We are in the midst of a reckoning: survivors of assault are sharing their stories and we need to learn how to respond

By Mandy Len Catron

I was 19 the first time someone shared her story of being sexually assaulted with me. Over AOL Instant Messenger, a friend from high school said she’d lost her virginity at a party a year earlier. “But,” she added, “it wasn’t what I wanted. I was drunk. He took advantage of me.”

I had no idea what to say. I understood that she was describing a traumatizing experience. I could tell she was still upset. What she was alluding to was terrible, but it was also commonplace. I heard stories of hookups gone bad almost every weekend. …

For years, Kathleen McLaughlin smuggled American plasma every time she entered China, home to the world’s largest and deadliest blood debacle. She had no other choice

By Kathleen McLaughlin

I started my decade-long turn as an international blood smuggler in 2004 with a mundane task: packing. I gently stacked a dozen half-liter glass vials into two soft-sided picnic coolers. The bottles held the components of a syrupy mix, a powerful medicine made from the immune system particles collected from thousands of people. A nurse would infuse the syrup into my veins, a treatment to keep my immune system under control, to halt its potentially paralyzing attacks on my nerves.

First, I had to get all of this, plus my own needles, to China.

Shortly after learning I had a nerve disease that required these periodic infusions, I moved from the US to China, home to the world’s largest and deadliest blood plasma debacle. Early on, I learned a statistic that would guide me through nearly 15 years in China: at the time, an estimated 50% of medications sold in the country were counterfeit or compromised. This was only one symptom of a fractured system where blood was perhaps the most notoriously unsafe product of all. …

The pain of being shamed by a boastful, lying schoolboy has never left me. Now, I’m reliving it all over again

By Leslie Bennetts

When Renate Schroeder Dolphin signed a group letter to the Senate judiciary committee claiming that Brett Kavanaugh treated women with respect, she didn’t realize that the boy she had known in high school had publicly slut-shamed her for the amusement of his fellow football players.

Then Dolphin — along with millions of other Americans — discovered that Kavanaugh described himself on his yearbook page as a “Renate Alumnius” (sic), which classmates explained as the code phrase that boys used to boast about their sexual conquest of a female student at a nearby Catholic girls’ school.

Dolphin was appalled. “The insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue,” she said, adding that she had never even kissed Kavanaugh. …

Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone’. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing well?

By Joe Moran

Every writer, of school age and older, is in the sentences game. The sentence is our writing commons, the shared ground where all writers walk. A poet writes in sentences, and so does the unsung author who came up with “Items trapped in doors cause delays”. The sentence is the Ur-unit, the core material, the granular element that must be got right or nothing will be right. For James Baldwin, the only goal was “to write a sentence as clean as a bone”.

What can celebrated writers teach the rest of us about the art of writing a great sentence? A common piece of writing advice is to make your sentences plain, unadorned and invisible. George Orwell gave this piece of advice its epigram: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” A reader should notice the words no more than someone looking through glass notices the glass. …

As people flee intense heat in Arizona for gentler climes, rental and property values soar. But what about those left behind?

By Oliver Milman

Only half-jokingly, some residents of a progressive city 300 miles north of the Mexican border have adopted the “build the wall” slogan in the face of a wave of newcomers. But these perceived interlopers are starkly different from Donald Trump’s imagination.

They are American, mainly white and are fleeing the unlivable heat.

Arizona’s vast sweep of landscapes stretches from the scorched western movie backdrop of the Sonoran desert in the south, past rusty red sandstone outcrops further north in Sedona until you ascend to Flagstaff, a pleasant city carved into the largest expanse of ponderosa pine trees in the world, at an elevation of 7,000ft. …

Former UN secretary general accuses ‘powerful’ health interests in the US of blocking universal healthcare

By Jessica Glenza

The former United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon has denounced the United States’ healthcare system as politically and morally wrong, and urged American leaders to enact publicly financed healthcare as a “human right”.

Ban made the comments in an exclusive interview with the Guardian in New York, as part of his work with The Elders, a group founded by Nelson Mandela to work on issues of global importance, including universal health coverage.

The US has the world’s most expensive health system, accounting for nearly one-fifth of American gross domestic product and costing more than $10,348 per American. The United Kingdom, by comparison, spends a little under 10% of GDP according to the latest available statistics, and healthcare is free at the point of delivery. …

It is two decades since Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved their fledgling startup out of their dorms. With threats to its power growing, how long can the company dominate?

By Samuel Gibbs and Alex Hern

In the summer of 1995, a second-year grad student called Sergey Brin was giving a tour of Stanford University to prospective students. Larry Page, an engineering graduate from the University of Michigan, was one of those being shown around the Palo Alto, California campus.

“I thought he was pretty obnoxious,” Larry Page said of the encounter. “He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too.”

“We both found each other obnoxious,” said Sergey Brin. …

Harper’s and New York Review of Books both published problematic essays by men disgraced by #MeToo. Here is what that reveals

By Moira Donegan

First, it was Harper’s. In their October issue, the magazine published an essay by John Hockenberry, the disgraced former public radio host who was accused of sexual harassment and racially inappropriate comments by women he worked with. He sent them emails asking for dates, made comments on their appearance and made sex jokes. In August 2017, after multiple complaints about his behavior were made to WNYC management, Hockenberry quietly retired from his program, The Takeaway. His behavior was only made public later, in reporting by Suki Kim for The Cut.

Hockenberry’s Harper’s piece, titled Exile, reached nearly 7,000 words — extraordinarily long for a personal essay — and details the suffering that Hockenberry claims to have endured since his behavior was made public. In the essay, Hockenberry relies heavily on the notion that his disability is exculpatory of his behavior — Hockenberry uses a wheelchair — and compares himself to Lolita, the teen girl who is kidnapped and raped in the…