The writer, on volunteering as a meditation teacher at a detention center holding men convicted of serious crimes: It’s several weeks after that first class, and the inmates looking me over don’t seem as menacing, I realize — just interested. I don’t know what anyone’s in prison for, and that allows me to talk as […]
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Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
Autistic and Searching for a Home
Between jail and the hospital, Savannah Shannon’s life is in limbo.
Posted inEditor's Pick
How We Survived Two Years of Hell As Hostages in Tehran
Three Americans recount their experience of being held captive in Iran’s Evin Prison after unknowingly crossing the Iraq-Iran border while out on a hike. An excerpt from A Sliver of Light, a co-written book about their ordeal: SHANE (October 2009) Solitary confinement is the slow erasure of who you thought you were. You think you […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Plot From Solitary
Four men from rival gangs launch a hunger strike protesting the conditions of solitary confinement: The severity of his isolation meant that as the strike began, Ashker had little idea of what effect it was having or how many other prisoners had decided to join him. It turned out to be the largest coordinated hunger […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Murderer and the Manuscript
Alaric hunt is writing detective novels, while serving a life sentence for murder, arson, robbery and other charges: Alaric Hunt turned 44 in September. He last saw the outside world at 19. He works every day at the prison library in a maximum-security facility in Bishopville, S.C., passing out the same five magazines and newspapers […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker
Before the Civil War, the clerk was “a small but unusual phenomenon.” By the end of the 19th century, clerical workers were a social force to be reckoned with. This is the story of their rise.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War
In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Giving Visibility to the Invisible: An Interview With Photographer Ruddy Roye
“I want to introduce white America to people who they might never have met, and I want them to fall in love too.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Question of Mercy
In 1998 a district attorney sent a teenager to prison for murder. Years later, he’s questioning the life sentence: According to the law, Cole continued, it did not matter that Randy had not fired the gun or had not wished Heather dead. In Texas, the “law of parties” erases the distinction between killers and accomplices, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Playboy Interview: Gawker’s Nick Denton
The media entrepreneur’s vision for the future of content and journalism: DENTON: The Panopticon—the prison in which everybody is exposed to scrutiny all the time. Do you remember the website Fucked Company? It was big in about 2000, 2001. I was CEO of Moreover Technologies at the time. A saleswoman put in an anonymous report […]
