Tara Williamson reflects on the lives of Tina Fontaine and Colten Boushie and on how Canada’s systemic dehumanization of Indigenous people led to their needless deaths.

“My Christmas wish is for an end to these fires. For no more loss of life. And for rain.” As many in the Northern Hemisphere celebrate a white Christmas, Australia-based Lee Mylne mourns the devastation brought about by wildfires.

With the final episode in the Star Wars saga just around the corner, writer Lucy Blue, a lifelong super-fan, reflects on the movies’ darker, more morally ambiguous tone, and the way the series has evolved since her ’70s childhood.

Steve Salaita spent 21 years in academia, a committed and passionate professor. Then he got fired. Now he drives a school bus, “one of the few institutions in the United States that protects the powerless from the depredations of commerce. “

“Across our 50 states we vote by mail, ranked-choice selection, provisionally, and by absentee— the fact we can know anything on election night is nothing short of a bureaucratic miracle. So the spectacle of election night television should be considered as just that: entertainment only loosely connected to determining the shift in political power.”

“If the hill is civil rights, if the hill is justice, if the hill is moral goodness or righteousness or whatever you personally call that, then the child that is the United States started pulling the sled up the hill in the late eighteenth century. And we didn’t start near the top.”

Designer, author, and AltSummit founder Gabrielle Blair created Design Mom in 2006; since then, she’s published thousands of posts on design and parenting, travel, food, and other topics (from the evergreen to the timely).

Sahitya Poonacha reacts to the Supreme Court of India’s landmark decision to decriminalize gay sex: “Society still has a long way to go, but now with the court on love’s side, it gives the confidence to the people who are afraid.”

Celebrate the pop icon’s 60th birthday by diving into the rich archives of all about Madonna, where you’ll find news, interviews, magazine stories, and other materials going back decades. 

“Being a food writer is the most punk rock thing a person can do, and Jonathan Gold was the most punk rock of us all.” Javier Cabral pays homage to the legendary Los Angeles food writer, who was both his mentor and his role model.

Librarian Deb Baker rejects a recent op-ed calling for Amazon to replace public libraries: “Libraries are often the only egalitarian spaces in American communities, radically welcoming of everyone who comes through their doors.”

If you love soccer, you probably enjoy a good underdog story. Here’s Uruguay’s: a small country with a rich World Cup legacy, which Candace Rose Rardon lovingly retells in her illustrated essay on Longreads.

The creator of The Wire and Treme remembers his years of friendship and collaboration with the late Anthony Bourdain.

“But the festival has little bearing on the lives of people on the valley’s east side, except perhaps as a reminder of how easy it is to not see them.” Investigative journalist Gabriel Thompson explores the lives of Latinos and the undocumented in California’s Coachella Valley, a region known for its annual music festival.