O.J. Simpson died this week. In light of this news, here’s radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin’s brilliant essay about Nicole Brown Simpson, the abuse she suffered at the hands of O.J., and how the help she needed never came. Dworkin, herself a survivor of domestic violence, originally published pieces of this essay in the Los Angeles Times; she then compiled and revised that writing for her 1997 book, Life and Death. The essay has since been republished by Evergreen Review:
You won’t ever know the worst that happened to Nicole Brown Simpson in her marriage, because she is dead and cannot tell you. And if she were alive, remember, you wouldn’t believe her.
You heard Lorena Bobbitt, after John Wayne Bobbitt had been acquitted of marital rape. At her own trial for malicious wounding, she described beatings, anal rape, humiliation. She had been persistently injured, hit, choked by a husband who liked hurting her. John Wayne Bobbitt, after a brief tour as a misogynist-media star, beat up a new woman friend.
It is always the same. It happens to women as different as Nicole Simpson, Lorena Bobbitt—and me. The perpetrators are men as different as O.J. Simpson, John Wayne Bobbitt, and the former flower-child I am still too afraid to name.
There is terror, yes, and physical pain. There is desperation and despair. One blames oneself, forgives him. One judges oneself harshly for not loving him enough. “It’s your fault,” he shouts as he is battering in the door, or slamming your head against the floor. And before you pass out, you say yes. You run, but no one will hide you or stand up for you—which means standing up to him. You will hide behind bushes if there are bushes; or behind trash cans; or in alleys; away from the decent people who aren’t helping you. It is, after all, your fault.
He hurts you more: more than last time and more than you ever thought possible; certainly more than any reasonable person would ever believe—should you be foolish enough to tell. And, eventually, you surrender to him, apologize, beg him to forgive you for hurting him or provoking him or insulting him or being careless with something of his—his laundry, his car, his meal. You ask him not to hurt you as he does what he wants to you.
The shame of this physical capitulation, often sexual, and the betrayal of your self-respect will never leave you. You will blame yourself and hate yourself forever. In your mind, you will remember yourself—begging, abject. At some point, you will stand up to him verbally, or by not complying, and he will hit you and kick you; he may rape you; he may lock you up or tie you up. The violence becomes contextual, the element in which you try to survive. You will try to run away, plan an escape. If he finds out, or if he finds you, he will hurt you more. You will be so frightened you think dying might be okay.
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Stephanie McCrummen | The Atlantic | April 8, 2024 | 8,385 words
The pastoral, semi-nomadic Maasai have lived on their land in northern Tanzania since the 17th century. But under the guise of conservation and modernization, the Tanzanian government is resettling the tribe, destroying their compounds and seizing their cattle—in other words, erasing their traditional way of life. This makes way for ecotourism, carbon offsets, and supposed conservationist efforts that work toward the goal set by global leaders to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. But is the violent displacement of an Indigenous group, one that has sustained the Serengeti ecosystem and its lush grasslands over time, necessary for such environmental progress? Setting aside this land for “conservation” also means fueling a lucrative safari industry that still sells a romanticized version of Africa, catering to billionaire trophy hunters, and partnering with powerful foreign interests, including the Dubai royal family (for whom land has been annexed as a private hunting playground). This story is eye-opening and upsetting, and Stephanie McCrummen’s reporting is admirable: she balances big players, sweeping actions, and power moves with smaller details and quiet telling moments. But it’s the emotional narrative weaved within—of one Maasai man, Songoyo, who navigates terrain that was once his home—that is most effective here. You’ll likely come to this piece to understand the larger humanitarian crisis that has unfolded, but leave it stunned by McCrummen’s gorgeous writing, which centers the journey of one herder as he feels and watches his community and culture slip away. —CLR
Mark Warren | Esquire | April 3, 2024 | 11,242 words
