The Washington Post Magazine, Feb. 2, 2022.

Charlotte Andrews has hazy memories from the three weeks she spent on a ventilator in the early part of the pandemic... Her life wasn’t the only thing that hung in the balance. Andrews, who is 72, was put on a ventilator March 16, the same day that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an emergency order closing bars and restaurants across Michigan. That order shuttered Club Yesterday’s, a nightclub Andrews opened in 1996 to be a home to Detroit’s distinctive style of couples dancing, known as club ballroom, urban ballroom or Detroit-style ballroom. The dance community she had been building and celebrating for nearly a quarter-century was also fighting for its life...

The New York Times, March 15, 2022.

Oleksii Polukhin’s 64 days in detention began when Russian soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint. They found that he’d been gathering information about Russian military positions to share with Ukrainian forces; they also discovered he was gay.

Mr. Polukhin recalled one of the guards calling him an anti-gay slur and forcing him to strip naked on the street. (This is a common practice by Russian forces, nominally to search for nationalist tattoos.) After he was dressed again, Mr. Polukhin said that the soldiers took the opportunity to humiliate him further, calling over a random passerby to ask what should be done with gays in his city.

“I think that all of them should be killed,” Mr. Polukhin said the man responded...

The New Yorker, September 22, 2024

For the first time, the International Criminal Court has concluded that an armed group specifically targeted women.

In the spring of 2012, members of a militia known as Ansar Dine seized control of Timbuktu, in Mali. The militia, which was working with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, meant to restore “proper” Islam to a city it saw as corrupted by secular influence. It forbade women from wearing jewelry, leaving the house at night, being alone with men other than their husbands, and even from speaking to their own brothers-in-law and cousins. When more than a hundred women gathered to protest the rules, the militants fired shots in the air to disperse them...