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Mind the Gap

Melissa Deckman on the Challenges and Strengths of Gen Z

The lion’s share of Gen Z organizing on the Left is being done by young women, because they care passionately about the issues. I think there’s less of that drive among young men. Instead there’s a sense of rootlessness. We’ll have to see whether that actually translates into conservative voting behavior or support for certain policies.

Blind History

Tiffany Griffin on America’s Narrow View of Africa

China is racist. Russia is racist. The US is racist. . . . Africans need to bet on each other. The Black Diaspora and the Global South need to bet on and support each other.

A House Is Not a Home

The buyer closed on the property in late April of this year. Despite all the logical, practical, convincing reasons for the sale, letting go wasn’t easy. The Sun’s offices had been in that house since 1989, and photos of its well-landscaped exterior had become familiar to subscribers, a couple dozen of whom would stroll up the front walk each year and knock on the door, hoping to get a glimpse of where their favorite magazine was produced and to meet the people who created it. If he was in, our founding editor, Sy Safransky, always welcomed them.

New Life

Since I had no one else to ask, I asked the hunger where it wanted to go. It said, West, like that was a point on the map called Freedom. So I drove west. I stopped at a Walmart somewhere in Kansas and bought a propane camp stove and a tent, because hotels were not in the budget.

Uniforms

For a job at Burger King, a prison in North Carolina, a girls’ school in Iran

Home Sick

Emily Kenway on the Health-Care Crisis No One’s Talking About

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Down in the Valley

Wendy Liu on the Tech Industry’s Power to Divide Us

Once I saw the development of new technology in class terms—how a particular kind of technology gives one group of people power over another—it started to feel more sinister.

Estate Sale

On the first day of the estate sale I strung a backdrop from a tree in the front yard and did what any photographer trying to deal with a difficult personal situation would do: I took pictures.

Tangled Avenues

Wade Graham on the Interlocking Challenges of the Modern City

Cities are social, so they have the same problems we do. The mistake we always make in our culture is thinking that cities are somehow separate from us and that if we conceive of the right design for them, they will magically relieve us of our problems. By investing this theoretical power in cities, we can avoid confronting the flaws in the way we have built the world: with inequality and oppression and systems that make some people’s lives miserable while other people’s lives are good.