Browse Topics

Sunbeams

Food has powers. It picks us up from our lonely corners and sits us back down, together. It pulls us out of ourselves, to the kitchen, to the table, to the diner down the block. At the same time, it draws us inward. Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people.

Jessica Fechtor

Shaving

A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face

To the Bone

“To the Bone” is an ongoing photography project documenting daily life and work on a small family farm in the Hudson Valley. Emily, a single mother, manages their small farm with the help of her children. My intention is to explore the strength, dignity and love that keeps them deeply connected as a family, to each other and to their unique way of life on the farm.

Guardians

His inability to tell me when he’s sick, the most baseline, possibly the easiest thing to express, means he isn’t expressing a million other needs that are harder to pin down: If his shoes are too tight. If his ear hurts. Once, my son was walking funny. When I looked at his foot, he had a bee stinger sticking out from his toe. Being a parent of a disabled child means I can’t assume anything. I am taking care of his needs, and if I miss a need he can’t express, I’m failing him. I’m always failing him.

Fantasy

Calling a 1-900 number, moving to the tropics, writing fan fiction

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?

Dirt

Shining shoes, spreading gossip, growing plants in prison

Gratitude

A second chance at work, a shared meal in the classroom, a helpful stranger at a rest stop