Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker

The letter that has taken the internet by storm. It's a stunning, heartbreaking, and brutal read — the judge in the case (who is up for re-election this year) gave the convicted rapist six months and probation, because a longer sentence would have "a severe impact on him". As this letter so rightfully points out, the punishment doesn't come near to fitting the crime.

I thought there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught. He’s going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me, find loopholes in my story to invalidate me and my sister, in order to show that this sexual assault was in fact a misunderstanding. That he was going to go to any length to convince the world he had simply been confused.

On the run with my dad

Spokane writer Shawn Vestal in a piece from the Guardian about his unusual upbringing with his dad.

That Sunday afternoon. Dad called us all into the living room and told us that he had done something terrible. The sheriff’s deputies would be coming the next day to arrest him for a crime he did not specify. Because he couldn’t bear that, he said, he was going to get in his car and leave, and he wanted us to follow him. We packed and Mom drove us north through a snowy night, following Dad across the border and into Canada, where we spent a week hiding from the law.

The Lost Secret Sign Language of Sawmill Workers

Sarah Laskow on the language sawmill workers developed as a way to communicate over the din of the machinery.

The core of the sawmill workers’ sign language was a system of numbers, standardized across the industry. Those signs were shared in a technical notebook, and, the linguists wrote,”in the view of the management, that was about all there was to the language.” But it covered much more ground than technical communication. Workers could talk about quitting time, lunch time, and cigarette breaks. They could talk about sports and the bets they placed on games. They could talk about their wives, cars, and colleagues. They could tell jokes and comment on what was going on around them without their bosses ever knowing.

Mr. and Mrs. B

Novelist Alexander Chee, once a member of ACT UP, on a job he held as a private waiter for William F. Buckley, who once wrote that AIDS victims should be tattoed for easy identification.

In 1997, I began working as a waiter for William F. and Pat Buckley. I was the picture of a New York cater-waiter: 5′ 10″, 165 pounds, twenty-nine years old, clean-cut. I took the job because I looked good in a tuxedo and couldn’t stand the idea of office work unless it was writing a novel. It was the easiest solution to my money problems when I returned to New York after getting my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I’d already been doing it for two years when I was called to work for the Buckleys. Cater-waitering paid $25 an hour plus tips and involved working everything from the enormous galas in the Winter Garden to People magazine lunches to openings at the Guggenheim. The tuxedo and the starched white shirt—and the fact that each assignment was at a different, often exclusive, place—all made me feel a little like James Bond. Sometimes my fellow waiters and I called it the Gay Peace Corps for how we could come into places, clean them up, make them fabulous, throw a party, and leave. And I liked that when I went home, I didn’t think about the work at all.