Returning to Terabithia
To teach her son the rewards of reading, one mother reads him a book with a very sad ending. It’s the same book her own mother quit reading her as a child, before they reached that ending. As an parent she now realized that sparing our kids sadness doesn’t them protect them from it.
Flights
One woman looks at her life of air travel to explore her drive to keep moving and taking risks, despite airplane anxiety.
On Wisconsin
In the wake of the Presidential election, it’s fitting to highlight this evergreen personal essay from the literary magazine Witness. In it, one man meditates on his home state, a cold place where a distrustful, resistant tribalism intersects with a history of early progressivism, harkening back to a time “when the Republican Party was on the side of the righteous” and to an unjust shooting.