New Urbanism sells faux sustainability as a luxury on Florida's 30A
The Florida beach highway that highlights how money, sustainability, and survivability intersect as the climate crisis unfolds.
Media for good trouble.
Liberation lives here.
Southern politics
Mississippi's childhood lead exposure interventions don't do enough for kids
Experts say solutions aimed at reducing lead exposure from water need to be educational and environmental.
Homelessness and eviction have always been public health crises. The pandemic made them even more deadly.
"On top of everything else, now you've got to find a place where no one will bother you for existing."
Overdose deaths are reaching record highs in the South as COVID vaccines take priority
"It's a trauma response. It's a response to stigma and shame and being beaten down and taught that you don't have any worth."
Breaking Through COVID: What data can't tell about the South's vaccine rates
The end-goal of any effort to end the pandemic should be the abolishment of a system where collective care is not center, where compassion is not heard, and where people cannot trust their fellow community members to act on the collective's well-being.
Arts & Soul
In photos: Afropunk 2021 is a queer, Black homecoming
The Atlanta festival is known for creating a no-hate space. After 18 months, "it's very nice to see just hella black people everywhere."
Contraband Books: What Texas prisons have against Michelle Alexander, Frederick Douglass, and Alice Walker
Bookseller Julie Poole tried to do a customer a solid by shipping books to a Mississippi prison. The process turned out to be harder than she ever imagined. How the human right to read is being restricted in Southern prisons.
'The rest of the world tells us that these bodies are killing us'
The author of 'Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness' in conversation about "the Black fat" and the nonbinary, trans-masculine experience.
In portraits and letters: 'Being free is not the same as freedom'
Lessons on what release from prison really means. Meet a dozen men from Louisiana and Mississippi who served a combined 311 years for crimes they didn't commit.
Race & Place
Requiem for the longleaf pine
'The story of longleaf is also the story of the Southern yellow pine. We've just done a really good job of telling the longleaf story.'
'We've come this far by faith:' Vaccines, religion, and community in Arkansas
In each of his community spaces, Reverend Kenneth B. Thomas Sr. has seen the casualties of a pandemic that is complicated, multi-faceted, and doesn't have a neat beginning or end.
You're swamped? Join the club.
Climate change is coming for all of us. What the people of the Gulf South need is solidarity, not thoughts or prayers—and certainly not your emails.
'We have to evaluate the motives of health care institutions'
"Being vaccine-skeptical or vaccine-hesitant is not the same thing as COVID-denial."
'A lifetime of damage' on a creosote plume in Houston's Fifth Ward
Recent public health studies confirm exposure to creosote and other chemicals from a nearby rail yard is responsible for poor health outcomes. When will Texas take action?
Long reads
Essays & Letters
MORE STORIES
Mellon Foundation announces Scalawag as an inaugural Humanities in Place grantee
Through their new Humanities in Place program, the Foundation will invest $350,000 in Scalawag over the next two years, allowing us to further concretize and grow our transformative work.
Hurricane Ida: How to get and give help on the Gulf Coast
These organizations are offering on-the-ground relief to Gulf Coasters in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Your frontlines lead our headlines.
For Black cowboys—from inner-city Philly to small-town Texas—horses and riding are a way of life
Photojournalist Ron Tarver spent years photographing people largely ignored in mythic depictions of white cowboys and the American West.
A prisoner's apothecary: Solitary Gardens reimagines six-by-nine cells
People in solitary confinement and volunteers team up to imagine a world without prisons—and grow plants to feed and heal the world in the process.
Welcome to Abolition Week
The national media is shifting its attention away from demands to restructure, defund, and abolish the police, but policing and prisons don't just affect those of us behind bars.
POC-led. Women-run. Southern.
Virtual Event: Join Scalawag for Realizing Abolition
Realizing Abolition is an opportunity to gather together with others committed to challenging the existence of prisons in our society
Akwaeke Emezi: 'A dead thing sentenced to life'
Dear Senthuran is its own swampland. It's thick with the muck of existence. It's as much land as it is water, decaying as it wills to live.