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Brian Fairbanks | The Atavist Magazine | April 2024 | 1,395 words (5 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 150, “The Last Shall Be First.”
A few weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Len Davis rose to face a jury. A former policeman, Davis was a big man who’d once exuded toughness and sometimes thrown himself in harm’s way on the streets. He became known around New Orleans...

Writer Chloé Cooper Jones has sacral agenesis, a congenital disability that affects the lower spine. In this beautiful essay—in which she describes her participation in a dance work choreographed by her boyfriend, Matty Davis—she writes about fear and...

Stuart Potts lives in a one-bed flat in Middleton, a town in Greater Manchester, and ever since he moved in, he has let homeless people come and stay. This unregulated charity work is clearly a means for Potts to keep his own demons at bay, but his efforts...

In this interview, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie speaks with Erica Wagner about the deeply personal costs of championing free speech, the process of writing his new memoir, Knife, optimism as a disease, and the comedic foreshadowing of the attack that...