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…

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…

Record-breaking US wildfires are fueling a cottage industry of boutique services — and many are happy to pay the price — By Lauren Smiley With record-breaking wildfires carving up the American west this summer, firefighters have become the rarest of civil servants: the kind almost universally lauded as heroes. …