Category: Featured

Six stories on the immediate and ongoing aftermath of the attacks that took place on September 11th, 2001.

“And thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction.”

Let’s go down to the woods today … with a reading list all about trees.

For 50 years, Enthusiastic Sobriety programs have offered to help teenagers kick drugs and alcohol. But former followers say ES doesn’t save lives—it destroys them.

A tale of racism.

Against the commodification of community.

Jill Talbot on secret messages between mother and daughter.

In Scott Kimball, the FBI thought it had found a high-value informant who could help solve big cases. What it got instead was lies, betrayal, and murder.

“He couldn’t remember coming here, or going anywhere. He looked down at himself. With a writhe of horror, he found he couldn’t even remember getting dressed. His clothes were unfamiliar.”

“The rest of my life will always be entwined with rheumatoid arthritis. But it’s my choice to also be something more, to not feel sick, to still find those shadows of a dancer, which is to say tiny flecks of magic, within me.”

One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.

Lisa Whittington-Hill suggests there’s a distinct gender bias in celebrity memoirs. Where female celebrities are expected to expose all, male writers get to write about whatever they want.

Adolfo Davis hoped a Supreme Court ruling would give him a chance at a new beginning. But nothing about freedom turned out as he expected.

If you underestimate a woman determined to avenge violence against her daughters, prepare yourself to get sacked. On repeat.

On vaccine privilege in America and COVID-19 inequities in India.

“Peering in, I see that last week’s eggs are now chicks. Tiny bright-yellow beaks, mouths opening and closing silently. This is the magic.”

On having a twin with cerebral palsy and navigating school bullies.

“When I moved to Billtown, I worried most about whether fracking tainted groundwater. By the time I left the area, my biggest concern was whether the liberty granted to citizens to lease their land, or to otherwise act in ways that limits others’ access to environmental goods, taints democracy.”

“Poetry has a way of forcing one into recognition, or transformation, or both if we’re lucky.”

“I have to wear all of these dolls, you see, so that Whiteness does not have to wear any.”

Pocahontas may seem like a strange vehicle for discussing our gay villains. But Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.

Two women gave birth on the same day in a place called Come By Chance. Half a century later, their children made a shocking discovery.

The story of a Somali family uprooted by war and separated by America’s broken refugee resettlement system — and the siblings who brought them back together.

“Then, after he was done seeing patients for the day, he’d begin his other work. The work no one could find out about. The work that would destroy his life, along with hundreds of others.”

On the wonders and benefits of natural relationships and what happens when humans meddle with the delicate balance between species.

“The UN gave up trying to count the war’s death toll in 2016, when it had already reached nearly half a million. More than 10m Syrians are refugees.”

“As marriages go, ours is an infant. Soft-skulled and milk-breathed. We’ve been married for two years, together for five.”

To catch a serial killer.

“The Wall Street Journal recently used the headline ‘We All Need OCD Now’ for an article on COVID-19 … Finally, my debilitating mental illness has a timely hook!”

“Maybe walking into some marshes, and deciding at an undetermined future point to stop walking, was what was available to the Romantics, but I think we can do better.”