I won’t mince words: this story hurts. It hurts because it holds a great deal of pain—the pain of Bubba Copeland, a Baptist pastor who took his own life when his personal secrets were exposed to the world, and the pain of the grieving community he left behind. It hurts because it lays bare the infuriating hypocrisy of the self-righteous trolls who made Copeland decide he could no longer go on. And it hurts because it is a searing reminder that right-wing pseudo-media threaten more than democracy: with their commitment to publicly humiliating the perceived enemies of conservative values, they also threaten individual lives. “The story of the Internet is of tribes hurling rocks over the horizon at targets they cannot see, doing damage that they do not care to measure,” Mark Warren writes. Warren does heroic work in this feature to reclaim Copeland’s story from the jaws of 1819 News, whose coverage of Copeland I won’t deign to link to. He approaches his project with a respect so strong it is almost palpable. You can feel it in the way Warren writes about Copeland, his family, and his friends, especially in the description of the careful, compassionate process of approaching subjects wary of speaking to a journalist for obvious reasons. You can also feel it in the way Warren writes about faith, tolerance, mistakes, and forgiveness. If you let the hurt wash over you, there’s grace on the other side. —SD
Trina Moyles | Hakai Magazine | March 12, 2024 | 3,100 words
One of the things I love about Hakai Magazine is how it uses awe and wonder to make nature and wildlife science accessible to lay readers. As the piece opens, Trina Moyles puts us on a viewing platform over a tumultuous river. Below, salmon catapult themselves upstream to return to their spawning ground as huge bears compete for fresh fish. “A 350-kilogram male submerges in the frothy pool of water beneath the falls, surfacing with a salmon 10 seconds later,” she writes. “He clutches the fish between his two front paws, as if praying, then skins it whole.” The scene is immediate and visceral, but this story is about another brown Alaskan mammal who spends its winter in torpor, albeit a much tinier one: the little brown bat, weighing in at 10 grams. Jesika Reimer is a chiropterologist who wants to better understand the interconnections between Alaskan bat colonies. You might wonder why she’s leading the world’s first gene-flow study to learn where bat colonies hibernate to help manage and protect their populations. Aren’t bats a rabies-carrying scourge? It turns out that they don’t deserve their bloodthirsty reputation. There are 1,400 documented species and counting, ranging from “massive fruits bats—the size of a small human child—to the tiny bumblebee bat, which weighs in at just two grams.” Each species fills “ecological niches, pollinating specific flowers, distributing fruit and tree seeds that help sustain and regenerate forests, and regulating insect populations.” This is just a small sample of their contribution to the planet, and yet we sit back while white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations across North America. If you think, though, that we don’t have much in common with bats, consider our hands and their wings. The human hand has 27 joints; a bat’s wing, 25. Reimer became interested in bats, who are often overlooked by conservationists, as a less-beaten scientific path. “I want to ask the questions that haven’t yet been asked,” she says. As a reader, I’m grateful for her curiosity and awe of these tiny flying bears. In the end I learned that when it comes to bats, it’s not about what they can do for you, but what you can—and should—do for them. —KS
Laura Preston | n+1 | April 10, 2024 | 8,200 words
Few subgenres are as dependable as the Writer Visits Industry Conference variant of subculture piece. Similarly, few topics offer more fertile ground for Wrestling With the Moment than artificial intelligence. Put those two things together, season them with insightful, wry writing, and you’ve got Laura Preston’s account of her visit to a conversational AI conference. The key here is that Preston was invited to the conference as the “honorary contrarian speaker,” based on a piece she’d written for n+1 about a real-estate chatbot. She sees the trap, but she also sees the paycheck, so she walks into it willingly. Her decision benefits us all; the conference’s emphasis on avatars provides an important preview on how the AI industry is turning chatbots into simulated humans, and Preston’s impeccable note-taking (and unfailing ear for good quotes) exposes the uncomfortable energy beneath each interaction. As much as the conference’s attendees pay lip service to avoiding ethical and cultural pitfalls, every single use case she encounters here sounds like an express train to dystopia. Medical-advice avatars who wear stethoscopes to coax disclosure but aren’t doctors. Customer-support avatars who convince people to euthanize pets. Senior-home avatars who are designed to palliate dementia patients in their darkest days. Services that promise to diagnose your mental and physical health based on a snippet of your voice. “What really frightened me,” Preston writes, “was the future of mediocrity they suggested: the inescapable screens, the app-facilitated antisocial behavior, the assumptions advanced as knowledge, and above all the collective delusion formulated in high offices and peddled to common people that all this made for an easier life.” With the news this week that Meta and OpenAI are seeking to create AI that can remember and reason, it’s tempting to look at the future and see eradication, just as Preston’s Lyft driver does. Thankfully, Preston suffuses the piece with a gallows humor that proves absolutely crucial. Laughing to keep from crying has never felt quite so necessary. —PR
