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All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

Alex Tizon

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

洛拉：我家的奴隶

Alex Tizon

她与我们家人一起生活了五十六年。她带大了我和我的兄弟姐妹，从早到晚做饭做清洁，从来没有工资。十一岁的我，一个典型的美国孩子，意识到她其实是我们家的奴隶。

她的骨灰装满了一个黑色塑料盒子，如烤面包机一般大小，重三磅半。去年七月，我用一个帆布口袋把这个盒子包起来，装在行李箱里，横越太平洋，飞去了马尼拉。我要从那里坐车去一个小乡村，去把这个在我家为奴五十六年的女人的骨灰交出去。

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

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At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

Why Did The Biggest Whales Get So Big?

Ed Yong

… and perhaps more importantly: when?

Five years ago, on a boat off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, I met the largest animal that exists or has ever existed.

The blue whale grows up to 110 feet in length. Its heart is the size of a small car. Its major artery is big enough that you could wedge a small child into it (although you probably shouldn’t). It’s an avatar of hugeness. And its size is evident if you ever get to see one up close. From the surface, I couldn’t make out the entire animal—just the top of its head as it exposed its blowhole and took a breath. But then, it dove. As its head tilted downwards, its arching back broke the surface of the water in a graceful roll. And it just kept going, and going, and going. By the time the huge tail finally broke the surface, an unreasonable amount of time had elapsed.

An Apple employee poses with a personal computer in 1986. — Corbis Historical / Getty

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

Deirdre Clemente

The office was, until a few decades ago, the last stronghold of fashion formality. Silicon Valley changed that.

Americans began the 20th century in bustles and bowler hats and ended it in velour sweatsuits and flannel shirts—the most radical shift in dress standards in human history. At the center of this sartorial revolution was business casual, a genre of dress that broke the last bastion of formality—office attire—to redefine the American wardrobe.

Born in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, business casual consists of khaki pants, sensible shoes, and button-down collared shirts. By the time it was mainstream, in the 1990s, it flummoxed HR managers and employees alike. “Welcome to the confusing world of business casual,” declared a fashion writer for the Chicago Tribune in 1995. With time and some coaching, people caught on. Today, though, the term “business casual” is nearly obsolete for describing the clothing of a workforce that includes many who work from home in yoga pants, put on a clean T-shirt for a Skype meeting, and don’t always go into the office.

What ISIS Really Wants

Graeme Wood

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The Girl Who Turned to Bone

Carl Zimmer

Unexpected discoveries in the quest to cure an extraordinary skeletal condition show how medically relevant rare diseases can be.

When Jeannie Peeper was born in 1958, there was only one thing amiss: her big toes were short and crooked. Doctors fitted her with toe braces and sent her home. Two months later, a bulbous swelling appeared on the back of Peeper’s head. Her parents didn’t know why: she hadn’t hit her head on the side of her crib; she didn’t have an infected scratch. After a few days, the swelling vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

When Peeper’s mother noticed that the baby couldn’t open her mouth as wide as her sisters and brothers, she took her to the first of various doctors, seeking an explanation for her seemingly random assortment of symptoms. Peeper was 4 when the Mayo Clinic confirmed a diagnosis: she had a disorder known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP).

Armed police officers stand near the Manchester Arena. — Andrew Yates / Reuters

The Manchester Attack Shows How Terrorists Learn

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

Can governments be as innovative about saving lives?

Yesterday’s terrorist attack that struck at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in Britain’s Manchester Arena—leaving 22 people dead and 59 injured, by the latest count—feels perhaps even more callous and personal than other such recent atrocities. As The New York Times noted, the target was “a concert spilling over with girls in their teens or younger, with their lives ahead of them, out for a fun night.”

For Europe, the attack, now claimed by ISIS, represents a continuation of a nightmare scenario: The pace and deadliness of terrorist attacks in the continent has reached levels unprecedented in the post-9/11 era, with the heinous and grotesque becoming frighteningly routine.

Even five years ago, specialists could count the major post-9/11 attacks in Western countries on one hand, and knew every date on which they had been perpetrated. They were known by names like 3/11 or 7/7 (references to attacks in Madrid and London, respectively).

How St. Ives's Apricot Scrub Plays on People's Shame

Julie Beck

I don’t want no scrubs.

I bought into the St. Ives lie for years. In the already insecure times of high school and college, my skin was host to constant colonies of acne, my nose peppered with blackheads, my chin and forehead a topographical horror of cystic zits that lasted for weeks. But as I moved into adulthood, it didn’t go away, making me, I suppose, part of a trend—adult acne is on the rise, particularly among women.

I’m sure it never really seemed so bad to others as it did to me, as is the way with these things. I covered it up with layers of gloppy foundation, then with more proficiently applied makeup later on, then went on hormonal birth control, which improved the situation significantly.

But for many of the years in-between, I washed my face with St. Ives Apricot Scrub, which is an exfoliator made with granules of walnut shell powder. It is extremely rough. Perhaps too rough. We’ll find out: Kaylee Browning and Sarah Basile recently filed a class-action lawsuit against St. Ives’s maker, Unilever, alleging that the wash “leads to long-term skin damage” and “is not fit to be sold as a facial scrub.”

That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis

Ed Yong

And other tales from the intersection of science and airport security

When Martin Cohn passed through airport security at Ronald Reagan Airport, he figured that he’d probably get some questions about the 3-D-printed model of a mouse penis in his bag.

The model is 15 centimeters long, made of clear translucent plastic, and indisputably phallic— like the dismembered member of some monstrous, transparent, 11-foot rodent. One of Cohn’s colleagues had already been questioned about it when she carried it on an outward flight from Gainesville to Washington D.C. She put it through the security scanner, and the bag got pulled. A TSA official looked inside, winked at her, and let her go. She was amused but embarrassed, so Cohn offered to take the model home on the return flight.

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Paul Rosenfeld

A wealthy white lawyer has spent 16 years and millions of dollars turning the Whitney Plantation into a memorial to the nation's past.

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Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

Tynesha Foreman and Nicolas Pollock

New data and analysis from PRRI and The Atlantic suggests that it was cultural anxiety more than economic distress that fueled white, working-class support for Trump.

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A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Nicolas Pollock

Uncovering the link between early trauma and lifelong illness

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Messiah Watch Returns!

About the Author

Most Popular

My Family’s Slave

洛拉：我家的奴隶

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Why Did The Biggest Whales Get So Big?

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

What ISIS Really Wants

The Girl Who Turned to Bone

The Manchester Attack Shows How Terrorists Learn

How St. Ives's Apricot Scrub Plays on People's Shame

That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain

Messiah Watch Returns!

Latest Video

Trump Scandals Are Good for Putin

About the Author

Most Popular

My Family’s Slave

洛拉：我家的奴隶

When Your Child Is a Psychopath

Why Did The Biggest Whales Get So Big?

Why American Workers Now Dress So Casually

What ISIS Really Wants

The Girl Who Turned to Bone

The Manchester Attack Shows How Terrorists Learn

How St. Ives's Apricot Scrub Plays on People's Shame

That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis

Why America Needs a Slavery Museum

Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

A New Understanding of the Childhood Brain