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“A few hours later, after giving birth in the car’s back seat, there was paperwork to do. In my bed at New York Methodist, my daughter’s buttery newborn skin against my chest, I tabbed through papers in a blue folder embossed with the hospital’s logo: birth certificate and social security forms, lactation support resources, a brochure asking, helpfully, “Can Your Baby Hear You?”

One line on an insurance printout caught my eye. PLACE OF BIRTH: EXTRAMURAL.”

“Kingsley Hall was an experiment that is considered imperfect by all who took part in it, deeply flawed; to some on the outside, it was wildly irresponsible, perhaps a failure.”

In the 20th century, anthropologists fell over themselves to study the “cargo cult” phenomenon in the South Pacific. But was it really a new religion—or just a Western fantasy?

An incredible photo essay in which both the images and words tell the crazy story of imprisoned mortician David Sconce (up for parole in 2022). In the ’80s, Sconce turned his family’s California funeral home into a mass crematorium and black market body part- and organ-harvesting business.

“Garishly food-styled heads of hollowed-out iceberg packed with pimiento cheese, or baked beans in aspic, bolster our own superior sense of ourselves. Like the Instagram freakshake, they are fantasy transgressions against which we define our superior awesomeness.”

After her book, So You Want to Talk About Race, becomes a bestseller, Black author Ijeoma Oluo offers to build her white mother a home with her earnings and learns how race can affect the ways adult children care for their aging parents.

Thanks to huge casino profits, the youth of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians receive a payment they call “The Big Money” at age 18 after graduating from high school. Payments — which were as small as $600 when the program started in 1996 — are now into six figures.

Baobab trees are as integral a part of the Botswana ecosytem as they are a part of local culture. Unfortunately, the scientists who discovered that ancient baobabs are dying have no clear explanation why.

Jen Doll dives into the world of the band Phish and their followers, known as “phans.” She discovers a hippy-esque subculture of “you do you” people dedicated not only to a band renowned for live jams, but a shared appreciation for uninhibited drug consumption, joyful escapism, and making new Phish-following-friends at every show.

Like cowboys in westerns, sheriffs were icons in the 20th century. They were the law. No matter what white residents in Alabaman’s Wilcox County say, so-called good ol’ boy Sherriff Lummie Jenkins used his power to violently suppress black voters and battle the Civil Rights movement. He’s no icon.