A personal essay in which Joy Notoma grapples with: saying goodbye to friends before a move, the complicated grief of shunning, and the way one parting can be a painful reminder of so many others.

California has set aside $2.1 billion in funding for construction projects to upgrade old jails, some of which have been branded as having “deplorable” conditions. But a majority of the projects have been delayed due to bureaucratic roadblocks and critical errors in planning. Meanwhile design flaws in the aging facilities have been contributing to deaths of inmates.

In this first piece in a series about women in the Bible and social constructions of feminine power, Nina Li Coomes examines the story of the Garden of Eden: “I first began to think of Eve as a woman punished for hunger in college. At the time, I was a recovering Atheist relapsing into her own disordered eating patterns. One evening, I struck upon this epiphany while staring intensely through the crosshatch glass of my apartment’s oven, willing the verdant kabocha squash (lower calorie count than sweet potatoes) I’d placed there to roast faster.”

“The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don’t normally speak to, and though my husband is white, I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage, even if my fantasies of these encounters seemed outlandish. I wanted to try.”

Lisa Miller makes a compelling argument that the male-dominated sexual revolution of the ’70s and the group-think it engendered led to the silence and tacit acceptance around Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of girls and young women. “A generation of entrepreneurial and ‘brilliant’ men took the job of defining the ‘erotic’ for everyone else,” she writes, “without consulting or including the interpretations of women, and then purveyed to the masses an eros that degraded women and girls while pitching it as ‘healthy.’”

After two decades of research and development, WA 38 lands this fall. It could disrupt an entire industry. It’s an apple.

Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses, a 1985 collection of testimonials from then-Soviets who were children during the Second World War, has been translated into English and excerpted at the Paris Review. “It became connected like that in my memory, that war is when there’s no papa.”

“But twenty-three years after Genesis, Alter has completed his work: a finished Hebrew Bible, three volumes lovingly footnoted; an altogether worthier object of contemplation than some fantasy series, or Lyndon Johnson. And I, who am but dust and ashes, review it.”

A deeply upsetting object lesson in how the arcane details of inheritance and property law are used to strip black Americans of their land.