The New Reconstruction
“The conditions in America today do not much resemble those of 1968. In fact, the best analogue to the current moment is the first and most consequential such awakening—in 1868.”
The Worst Day of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction
The author visits the 9/11 Memorial Museum, 13 years after his sister’s death.
The Last Shakers?
The last living Shakers—just two by some counts—keep their centuries-old faith in a village in Maine.
A Pandemic, a Motel Without Power and a Potentially Terrifying Glimpse of Orlando’s Future
Florida’s tourism economy crashed, leaving dozens of low-wage workers trapped in a crumbling motel without electricity.
The Children in the Shadows: New York City’s Homeless Students
More than 100,000 city public school students lack permanent housing, caught in bureaucratic limbo that often seems like a trap. This is what their lives are like.
Michaela Coel's Pressure Points
An interview with the creator and star of “I May Destroy You.”
Fiction Pick of the Week: "The First Expedition"
A trip to the moon is not what it seems.
Alabama’s ‘Vending Machine Justice’ Victims Are Living ‘Like Livestock’
COVID-19 has led many Americans to rethink prison. But a habitual offender law has condemned hundreds of people who never physically hurt anyone to grow old and die behind bars.
Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. She is the author of the new book, Just Us: An American Conversation.
“I began to wonder, why am I maintaining civility around things that are actually very important to me? This might be the only chance I get to stand up for myself. As Claudia. As a Black person. As a Black woman. As an American citizen. So what am I waiting for? What am I preserving when the thing I am supposedly preserving is also the thing that is on some level killing me?”
Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral
As the U.S. heads toward the winter, the country is going round in circles, making the same conceptual errors that have plagued it since spring.
A Second Chance
On learning persuasion.
Going Postal
A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive.
Black Communities Have Known about Mutual Aid All Along
In the pandemic, “caremongering” has become a new term for an old—and joyous—practice
Magic Act: The Making Of Earvin Johnson, AIDS Saint
“His life with the virus would be his witness, his public testimony. Performance as life, and life as performance.”
Extreme Heat Is Here, And It’s Deadly
Gearing up for the fight against a new climate enemy.
How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda
Immigrant struggles in America forged a bond that became even tighter after my mother’s A.L.S. diagnosis. Then, as COVID-19 threatened, Chinese nationalists began calling us traitors to our country.
Targeted
A Florida sheriff created a futuristic program to stop crime before it happens. It monitors and harasses families across the county.
Here Be Monsters
Three teenage boys decide to set sail after a night of drinking. They go missing for 51 days.
You Don’t Know Her
A profile of Mariah Carey.
Sent Home to Die
In New Orleans, hospitals sent patients infected with the coronavirus into hospice facilities or back to their families to die at home, in some cases discontinuing treatment even as relatives begged them to keep trying.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Smoke at the End of the World"
Construction work, measured in bad habits.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
An essay on meaningless work.
The Little Cards That Tell Police 'Let's Forget This Ever Happened'
Some cops give their friends and family union-issued “courtesy cards” to help get them out of minor infractions. The cards embody everything wrong with modern policing.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author and journalist. He served as guest editor for the September issue of Vanity Fair, titled "The Great Fire."
“There’s this pressure to say something. Say something. The world’s burning, say something. But I try to stay where I’ve been or where I’ve tried to be in my career. ... Good things take time. You gotta let things cook. You can’t insta-bake something like this.”
Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
Can Greek Tragedy Get Us Through the Pandemic?
A theatre company has spent years bringing catharsis to the traumatized. In the coronavirus era, that’s all of us.
