Esquire

Ten of every eleven psychiatric patients housed by the government are incarcerated. Here’s what this crisis looks like from the inside—a series of lost lives and a few rare victories—as reported by a prisoner-journalist.

After two siblings got kidnapped on the Navajo reservation, jurisdictional issues and a structural breakdown of the Amber Alert system slowed the search. Trying to protect Indigenous children on tribal lands requires increased police training and federal funding, but funding often means compromising some tribal sovereignity.

A personal essay in which writer and producer Rebecca Carroll catalogs her experiences with not only sexism, by racism as well, as the only black woman on Charlie Rose’s staff in the late 90s.

In an incredibly moving feature, journalist Libby Copeland spends time with a couple in their 60s, Kate and Deloy Oberlin, as they very consciously prepare for Kate’s death from metastatic breast cancer, and again in the aftermath of her passing. Deloy honors his wife’s wishes that once she’s gone, for three days while her body is chilled with dry ice and frozen water bottles, a gathering his held where family and friends can visit with her body. Afterward, also per her wishes, he delivers her body to a site where it is composted as part of a study in “green” burial.

For Esquire, Robert P. Baird talks to Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the recently appointed poetry editor at the New Yorker about the future of poetry.

Do you know that the company that makes OxyContin and reaps the billions of dollars in profits it generates is owned by one family?

A new study from Boston University suggests that youth aged six to 12 who play football are at a higher risk for irreversible damage to their brains. Even Mike Ditka — had he a young son today — wouldn’t let him play football. “I think the risk is worse than the reward. I really do.”

A young woman encouraged her boyfriend to commit suicide in a series of texts and telephone calls. Was it a homicide?

Afghan Noorullah Aminyar was a valuable ally to the American military. Now, after a failed defection attempt and three years in detention, his asylum claims rests on the argument that the U.S. has lost the war in Afghanistan.

Spending six days in a cave without any light means hallucinations, hypothermia, and the potential for fatal falls. Why would anyone volunteer for one of the most extreme reality shows ever?