Competitive sports can mean professional and financial success — if they don’t compromise your mental health first. ‘Cheer’ and ‘Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez’ show how athletics can hurt as much as they can heal.
Essays & Criticism
Please Don’t You Be My Neighbor
“To watch those people vanish and be replaced by people who shine like glass, who cut through the sidewalks like knives but reflect nothing back, has been another scraping out. Am I still here? I don’t know anyone here anymore.”
Waiting for Alice
Nick and Nora had Asta. Why can’t we have Alice?
At Mrs. Balbir’s
Jillian Dunham traveled thousands of miles from home to get away from her grief. It found her anyway, in a stranger’s Bangkok apartment.
Inking Against Invisibility
In the face of chronic pain, invisible illness, and medical discrimination, Talia Hibbert turned to tatoos to reclaim ownership of her body.
Eating To Save My Mind
Can diet determine the future of your mental health? Claire Fitzsimmons attempts to find out through a month of Whole30.
Menace Too Society
Cancel culture suggests we can change the world from the outside in, but the misogyny and racism are coming from inside the house.
In Defense of Boris the Russki
Ayşegül Savaş calls into question a kind of racism in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and laments the liberal reluctance to rebuke discrimination outright, regardless of its targets.
In Pocahontas County, Deep Divisions and a Gruesome Discovery
In an excerpt from ‘The Third Rainbow Girl,’ Emma Copley Eisenberg interrogates various social conditions that might have contributed to a mysterious double murder in West Virginia in 1980.
Leadership Academy
Victor Yang considers how his time as an immigrant rights organizer helped him understand his mother, and the guilt and obligation he carries from their relationship.
