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Sunbeams

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?

Martin Luther King Jr.

Extrication Day

It is easy to forget your own body with a patient under your hands. In training we learned how to call the air ambulance—how to say the right words on the radio, hand off our patient to the flight crew, and keep our heads beneath the spinning helicopter blades.

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

And These Too Are Defensive Wounds

I’d thought the transcripts would help me write a letter to the parole board, but when I opened them, I saw a section of my own testimony at Maynard’s trial, and that was that. My head filled with hissing static; my heart raced.

Wedding Colors

Somehow my bubble went unpunctured for twenty-four years, allowing me and my coffee-colored skin to arrive in Hartford, Arkansas, blissfully ignorant of what my Blackness might mean in this place.

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.

Fuel

Feeding the woodstove, siphoning gas with a hose, drinking endless cups of coffee

Athens, Revised

Perhaps you know where this is going, or think you do. I do not. I decide the man is just being hospitable, like all the Greeks I’ve met during my ten days traveling through the country. As we disembark from the ferry, he says he is a father, recently divorced, and was raised in Athens, where his mother still lives. He is on his way there to visit her.