The Countess and the Schoolboy
Daniel Mendelsohn’s writing career started with the help of septuagenarian French dancer whose embrace of simple pleasures helped teach him to engage with the world differently.
When Barbie Went to War With Bratz
Jill Lepore looks at the problem of defining intellectual property when it comes to what young girls should play with: “The feud between Barbie and Bratz occupies the narrow space between thin lines: between fashion and porn, between originals and copies, and between toys for girls and rights for women.”
A Tech Pioneer’s Final, Unexpected Act
When virtuoso violinist and tech worker Eric Sun got diagnosed with brain cancer, he turned his attention from making money for Facebook to making music for himself.
My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion
A reported, scientific essay in which physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee considers the body’s proclivity for homeostasis, which kept his elderly father’s failing body alive for longer than seemed to make sense, after he had begun failing, and falling.
Under Trump, A Hard Test for Howard University
For The New Yorker, historian and journalist Jelani Cobb dives deep into the history of Washington D.C.’s Howard University, one of the nation’s largest HBCU’s. Howard alumni include Thurgood Marshall, Kamala Harris, and Toni Morrison, and the school has played a large role in facilitating the social mobility of blacks in America since the Civil War. Cobb speaks at length to Wayne Frederick, the university’s current president, whose pragmatism during the Trump era has drawn ire from student activists. But similar tensions have arisen before.
The Teens Trapped Between a Gang and the Law
More than 200,000 children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras came to the U.S. unaccompanied between 2014 and 2016. Allowed to enter the country while awaiting deportation proceedings or asylum decisions, many settled with relatives in parts of Suffolk County, Long Island. For The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer writes of the precarious course the children must walk — enduring threats of gang violence and a local power structure hostile to their existence.
Estonia, The Digital Republic
To encourage business and save money, this small Baltic nation streamlined itself into a society where all bureaucratic processes, from banking to voting, can be conducted online on one platform, and citizens only need to enter their personal information once, be they physical citizens or e-residents. It sounds like an Orwellian nightmare, but e-Estonia believes it’s the US who has it all wrong.
Cat Person
[Fiction] A young woman goes on a bad date with an older man.
Lake Chad: The World’s Most Complex Humanitarian Disaster
As the massive Lake Chad started drying up in Central Africa, famine sent the native tribes scrambling to survive. Now political factions and jihadists have compounded the climate change and food shortages to throw this region where four nations meet into turmoil.
Where Millennials Come From
Millennials have been blamed for destroying the world they were born into, killing entire industries simply because they can. They don’t consume like the generation before because they don’t make money like their parents did. But this isn’t because they’re lazy and irresponsible. Rather, as the most productive generation, the more millennials give, the more the world takes.