Cameron Dezen Hammon reflects on her frustrations as a Christian music minister for the terminally ill, unable to heal a cancer patient she cared for, and struggling to be compassionate at her belligerent Jewish father’s bedside.
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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Pearls
Born from irritation and intrusion, luminous and complex, surprisingly durable: pearls are rich with symbolism and saturated with pain.
A Beast for the Ages
Why do we love (and fear, and kill) polar bears with so much intensity?
Memoirs of a Used Car Salesman’s Daughter
Hearses, limousines, Detroit’s newest model — cars marked many milestones in Nancy Nichols’ life of heartache and family deception.
Born to Be Eaten
What’s at stake in the fight over development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? A caribou herd, and a culture that relies on it.
When Black Male Singers Were Sex Symbols
Teddy Pendergrass was the R&B singer women wanted and who men wanted to be. And the one whose life-sized cardboard cutout stood in one family’s living room.
A Walk On The Wild Side: The Pete Ripmaster Journey
After discovering ultrarunning, a middle-aged father battling depression attempts his most daunting and dangerous race to date: 1,000 miles, solo, across Alaska in winter.
When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston gave Langston Hughes a lift to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie.” It was one of most fortuitous hangouts in literary history.
The Dead End on My Record Shelf
I believed that there was no music existing in the world with an unbroken connection to its original context. I was wrong.
Here is My Heart
Long after the shooting at her old high school, Megan Stielstra worries about her father’s heart. Part one of a three-part series on gun violence.
