Brian Fairbanks | The Atavist Magazine | April 2024 | 1,395 words (5 minutes) This is an excerpt from issue no. 150, “The Last Shall Be First.” A few weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Len Davis rose to face a jury. A former policeman, Davis was a big man who’d once exuded toughness and sometimes thrown himself...

Writer Chloé Cooper Jones has sacral agenesis, a congenital disability that affects the lower spine. In this beautiful essay—in which she describes her participation in a dance work choreographed by her boyfriend, Matty Davis—she writes about fear and disgust as forms of self-protection, opening up to and trusting a partner, and expanding the definition...

Stuart Potts lives in a one-bed flat in Middleton, a town in Greater Manchester, and ever since he moved in, he has let homeless people come and stay. This unregulated charity work is clearly a means for Potts to keep his own demons at bay, but his efforts for others still make for a heartwarming story.  Still, when someone from a local charity...

In this interview, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie speaks with Erica Wagner about the deeply personal costs of championing free speech, the process of writing his new memoir, Knife, optimism as a disease, and the comedic foreshadowing of the attack that nearly took his life. The task you undertook is different from therapy, but what did you...

In this Vanity Fair story, Keziah Weir recounts how the Vatican played a role in the science of in vitro fertilization. A 1957 encounter between two men—Bruno Lunenfeld, an endocrinologist, and Don Giulio Pacelli, an Italian prince and one of Pope Pius XII’s nephews—marked the start of the journey toward the first successful IVF pregnancy. The miracle...

Why visit a library if you’ve got Google at your fingertips? In this thoughtful essay, Charles Digges reflects on the services and experiences that libraries have given us over the decades, and how today’s libraries—and librarians—still offer things that a search bar can’t: Community and connection with people IRL. The space to be curious. The chance...