A playlist is very much like an anthology — a collection of different artists, each with their own unique sound and vision, coming together to create something new. The combination creates its own power. When I was soliciting and editing work for my anthology, Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, it was important to me to have a range of different kinds of essays — I didn’t want to push any of these writers into a specific form but wanted them to write their anger in the way that felt most natural to them. The voices and styles in the book range as widely as the topics and the backgrounds of the writers — but they all work together. They flow into one another like a Beyoncé song can flow into a PJ Harvey song on a good playlist.

I asked each Burn It Down contributor to choose a song to accompany their essay, and say a little bit about why they picked the song they did. Check out their selections below, and listen to the whole playlist here. If you like what you hear, check out Burn It Down here!

Burn It Down, a playlist by Lilly Dancyger on Spotify

Face Up and Sing — Ani DiFranco

Selected by Leslie Jamison, for her essay “Lungs Full of Burning”

I remember hearing Face Up and Sing for the first time as a shy teenage girl who smiled all the time and said sorry all the time because I felt like I had to apologize for taking up room in this world — for even existing in this world — and spent much of my life chasing various kinds of male approval. I loved that this song was about beauty and anger at once, and I felt simultaneously inspired and chastised by it. When Ani (and we were already on a first-name basis, obviously) sang:

it’s nice that you listen

it’d be nicer if you joined in

as long as you play their game girl

you’re never going to win

It made me aware of the ways I was still playing their game, but also made me catch a glimpse of a version of myself — somewhere on the distant horizon — who didn’t have to play it anymore.

Bravebird — Amel Larrieux

Selected by Monet P. Thomas, for her essay, “The One Thing Black Women Are Free to Explore”

“Brave Bird” is a song about a secret event that happens to a group of women that causes them to feel shame. But one girl escapes. I hope my essay will help young Black women find their courage and express their righteous anger.

Marry the Night — Lady Gaga

Selected by Lisa Marie Basile, for her essay, “My Body Is a Sickness Called Anger”

To me the night is intense emotion, anger, darkness, sorrow. It’s all the feelings and truths we fight against, that we hide and repress. But what happens when we lean into the shadow, as Jung would call it? What happens when we give in and open the abyss? I think we discover who we are and give validity to our many layers. Living with a chronic illness forces you to lean into your reality, even the harsh realities, of pain and exhaustion. There is so much forced (and false) positivity out there — but we need to balance the day and night, the quiet and the spoken, the constantly repressed and the truth.

Feels Blind — Bikini Kill

Selected by Melissa Febos, for her essay, “Rebel Girl”

“Feels Blind” is the first Bikini Kill song that I ever heard and it plays an important part in my essay, “Rebel Girl.” For one day at summer camp as a teen, I was in a cover band and got to scream Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics into a microphone and it was the first day I had words for the what and why of my own anger.

Precious Things — Tori Amos

Selected by Marissa Korbel, for her essay, “Why We Cry When We’re Angry”

I can still remember the first time I heard Precious Things; the song spoke to me immediately. I loved the beautiful sound of the piano furiously pounding under her fingers. That opening still makes my fists clench every time I hear it. Wrapped inside that raging heartbeat are lyrics full of longing. My essay attempts to capture that pull between polarities: rage and longing, tears and fury. In the piece, I explore crying as a rage language, asking what purposes tears can serve. Inside my fury, there’s a girl-me, and Tori always sings her back to life.

Lined Lips and Spiked Bats — G.L.O.S.S.

Selected by Samantha Riedel, for her essay, “On Transfeminine Anger”

When Sadie Switchblade screams, so does my heart. G.L.O.S.S., or “Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit,” may have been a short-lived project, but the uniquely trans hardcore sounds they captured in their time together tapped into the hidden pain and anger of thousands of transfems, including me. “They told us to die, we chose to live” is one of my mantras for life, and when Sadie tells us that “bad girls have each other’s backs,” I’m reminded of the true bonds I share with my sisters. Try and start something. We dare you.

Don’t Hurt Yourself — Beyoncé

Selected by Evette Dionne, for her essay, “Unbought and Unbossed”

For a long time, I was unable to locate my anger or identify with other women who were rightfully angry about an array of different issues impacting them, including racism, sexism, and just plain old mistreatment. Based on the trajectory of Beyoncé’s music and career, it would seem that she was slow to anger as well, but “Don’t Hurt Yourself ” is her boiling point. She is bold, ferocious, and angry in a way that encouraged me to continue tapping into and wielding my own anger. You cannot play me without playing yourself.

