At one point, Twentieth Century Fox Film Group tried to convince Mike Judge, Office Space‘s director, to cast Matt Damon, feeling the film wouldn’t draw audiences without a star. Twenty years later, it’s inconceivable that anyone but Ron Livingston could have played Peter Gibbons.

In this hilarious piece, Meaghan O’Connell reflects on all the “being a mom” advice she ignored before having kids, that now, she not-so-secretly wishes to be consulted on.

“People don’t necessarily revolt when things are bad, but they might when things aren’t getting better, or are getting demonstrably worse.”

In this braided personal essay, Patrice Gropo compellingly draws together narrative threads about the solar eclipse in August, 2017, and how it, in ways eclipsed the white nationalist march on Charlottesville 10 days before; and the way in which a white writer effectively eclipsed her by publishing plagiarized portions of an essay she’d read at aloud at a conference.

A chance run in with a recently-released detainee drives home that the border Reyna Grande crossed into the U.S. with her family 30 years ago doesn’t lead to the same place as the border crossed today.

When relationships grow tired or toxic, some people write songs about the people they leave behind, the way John Coltrane did for his first wife Naima Grubbs. For others, like this essay’s author, there are too many things that can’t be spoken about, so they talk mostly about music.

For stroke survivor Sherman Hershfield, rapping and rhyming kept his seizures under control.

In USP Florence, the most violent prison in the U.S. federal prison system, rats don’t live long and they don’t die peacefully. But Wayne Byerly talked, and lived — and found redemption.

At an art exhibit exploring black models through Western art, Morgan Jerkins finds historical evidence of the white supremacist definitions of beauty Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom identifies in Thick: and Other Essays.