Jack King | British GQ | April 9, 2024 | 2,522 words
It took a moment for me to forgive Jack King for making me feel very old with this interview. It’s been 20 years since Shaun of the Dead was released. Yes, 20 years since a motley group of Brits chose to ride out the zombie apocalypse at their local pub. (A plan I always admired.) A bastion of understated humor, the film is full of lines I can still quote today, and if I ever receive a zombie bite, I’ll aim to state, “I’m quite all right, Barbara, I ran it under a cold tap.” King honors the passage of two decades by bringing together the stars of the film, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, along with the director, Edgar Wright, to talk about the making of this first-ever zombie romantic comedy (rom-zom-com). There are fascinating insights into how the film got commissioned and went on to spawn two further spoofs, and I particularly enjoyed learning of the debate over which vinyl records to fling at zombie heads, and the real tears that were shed when Shaun’s mum—the aforementioned Barbara—became a zombie and died. Pegg and Frost are as baffled as I am by how much time has passed, remarking how bizarre it is that they are around the same age as actor Bill Nighy was when he made the film. (They describe Nighy as the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” of the film shoot; imagine realizing you are now the same age as your Obi-Wan.) But the trio remembers the filming vividly, and warmly, with time not diminishing the dry sense of humor they share. While reading this, I felt like I had wandered into The Winchester for a pint and a chinwag with Shaun and Ed. I didn’t want to leave. —CW
Gary Shteyngart | The Atlantic | April 4, 2024 | 9,099 words
As Gary Shteyngart is quick to remind you, he’s far from the first writer to chronicle a cruise ship voyage. He may, however, be the first to do so while wearing a daddy’s little meatball T-shirt. And for more than 9,000 words, he adds a worthy entry to the participatory subgenre. It helps that he punches up (and in) more than down, though the result is the same: making you savor terra firma. —PR
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The Maasai people were stewards of the Serengeti for centuries. Now they’re being evicted and violently displaced by the Tanzanian government in the name of “conservation,” and so the land can be set aside for ecotourists, safari companies, trophy hunters, and powerful foreigners like the Dubai royal family. An important but upsetting read—one that’s both incredibly reported and beautifully written by Stephanie McCrummen.
Songoyo headed north with his next herd of sheep, through a clearing with a seasonal stream and smooth rocks. He skirted Serengeti National Park, where he was not allowed to be, then crossed over a low mountain range that marked the Tanzania-Kenya border, his sandals splitting at the soles. At the gates of the park, some of the half a million people who visit every year were lining up in Land Cruisers, the bumpers displaying flag decals representing the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the United States. And as the sun rose one morning, in they went, tourists with bucket lists, anniversaries, dreams, and romanticized images in mind.
They roamed the dirt roads through grassy plains that really did seem to stretch on forever—a rolling sea of greens and yellows and flat-topped trees. They slowed for herds of gazelles and elephants. They sped to a leopard sighting in trucks bearing the wishful names of various outfitters—Sense of Africa, Lion King Adventures, Peacemakers Expeditions—and soon they began gathering along one side of the Mara River.
“We got ’em!” yelled a woman holding up a camera, and as far as anyone could see, the view was wildebeests, river, trees, and the grassy savanna beyond—no cows, no goats, no Maasai herders, no people at all, except the ones beholding the spectacle they’d been promised.
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Laura Preston didn’t really believe in the promise of artificial intelligence—which is exactly why Project Voice, a conference about conversational AI, invited her to come speak at the event. She would be their “honorary contrarian speaker.” So she did. But more importantly, she spoke to the people who are trying to get a cut of the AI-dominated future. The result is immersively reported and somehow as entertaining as it is terrifying. (Well, almost.)
