A little over three years after he returned in triumph from his epic exploration of the North American West with William Clark, Meriwether Lewis was found dead in October 1809 of gunshot wounds at a small inn along the historic Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Ever since, historians have debated how he died, with most opting […]
Joseph “Breeze” Bye, a wheelchair-bound former professional baseball player, is on the cusp of finding major success in his second, post-accident career: painting. Breeze paints portraits of great pitchers—players who are as good as he was, before he was the victim of a hit-and-run. As a major exhibition of his work in New York City […]
Things are off to a rocky start as Honey Bunny—who’s made of melting honey—oversleeps, but Muk Muk the moose rouses her by pulling the Emergency Bunny Wake-Up Lever. Conflict arises as the two disagree over which invention to enter in the convention: the Nut-o-Roombots vs. the Fort-a-Potty. Or maybe the Sweet-N-Sour-Smooth-E-Chomp-R? But Honey doesn’t listen […]
Simi and Rupi Naik are estranged sisters, Indian immigrants to the U.S. who find love and salvation through a dramatic sacrifice. Simi has built an enviable life in rural Kentucky, with a nursing career that suits her (even if she has to work three jobs to sustain it) and the love of Prem Gupta, a […]
Raised by her father in Silverpine, Oregon, after her mother moved halfway across the world, Dani’s separation anxiety ran deep long before Parker ghosted her, so when she runs headfirst into him at a bar in New York City, she promptly runs out rather than reopen a door for the former best friend who’d loved […]
For six years Sasha has lived in Haven, the underground society built to withstand nuclear war. Since the war, since her family’s deaths, since discovering she doesn’t get sick like everyone else does, Sasha’s life has been full of death and overfull with grief. While working in the Ward, Haven’s limited hospital, she stays with […]
In the opening story, “Christmas Holiday, 1945,” a veteran returning home to Chicago after Germany’s surrender prepares to meet the wife he hasn’t seen in two years. Upon arriving in America, he visits his sister, Edith, a nun who’s about to embark on a missionary voyage to China. In “The Visit,” a man named Rob […]
In the post–Civil War era, writes law professor Green, a “freethought” movement swept across the United States. It was never quite coherent, with many strains of dissent advocating such causes as sexual liberation and militant atheism. Green’s account opens in 1887 with a New Jersey activist being hauled to court for blasphemy, “one skirmish in […]
When she was growing up, writes Machado, Venezuela regularly held elections with peaceful transfers of power and enjoyed a degree of prosperity greater than many of its Latin American neighbors, thanks to abundant oil. That changed when Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999. He “began by focusing on controlling the judicial system,” replacing longtime […]
It takes time, Barack Obama warned, for a community to recover from disaster, discarding poor prior practices and experimenting with new ones. Vigliotti’s on-the-ground account suggests that at least some of the Los Angeles fire disaster of 2025 was the result of a rush to rebuild in the same old ways and in the same […]