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Browse Topics
Sports
Readers Write
Shaving
A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face
July 2024
Readers Write
Uniforms
For a job at Burger King, a prison in North Carolina, a girls’ school in Iran
June 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Loving a Sport That Doesn’t Always Love Me Back
I’ve always enjoyed pickup: the sudden poetry of it, the immediate bond and intimacy among strangers. . . . It’s all guts and very little glory—yet there is some glory, even if only a handful of spectators are watching. One OHHHHHHH, after you cross someone so hard they fall on their ass, can make you hold your head high for the rest of the week.
March 2024
Photography
A Thousand Words
A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
January 2024
Photography
A Thousand Words
A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
November 2023
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Off Camera
When I was a senior in high school, I became obsessed with the home movies Dad kept in his armoire, behind bottles of cologne. Every day I’d reach through a cloud of Brut and vanilla musk, remove a tape from the stack, and watch the footage alone in our basement, captivated by images of the kid I used to be.
October 2023
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Run Home
Long-distance running is the dogged refusal to bend to the way you feel. It is the accommodation of pain. If you run long enough, far enough, fast enough, you will carve out a place in yourself where pain can live.
August 2023
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Coach’s Kid
Coach Walls started calling me “Tank.” Coach O’Brien said, “J.P. is out to kill.” Dad said nothing, but every time I looked at him — shin-high socks, gray shorts, V-neck tee with chest hair spilling out, whistle dangling around his neck — he was unable to hide his grin.
August 2023
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
All-American
My perceived faults would be erased the day I donned the letter jacket that bore my last name across the back, all my inconvenient vowels blazing, with Cheerleader in a semicircle underneath.
May 2023
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
White Lines
We divided ourselves up until the teams were formed correctly, evenly. In other words, until the white kids were satisfied. No one had declared them the leaders, but, like most enduring traditions, the rule had become quietly understood, rooted in our fledgling muscles and minds.
August 2022
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