Zilong Wang cycled 3,400 miles west across America to San Francisco on his bike, the White Dragon Horse. At Bicycling, John Brant recounts Wang’s enlightening adventure: how he befriended kind strangers along the way, found an appreciation for life in his solitude, and lost — but later found — his bike at the end of the journey.
Quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The United States of America: A Country of Contradictions
Conservative political commentator Andrew Sullivan recently became a United States citizen. In New York magazine, Sullivan reflects on how he learned to embrace the U.S.’s flaws and virtues as he watched the country go through social and political shifts over the last three decades.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Quotes
Blithe, Euphoric, Grateful, and Over
Monica Uszerowicz reflects on what living through the Holocaust does to a survivor’s relationship to food, hunger, and eating for pleasure, and how these relationships get passed on to successive generations.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
President Trump, Three Days On: The Sound and the Fury
This story in the Washington Post — based on interviews with almost a dozen senior White House officials and and Trump advisors — paints a picture of an uneasy administration trying to stay in orbit around its hyper-sensitive leader and his insider cabal.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
We’re Stronger Together: What Happens After Standing Rock?
In High Country News, Tay Wiles reports on how the Dakota Access Pipeline protests have spread greater understanding of environmental issues among Natives and non-Natives alike, and how they’ve inspired a new generation of protesters who are collaborating to raise awareness of and oppose other projects that impact Indigenous people, their rights, and their land.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Mike Pence Came Back from the Dead
On the vice president’s unlikely journey from unpopular, ultra-conservative governor to second-in-command to Donald Trump.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Ten Letters A Day: To Obama With Love, and Hate, and Desperation
Jeanne Marie Laskas goes behind the scenes in the White House mailroom where “50 staff members, 36 interns, and a rotating roster of 300 volunteers” read and processed the 10,000 emails and letters President Barack Obama received each day during his eight-year presidency.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When Beauty Brings Dishonor: Beauty Shopping With My Mother, A Former Cultural Revolution Red Guard
In Racked, Noël Duan — A former beauty editor — reflects on the differences between the definition of beauty in America and in China during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where an “unadorned woman was a symbol of liberation from a patriarchal capitalist system.”
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
California Defends Itself
Alexander Nazaryan details the many ideological and legal fronts on which California and President Trump clash, and the ways Californians are resisting and preparing for future federal incursions.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Whitefish, Montana Will Not be Intimidated
Andrew Romano tells how the small town of Whitefish, Montana, stood up to the anti-Semitic threats of resident neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and his band of white supremacists, sending a strong, clear message: hate is not welcome here; we will not back down.