Rid of Me — PJ Harvey

Selected by Erin Khar, for her essay, “Guilty”

Anger was a thing I, like so many women, ran from for the first 2/3 of my life. I sublimated anger into guilt. If I owned all the guilt, I kept control. If I never showed anger, it would prove you couldn’t hurt me, couldn’t touch me. But my need to control put me out of control, with drugs, with sex, with emotional intimacy.

PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me reminds me of the person I used to be, the one who was out of control, the one you wish you’d never met. The song starts out low; she’s practically whispering. It ramps up and explodes and becomes loud and undeniable, just the way my anger inevitably did. It’s a song that still stirs me and I listened to it a lot while writing this piece.

The Body is A Blade — Japanese Breakfast

Selected by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, for her essay, “Hangry Women”

Michelle Zauner wrote this song in response to her mother’s death. It’s about how the body continues in the face of loss. The line — Your body is blade that cuts a path from day to day ascribes the body a violence it uses to keep going when the mind doesn’t want to. My essay is about the way women are taught to fight their bodies and how our bodies fight back as they attempt to keep us alive and full. And so this song filled with sadness and hope felt just right.

Down by the Water — PJ Harvey

Selected by Rios de la Luz, for her essay, “Enojada”

PJ Harvey showed up in my life when I was 17. I was unsure and confused about a lot of things, but her voice and this particular song made me want to exude a haunting presence.

She’s a Bitch — Missy Elliot

Selected by Nina St. Pierre, for her essay, “A Girl, Dancing”

Dance was my first love. But as I came into the teen year and shit got real heavy at home, I fell away from dance and into other ways of using my body. Boys, booze, drugs. Basically, I didn’t give a fuck and went from being a straight-A student to barely graduating high school. During this spiral, adults around me made many assumptions: That I was being a drama queen, a dropout, a diva, a bitch. While, inside I was drowning. Not only did we bump Missy Elliot’s albums during all those late ’90s parties in the woods, but the way Elliot claimed space for her unique brand of creative expression and dance reignited something in me. No I was not just a diva or a bitch, but so what if I was? In “She’s a Bitch,” Elliot doesn’t ask who has the power. She simply takes it.

Girl on Fire — Alicia Keys

Selected by Reema Zaman, for her essay, “My Name and My Voice”

This song is one of my favorites. It’s an anthem that epitomizes rising from disempowerment to reclaim one’s full breadth of voice, which is central to my essay.

Daredevil — Fiona Apple

Selected by Marisa Siegel, for her essay, “Inherited Anger”

When Fiona Apple released her first album, Tidal, I’d just turned 13. I’d been aware of my father’s cocaine addiction for five years, and was three years away from the incident I write about in “Inherited Anger” that led to cutting him out of my life completely. I remember how I’d lay after school on my bedroom carpet, ear to my Sony boom box, and listen to Fiona sing her — and my — anger. “Daredevil” wouldn’t be released for more than a decade, but its lyrics speak directly to the angry teenager I was then (“I guess I just must be a daredevil / I don’t feel anything until I smash it up”) and the adult woman I am now, who’s learned to harness her anger and make it useful (“Say I’m an airplane / And the gashes I got from my heartbreak / Make the slots and the flaps upon my wing / And I use them to give me lip”).

Killing in the Name of — Rage Against the Machine

Selected by Dani Boss, for her essay, “On the Back Burner”

The first time I heard this song, I felt like I had been introduced to an anthem for the defiance I’ve felt since I was thirteen. When my favorite refrain begins (fuck you/I won’t do what you tell me), I travel from suppression to expression. It begins in a whisper, and as the lead singer repeats it, he gets louder until he’s screaming. This escalation mimics my increasing rage and is emblematic of the collective voices of women beginning to unfurl their anger.

