Tag Archives: rs-reports

T his report was produced in partnership with Important Context, the news outlet of the OptOut Media Foundation. In April 2020, as the first wave of the deadly coronavirus pandemic was breaking across the U.S., the largest charitable fund in the country, Fidelity Charitable, announced a plan to help mitigate …

T he police entered the foggy forest not long after sunrise. The group of officers made their way through the thin, bare trees and found two people tucked into a hammock. With guns drawn, they ordered that the couple get out, and placed Sarah Wasilewski, her partner, and their friend …

S everal hours after the gates opened for the Israeli music festival Supernova, Amit Bar and her boyfriend Nir Jorno arrived with their friend Ziv Hagbi, excited for the event. The devoted electronic-music fans had traveled from Matzliah, some 60 miles away. “We really waited for this event,” the 27-year-old …

W hen Sara Benincasa first met Ben Kissel in 2010, she was smitten with him almost immediately. Tall and handsome with boyish features, a six-foot-seven-inch frame, and an aw-shucks Midwestern mien, Kissel was working as a stand-up comic in New York City, just like she was at the time; they …

P atricio Manuel sits silently backstage at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino. He’s in the back corner of the white-tarpaulined gazebo as he waits to be called to the ring of the 3,000-seater events center here in Indio, California. Inside the thin tent walls, he can hear the hubbub of …

S ince DuQuan Myers died six years ago, he’s come back in ways that are mysterious and magical and hard to explain. It started the day of his funeral, when the doves that were released over his coffin refused to fly home, perching instead in the oak tree just above …

J uly 19, 2003: It’s well after midnight in San Francisco, and the Exploding Hearts — Adam Cox, Terry Six, Matt Fitzgerald, and Jeremy Gage —are ready to play for a packed house at a bar called Thee Parkside. The show is a “last-minute thing,” Six, the band’s guitarist, remembers. …

I f there was one punk group that positioned itself as a leader of a movement for inclusivity, radical change, and allyship in the early 2000s, it was Anti-Flag. Co-founded by Justin Geever, a.k.a. Justin Sane, in Pittsburgh in 1993, members flitted in and out until the group solidified in …

I first visited the Grand Canyon in 1967 with two school friends and an elderly teacher who filled his summers by taking young students on long road trips, camping across the country. I mostly remember the color of the sky and the immensity of the chasm, with the Colorado River …

WASHINGTON and MOGADISHU —Fadumo Abdi has been hungry for months now. She’s already lost one child to starvation and she doesn’t know if her surviving children will make it to the end of the year. Having recently relocated to a camp for internally displaced persons, or IDPs, near Mogadishu after …