“When I moved to Billtown, I worried most about whether fracking tainted groundwater. By the time I left the area, my biggest concern was whether the liberty granted to citizens to lease their land, or to otherwise act in ways that limits others’ access to environmental goods, taints democracy.”
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Posted inEditor's Pick
How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools
Journalist and documentarian — and Stuyvesant High School alumna — Laurie Gwen Shapiro profiles Alice de Rivera, whose 1969 case challenging Stuyvesant to open its enrollment to girls led to so many other male-only secondary schools and colleges to abandon gender-based exclusion.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, History, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘By Choice, and Not By Choice…Time Is Going To Change You.’
Nina MacLaughlin discusses her retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “[In] my very vague high school memories…there was no discussion of the fact that this book is just rape after rape after rape.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Her Own Space
“At Hackensack High School in New Jersey, where her family later moved, [Melina] Matsoukas was into photography and hip-hop. At home, she watched the films of Mira Nair, The Color Purple, All About My Mother, The Royal Tenenbaums, West Side Story, Belly, and her absolute favorite, Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dust, an impressionistic movie about three generations of […]
Posted inNonfiction
‘Are We Breaking Apart, Or Is There Enough Left to Bind Us?’
Conversations and revelations about an ailing nation along Interstate 95.
Posted inUncategorized
On Different Kinds of Love (and Our Top 5)
“Give me the complicated, the missed connections, the big gestures, the bittersweet endings. Give me the struggle, because it’s the struggle that makes it love.” Yes, today is that day. Dreadful for some of us, but delightful for others. (Especially all the excited school-age kids exchanging “Be My Valentine” messages—which, these days, are no longer […]
Posted inNewsletter
Stories on Shady Science (and Our Top 5)
“On one hand, it’s critical to root out research fraud and serious errors. On the other hand, highlighting the most dramatic outliers risks creating the impression that science as a whole can’t be trusted.” When I told my 7-year-old daughter that the recent viral clip of bunnies jumping on a trampoline was fake, she looked […]
Posted inNewsletter
Hope in the Desert and the Week’s Top 5
“Talking with them I realized how many people, like me, had run away from hard conversations. How we did it on purpose, and sometimes without realizing. How people who needed to talk waited for invitations to spit out the hard stuff, and how good it felt when they did.” Happy Friday, y’all. Summer is drawing […]
Posted inFeature
My Unlikely Existence
Is AI helping prospective parents game the fertility lottery? Should it?
Posted inUncategorized
People vs. 👻, Townspeople vs. Nazis, and Our Top 5
“The new bridge is square where the old bridge is round, bustling instead of deserted, awash in the sounds of schools and neighborhoods nearby. At some point, Lydia’s haunting shifted along with the traffic patterns. She’s been seen at both bridges, but the new one is the only place she might still hail passing motorists.” […]
