Fourteen years after her memoir about about her father’s death was released, novelist Aminatta Forna still deals with after-effects, both good and bad.
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Posted inNonfiction
The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The Masterless People: Pirates, Maroons, and the Struggle to Live Free
In the “bizarre and horrifying world” of the early modern Caribbean, maroons and pirates both prized their freedom above all else. And sometimes they worked together to safeguard it.
Posted inNonfiction, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Ronan Farrow, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, Vivian Ho, Christopher Goffard, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Alex Pappademas.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Story
A Green New Jail
What does environmental justice look like in a landscape overrun by prisons? Where the incarcerated suffer from unusually polluted surroundings, and prisons are a toxin in their own right?
Posted inUncategorized
Donald Trump’s War With the Past
The president willfully ignores, rewrites, or rejects history just as we have begun to truly interrogate the trauma of the Civil War.
Posted inBusiness, Business & Tech, Current Events, Nonfiction, Story
The Prosperity Plea
Paying attention to the Poor People’s Campaign.
Posted inBlog Post, Reading List
Celebrating a Second Independence Day: A Juneteenth Reading List
Nine stories that explain the fraught history of the holiday, and the need for celebration.
Posted inCulture, Nonfiction, Story
Land Not Theirs
Reckoning with a religious upbringing means confronting religion’s role in oppressing women and people of color.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Nina Simone in Liberia
Katherina Grace Thomas weaves together a gripping account of the years Nina Simone found freedom from America’s racial strife in lush, pre-Civil War Liberia.
