Aroostook County, in Maine’s far north, is the largest county east of the Mississippi, a sparsely populated region of fields and forests with just two small cities and about 50 smaller towns. Police chiefs describe their jurisdictions as sleepy, with little serious crime. Even so, the county has sent a disproportionate number of adolescents in…
For many progressives, it was a big moment. In 2019, Congress was holding its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery. To support the idea, Democrats had invited the influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had revived the reparations issue in an article in The Atlantic, and the actor and activist…
At a dusty military base in northeastern Jordan, Specialist Kennedy Sanders drove bulldozers and road graders. When she had free time, she liked to spend it knitting, or feeding her sneaker-head habit by shopping online for rare pairs of Nike Dunks that she would make her mother unbox for her over FaceTime. She spent a…
They woke up last Saturday morning and picked up their phones, the daily ritual of reconnecting with the world. The horror came flooding in, through direct messages, Instagram posts, terrifying video clips and scattered news reports. “Good morning,” read an overnight text from a friend in Israel. “I just woke up to a war with…
Ayla Wing’s middle school students don’t always know what to make of their 26-year-old teacher’s hearing aids. The most common response she hears: “Oh, my grandma has them, too.” But grandma’s hearing aids were never like this: Bluetooth-enabled and connected to her phone, they allow Ms. Wing to toggle with one touch between custom settings.…
A mother lost her daughter 40 years ago. Until investigators knocked on her door, she had no idea what had happened.
She was just 10 years old, so young that many people were horrified when they heard it, and others refused to believe it. But the ordeal of the child rape victim in Ohio who had to cross state lines for an abortion, and the ugly political fight that followed, have highlighted two uncomfortable facts: Such…