“To most outsiders, Hawai‘i is defined by the lei-draped, aloha-dispensing, honeymooner-welcoming image of the place. There’s no room for another version to emerge.”

“He has a story he wants to share, about what life looks like afterward. It does not offer Five Easy Steps to Bury Your Pain. He knows how deeply loss can cleave a person. But he also learned that we need other people to help pull us clear of the wreckage.”

“When Jason and Ashley put up a memorial for Dylan in Bible Hill’s Holy Well Park—a blanket laden with teddy bears, a toy fishing rod, the boy’s first-ever pair of rain boots hanging from the tree overhead—locals tore it apart and dug a hole beneath it, looking for bones.”

In a period of trying to sell her novel, Danielle Lazarin reflects on art, waiting, and the space between grief and hope.

“When members trickle out of a commune but retain their stake in the property, ownership can become a tricky issue. Often co-owners will refuse to sell their share because of ideological reasons—many members of Northern California’s communes acquired land to liberate it from logging and developers. This is why large, expensive swaths of land sometimes remain uninhabited even after all members of a commune have long since decamped.”

“In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.”

“The public and political reaction to the crash has been driven by a fundamental and, perhaps, ultimately unknowable question, one that will cast a shadow long after Ravnsborg emerges from the criminal and potential civil litigation: Was he really unaware that he hit another man?”

“Rare is the actor who can locate the specific in the universal and vice versa. Michael K. Williams was that actor.”

“Public information films – or PIFs to the aficionado – still exist today. We have seen them recently with regards to Covid; government advice on washing our hands, wearing masks and being careful of hugging our friends.

But next to the PIFs of the heyday of the genre, these touchy-feely, nicey-nicey televised messages are like comparing the Teletubbies with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

The weird, and often damaging treatments offered by unregulated wellness retreats.