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Losing My Religion at Christian Camp (Katy Herschberger for Longreads)
When we were 11, I convinced my best friend, who wasn’t religious, to join me for my fifth summer at camp. Her mother expressed concern that since she didn’t have a religious background, she might feel left out. I assured them that it didn’t really feel like a Christian camp and her mother agreed to let her attend.
Is It Possible to Stop a Mass Shooting Before It Happens? (Andrea Stanley for Cosmopolitan)
She’s wearing a gray T-shirt, jeans, black boots, gold hoop earrings. Her height, her brown hair—it’s all normal, unremarkable. She looks how she looks, which is not like a top-secret agent hunting murderous internet villains but also not not like one.
The Great Escape (Rachel Sugar for The Goods)
It is weird to gather in a themed room for an hour to unlock combination locks in a high-stakes situation that matters not at all. We didn’t use to trap ourselves in $30 rooms and now we do, and it doesn’t feel like an accident that the rise of escape rooms in the first half of this decade corresponds almost exactly with a seismic shift in how we relate to technology (intimately, all the time).
After Being Harassed And Pushed Out Of A Shell Oil Refinery, This Woman Pushed Back (Zahra Hirji for Buzzfeed)
One took place last December, on the fourth floor of the federal district court in downtown Oakland. When the pregnant plaintiff took the stand, she looked out on a largely empty room. To her far left sat two lawyers representing the American subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, the multinational oil giant that last year posted revenues of $396.5 billion, and the woman from human resources who had fired her. Next to her was her own legal team, a trio of lawyers working on the expectation that if they won, Shell would pay the bulk of their fees.
Why Does the U.S. Army Own So Many Fossils? (Sabrina Imbler for Atlas Obscura)
The Corps’ accidental fossil collecting began in earnest during the Great Depression, after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the Flood Control Act of 1936. This monumental civil engineering project led to the construction of countless dams, levees, and dikes. The scale of the work required the Corps to conduct surveys of the designated land to ensure no archaeological or paleontological resources would be destroyed or disturbed.
Photo: Becky Matsubara