We recommend these incisive essays on Abbott Elementary, The White Lotus, and The Dropout in Scalawag’s series on pop culture and justice.
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Return to the Saddle Club: A Reading List on Horse Girls
Celebrating the girls with an equine obsession.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Featuring standout reads from Ian Urbina, Hanif Abdurraqib, Sallie Tisdale, Brad Rassler, and Adam Reiner.
Forest
“My father joked to me that running and hiding is our blood. That we are a line of victorious refugees.”
Futures From Ruins
Bombay Beach was once a vibrant resort town on the Salton Sea until agricultural pollution, drought, and toxic air led to its demise. Today, an art movement and emerging community hope to bring it back. In this Noema essay, writer Johanna Hoffman and photographer Tao Ruspoli show how a town in ruins is experiencing a […]
They Call Her Lamb Mom
A gentle essay, that still manages to be gut-wrenching. AC Shilton tells this story of two sickly lambs with compassion and beauty. For a single day, though, I showed a disabled lamb the freedom of movement, one of the greatest joys of my former life as an endurance athlete. More importantly, in Sebastian’s last hours, […]
Parks and Re-Creation (and the Week’s Top 5)
“In spite of my confidence in cooking, I’ve never brought mulukhiyah into my urban kitchen. Eating it without my family’s elbows pressed against mine doesn’t make sense to me. I know I’d feel like an impostor, inserting myself into the sacred and altering it irreparably, as I can’t help but reinvent recipes with my own improvised […]
False Passives
As she travels north through Ethiopia, Anna Badkhen speaks with people who are looking for a way to escape — to cross the Gulf of Aden toward Yemen — and ruminates on the plight of refugees and vulnerable populations around the world. When does a journey begin? When droughts parch the land, or mudslides take entire farms […]
The Trait That ‘Super Friends’ Have in Common
For some people, friendships are just easier, argues Marisa G. Franco in this enlightening essay. You are guided by your attachment style, for better or worse, in your romantic, and platonic, connections. The secret: Assume that people like you. The psychologist Fred H. Goldner coined the term pronoia to describe the optimistic counterpart to paranoia. […]


