Who Speaks for Crazy Horse?
So much of the American story—as it actually happened, but also as it is told, and altered, and forgotten, and, eventually, repeated—feels squeezed into the vast contradiction that is the modern Black Hills. Here, sites of theft and genocide have become monuments to patriotism, a symbol of resistance has become a source of revenue, and old stories of broken promises and appropriation recur. A complicated history becomes a cheery tourist attraction. The face of the past comes to look like the faces of those who memorialize it.
My Terezin Diary
Octogenarian documentary filmmaker Zuzana Justman tells the story of her family’s imprisonment at Terezin, a Czech concentration camp also known as Theresienstadt, through the lens of what she didn’t write in the diary she kept then, which she relocated a few years ago.
The Book of Prince
“On January 29, 2016, Prince summoned me to his home, Paisley Park, to tell me about a book he wanted to write…Prince had always embodied dualities. Here was one more: he had told me that he was O.K., and he was not O.K. There was nothing false in the way he spoke to me, and nothing false in the way he spoke during his darkest moments.”
Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience
Despite many companies’ ambitious goals and marketing, Big Tech is not making the world a better place, and some tech workers are going to spiritual centers and mindfulness training to search their conscious and, maybe, find an ethical solution.
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
How two moderators are trying to make a popular Silicon Valley forum a thoughtful and productive space to have a conversation.
Alan Dershowitz, Devil’s Advocate
“The noted lawyer’s long, controversial career—and the accusations against him.”
The Lingering of Loss
My best friend left her laptop to me in her will. Twenty years later, I turned it on and began my inquest.
The Invisible City Beneath Paris
Six hundred years of quarrying has left the great city with two hundred miles of subterranean tunnels and chambers. Curious, the author explores part of this damp, dark, claustrophobic network with a couple of anonymous urban explorers who belong to a subculture with its own codes of conduct.
Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston
“I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all.”
Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s profile of American folk singer, composer, and MacArthur Fellow Rihannon Giddens includes a history of the influential, but little known black antebellum fiddler Frank Johnson, as well as the 1898 racial massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina.