I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.
“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.”
How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight
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.’”
The Launch
After two decades of research and development, WA 38 lands this fall. It could disrupt an entire industry. It’s an apple.
The New Prospectors
The Soviet Children Who Survived World War II
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.”
Poetry and Prophecy, Dust and Ashes
“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.”
Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave 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.
Going Down the Pipes
For the “Journeys” issue of Topic, Anna Holmes shares a reprint of a 1996 New York Times Magazine piece by Darcy Frey originally titled, “Something’s Got to Give.” The piece is a wild, frenetic look at the fragile fraternity of air traffic controllers minding the busiest airspace in the United States. “Every hour around here is 59 minutes of boredom and 1 of sheer terror.”
Food Injustice
Does helping poor urban families access fresh vegetables reduce health disparities? Probably not, but universal health care sure would.
Is It Okay to Laugh at Florida Man?
“What it’s like to go viral as one of the Internet’s biggest memes — and the moral complications of laughing along.”
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