“Tears are central to great acting. A lifetime of weeping at the movies has taught me how much letting it all go in real life can matter, too.”
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A New Series, An Unknown History, and the Week’s top 5
“Minstrelsy shows you one hand, convinces you of one thing—the thing you can see most vividly—while something else works behind the scenes. That something is something only those who are tapped into a specific kind of pain, a specific kind of quest for freedom that has failed before but is not worth abandoning, might understand.” […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Simon van Zuylen-Wood, Elizabeth Weil, Jeannette Cooperman, Ryan Katz, and Madeleine Watts.
Guatemala’s Baby Brokers: How Thousands of Children Were Stolen for Adoption
“From the 1960s, baby brokers persuaded often Indigenous Mayan women to give up newborns while kidnappers ‘disappeared’ babies.”
The Abortion I Didn’t Have
“I would never give my son back, for anything, but I would certainly give him a different mother.”
There She Goes: A Reading List on Women Adventurers
The women you’ll find on top of the world.
This Isn’t the California I Married
“The honeymoon’s over for its residents now that wildfires are almost constant. Has living in this natural wonderland lost its magic?”
Into the Belly of the Whale With Sjón
“His books dance — with light, quick steps, never breaking eye contact — all over the line between the mythic and the mundane.”
“They Took Us Away From Each Other”: Lost Inside America’s Shadow Foster System
“It would take years before Molly and Heaven would learn that neither of them was ever in the foster system. Instead, caseworkers had diverted them to what some scholars call ‘hidden foster care’ or ‘shadow foster care,’ in which the legal protections of the formal system disappear.”


