The Atlantic

Dillard’s 1982 personal essay — excerpted by The Atlantic from her new collection, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New. She writes in exquisite detail about the haunting, surreal experience of witnessing the last solar eclipse, on February 26th, 1979, after driving five hours inland in Washington State to catch it from a hill top.

With drug resistance on the rise, the world faces a potential health catastrophe from infections we can no longer fight. One English scientist is probing toilet seats and pools of nasty stuff to find cures the way earlier scientists did: in nature.

One person searches for the flavor of the pediatric amoxicillin that, despite the pain of the ear infection it treated, endeared itself to so many of us. It’s what you might call a pharmaceutical travelogue, following a different sort of chem-trail.

Increasing deportations under Trump not only threaten the well-being of America’s undocumented farm workers, they threaten the very system that keeps America’s farms running, tax dollars flowing and food prices low. Here’s what’s happening in New York’s rural Hudson Valley.

“Of all the inequalities that exist” said Martin Luther King in 1966, “the injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman.” The ACA did the most in American history to extend coverage to people of color; “they have never been closer both to racial equality of, access and to, the federal protection of health care as a civil right. But if Republicans have their way, that dream will be deferred.”

Alex Tizon tells the story of his family’s slave, Lola. A utusan (“person who takes commands”), Lola was given as a gift from his grandfather to his mother in 1943, when Lola was 18 years old. Lola worked — unpaid — for Alex and his family for 56 years. In a turbulent childhood where his parents were out of the house for days at a time, Lola was a constant source of love and devotion for Alex and his three siblings. In this moving piece, Alex attempts to understand his parents’ point of view, their motivations, and reconcile himself with Lola’s life of servitude.

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?

Admittedly, it doesn’t take much, but Baldwin satirizes and critiques our sensitive, insensitive President with panache, raising himself to the role of America’s Deflator in Chief.

“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”

The facts on why facts alone can’t fight false beliefs.