Outta That Holler
“The rural poverty that created Dolly Parton.”
You Could Make This Place Beautiful
“Great,” she says resignedly. “What I’ll always be known for is writing this poem about how bad things are, and maybe they could be better, but they’re bad.”
The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd
“A teenage clerk dialed 911. How should the brothers who own CUP Foods pay for what happened next?”
“It Was Gone Overnight”
One restaurant’s struggle to weather the pandemic.
The Bible That Oozed Oil
A small Georgia town, a prophecy about Donald Trump, and the story of how a miracle fell apart.
Heard but Not Seen
“Now that hip-hop is no longer seen as a threat, the way it was when I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, it’s become the default ambiance in the kinds of high-end spaces that include few Black people.”
“Hot Topic”: The Complete Annotated Lyrics
A guide to the 57 champions of queer feminism name-dropped in Le Tigre’s most joyous song.
Theodore McCarrick Still Won’t Confess
He’s living at a friary in Kansas (the only place that would take him) on the condition that he not leave the grounds, still insists he hasn’t harmed anyone, and life goes on in the small town that surrounds him: it’s the best and worst of Catholicism in a microcosm.
The Mad Rush to Bulletproof American Schools
With no help from Congress, architects and school administrators are now responsible for redesigning schools to stop mass shootings. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees that the best approach is to make buildings safe without making them resemble prisons.
Why I Printed My Facebook
“I needed to convert my Facebook into something like a physical book, flip through its pages, prop open a window with it, and feel its weight in my hands. All of this would prove difficult, I later learned, because my Facebook was more than 10,000 pages long.”