READ STORIES

The Weight of the Water; Fatmata Turay

04.01.26 01:53 AM - By Second Chances - Comment(s)

I have spent some time thinking about the particular sound a dry throat makes when it tries to swallow. It is a sandpaper sound. In the camps outside Freetown, after the rebels had finished tearing the country into pieces, that sound was everywhere. It was the rhythm of the displacement.

Fatmata Tura...

Steve Jobs's Long Road Back to the Garage   

04.01.26 01:13 AM - By Second Chances - Comment(s)

It is a strange thing to be thirty and already a ghost in your own house.

In 1985, the air in Cupertino didn’t smell like revolution anymore. It smelled like mahogany boardrooms and the sour sweat of men who were afraid of the very monster they had helped create. Steve Jobs wasn’t just fired; he was ...

The Weight of a Small Room for Patti Smith

01.01.26 02:24 PM - By Second Chances - Comment(s)


Sometimes, the most violent thing a person can do is stay still.

In 1979, Patti Smith was the high priestess of a certain kind of New York chaos. She was lean, androgynous, and spoke in a language that felt like it was being torn out of her throat. People called her the "Punk Poet Laureate,"...


The Gravity of the Robert Downey Jr's Second Chance Story 

01.01.26 02:23 PM - By Second Chances - Comment(s)


It is 1996, and the sun is likely setting over Sunset Boulevard, that strange, gilded stretch of Los Angeles where everyone is pretending to be something else. Robert is speeding. He has a .357 Magnum in the car, along with cocaine and heroin, a trio of companions that suggest a man who has stopped ...


Nelson Mandela The Architect of the Long Wait

01.01.26 02:08 PM - By Second Chances - Comment(s)


It is the glare that gets you first. Not the bars, not the heavy clang of the gates, but the way the sun hits that limestone quarry on Robben Island and bounces back with a blinding, aggressive whiteness. It’s enough to make a person squint until their face permanently carries the map of a struggle....