Pacific Standard

“Terese Marie Mailhot interviews Alicia Elliott and Arielle Twist about some recent triumphs in Indigenous literature — and about other triumphs still to come.”

The Charleston Gazette-Mail was known as the newspaper that used “sustained outrage” to hold the powerful accountable in West Virginia, a state with a legacy of corruption. Last year, the paper filed for bankruptcy and changed owners; its future as a watchdog remains unclear.

You buy cage-free eggs, free-range beef, hormone-free milk. What about produce that was grown without injuring a migrant or depriving a kid of a normal childhood?

In an excerpt from his new book Underland, Robert Macfarlane asks if we are being good ancestors on a visit to Onkalo, a Finnish “experiment in post-­human architecture” designed to be the world’s most advanced underground repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste.

The news cycle means that Esquire‘s March cover story is already a half-dozen horrors ago, but that was the time needed for Patrick Nathan to produce this smart, searching exploration into the danger of false journalistic neutrality.

“The story of a Chinese billionaire who moved back home, setting his mansion down in the middle of his economically depressed ancestral village.”

Living next to North Carolina Naval Base Camp Lejeune, Lori Lou Freshwater grew up drinking and bathing in water contaminated at levels 240 to 3400 times the safety standard. Now a Superfund site and a candidate for “the worst water contamination case in U.S. history,” the area’s carcinogens caused her mother to lose two sons, one born with an open spine, the other with no cranium, and to develop two kinds of leukemia. As a stopover base for military personnel, up to a million others could be affected.

Terese Marie Mailhot reflects on the systemic racism she’s experienced as a human and as a writer. She relates that speaking out against racism can come with a personal cost, but that as a natural-born liberator, she is both willing and prepared to use her voice and her stories to overcome it.

If you’re dedicated and have an original vision, you can make things happen, even way out among the cactus. Anyway, the rattlesnakes are nicer than some of the people in New York media.

Sabine Heinlein tells the heartbreaking story of Terri Been, who has devoted years of her life to saving her brother’s after he was sentenced to death by the state of Texas almost two decades ago for a murder he definitively did not commit.