“When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September—penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself—it made the news because she was a professor.” So begins the dark tale of […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Unapologetic Women
The Answer Is Never
Rewriting the false narrative of childlessness.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
How the Emperor Became Human (and MacArthur Became Divine)
The end of divine rule in postwar Japan, and the absolute power of General MacArthur.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Vagabonds, Crafty Bauds, and the Loyal Huzza: A History of London at Night
In the 16th & 17th centuries, “nightwalking” was a transgressive act in a city still on the brink of total nighttime illumination, but with complex implications depending on your social status.
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 inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Fairyland: Memories of a Singular San Francisco Girlhood
Alysia Abbott recalls being raised by her poet father—a single, openly gay man—in the San Francisco of the nineteen-seventies and eighties.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Heart You Save Won’t Be Your Own
A young social worker fights Medicare to cover a homeless teenage boy’s medication, forfeiting her own idealism in the process.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Hell—Nothing Less—And Without End: Six Days in Warsaw
“The uprising,” we told each other immediately, like everyone else in Warsaw. Strange. Because no one had ever used that word before in his life. Only in history, in books.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Southern Music’s Racial Double Standard
We believe automatically that Chris Knight is not — could never actually be — that homeless man with a gun. Put the same lyric in Killer Mike’s mouth, though, and you think something different, don’t you? You do not assume instantly that Mike is merely inhabiting a character. No, in your mind, he is the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Sister’s Sleuthing Unravels a Teenage Love Triangle Murder Mystery
A twisted tale of teenage love and cold-blooded murder in Hollywood, Florida. For detectives, the killing at first glance must have seemed an all-too-common crime: another dead thug, likely felled by the same drug culture that had left him homeless and broke. Yet Savage’s life and death — as told through hundreds of pages of […]
