According to the law, Robert Morris was a criminal. The second Black lawyer in the history of the United States, Morris was among a group of abolitionists who, in 1851, stormed a Boston courtroom to free Shadrach Minkins, an escaped slave from Virginia. Minkins had been detained under the Fugitive Slave Act and was to be returned to his master.
Morris filed a writ of habeas corpus on Minkins’s behalf, but the effort failed because Minkins was property in the eyes of the law.

In 1979, five months after my seventh birthday, my father crashed his plane into an orange grove and died. Dad, a pilot, had gone up in one of his twin-props with a friend and lost control after some sort of mechanical failure occurred in the skies above Central Florida.
The funeral was closed casket—an uncommon thing for Catholics back then—because my mother did not want people to see the work the undertakers had to do to stitch my father back together.

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Judy Blume’s Forever wasn’t a book that most readers just stumbled upon. “Obtaining, hiding, and reading it—and then sharing it with others—was a rite of passage for many teens who came of age during and after the sexual revolution,” Anna Holmes writes of the teen novel.

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This week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of U.S. military leaders to Washington.

Whitney Wolfe Herd has a vision for modern romance. More than a decade after founding Bumble, in 2014, she’s back at the dating-app company—and this time, she wants to get things right. For too long, she argues, people have been swiping in the dark: evaluating other multifaceted beings on the basis of a few pictures and superficial bits of description, being evaluated in turn, feeling judged and empty.

When ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air last week after his comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the obvious way to understand the story was that it was an attack on free speech. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr had, after all, publicly declared that ABC could do things “the easy way or the hard way” with regard to Kimmel, and then implied that local ABC affiliates might face “fines or license revocation” if nothing was done.

In the two weeks since Charlie Kirk’s killing, Trump-administration officials and allies have not only promised a sweeping crackdown on liberal groups. They have marshaled the language of a rising charismatic Christian movement to describe their political agenda as a cosmic battle against the forces of evil.
At Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the moment at hand as “not a political war” and “not even a cultural war—it’s a spiritual war.