Human Stories, Boldly Told
How a white kid from rural Minnesota who was raised to be racist grew up to become one of the country’s foremost collectors of black literature.
Kurt Thometz, a private librarian to the ultra-rich and a rare book collector with an affinity for African literature, surrounds himself with more than 15,000 obsessively organized books in an 1891 brownstone on West 160th Street in Upper Manhattan. Part-bookstore, part-bed and breakfast and private library, Thometz’s home is situated in a neighborhood steeped in African American history, from the Sugar Hill row houses where W.E.B. Du Bois and Duke Ellington lived, to the Edgecombe Avenue buildings that Count Basie and Paul Robeson once called home. The bookstore, Jumel Terrace Books, which is located in the brownstone’s basement, is where Thometz sells his Afrocentric selections, ranging from modern histories of tango and samba to Nigerian market literature that he’s compiled into a collection called “Life Turns Man Up and Down: High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English.”
Illustrator Ryan Raphael gives us an inside look into his process when creating the art for the Narratively story Inside the Queer-Centric Frat That Dared to Question What a Frat Even Is.
An award-winning producer on how freelancers bring freedom and innovation to structured work environments.
A new dad on the nightmare-inducing challenge of coming up with a timeless but fresh, cool but not too cool name for his son.
A filmmaker and surfer proudly explores her Indigenous roots, and discovers that thrill-seeking runs in the family.
The coalminer’s daughter. The bartender. The police brutality activist. The grieving mother. Each looked at the man representing her in Congress and said, “I can do better.”
Amy Vilela lost her daughter when she couldn’t afford the medical bills. When her Congressman told her he wouldn’t support universal healthcare, Amy said, “I’m running.”
Cori Bush is a registered nurse, a pastor and a mom. After taking to the streets to protest police killings, she looked in the mirror and said, “why not politician, too?”
In early 2018, we introduced you to a bartender from the Bronx trying to pull off what many said was impossible. Here’s how AOC became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
Paula Jean Swearengin has seen West Virginia’s land exploited, its people fall ill, and its politicians do nothing. So she decided to do something herself.
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