Every day, Donnie Caldwell gets out of his Franklin County Jail cell briefly to grab his food and bring it back to his bunk — right next to his toilet — to eat. On Saturday, April 4th, while standing in line in the jail’s cafeteria and waiting for his food …
Read More »Sex Workers Built OnlyFans. Now They Say They're Getting Kicked Off
Editor’s note: Adult-content creators interviewed in this piece have asked that we identify them by their performer names for their privacy and safety. Last March, Allie Awesome, an adult-content creator, woke up one Sunday morning to check her DMs on OnlyFans, only to realize she couldn’t log into her account. …
Read More »How the U.S. Made it a Crime to Have Mental Illness
Dr. Ken Rosenberg became a psychiatrist because of Merle, his late older sister who suffered from schizophrenia. But did the documentarian and Cornell Weill Medical College doctor set out to tell Merle’s story in Philadelphia when he began shooting Bedlam, his new documentary on the troubled American mental-health system, nearly …
Read More »Pharmacy Workers Are Coming Down With COVID-19 — But They Can't Afford to Stop Working
At his home in the Bronx, where he lies in bed with a fever, Jose Peralta keeps replaying the scene in his head. It was Monday, March 16th, the start of an unusually hectic week at a Walgreens in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. Peralta, a senior pharmacy …
Read More »Weed Worries: Cannabis Sales Are Steady — for Now
On a rainy evening in Los Angeles, the flagship store for Genius, a cannabis brand catering to hipsters and tourists on Melrose Avenue, is empty. A lone budtender wearing latex gloves stands behind glass display cases in the middle of the showroom, surrounded by vapes and edibles and jars of …
Read More »What's Going on With Jeffrey Epstein's Autopsy?
Two months after observing the autopsy of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother has claimed that the injuries associated with his death are more consistent with homicide than suicide. But until we have more information, according to experts, it’s impossible to know what really happened. …
Read More »Everybody Wants a Piece of Black-Cowboy Culture
Justin Cory Richard sits at a watering hole somewhere outside of East Los Angeles. It’s empty, save for a few patrons and a regular who has just pulled up a bar stool next to us. Richard, a 36-year-old African American professional bull rider from Houston, is dressed like he came …
Read More »How a Right-Wing Troll Managed to Manipulate the Mainstream Media
There’s a folksy saying that grandparents of all stripes like to dispense: If it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, then you shouldn’t be surprised when it starts quacking. Another, perhaps less folksy version of this idiom is Occam’s Razor, the theory that the simplest explanation for …
Read More »Stonewall's Gift: 50 Years Ago Queer Fury Erupted and Changed the World
In the spring of 1968, weeks before the start of her final year of life, Judy Garland met with a biographer to discuss collaborating on her memoir. The author, Gerold Frank, was a journalist well-known for ghostwriting the life stories of celebrity women, including Zsa Zsa Gabor. The meeting, arranged …
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