Eighty years ago, in Berlin, Stella Walsh won her second Olympic medal. Decades later, Walsh’s murder and subsequent autopsy threw the legacy of track’s first female superstar into turmoil.
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Unchain My Heart: On the Emotional Effectiveness—and Lingering Sexism—of Jewish Divorce
Sari Botton explores the dark side of a tradition that has for millennia subverted women’s rights.
Bad News: Censorship, Fear & Genocide Memorials
“They are manufacturing fear,” Moses said, gasping. “We survivors have asked them to stop this violence. What do they want from us?”
Think of This as a Window: Remembering the Life and Work of Maggie Estep
“I moved to Lower Manhattan when I was seventeen. The only things I cared about were books and music.”
The Mysteries and Truths of Illness: A Reading List
In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a […]
Looking for Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles
Tracing Raymond Chandler’s early days in L.A.
The Walkable Multiverse According to Charles Jencks
On an abandoned mining site in Scotland, an architectural theorist attempts to bring the mysteries of the cosmos to life on Earth.
Loving Books in a Dark Age
In the “dark ages” of Europe, people began reading silently to themselves, and a love of books and learning took hold, pioneered by Bede.
Desperate Characters
An excerpt from the 1970 novel by Paula Fox: Status-conscious Sophie and Otto Bentwood attend a dinner party in Brooklyn Heights in the late sixties, shortly after Sophie sustains a bite on her hand from a stray cat.
The Missing History of Ravensbrück, The Nazi Concentration Camp for Women
The story of the Nazis’ only concentration camp for women has long been obscured—partly by chance, but also by historians’ apathy towards women’s history. Sarah Helm writes about the camp, where the “cream of Europe’s women” were interned alongside its prostitutes, and members of the French resistance perished alongside Red Army prisoners of war.
