Category: Narrative

The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River.

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Image credit: Jordan Vonderhaar | TexasMonthly

No matter where you live, it’s a pretty good bet that you’ve experienced some extreme weather: heat waves, snowstorms or avalanches, tornadoes or hurricanes, cyclone bombs, drought, flooding. In 2006, Yale Climate Connections reported that the United States was facing a billion-dollar disaster roughly every two weeks. Aaron Parsley feels this statistic in his bones, as you’ll see in his first-hand account of the nightmare he and his family experienced during the deadly flooding of the Guadalupe River on July 4, 2025, when 135 people lost their lives. But statistics are just numbers, numbers that can scarcely capture what it feels like to be caught up in such an event, fighting to stay alive. With words and images, Parsley’s report takes us way beyond statistics, into the very eye of the storm he lived through. Parsley’s article was published on July 10, 2025 in the Texas Monthly, where he serves as a senior editor.

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Ghosts

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Illustration by Jesse Zhang | The Believer

Do you remember a crucial moment or event in your life that you really wanted to write about—maybe to help you understand it more fully? Yet no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t find the words? That’s what happened to Vauhini Vara, whose sister was diagnosed with cancer when they were both in high school. Her death four years later left Vara feeling like a ghost, one who was unable to write about her sister’s death. That’s when she, a reporter and editor, turned to a relatively new kid on the technology block: Chat GPT. Read on to see what happened when Vara asked AI to take over and write about her sister’s death for her. Be prepared for more than a few surprises! Vara’s essay was first published in 2021 in The Believer, a quarterly arts and literature magazine.

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What I Learned as a Liberal Faculty Adviser for a Turning Point USA Chapter

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Image credit: Ricardo Tomás | The New York Times

Imagine being asked to work with an organization whose goals you strongly oppose. That’s what happened to Nicholas Creel, a professor of business law at Georgia College & State University, when a student asked him to be the adviser for their college’s chapter of Turning Point USA. It was not something he would have thought to do, but his “dedication to the principles of free speech” led him to see it as a request he could not turn down. So, he said yes, “despite disagreeing with virtually every position the organization holds.” Read on to find out how it all turned out, in a 2025 piece he wrote for the New York Times. You may be surprised.  

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Did Usher Write His Own Commencement Speech? (Yeah!)

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Image credit: Emory University

Have you ever had to make a presentation or give a speech that meant a lot to you, one in which you hoped to hit just the right note, make just the right connections, leave just the right impression? If so, you probably worked hard on it, revising over and over, getting advice, tweaking it right up to the last moment. Pretty much like Usher did for his 2025 commencement address at Emory University, though he had a publicist and team of professional advisers while you probably relied on friends or family members. In this New York Times article from May 2025, national correspondent Alan Blinder takes a close-up look at Usher’s speech composing process, trying to capture the recursive dynamic that drove Usher from start to finish. Here’s your chance to experience some of that process—and perhaps compare it to your own. 

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A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA

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Image credit: TED

How would you feel if you had no way of getting healthy food? Not good, right? That was the situation in South Central Los Angeles, one that Ron Finley set out to correct. He started by planting a vegetable garden on a strip of land between his house and the street. His 2013 TED Talk describes what happened after that.

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I Feel So Ugly without My Makeup On

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Image credit: Buse Koldas

Throughout history and in widely differing cultures around the world, people have used various kinds of makeup to mark or adorn themselves. Why? Answers to that question vary according to time and place, of course, but how about in our time and place: twenty-first century college campuses in the US? Enter Buse Koldas, a student from Istanbul who was in her first year at Johns Hopkins University, studying computer science and engineering, when she wrote about what makeup has meant to her for the Johns Hopkins News-Letter in 2024.

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Philip Gove and “Our Word”

Closeup view of a large dictionary viewed from the side. The book is open, and the yellowed edges of pages with thumb tabs are visible.
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Image credit: Rosmarie Voegtli (rvoegtli/Flickr)

If we think about dictionaries at all, we mostly tend to think about them in a fairy tale way—that is, they simply appear, whole and complete, in the fullness of their power, delivered by some mythical being, probably one with wings. But where do dictionaries come from? Who writes them? What words are worthy of inclusion? Who knows? Their very authority defies questioning. But that’s silly, isn’t it? Of course humans make dictionaries, and it’s no small task. Like other grand human activities, dictionary-making involves a lot of debate, controversy, and passionate argument. In this November 2023 essay from American Scholar, writer, editor, and language scholar David Skinner shares a dictionary story that is, well, f*ckin’ epic.

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Love It or Lose It: The Cycle

Photo of a brightly colored bird with a long beak perched on a branch. Superimposed on the image in large lower case letters are the words “love it or lose it”; beneath the words is the logo of the World Wildlife Fund, and below that, the URL wwf.org/love.
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Birds are terrific, aren’t they? We like them. Some people even hang bird feeders in order to be able to see and hear birds more often. But then maybe those same people might unthinkingly kill the insects that the birds enjoy eating. Oops. In this short 2021 video, the World Wildlife Fund shows how all of nature is interconnected and comes around full circle to make one continuous chain of life.

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