Past midnight, or at 2 a.m. on the weekends, our fast-food place closes its doors and we use the next hour to clean up and put everything back in its place. Recently, we got an additional task, sorting through the trash to meet new recycling requirements: plastic in the yellow trash can, food in the red one. “We grill burgers, not the Earth” was the gist of the initiative, an effort to address the fast-food industry’s impact on the planet.

We’ve been working overtime ever since. The stacking of task on top of task takes its toll. No amount of…

How to use Google Docs to fight for social change. Forge is always trying to make our lives better, and this week, it released an incredible new resource that promises…

Residence in America requires interaction with its vast network of highways. Yet the American highway system, born to defend against foreign military attacks and to transport commodities, is redundant. America and its highways are synonyms for each other; both narrative-based, costly, and destructive. This summer we’ve seen elected officials, and the judges they appoint, stretch every sense of the law to maintain white power structures, and we’ve seen how nervous they get when the people stretch our own power, moving from our streets to the highways. …

Remember the Moral Majority? Founded in 1979 by the legendary Southern Baptist minister and televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., it was a group of religious leaders and conservative lawmakers that aimed to spread right wing Christian values across an increasingly secular (and, to their minds, increasingly depraved) nation. The group gained huge cultural and political influence during the Reagan administration and set the tone for American conservatism through most of the 1980s. Nationwide efforts to curtail sex education in public schools? The Moral Majority was there. Those famous campaigns to censor art and defund the NEA because it supported artists like…

I’ve been glued to my phone for weeks. Since May, social media has given me 24-hour access to the protests over systemic racism. The barrage of camera footage and live feeds have bookmarked my Groundhog Day–esque shelter-in-place routine; these check-ins are as much a part of my day as brushing my teeth or tucking my kids into bed.

Watching the protests against police brutality day after day, I’m reminded of Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix special 8:46. In the act, Chappelle shares gratitude for the African Americans out on the streets protesting police brutality and the eight minutes and 46 seconds…

MEDIUM RARE

Each week on Medium Rare, I’ll be sharing stories you might have missed that are definitely worth a second look. Got a suggestion for a piece we should feature? Pop it in the responses below!

• After 17 years with the Master Sommeliers, Americas, Richard Betts is handing in his resignation, saying the group’s values no longer reflect his own. Betts is likely the first-ever Master Sommelier to leave the organization, which is currently in the midst of a reckoning for repeatedly failing to make the wine industry more inclusive.

• Following Betts’ resignation, fellow Master Sommelier Brian McClintic said he too…

I grew up about 25 miles outside of Minneapolis. As a kid, going into the city was an exciting and welcome change from the tree-lined monotony of the suburbs. But my childhood memories felt convoluted this week as I watched my city and a beloved neighborhood turn into a war zone. I attended my first preschool just blocks from where George Floyd was killed. My mom once worked at the Target store on Lake Street, which now sits in rubble. But the truth is, the area was in ruins long before Floyd’s killing.

When I was growing up, the neighborhoods…

In the last week, I have been party to a dozen or so eye flushes. It’s a simple act, using a water bottle to clear someone’s eyes of chemical irritants after they’ve been tear-gassed. The volume of eye flushes signals, for me, a rapid development in protesting — I performed only two eye flushes all of last year. There are people in my city (Columbus, Ohio) and likely in yours, too, who are attending their first protest and performing their first eye flush on the same day.

All across the U.S., protests are being organized. In the days since George…