All That Was Familiar
In Nigeria, Boko Haram left millions of “internally displaced persons,” called IDPs, living in makeshift camps, trying to keep their children from starving while relief food gets pirated and sold off in local markets. A journalist snuck into one camp without authorization to get the real story of life on the ground there.
Love in the Age of Prince
Michael Gonzales affectionately looks back on a romantic relationship where the partners share a love of Prince.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young African Immigrant
Writer Taiye Selasi profiles novelist Yaa Gyasi and visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, both African-born, Alabama-raised creatives, whose work complicates the notion of blackness in America.
Dorothy Allison on Why Working-Class Literature Is the Strongest
An interview with Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard out of Carolina, on growing up poor, finding her voice, the limitations of fiction, overcoming the stigma of poverty, and being a lesbian in Donald Trump’s America.
My Grandmother’s Desperate Choice
As a child, Kate Daloz was told her grandmother died in a “household accident,” but the secret her mother had been keeping was a source of long-held family trauma: She had died of a “criminal abortion” on an unremarkable afternoon in her own home after she was unable to get a doctor to perform one illegally. Her grandmother had been married with two kids and a third on the way, when her husband was been shipped off to London by the OSS. Without a doctor, her French step-mother had suggested an alternative method: “Frenchwomen take care of these things themselves.”
There’s So Much to Learn From the Montana Special Election
There are few independent voters more independent than the Montana voter. The enormous, rural state swings neither wholly Republican or Democrat, which allows for checks and balances to the system: “Montanans don’t like big government,” writes Anne Helen Petersen, who criss-crossed the state in the weeks before the upcoming special election, “but they also have very little tolerance for getting screwed over. One way to prevent that is by preventing any one political party from obtaining too much power.”
The Painful Truth About Teeth
The divide between rich and poor in this country may be a sharp line between those who can care for their teeth and those who can’t. Thirty-five percent of American adults don’t have dental insurance, and even those who do may only be able to afford cleanings, and little else. The Washington Post visits a free dental clinic on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which for two days provided over a million dollars in free care to those who couldn’t afford it.
‘America’s Deaf Team’ Tackles Identity Politics
In order to survive, Gallaudet University has to blend a diverse student body from very different backgrounds: deaf culture and hearing culture. Can football players show the school how?
The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth
This deep dive by ProPublica and NPR into maternal death in the United States equal parts devastating and essential. But for a country that prides itself in the lowering of infant mortality, concerns about the health of the mother in the days and weeks after birth has declined to the point that even preventable illnesses are going under-treated, or untreated.
End Notes
How is a death mourned after it’s gone viral? China, WeChat, and the public consumption of private tragedy.
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