Emily Flake reflects on the shifting nature of magic and power in middle age.

All the good habits and self-optimization in the world don’t give you real control over your body. Back away from the bread starter.

Adam Kuhlmann was outmatched at the 1993 Little League World Series. His 11-year-old nephew helps him to learn from his errors.

Dementia is a kind of erasure, a death before death, where the living discount the infirmed long before they’re gone.

Under self-quarantine, Aaron Gilbreath ‘moves’ freely with the help of Rambalac’s video travelogues.

Witches we need you. Now more than ever. In the time of COVID-19 we can find respite in place-based reverence, plant magic and the divine feminine. So writes Lisa Richardson, who came to witchiness with nothing but white hetero straight-lacedness and a crush on a yoga teacher.

Deenie Hartzog-Mislock confronts a lifetime of body image trauma when her marriage turns south and sexless.

When the only way to be a real community is to be apart, it quickly becomes obvious who is out for themselves.

“With a drink in my hand and earplugs responsibly in place, I’m very aware that I’ve spent more than half my life essentially standing in the same spot: off to one side of the stage (close but not too close), eyes forward, shifting weight from foot to foot.”

Coronavirus inspires Sari Botton to reach out to family and friends she’s fallen out with.

Faylita Hicks considers what it means to be a Black nonbinary activist in the age of Trump — and questions how the social justice movement has changed the way they have sex.

With physical distancing the order of the day as COVID-19 spreads, cultural locales — sites for communal experiences, like museums and theaters — are emptying out. What are we sharing if we’re not sharing these spaces? And were we really sharing them to begin with?

“It’s strange to think that the Righteous Brothers outlive my mother. Sometimes I pretend they are singing to her.”

Rachel Vorona Cote on how the Victorian era’s restrictive prescriptions for acceptable female behavior pollute society to this day.

In the midst of a pandemic, nature reminds Susan Krawitz that miracles are possible.

June Amelia Rose remembers coming out in her youth to a turbulent family as her mother died of cancer.

Navigating distance and time in the age of uncertainty.

As she’s done before, Sara B. Franklin greets the specter of death by defiantly planting a life-sustaining vegetable garden.

Naz Riahi recalls her vibrant childhood in a suburb of Tehran, and considers how the harsh realities imposed by the still new Islamic Republic seeped into her family’s life.

Sarah Fay reflects on four years spent in solitude (and isolation [and loneliness]), viewing it through the lens of punctuation.

A headline-grabbing murder-for-hire plot helped expose the dark side of exotic animal ownership in the U.S. Is there now enough momentum to reform the industry?

Dialogue, Twitter-style: you get called out on social media. People pile on to you. Other people pile on to the pile-oners. Soon everyone’s anxious or angry or both, no one’s really talking (or listening), and a few tech CEOs are buying new houses in Jackson Hole.

For years, singer-songwriter Paul Curreri was a shouter of singular beauty. Then he went quiet — slowly, at first, then all of a sudden.

Sarah Miller thinks about climate change and other current horrors, and what it’s like just being sad forever.

New York midwife Elizabeth Catlin faces 95 individual felony counts at her upcoming trial. For what? For doing her job. Politics and patriarchy make the work of many credentialed, experienced midwives illegal — to the detriment of women and underserved communities.

How youth in Rochester, New York, are working to save their neighborhood — and themselves — by forging pathways away from violent street crime.

An entanglement with her shrink-stalking protege teaches Susan Shapiro something about forgiveness.

Why couldn’t this ailing appendage get over itself? Diagnosing a mysterious malady.

When she loses a pregnancy, Anna Lea Hand searches in vain for vital advice and information.