Everyone at this conference kept invoking loneliness and claiming the antidote was conversation. That didn’t track with my own experience. My most desperate moments of loneliness have been in conversation: on a Hinge date, doomed but persisting as a form of protocol. At a publishing party, surrounded by people who look and talk like me, all of us a little drunk but maintaining our nervous, manic professionalism. My moments of connection, by contrast, have been beyond language. Biking along the east edge of Prospect Park on an August night, hearing cicadas chant their reedy iambs, as loud on that stretch of Flatbush as they would be in the countryside, remembering summers of childhood, a house that’s gone, and my grandmother’s two-handed wave from the threshold.
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Daniel Serrahas has been studying the food habits of the Vikings for over 20 years—and demonstrates them to be farmers, rather than “gnawing off the meat of the bones of wild animals.” Maddy Savage and Benoît Derrier give a respectful report of Serrahas’ work and provide his recipe for Viking fish porridge for good measure!
Viking imagery often focuses on seasonal banquets of roasted lamb accompanied by mead. While the elite did enjoy this kind of food (and used it as a way of expressing their wealth), Serra’s research suggests that everyday cooking was quite different.
He said most people focussed on developing simple, “tasty”, “feel-good” dishes that could be easily shared and helped keep them warm in Scandinavia’s harsh climate. “The winter would have been cold. So, yes, people working in those conditions would probably need a hot meal. A hot, comforting meal – filling.”
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For Hakai Magazine, Trina Moyles introduces us to Jesika Reimer, a chiropterologist who is leading the world’s first gene-flow study to better understand the hibernation patterns of bat colonies in Alaska. Bats, who have a bad rap as vectors for rabies, are little understood for the critical and varying roles they play in the environment.
Bats are incredibly diverse in their adaptations. They’re the only mammal capable of true flight, living on every continent except Antarctica. Next to rodents, bats are the second-largest mammal group in the world, with over 1,400 documented species and counting. These range from massive fruits bats—the size of a small human child—to the tiny bumblebee bat, which weighs in at just two grams. The fish-eating bat, meanwhile, has elongated feet for raking the surface of the water to catch fish and crustaceans. And the Mexican long-tongued bat uses its long, tubular tongue—nearly half the length of its body—to feed on nectar. Bats are the major pollinators of over 500 different plant species, boosting both natural habitats and human agriculture.
Despite these wonders, the bat has an unfair reputation as a “bloodthirsty, rabies-carrying rodent,” Reimer says. “In North America, less than two percent of wild bats test positive for rabies, a number significantly lower than, say, foxes,” she points out. In 2021, only three people in the United States died from rabies contracted from bats.
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Shaun Overton, a former programmer from Fort Worth, Texas, has a vision: to turn his 320 acres in far West Texas into a desert forest. Overton, having no formal experience in ecology, hydrology, or agriculture, has grown an audience by sharing videos on TikTok and YouTube from his property, Dustups Ranch, about his efforts to change the landscape into one of abundance. His work has caught the attention of conservationists as well as volunteers who want to help; critics, however, are skeptical, saying he should instead focus on restoring the natural habitat rather than try to grow a forest in a harsh environment and climate. Ultimately, it’s an inspiring journey, and Wes Ferguson captures it nicely.
Overton recently began using the bulldozer he purchased to put in a dam for a pond—again, learning as he goes. He’s also using it to build terraces along a hillside where he hopes to soon plant fast-growing “pioneer” trees that can withstand the harsh conditions of the desert. Once those trees are established, he wants to add fruit and nut trees.
Addington says he is reserving judgment until he’s had a chance to visit Overton’s property. “Shaun is conservation-minded. He really is. He cares about the land, and he wants to improve it,” says Addington, 67, a longtime environmental activist who has made headlines over the years for, among other things, defeating a proposed nuclear waste site near Sierra Blanca. When asked if Addington thinks a desert forest is possible, he pauses. “Not a forest, no,” he says. “You can catch water and grow things. Ranchers have done that out here before. It’s not exactly new, to be honest.”
