Rush McKenzie lives in what seems like endless summer, just blocks away from the beach in Santa Barbara, California. His three-story apartment complex—with a stone courtyard and palm trees in every direction—is one of the few Section 8 complexes for low-income workers in a city that’s known to be prohibitively…
The first time Crystal Wang had a gynecological exam was at a large medical center in the central business district of Beijing. When she arrived at the examination area, she was taken aback by a bold red sign that said 处女不能检查, or “virgins may not be examined.”
In years past, Lululemon has made the news most frequently in matters related to founder Chip Wilson, a man prone to tone-deaf statements who brought his company into permanent association with strange health claims, Ayn Rand devotion, and an aversion to large bodies. After Wilson vacated his management role in 2012…
I drove to Milliken, Colorado in my boyfriend’s grandmother’s Mercury Sable and an orange gingham skirt. I hello-ma’am’ed it up in lipstick and chunky heels, wore my favorite Hidden Folk perfume with katafray in it—this wasn’t drag, it was so no one would assume anything slant about my body or ask questions about my…
In the late afternoon on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, a petite Korean mother of one walked into the lobby of the Yolo County Jail wearing army fatigue pants, with tears streaming down her face. Convicted by a jury in February, she’d been locked up in the Northern California holding facility for a total of nine months. In…
After driving 30 minutes east of downtown LA, I reached the apartment complex in Rowland Heights, California, that was rumored to contain a so-called Chinese “maternity hotel”: a place of questionable legality, where wealthy women seeking American citizenship for their children and a way around the one-child rule come…
"My mom's cat was dying," a woman in a white blouse dotted with holographic silver sequins explains. ("I live in a community of healers," she told me earlier, in the same breezy, dismissive manner one might use to say in Queens.) "Couldn't eat. Had lost half her fur. And he saved her life."
Today, Amnesty International released its report "No Place For Us Here: Violence Against Refugee Women in Eastern Chad" (PDF), which describes in painful detail the sexual violence that women escaping from Darfur face both outside and inside United Nations camps.
