Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
This week ProPublica talk to the beleaguered tenants of Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Photo: AFP
The Beleaguered Tenants of ‘Kushnerville’, by Alec MacGills, ProPublica
That February — five years after she left Cove Village — Warren returned to court, this time with the housing form in hand, asking the judge to halt garnishment. “I am a single mom of three and my bank account was wiped clean by the plaintiff,” she pleaded in another handwritten request. “I cannot take care of my kids when they snatch all of my money out of my account. I do not feel I owe this money. Please have mercy on my family and I.” She told me that when she called the law office representing JK2 Westminster that same day from the courthouse to discuss the case, one of the lawyers told her: “This is not going to go away. You will pay us.”
Longing for a World Yet to Come: Nostalgia in Contemporary Politics, by Andrew Dean, The Pantograph Punch
“We in New Zealand are not immune from the desire for the return to the true home, either. In fact, quite the opposite: I wonder if attachment to the way things weren’t is latent in Pākehā self-identification. That sense that we’re all from small towns and organic communities which have sprung from the earth asks of settler colonialism that it never happened. And, as in so much of our earlier literature, we still seem to believe that putting labour into the land – shedding blood, or dying on mountaintops – is what makes it ours(ours as opposed to theirs).”
How Dallas Became One Of America’s Most Refugee-Friendly Cities, by Anne-Helen Petersen, Buzzfeed
“At 10 a.m. on the day before Easter, the area around the Canyon Creek Presbyterian Church in Northeast Dallas already has the manic air of a massive children’s birthday party. In one corner, a bounce house pulses like an arrhythmic heart. Volunteers from the church assist an endless line of kids as they climb the stairs of the giant inflatable slide. Toddlers absentmindedly drag Easter baskets behind them, trickles of sno-cone wandering down their party dresses. It’s like any other quasi-public Easter egg hunt, with just one defining difference: Half of the families are refugees.”
Ray Spencer Didn't Molest His Kids. So Why Did He Spend 20 Years in Prison for It?, by Maurice Chammah, Esquire
‘"In the haze, there was a niggling in my stomach that something wasn't right," Ray says. But as the trial approached, he was presented with what he saw as an impossible choice: force his own kids to relive on the witness stand whatever unspeakable things had happened to them, or confess to something he couldn't remember. That May, Ray decided to take an Alford plea—similar to a "no contest" plea, acknowledging the strength of the case against him without admitting guilt—and was sentenced to two life sentences, plus fourteen years.”
How Amanda Chantal Bacon Perfected the Celebrity Wellness Business, by Molly Young, The New York Times
“Growing up in New York City, she was a sickly child (“bronchial stuff”) whose parents took her to doctors (“I got pumped through the Western-medicine chain”) without satisfactory results (“Of course nothing helped”). One day she went shopping with her family at a downtown health-food store, where, the story goes, an Ayurvedic doctor visiting from India overheard Bacon coughing. The doctor came over and posed some questions (“Very typical Ayurvedic ones, like ‘How often do you poop?’ ”) and took the child’s pulse. After examining Bacon’s tongue, the man provided her mother with a list of forbidden foods: cow’s milk, wheat and white sugar, among others. Bacon stopped eating gluten at age 4 and became a vegetarian at around 7.”
The Tragic Story of a Texas Teen and the Marines Who Killed Him for No Reason, by Sarah Von Oldershasen, Fusion
‘“The way I see it, my brother’s death was like an abuse,” he says. “Because the military was close to our houses. When they shot him, they shot toward the houses. It’s kind of like somebody coming to your backyard with a gun and trying to play cowboys, trying to shoot. That’s the way we felt. That’s where we used to go shooting for rabbits.”’
Why Sally Yates Stood Up to Trump, by Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker
“Yates went back to her office, where she weighed her options: she would either resign or refuse to defend the order. She told me, “But here’s the thing: resignation would have protected my own personal integrity, because I wouldn’t have been part of this, but I believed, and I still think, that I had an obligation to also protect the integrity of the Department of Justice. And that meant that D.O.J. doesn’t go into court on something as fundamental as religious freedom, making an argument about something that I was not convinced was grounded in truth.”’