But Addington has noticed the attention Dustups is bringing to Hudspeth County, both in the form of online views and the volunteers who flock from around the state to work on the property. “I’m interested in what Shaun’s doing to get more people out here, so they’ll actually appreciate the land. You only protect what you love, right?” he says. “Most people drive through here at 80 miles per hour. They don’t realize what’s out here.”
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Shaun of the Dead was a British movie that launched a new genre: zombie romantic comedy. It also launched the Hollywood careers of director Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. In this endearing interview, the three look back on the film fondly.
Nick Frost: I saw a picture of us at the [Shaun of the Dead] premiere the other day, and it struck me that I’m now the age Bill Nighy was at the premiere.
Edgar Wright: No way.
Frost: Yeah, really. What was Bill? 50-odd? 54, 52? We’re in that ballpark now. And it’s funny, I’m doing a job with kids who’re in their 20s, and it’s like, I am their— I’m not Bill Nighy at all, but age-wise, I’m their Bill Nighy.
Simon Pegg: We used to sit around in Bill’s trailer, just listening to him tell us stories about his wilder days. He was just like the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the shoot. It’s crazy to think that we’re that age now.
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Colleagues using the N-word frequently and openly. Spray-painted swastikas in the parking lot. White-power graffiti in the bathroom. Inappropriate touching and catcalling. On-the-job injuries. A lack of training. The list goes on. Bryce Covert’s cover story for The Nation is a deep dive into the rampant and blatant racism, sexual harassment, and discrimination that Black and female employees face at Tesla, and its factory in Fremont, California, in particular.
After Jermaine Keys’s twins were born, he needed more than the $15 an hour he was earning at a construction company. So in September 2019, Keys got a job at Tesla’s Fremont factory, which paid about $23 an hour. “It was a big difference,” he told me. At first, Keys enjoyed the job. But a few months in, his supervisor started calling him “boy.” Keys heard white coworkers use the N-word and call people “monkey.” There was a swastika drawn with a black marker near where he clocked in to work every day. Black workers, he said, were made to do things like clean up the work area when the assembly line was slow; white ones weren’t. “It was just hurtful,” Keys said. When he said something to a supervisor, he was told to put his head down so he wouldn’t get fired.
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You may have read about the trauma afflicting American workers who do content moderation for tech companies. But these days, moderation work—and, thus, the aforementioned trauma—is increasingly being outsourced. In fact, it’s being sold as a way to help people climb out of poverty:
For companies like Sama, the conditions here were ripe for investment by 2015, when the firm established a business presence in Nairobi. Headquartered in San Francisco, the self-described “ethical AI” company aims to “provide individuals from marginalized communities with training and connections to dignified digital work.” In Nairobi, it has drawn its labor from residents of the city’s informal settlements, including 500 workers from Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa. In an email, a Sama spokesperson confirmed moderators in Kenya made between $1.46 and $3.74 per hour after taxes.
Grace Mutung’u, a Nairobi-based digital rights researcher at Open Society Foundations, put this into local context for me. On the surface, working for a place like Sama seemed like a huge step up for young people from the slums, many of whom had family roots in factory work. It was less physically demanding and more lucrative. Compared to manual labor, content moderation “looked very dignified,” Mutung’u said. She recalled speaking with newly hired moderators at an informal settlement near the company’s headquarters. Unlike their parents, many of them were high school graduates, thanks to a government initiative in the mid-2000s to get more kids in school.
“These kids were just telling me how being hired by Sama was the dream come true,” Mutung’u told me. “We are getting proper jobs, our education matters.” These younger workers, Mutung’u continued, “thought: ‘We made it in life.’” They thought they had left behind the poverty and grinding jobs that wore down their parents’ bodies. Until, she added, “the mental health issues started eating them up.”
