In honor of Thanksgiving, here are five stories on family ties—the ones we forge, and the ones we can’t escape from.
For months, the Department of Homeland Security has been using tattoos as pretext to deport immigrants to El Salvador. As Olivia Heffernan and Steve Brooks explain, the DHS sees any ink as proof of active gang membership, even if a deportee had long since left the gang, done time, and paid their debt to society. And speaking of debts paid, Kristen Martin lays out how student financial aid is built to benefit an intact nuclear family, and presupposes that they will bear the cost of higher education together. She reviews a new book detailing the system of lending that drags students and their families down.
Elsewhere, Alana Pockros writes on If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a new movie that illustrates how the stressors of contemporary life can make a bad mother of anyone. Daniel Petrick reviews a family saga that plays fast and loose with historical fact. And fiction from Jess Row presents a heartwarming story of friends reunited in a common cause: trying to assassinate a war criminal.
“In reframing who is to blame for her student debt, Collier opens up a broader view of what justice would look like—one that seeks to free millions of student debtors from a system that the government has chosen to trap them in.”
“While at points devastating, eerie, and frenzied, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is also a feminist comedy of errors: at every stage of the film, husbands abdicate domestic responsibilities while wives nearly drown under the weight of their burdens.”
“Indignity reads as if the author started with a list of assumptions and arguments, cross-referenced it with a list of characters, and methodically ticked off the requisite boxes in pursuit of her pedagogical aim.”
“I know it sounds crazy. But I was alive, and I saw it. The worst hadn’t happened. We were inside Henry Kissinger’s house, making history, molding it like Play-Doh. That’s how it felt. We were real.”
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