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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.

A Thousand Words

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

Drama

A high-school play, a support group, a catechism class

Sunbeams

The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely. That was why he’d always dreamed of leaving, and why he’d always been so afraid to go.

Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles

Stranger Kin

I don’t recall now if he barked, if he made a sound. How did it happen, that the rest came? They must have been summoned somehow. But it so happened that another dog appeared, lumbering toward us, followed by another, and a third and fourth, until there were five dogs gathered on the rocks. Five huge Istanbul dogs.

Macho Baby

I know that what we call hate is sometimes love that was pushed under a rock, love deprived of light and water. “Tell me to what you pay attention,” writes the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his book Man and Crisis, “and I will tell you who you are.” How much love is putrefying inside boys this very moment, starved for nourishment?

Under Fire

Thor Hanson on How Animals and Plants are Adapting to a Warming World

We’ve got changes playing out now with astounding rapidity. Biologists can see natural selection occurring over the course of a field season. . . . Studying these adaptations can help us identify the issues that are most important and the species that need the most help. This may not make us worry less, but it can help us worry smarter.

La Diáspora

People of sub-Saharan African descent have lived in what is today Mexico since the early days of Spanish colonization. . . . Today there are only a handful of communities left with large Black Mexican populations. The Costa Chica, the coastal region of southern Guerrero and northern Oaxaca, boasts the greatest number. . . . My experience in Juárez and the relative scarcity of information about Mexico’s Black communities made me curious to visit the Costa Chica myself. So a few years later I did. I ended up staying there for six months, forming friendships and documenting the residents’ daily life. This is a selection of photos from my time there.

Basements

I was considered “good,” considered a “good influence.” It amazed me — like the cool feeling of Marshall’s tongue on my labia had amazed me — that I could possess all of these qualities; that I could be both warm and cold, virtuous and defiant; and that someone could love me for all of it.