Photo Essays

Life after Innocence

March 2, 2012 •

Among them, Jeffrey Deskovic, Kian Khatibi, and Fernando Bermudez spent forty-three years in New York prisons. All were eventually exonerated — freed by DNA evidence, confessions, and recanted testimony. Their photos before and after incarceration speak to lives transformed, years lost. By Dana Ullman

Photo Essays

Capitalism Reborn: An East African Story

December 20, 2011 •

Around the world, protesters decry the inequality and excess of free-market capitalism’s “race to the bottom.” But in East Africa, social entrepreneurs are planting the young roots of a new, cause-minded capitalism. By Jonathan Kalan

Editor's Blog

It's hard to think of another role with as much impact as being a mother and father. For almost every other position, we are replaceable in the long term. Someone else will do our job, for better or worse, if we're not there to do it. Someone else will eventually start our company or make our invention or sketch out our idea. Maybe it won't happen for a long time; maybe it would have happened earlier, if we weren't around to slow things down. But eventually, society makes progress, and the niches of innovation — in business or technology, art or politics — are filled.

The stories we're featuring on the site now touch upon the impact that fathers have — even in their absence. In Learned at My Father's Feet, Kae Dickson remembers her experience caring for her "Daddy" at the end of his life, as dementia robbed him of his memories and independence. In A Circle, Broken, Amy O'Loughlin reviews a family memoir by CNN journalist Mark Whitaker, who describes his complicated relationship with his absentee father, an African American scholar who blazed trails only to see his career burn out amid his struggles with alcoholism.

This week the magazine is featuring a trio of articles about prisons, real and psychological. In Freed, but Scarred, Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald describes the post-prison lives of three men who spent, among them, forty-three years in New York penitentiaries for crimes they did not commit. In an accompanying photo essay, Life after Innocence, Dana Ullman presents intimate portraits of the three men and their families, still scarred by absences and regrets. Finally, in Across Oceans, Haunted by Memories, Susan M. Lee reviews the novel "The Reeducation of Cherry Truong," a tale of two Vietnamese families flung across the globe, chased by their war-era remembrances of traumas endured and wrongs perpetrated — at times, on each other.