Tossing a Bird That Does Not Fly Out of a Plane
A Thanksgiving story about the limits of human empathy.
A Thanksgiving story about the limits of human empathy.
Annie Lowrey The Atlantic Nov 2018 20min Permalink
Giving birth as a black woman in America.
Naomi Jackson Harper's Aug 2020 25min Permalink
Reckoning with the American flag.
Kiese Laymon The Fader Sep 2016 15min Permalink
The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor The New Yorker Jun 2020 30min Permalink
Love, purpose, and prison on the Dakota Prairie.
Elizabeth Flock The Atavist Magazine Apr 2019 30min Permalink
An interview with James Baldwin on race in America.
“It is a John Wick training montage, but with teachers wearing T-shirts with elementary-school mascots or “This is what an AWESOME SCIENCE TEACHER looks like” emblazoned across the front.”
Jay Willis GQ Jan 2019 20min Permalink
Tracing an airstrike halfway around the world back to an American bomb factory.
Jeffrey E. Stern The New York Times Magazine Dec 2018 30min Permalink
Should marrying a child be allowed?
Terrence McCoy The Washington Post Oct 2018 25min Permalink
More than 50 foreclosure stories have one word in common: Nightmare.
Desiree Stennett, Lisa Rowan The Penny Hoarder Aug 2018 30min Permalink
The director’s provocative new film will change the way you think about racism
Rembert Browne Time Aug 2018 15min Permalink
And I fear what it has become.
David Joy New York Times Magazine Apr 2018 20min Permalink
What should a father teach his sons?
Will Leitch The Cut Mar 2018 10min Permalink
What happens when you get evicted.
Joseph Williams Curbed Jan 2018 15min Permalink
The country’s elites are desperate to figure out what they got wrong in 2016. But can they handle the truth?
Molly Ball The Atlantic Oct 2017 20min Permalink
A search for common ground.
Atul Gawande The New Yorker Sep 2017 30min Permalink
Visiting a gargantuan shrine to democracy in 2017.
Sam Anderson New York Times Magazine Mar 2017 15min Permalink
Thinking about the right thing to do, now and in the imaginable future.
Masha Gessen New York Review of Books Nov 2016 10min Permalink
“We take the bus when we can’t afford to do anything but disappear.”
Haley Cullingham The Awl Feb 2016 10min Permalink
David Hosack attends to a mortally wounded Alexander Hamilton.
"Hosack felt a hitching panic build, his instincts wound too tightly, overtaxed, a clockwork spring about to snap. Only Hamilton could do this to him. The frame prone before him was frail, narrow, woman-small. His coat, waistcoat, shirt, underclothes sopping him up, holding him together. Delicate embroidery sodden, delicate fingers cold with the loss of blood. Hosack had seen this man’s blood before, and the blood and vomit and delirious fever-dreams of his wife, his children. But this was—Hosack sickened, the scene before him tilting. Three years before—Hamilton’s son, Phillip, bleeding out after his own duel on the same Weehawken site. Their faces so alike, their mangled bodies. Their right sides."
On the decline of America.
David Remnick GQ May 1988 15min Permalink
A mysterious figure appears to early settlers in Wisconsin.
"t would make sense to Tellie later, after she'd hear it at the mill, after she'd race back the four miles in her bare feet to the home of the family where she'd just that morning left her babies, that it had happened to Adele Brise in the woods. The Lady, the Queen of Heaven, showing herself."
Jill Stukenberg The Collagist Feb 2014 10min Permalink
Diary entries concerning innocent Americans abroad.
</blockquote><p>“Our conversation continues!
He is come to tell me I may lunch with him, the progress of my new composition permitting—but immediately he sees I have not moved, not even to dress myself, or put pen to paper.
You have a look of puzzlement on your face, little Lotte! he says, and again, I fear he is about to laugh.
Indeed, sir, I do! I said. Because I am puzzled! Greatly puzzled!
Look! he cried. She gesticulates! You are perhaps at heart una italiana!”</p></blockquote>
Rachel Cantor Five Chapters Jan 2014 50min Permalink
This year's National Book Award winner looks at the life of a preacher's son in the Kansas Territory.
"Now, it's true there was a movement in town to hang my Pa, on account of his getting filled with the Holy Ghost and throwing hisself at the flood of westward pioneers who stopped to lay in supplies at Dutch Henry'sspeculators, trappers, children, merchants, Mormons, even white women. Them poor settlers had enough to worry 'bout what with rattlers popping up from the floorboards and breechloaders that fired for nothing and building chimneys the wrong way that choked 'em to death, without having to fret 'bout a Negro flinging hisself at them in the name of our Great Redeemer Who Wore the Crown. In fact, by the time I was ten years old in 1856, there was open talk in town of blowing Pa's brains out."
The opening of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom; the complexities and relationships of a wholly American couple.
"For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee. She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said that she expected to be 'beheaded' someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she’d replaced. Her children were 'probably' dying of trichinosis from pork she’d undercooked. She wondered if her 'addiction' to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her “never” reading books anymore. She confided that she’d been 'forbidden' to fertilize Walter’s flowers after what had happened 'last time.'"
Jonathan Franzen The New Yorker Jun 2009 35min Permalink