Launched This Week: May 1st-5th

Love in the Age of Prince

“The police are there, expecting us, academics in revolutionaries’ outfits”: Emma Eisenberg on teaching, writing, and marching in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Harry Harris on cast-iron pans and paying it forward:

Obviously, given that I was a link in a chain, I had to then get a skillet for someone else. That was the contract I was bound to. It was a good friend’s birthday recently. She had moved this way in similar circumstances to myself, under a similar cloud, and is coming out of it. She is now the owner of a cream-colored cast-iron skillet, a little deeper than mine. The first link in a new chain, in a new place.

Abbey Fenbert on “boys will be boys,” growing up a book lover, and that time she kinda sorta got Brave New World banned from her seventh-grade English class:

I wonder about an education not just in the ideals of free speech, but in the skills and practices of freedom. If kids learned to defend their rights, earn respect, question authority, survive criticism. If the anti-censorship brigades swooped in not just when syllabi are challenged, but when a girl is told that the appropriate reaction to mistreatment is silence. If we stopped conflating social vulnerability with intellectual cowardice, and the frame that pits safe space against free speech dissolved. If every kid’s basement were stuffed with books, and nothing was off-limits.

A beautiful essay from our columnist Laura Turner on anxiety, unmet expectations, and trying to find hope after miscarriage.

A couple of link roundups for you, if you like the internet.

“To the extent that the world is striped, it is a happy place.”

Just too real, Liana.

• 0