Mother Science
Uterine transplants are frontier science, but they offer hope of possibility for trans women and others seeking parenthood.
The Feels of Love
Yes, kids are cruel and adolescence is challenging, but when we equate sexual assault with the standard teasing of adolescence, we normalize rape culture, and that is not normal. Madden’s story of rape and redemption is still too familiar to the many young woman who men routinely victimize. If America is going to progress as a culture, we must talk openly about our sexual traumas, the victimizers who commit these assaults, and remove the victims’ shame. In this essay, Madden does that her for herself, and for us of all, masterfully.
Is Infidelity A Search for Identity? On Coupling: An Inventory
On a friend’s porch, someone has left behind a deer skull, beautifully intact, antlers and all, inside a wood crate set up against the wall. I consider the dead skull, the solid antlers, which won’t age for ages, which won’t die. The hollow sockets where eyes once looked for grass, the empty caves where a nose once bent to dirt. This deer must have lived in the woods behind here, in the fir and madrone, on the hillside taking a bed for its children, laying down in nights cold and rainy like this one. It makes me think about the wild in us all, how it stays tight, how we manage it or don’t, how we are animal in our marrow, our depth, our desire for sex as natural as the instinct to build a home, to shelter, to protect.
Why Is There a Patient Cap on Medication Used to Treat Heroin Addicts?
At Guernica, Lucas Mann (who lost his brother to heroin addiction) writes on why abstinence and methadone don’t work and how doctors are failing in their fight against arbitrary, DEA-enforced patient caps on buprenorphine — a promising treatment for heroin addiction.
The Public Is Us
Groner’s essay charts public health from Typhoid Mary to the Ebola outbreak, considering the balance between civil liberties and disease control.
Hidden in a Suitcase
In search of the mother who gave her up for adoption, the author instead finds six siblings—and a family ravaged by addiction.
Utter Neutrality
On working as a sign language interpreter for the defendant in a murder case.
On Mercy
An essay about the meaning of a death sentence, from a pediatric cancer ward to death row.
History Is Who You’ve Lost
As an adult, Gabis discovers that her grandfather had been the chief of security police under the Gestapo in Lithuania and sets out to learn the truth about what he had done.
On Chicken Tenders
A food writer explains her deep love for chicken tenders.