncommon Ancestry
How fertility doctors impregnating their own clients is more common than you might think and on how the law around tracking sperm donors and donations is impotent against the problem.
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The Cult of ‘Zelda: Majora’s Mask’
How the video game Zelda: Majora’s Mask — the “black sheep” member of the game franchise notable for its apocalyptic storyline as a stark departure from the beloved princess-saving series — became a cult object that spawned a fan-made, horror-based, sinister “creepypasta” storyline called Ben Drowned which has terrifying connections to the story of Katelyn […]
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Saving Chickens, Saving Myself
On seeing and “being seen” — the silent gift of bearing witness to one another and individual suffering as a way of offering comfort and hope.