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Can psychedelics help to restore consciousness in a patient whose awareness is impaired or seemingly gone? Can these powerful drugs give the brain a chance to reorganize and rewire itself? After David’s wife, Sarah, was hit by a car, she suffered severe brain damage; she became unresponsive and remained in a coma, and David explored many treatments with no success. Working with a neuroscientist in Belgium, whose research involves using psilocybin and ketamine in patients with “disorders of consciousness,” he decided to give a dose of distilled liquid psilocybin high enough to induce a psychedelic experience. In this fascinating read, Jonathan Moens recounts the experiment and the science behind it, and poses important ethical questions surrounding consent.
On August 25, 2023, exactly 336 days following Sarah’s tragic accident, David, who is based in Colorado where psychedelic mushrooms are decriminalized, obtained a tincture of distilled liquid psilocybin. He had already given Sarah low and moderate doses of the drug over the course of several months and it had a “remarkable” affect in her bodily movements.
This time, however, he would go all in, using the equivalent of 2.5 grams—a dose high enough to provoke a powerful psychedelic experience and which is often used in clinical trials for therapeutic purposes. At this dose, both Gosseries and Carhart-Harris said an awakening was theoretically possible.
The legalities of what David was about to do were unclear. Colorado’s decriminalization of certain psychedelics in 2022 means that psilocybin is easy to access and magic mushrooms can be grown and consumed. But whether David was crossing a line by giving Sarah the drug, when she could not consent, was not obvious.
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Bubba Copeland was the heart and soul of his community—mayor, businessman. When a right-wing website called 1819 News exposed his deepest secrets, his life wasn’t the only thing that was destroyed:
When the story hit the next morning, Bubba’s son Carter, a junior at Auburn, was still asleep. He woke up to a text from his best friend that read, “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do.”
“I had no idea what she was talking about,” Carter says. “I called her, and she told me what had happened. Immediately, I looked up my dad’s name online and saw it everywhere. It was early in the morning, and every news outlet I’d never heard of had already jumped on it, like piranhas. I watched the whole world tear him down almost instantaneously.”
Carter and his father were extremely close. Over the years, each had confided in the other about their innermost struggles—in high school, Carter had come out to his father, and Bubba had shared his secrets with his son. Carter was shocked at the meanness of the story and was overcome with a visceral fear that he had never known before. In a panic, he called his dad.
“He picked up and said, ‘Good morning, buddy.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about, Good morning?!’ Trying to calm me down, he again slowly said, ‘Good morning, buddy.’ And I said, ‘Okay, good morning.’ And then I said, ‘Dad, we have to talk.’ And he said, ‘No, we don’t. I need to get into a meeting. I have people I need to take care of. We’ll talk later.’ ”
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At age 20, while beginning to form her worldview and her politics, Eula Biss read the book, “My Traitor’s Heart” by Rian Milan, a young white Afrikaner who “told the story of his country through a series of murders.” Twenty years later, Biss traveled to South Africa for the first time. At first, she’s surprised by all she did not understand about Black living conditions under Apartheid, realizing that her only guide up until that point—the author Milan—was hopelessly myopic as a member of the ruling whites.
The young Rian Malan opposed apartheid, but not in any way that he would later consider meaningful. “We believed that apartheid was stupid and vicious,” he wrote of himself and his teenage friends, “but we also believed that growing our hair long undermined it.” He and his friends spray-painted SAY IT LOUD, I’M BLACK & I’M PROUD in six-foot letters on an embankment in their suburb, and Malan showed a photo to his family’s black maid. Her response: “Ah, suka.” Get lost. Malan had never heard the James Brown song, but he’d read about it in Time. He knew more about American culture than he knew about the culture of the people who lived in his backyard, in shacks. “The strangest thing about my African childhood,” he wrote, “is that it wasn’t really African at all.” Malan was more Western than he was African—because he was, more than anything, a product of apartheid.
At twenty, I recognized myself in the young Malan. I saw my own undeveloped politics, my own failings and my own frustrations, my own crisis of conscience. I saw the deficiencies in my education, which was, in many ways, an apartheid education. I had been fed mostly platitudes about race in America and I was hungry for real talk, so I was drawn to Malan’s impatience with empty gestures and his intolerance of pious pronouncements.
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