Vox Populi: The Most Popular Posts of 2024
Thank you so much for helping to make Vox Populi a success in 2024. Since our founding 10 years ago as a newsletter for anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania, we’ve accumulated more than 5,000,000 visits. We now have over 20,000 daily subscribers, about 35% outside the United States.
Mike Vargo: Magical Realism — in Literature, in Life, and Online
My daughter called herself Dark White Wolf, and when I was a child, I had an imaginary companion — a second self — whom I brought to the dinner table with me. Nobody was allowed to sit in my doppelgänger’s chair.
Andrea Mazzarino: Broken Heart Syndrome in Trump’s America
I’m the wife of a U.S. military veteran and the mother of children who have been encouraged by those in our family and community to become fighters “like Daddy.”
Adam Patric Miller: How (Not) to Wear a Keffiyeh to School
Fold the keffiyeh in a triangle, lift it to your face, lift your arms about your head holding the ends of the longest edge, then wrap it so the triangle covers your face, tie the long ends together behind your head, letting the patterns drape over your shoulders.
Baron Wormser: The Loss of Literature
Literature challenges the very idea of right thinking, which is one reason tyrants have suppressed literature, though that suppression is ably carried out by any zealous group of chiding, censorious know-it-alls.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Watch your back my dead mother warns
I was in my late teens, off to college up north. I’m hoping you’re rid of M for good, my mother said. But he wanted to move north with me, and begged me to move in with him, that we would go to school together. Me, desperate to be a solo act. The look on his face when I turned him down, unforgettable.
Rebecca Gordon: Staring Down Misogyny
What the election means for women (and the rest of us)
Andrew Reginald Hairston: Sweet Potato Pie
Having gone public with your bisexuality the month prior — and blocking your parents and sister at the same time — the memories would have to suffice
William Trowbridge: Packinghouseland, 1957
In the summer of my junior year in high school, I got a job in the hog-cut department at Cudahy Packing Company.
Matthew Parker: Foot Soldier
As a junkie and petty thief, I often found myself caught like a foot soldier behind enemy lines in the war on drugs. And, like most street-level addicts, it was inevitable that I’d become a prisoner of war.
Adam Patric Miller: The New Normal
The answer to the threats, the bullets, the bombs, the bombast of our politicians, is contained in the act of educating young people to think for themselves and to see the fragile humanity of people.
Baron Wormser: “Gilgamesh Hector Roland” | On Zbigniew Herbert
If only we had the strength to acknowledge our weaknesses, how different we might be as creatures.
Mike Vargo: The Insanity of Our Times, According to Philip Slater
Nothing explains everything, but some things explain a lot.
Zeina Azzam: Alive in Gaza
Ahmed spends hours each day trying to find potable water, wood to make a fire, anything for his family to eat.
