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Sally Jenkins gives us a searing portrait of the life of the bull-riding cowboy J.B. Mauney—a life filled with pain after sustaining multiple horrific injuries flung from bulls. Breaking his neck in his last ride was career-ending, and in this piece...

In this deeply thoughtful essay for The Common Reader, Jeannette Cooperman considers silences both healing and harmful. This layered and nuanced piece will give you a much-needed pause; you may not think of the absence of sound quite the same again.
Most days, life’s demands come at me like flung Frisbees, but here, they cannot reach me. Here, I feel at home in a way I do not even feel at home, because here, all I need do is be. This is the silence I craved all along: not an absence of noise but...

Pigeons. Rats. Opossums. Raccoons. Most people consider these critters as pests—they don’t belong in our homes and neighborhoods and should be exterminated instead. But there’s a group of people across New York City’s boroughs who rehabilitate these...

As COVID-19 swept across the world, a preacher in Kenya lured thousands of people into a remote forest, promising them safety and salvation. Then he told them to stop eating. In this feature*, Carey Baraka details the terrifying rise and fall of a cult...