TKO — Le Tigre

Selected by Meredith Talusan, for her essay, “Basic Math”

Le Tigre’s “TKO” is one of those wonderful revenge anthems that just happens to be sung by my favorite band from the early 2000’s, which was when the events surrounding my essay, “Basic Math” happened. I wish I’d had the confidence then to tell the man who undermined me, “I say my piece / And when it’s over, you’ll be on your knees,” and to inform him that someday he’ll read about me at the Barnes and Noble. But I guess it’s even better that this has actually turned out to be true.

Control — Janet Jackson

Selected by Shaheen Pasha, for her essay, “The Color of Being Muslim”

Aside from the fact that I love Janet Jackson as an artist and performer, growing up, I didn’t have much say or control over how I behaved, how I dressed and how I even thought due to the strict norms of my Pakistani Muslim-American community. The song resonated with me when I was a kid because I thought I would never know what it would feel like to be in charge of my own self. It wasn’t until I finally embraced my anger and my desires that I truly took control of my life. It’s the perfect song to bring my voice out.

Us — Ruby Ibarra

Selected by Lisa Factora-Borchers, for her essay, “Homegrown Anger”

Ruby Ibarra’s “Us” is a rap song about the Filipina American experience, which hits the underbelly of my essay about growing up in an immigrant family as a first generation American in the midwest. It mixes dialects and the lyrics activate the memory of my ancestry — of all the strong women who came before me and who I carry with me. It’s celebratory, meditative, and unapologetic about the legacy of resistance and strength that I inherited.

Pages — Stephanie Rice

Selected by Sheryl Ring, for her essay, “Crimes Against the Soul”

Pages is about how spiritual books can be turned into weapons. For me, it describes the uneasy relationship I still have with my faith given how it has been weaponized, and how I can assert my independence from it.

Love Yourself — Rome Fortune + Toro y Moi

Selected by Minda Honey, for her essay, “For Women Who Grew Up on Eggshells”

This is a song about choosing yourself, but also about encouraging the other person to focus on loving themselves more so they can grow as a person and be better toward you. I found this that this was the key to moving past the residual anger I was harboring for my father.

Be More Kind — Frank Turner

Selected by Megan Stielstra, for her essay, “No More Room for Fear”

My whole heart is for women who sing rage: PJ Harvey, Sleater-Kinney, Sinead yelling, “I’d kill a dragon for youuuuu.” That said, my essay in Burn It Down is about trying to explain my anger, specifically about gun violence in this country, to a child. The first verse in “Be More Kind” is everything I want to say to my son: this is awful and confusing and sad but there are things we can do to make it better, even when we’re small.

Brighter — Paramore

Selected by Keah Brown, for her essay, “Going to War with Myself”

This song is an ode to hope. I believe my essay is as well. For me, there is hope in allowing yourself to be angry. I know that now. So, when I allow myself to feel my full range of emotions, including anger, I do shine brighter.

This Feeling — Alabama Shakes

Selected by Anna Fitzpatrick, for her essay, “So Now What?”

It’s a pretty mellow song, but it speaks to acknowledging and accepting emotional ambiguity. I think of it as a kind of calm after the storm. And yes, I fell in love with it after watching the second season of Fleabag.

Listen to the full playlist here:

Burn It Down, a playlist by Lilly Dancyger on Spotify

And order your copy of Burn It Down here.

The tricky thing about writing an ending for a memoir is that if you’re still alive to tell the story, it’s not really over yet. Even if they’re in the past, the events you’re writing about are probably still reverberating in your life today, and will continue to do so for years to come. So how do you end the story if you’re still living in its aftershocks?

One important part of managing this unendingness is to pick a point in time at which your story ends and stick to it, rather than chasing yourself into the present. If you constantly revise to incorporate new experiences and realizations as you live them, the story will keep changing forever and ever and you’ll never be done writing it! This can be tempting, because new experience brings new perspective on the past so you always see your story differently than you did before—but resist! The story is not your whole life, remember, it’s a small sliver of it, told from your perspective at a specific point in time. So at what point in time does the piece of your story that you’re telling logically conclude?

To figure that out, it’s helpful to return to the traditional story structure of the narrative arc, even if you experiment with breaking and twisting the arc over the course of your story. Even in a non-traditional story structure, readers tend to want something resembling conflict and resolution somewhere in a story, and resolution is likely to come near or at the end. It’s important to remember when you’re looking for a satisfying end point for your story that narrative resolution doesn’t have to mean “it’s all over and done and everything is fine now.” A story can reach its “resolution” when after-effects of the main action are still being felt, when there’s still conflict, when things are still unresolved for you, as a human being. In the narrative sense, resolution can just mean “the impacts of the main action have been/are being integrated into the narrator’s life and perspective.”

