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.
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.
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 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.
A Transgender-Military Reading List
Thousands of people in the U.S.’s all-volunteer military are transgender.
