First, in “Empowerment Inc.,” Brandon Hicks satirizes those who whitewash the legitimate challenges of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community.
Then, in the Saturday Essay, Haley Swanson reaches for solace in the face of her mother’s drinking problem and the deaths of family members. Swanson struggles to define the act of mourning and finds a kind of complicated reward in that struggle.
And in the Sunday Essay, Hilary Collins mourns a friend who was, despite her private admonitions, more than a friend. Collins looks back on the profound and difficult-to-define relationship and decides that her love may not have been “unrequited” after all. “Grief,” she writes, is a “performance, [and a] code.”