To give a tangible example, if your story is about a marriage ending, the rising action would be the marriage itself, and conflict building in the relationship. The climax would be the tipping point where the couple finally breaks up, and the drama of that split. The falling action would be the aftermath, the narrator learning to be on their own. The resolution/ending there could be a first symbolic step toward building a new life as a single person — like hanging a beloved piece of art that your ex hated above the couch in your brand new studio apartment. The perspective shift that’s taken place there is moving from the anger and hurt and confusion of the break-up to some semblance of hopefulness for the future — even if anger and hurt and confusion are still very much present! Showing that symbolic moment doesn’t mean the story is “resolved” in that person’s actual life — there are several more challenges and milestones to come — but there’s still a sense of narrative resolution.

Hopefully that distinction between narrative resolution and actual lived resolution takes a little pressure off of feeling like you have to find perfect closure before you can write an ending for your story. Some experiences are never really over, but you can still write about them.

But remember: creating narrative resolution even if it’s much more complicated in real life doesn’t mean pretending everything is neatly resolved when it’s not! You can have that satisfying ending without pretending to skip off into the sunset (in the example above, the narrator hanging a painting doesn’t mean all their problems are in the past, and the writer doesn’t need to pretend it does). Trying to fake a tidy happy ending will only do a disservice to your story. Memoir is all about emotional honesty and complexity, and if you manage to accomplish that throughout your story only to throw it away at the end in favor of tying the story up in a neat bow, readers will be disappointed and you probably will be too.

It’s ok to leave it a little open-ended, to address and acknowledge the fact that some strands of your past reach into the present. That doesn’t mean you can throw your hands up and cheat your way out of writing an ending by saying “and it’s still going on so who knows what will happen” (if you’re really still so in the midst of the experience you’re writing about that an ending just doesn’t exist, maybe it actually is too soon to write the story! That’s ok too). But you can make room in your ending, along with some significant moment that creates a sense of narrative resolution, for the fact that there are still elements that are unresolved and that may never be resolved.

The story is only a snapshot compared to the layered complexity of real life. To some extent it will always be simplified; but you also want be as true as possible to your emotional experience with its many contradictions and complications. These two goals can feel like they’re in conflict, especially when writing an ending—inherently the least true-to-life part of a memoir, because the story ends while life continues. But it’s all about finding a balance and accepting that eventually the story you’re writing will become its own entity, almost independent of the lived experience you built it out of—which means an ending can be true to the story even if it’s not necessarily the whole story as you experience it in real life.

If you found this post helpful, check out my independent study on memoir structure for more.

Figuring out where to enter your story can be one of the most challenging aspects of memoir structure. It can feel like you need to nail down the beginning before you can write the rest. That’s not true — you can start anywhere in the story and it’ll fall into place eventually — but having a strong beginning to anchor the story can still go a long way toward bringing the overall shape into focus and helping you feel in control of the narrative as it develops. So how do you figure out where your story should start? Here are three approaches*:

1. Straightforward chronology and when the traditional narrative arc might work for you

There are a lot of good reasons to break away from and play with the idea of straightforward chronology in memoir, but there are also plenty of good reasons to keep it simple and tell your story in order. The reason the straightforward narrative arc is the default structure for storytelling is because it works—it keeps the reader engaged, it lends itself easily to building tension and a satisfying pay-off. So before you twist yourself up in knots trying to come up with a clever and different way to tell your story just for the sake of being clever and different, ask yourself if it might make sense to just start at the beginning.

In a traditional narrative arc (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution — for more info on how a narrative arc functions, check out this useful post on Masterclass), the story starts with backstory and/or exposition — also known as the part of the story before the main action starts, when you’re just living your life and we get to see what that life looked like before whatever major event is yet to come changes everything. This tends to work better for memoirs that cover a shorter period of time, as opposed to those that span decades. The reason for that is that if your story starts when you were a small child and covers most or all of your life up until the adult perspective from which you’re currently writing, that’s a lot of ground to cover before the reader ever gets to meet the version of you that’s telling the story. That’s a lot of build up before we get to the point, as it were. And that means a lot of time for the reader to lose interest.

