The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Taffy Brodesser-Akner recounts her tangential connection to a 1974 incident involving the kidnapping of a well-off New York businessman. Ostensibly prompted to pen the article by little more than sharing the real-life story that served as partial inspiration for her new novel, Brodesser-Akner, as she’s wont to do, expands the piece through the typed equivalent of thinking out loud. Before it’s done, she has an expansive, intensely personal essay on how trauma lingers, even when it’s hidden. The article is striking, insightful, and surprisingly moving.

I Was A Creative Force Behind One Of The Biggest Rock Bands Of The ’90s. Then I Watched Them Erase Me From Their Story. by Casey Niccoli

Casey Niccoli was a vital contributor to shaping the stylistic allure of Jane’s Addiction in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties. It’s her artistic handiwork that graces the covers of the band’s two biggest and most revered albums, Nothing’s Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual. Because she was also dating the band’s frontman, Perry Farrell, at the time, her place in Jane’s Addiction history is often reduced to muse, a diminishment that also suits Farrell’s cultivation of an image of himself as a singular genius. In this article, Niccoli reclaims her narrative and asserts her prime place in the act’s legacy. This piece was published by HuffPost.