The Rescuer

… an early strike against her so-called masters, Miles speculates, that “casts a glow of foreshadowing over her story.”
That story is well known. In 1849, Tubman fled her captors and headed north. Under cover of darkness, she walked nearly 150 miles through dense woods and along the banks of creeks and rivers until she …

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A Forgotten Turner Classic

… new patient. Thirty, Lutheran, and middle class, he had been admitted three weeks before, leaving his pregnant wife and daughter in the town of Husum, some 50 miles away on the North Sea. For two years, Georg had been decompensating, feeling at first “irascible and careless,” he told his doctor, and then distrustful, anxious …

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Facing the Facts

… during her long widowhood, when her mighty protector was gone. Livia had her will nullified and her memorial honors denied; that is, she ended up with less freedom and dignity than an ordinary matron.
Such outcomes were cemented in place by custom. Married off in their teens and almost never treated as full human beings …

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Catalina Schliebener Muñoz

Growing up in Chile, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz doodled incessantly. “Like any teenager, and especially a queer teenager coming out,” they say, “I had a lot of questions and feelings that I was trying to express through those drawings.” The subject of gender, especially how it is often reduced to a binary, preoccupied them. “I was …

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Bubble Girl

… landed on one of the most protracted, pretzel-plotted sagas in the history of American weirdness. I’ve probably read 100 of those articles now, and I feel less confident in my ability to tell the true story of the incubator baby than I did after reading the first one. But it’s not going …

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Lift Off

… in November. He says a lot of time has passed, though I think seven or eight months is nothing. Yet it is enough time to alter his feeling about the dead whose graves he has visited in the cemetery in Maine over the spring and summer. These people are his wife, his parents, a brother …

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The Importance of Being Different

… of Magical Thinking and Mary Karr’s Lit, to name just two. But why, I wondered, were they the only subjects now allowed? Why were Americans being fed a steady diet of misery, with no reprieve, no glittering outliers to brighten the gloom?
And why this unrelenting focus on the self? The United States was …

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Tramping With Virginia

… end, it surprises the reader by ballooning into universality. Let me teach it now.
As “Street Haunting” opens, the reader finds the author at home, alone and feeling restless, surrounded by objects whose provenance she knows almost too well. She cherishes the memories these familiar belongings call up, but just now she wants to escape …

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Bitten

… it all over again from the horse’s mouth: how she had slipped off her pack to swing it at the dogs; how while she tried to fend off one, the other jumped at her, biting; how she had lain on the pavement in the middle of the road; how a small delivery van had …

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Laura S. Lewis

Laura S. Lewis studied sculpture at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and now, a decade later, works as a welder by day and an artist by night. “I love to weld—that’s my primary job,” she says. “I feel like it’s magic.” In her Atlanta studio, she welds sculptures out of …

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