If your story covers a shorter span of time, however, like a 1-to-5-year period, then simply starting at the beginning and progressing through time is more likely to work — there’s less ground to cover between that chronological beginning and the heart of the action, and the version of you that we meet at the beginning of the story is more-or-less the version we’ll stay with throughout (as opposed to meeting you as a child and waiting 100 pages to see the adult version of you that’s telling the story).

So when deciding if the straightforward narrative might work for your story, look at how much time you cover, and how far away we’d be from the narrator version of you if we were to start at the beginning.

2) In Medias Res and the case for starting in the middle

One good and common reason to break the traditional narrative arc structure is that the actual “beginning” of the story in a chronological sense is not always that interesting. Exposition and backstory can be a little bit of a slog, and you don’t want to bore your reader! We might not care to read several chapters about your childhood if we’re not invested in you or your story yet — but if you grab us with the most exciting part first and then flash back, we’re more likely to care about what your childhood/backstory was like and how it led to the main action we know is coming.

So maybe the second most common narrative structure after the traditional chronological arc is starting in medias res, meaning you start in the middle of the action (or, literally in Latin, “in the midst of things”). With this structure you’d open with the climax, or maybe just before or after it, and then go back to the beginning to work your way back up to that same moment. (So if a traditional arc is ABCDE, this would be CABCDE or DABCDE.)

This works wonderfully because a) you start with something dramatic, so the reader is likely to be hooked right away, and b) when you go back and give the exposition and backstory, the reader knows you’re headed somewhere interesting, so there’s more likely to stick with you through the set-up than if they had no idea where you were leading them.

This is a very popular and effective approach that tons of memoirs use — once you know to look out for it you’ll start recognizing the pattern. It’s incredibly effective at keeping a reader invested, because even though they now know what’s coming, they want to know how you got there, and will follow your story to understand the circumstances that led up to such a dramatic moment. The trick then is making sure that a) you pick a moment that really is immediately gripping and dramatic and b) by the time you work your way back up to it in the narrative there are new layers of meaning and nuance so it hits the reader differently than it did the first time.

A great example of this is Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club. She starts at the most pivotal, dramatic moment of the story, and then jumps back in time, building back up to it, so that by the time we return to that same moment we have a deeper understanding of all the factors at play and there’s a great emotional pay-off.

3) Getting to the emotional core as quickly as possible, regardless of plot structure

I read somewhere once that in every Shakespeare play, the first line encapsulates the central themes of the play. I don’t know if this is true (I’ve checked and some definitely feel like a stretch), but I still love it as a concept. The idea that right from the very first scene, the first line even, we should get straight to the heart of the thing. There are lots of different ways to think about what that would look like in practice, but I think it’s a useful guiding principle whether you plan to use a traditional arc, an in medias res opening, or something else — that whatever moment you choose for the beginning of your story can (and should) get right to the emotional core of the story as quickly as possible.

This can help you pick which moment to use if you are going to pull one from the middle of the story for an in medias res opening — looking for a moment/scene/chapter that’s not only dramatic and engaging, but also particularly emblematic of the emotional story you’re trying to tell. It can also help you pick a moment from earlier in the story as an entry point, perhaps even the chronological beginning, that somehow encapsulate the essence of the story, in more of a foreshadowing sense than a literal one.

Ultimately, emotional resonance with the heart of the story is more important for an opening moment than where exactly it falls in the chronology of the plot — wherever you start, the purpose of the beginning is to grab the reader’s attention, get them emotionally invested in you and what’s happening, and give some sense of what kind of story they’re settling in for. So think about whether the chronological beginning or the dramatic high point makes more sense for the plot of your story, but then whichever direction you go, zero in on a moment that resonates with the heart of the story you’re trying to tell—and start there.

If you found this post helpful, check out my independent study on memoir structure for more.

I not afraid of needles. I have 13 piercings and too much tattooed skin to even pretend to have trypanophobia. But as the nurse stuck the muscle of my upper arm, I recoiled. My instinct was to run. It wasn’t the needle that scared me, but what was in it: The Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine. The one you’re supposed to get when you’re a baby.

