Back then, death row for men was located in a prison near Huntsville, Texas, where hundreds lived in tiny cells. The men were allowed to hang out together, watch television, play basketball and go to work at prison jobs. And because they were locked behind bars rather than solid doors, they could call out to one another and talk. That was how, one day, Ford caught familiar words drifting down from the cells above him, phrases like, “I’ll cast a spell!” “Aren’t there too many of them?” and “I think you have to roll.”

It was the sound of Dungeons & Dragons.

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/dQG0e

This is part 4 of an ongoing Pulitzer-Prize winning series. Click here for the earlier parts in the series, or to discuss the series as a whole.

The belt caught the sleeve of Marcos’s baggy jacket and pulled him across the floor. Hard plastic teeth ripped through his muscles, tearing open his forearm down to the bone. By the time someone heard his screams and shut off the power, his arm was limp, a deep triangular gash running down the length of it. A rope of white tendons hung from his elbow to his wrist, horrifying the workers who gathered around him. He understood from their faces that something was badly wrong but didn’t feel any pain as the wound began gushing blood and he started to lose consciousness.

...

The morning after Marcos’s injury, workers in Dreamland began talking about a child whose arm had been nearly torn off at the plant. Word soon spread through town. There were reasons that supervisors, teachers, federal inspectors and even police officers had said nothing for years about children working at the slaughterhouses. Everyone understood that the children were under extraordinary pressure to earn money to pay off their travel debts and help their families back home. They were living on a remote stretch of peninsula with few job options — if the plants shut down because of a labor scandal, the local economy could collapse. Now, with an eighth grader in the hospital, many wondered if they had been wrong to keep quiet.

This is part 3 of an ongoing Pulitzer-Prize winning series. Click here for the earlier parts in the series, or to discuss the series as a whole.

The White House and federal agencies were repeatedly alerted to signs of children at risk. The warnings were ignored or missed.

I knew about the royal family of Oudh, of course. They were one of the city’s great mysteries. Their story was passed between tea sellers and rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers in Old Delhi: In a forest, they said, in a palace cut off from the city that surrounds it, lived a prince, a princess and a queen, said to be the last of a storied Shiite Muslim royal line.

There were different versions, depending on whom you spoke to. Some people said the Oudh family had been there since the British had annexed their kingdom, in 1856, and that the forest had grown up around the palace, engulfing it. Some said they were a family of jinns, the supernatural beings of Arabian folklore.

This is part 2 of an ongoing Pulitzer-Prize winning series. Click here for the earlier parts in the series, or to discuss the series as a whole.

The White House laid out a host of new initiatives to investigate child labor violations among employers and improve the basic support that migrant children receive when they are released to sponsors in the United States. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, called the revelations in The Times “heartbreaking” and “completely unacceptable.”

Part 1 of a 2023 Pultizer-winning article series by Hannah Dreier

Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom.

• Part 2: Biden Administration Plans Crackdown on Migrant Child Labor
• Part 3: As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings
• Part 4: The Kids on the Night Shift

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The Case of the Missing Chacmools Soon after New Age icon and bestselling author Carlos Castaneda died in 1998, a group of his most loyal followers vanished, and many believed they’d made a suicide pact. Geoffrey Gray investigates the writer’s bizarre cult and finds himself entangled in a web of murky financial dealings, sex, possible foul play—and one death-defying supernatural being.

This is a 7-part series of blog posts, written by a history professor, contrasting the realities of ancient Sparta with it's depictions in popular culture.

I've been interacting with a guy who is very transphobic and it has brought to light the concept for me. Something that has been growing on my mind is that fighting to keep a she||him dichotomy feels unnatural. What do I mean?

I remember when I used to have a facebook and they tried to force everyone to be who they seem instead of who they want to be, that it would make sense for people in conversations to say 'she' or 'he' depending on the sex they could perceive of who they were talking to. But facebook is a very small aspect of a much bigger internet. Even before facebook, I was on miscellaneous forums of the internet, where I would interact with people who's names would imply they were dragons, or elves, or puppets, or abstract concepts, or words that don't even have a definition, let alone a gender. And here we are again on a forum where individuals can purposely choose to give themselves an image or name that makes them seem to have a certain gender, but there is no force behind it, so the vast majority of people are not waving their sex in front of them when interacting.

And, in general, FREEDOM includes CHOOSING what information one shares about themself. So, upon moral growth of a world, assuming Freedom increases, English should drop it's enforced telling of someone's gender through she/he him/her hers/his. We are already in an age where it would be blatantly inappropriate if the language enforced divulging someone's Ethnicity or Religion like it does Sex.

And through forums and other nondirect personal communication, there are many people we encounter, most of us daily, who are not waving their sex in front of them. How do we refer to these people? So, to me, Freedom seems a natural direction the language is to go; AND that the internet is catalyzing it.

And so, when watching a transphobe, it seems they ignore that the internet itself, unless entirely held by facebook, naturally grows 'they them' as the natural means of referring to others, with automatic 'she/he' comparatively more assumptive and thus less polite.

It seems very obvious to me that nature and the structure of the internet pushes growth specifically in this direction.

An unimportant mystery