I was 28 years old, but I cringed like a little kid who should get a lollipop after a shot.

You see, I’d been raised to believe that vaccines are toxic and dangerous; that they’re a ploy to make money for the big pharmaceutical companies; that they do more harm than good. But nearly three decades later, I went against family ideology and joined responsible society by inoculating myself against these deadly-but-avoidable diseases.

“Anti-vaxxers” are all over the news these days. There was a measles outbreak in New York City, because too many hipster parents were choosing not to vaccinate their children. The mumps spread across Ohio State University. And the second-worst candidate in the last presidential election, Jill Stein, brought the vaccine debate onto the national stage by giving credence to the myth that vaccines cause autism.

MMy mom was an anti-vaxxer before it was cool. For as long as I can remember, she’s believed in alternative medicine; she says some homeopathic remedies could cure chicken pox faster than anything from a pharmacy. She only gave me antibiotics once when I was a child, when I had an ear infection so bad it could have killed me if she didn’t.

When I was born in the late ’80s, my mother was skeptical of the accepted wisdom. She’d heard that the vaccines were full of toxic stuff that could weaken my immune system for the rest of my life. She’d heard they could cause autoimmune diseases. Plus, when she was a baby, she’d had an extremely rare and nearly lethal reaction to a vaccine. She told me she was in medical textbooks. Since her mother couldn’t remember which vaccine had nearly killed her, she figured the safest bet was just to keep me away from all of them.

Every time I entered a new school (which was five times between kindergarten and ninth grade), she had to fill out a bunch of paperwork and insist over and over that she had a religious objection to vaccinations. She didn’t, but that was one type of objection that no school board is allowed to argue with, or even inquire further about. I never understood what the big deal was, but no kid is going to argue in favor of a shot, so I kept my mouth shut and went through life unvaccinated.

When I entered college, I filled out the same paperwork and told the same lie; it was just habit at that point. I wasn’t convinced that vaccinations were a money-making conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies — but I wasn’t convinced that they weren’t. It sounded about as reasonable as our government pretending they’d found weapons of mass destruction as a cover for a war based on oil.

I could have just gotten the shot, but that sounded like more work than filling out an extra form. Plus, I figured, I’d made it through childhood — what was the likelihood of me getting a deadly, extinct disease? As far as I knew, everyone else had gotten the vaccine, so my chances of being exposed were extremely low.

My paperwork was approved with a skeptical glare from a college administrator, and I didn’t give much thought to vaccines again. That is, until I got married and started thinking about having kids of my own.

AAfter getting married, before I realized it, much of my life became about preparing for kids. I began to think about my long-term career, whether I should settle down in New York City, whether I should start saving up for an apartment with room for toys and a crib. At some point, my thoughts started drifting to questions like whether or not to circumcise, and whether or not to vaccinate.

Once I began considering the merits of vaccination not for myself, but for a hypothetical child, I gave it much more thought than ever before.

I read the things anti-vaxxers were posting, which went far beyond the general level of cynicism that would make me believe them, into full-fledged, illogical paranoia. The arguments just didn’t make sense. Study after study shows that vaccines don’t cause autism. Autism is a chromosomal abnormality that can’t be triggered after birth. Autism isn’t more common today because of vaccines; it’s just more easily spotted and diagnosed.

And as I wrapped my head around the fact that vaccines only work if everyone gets them, I realized how selfish it had been for me to assume I was safe because everyone else had gotten their shots. It was like presuming that someone else would call 911 when witnessing a violent crime. A child can’t get vaccinated against Measles, Mumps, and Rubella until they’re a year old. If they get exposed to any of those viruses before that point, by, say, an adult or child who was never vaccinated, they could die. When you’re a kid you don’t think about civic duty, but as an adult planning to become a parent, I got so angry thinking about the fact that these Park Slope parents were putting other people’s babies at risk.

Suddenly it wasn’t about the outside chance that I could somehow get the mumps; it was about the fact that I could expose my hypothetical newborn to the mumps, and kill them.

I made my appointment right away, and shoved my ingrained paranoia down as I looked away from the cylinder full of cloudy liquid that the nurse was plunging into my arm.

I haven’t told my mom.

Why I Got Vaccinated For The First Time At 28 was originally published in BRIGHT Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.