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Vodou is a religion freighted with mischaracterizations, down to its very name, which is frequently styled incorrectly as “voodoo.” Among practitioners, the word is considered a pejorative. For centuries Haitians have practiced Vodou as a holistic way of life, brought to Haiti from West Africa by enslaved people. Vodou is at the core of Haitian identity. Photographer Dieu-Nalio Chery (@cdieunalio) has been documenting his fellow Haitians in New York. “I was hoping to dispel prejudices about Vodou and help practitioners to gain greater acceptance in the United States,” he writes. Head to the link in our bio to view his photo essay. (Pictured, believers on the stairs at a crowded temple in Brooklyn in November. Vodou priestess Jocelyne Pierre Louis is taken over by a spirit during a ritual in Brooklyn in March. Drummers, shown here in Brooklyn in March, are essential to Vodou ceremonies, beckoning ancestral spirits to be present.)

“I’m not a vacation expert. Barely a vacation veteran. If you remove bachelor parties, I’ve been on fewer than 10,” writes columnist Damon Young (@damonyoungvsb). “Yet this lack of experience is why I’m specifically equipped to say that most of you are bad at it. Because I have no vacation baggage. ... I’m coming in cold and sober, with fresh eyes to assess you and your vacationing deficiencies.” Head to the link in our bio to read why everyone is vacationing wrong, according to Young. (Illustration: @made.by.small)

“Almost 80 percent of the country thinks that a politician should not come between a woman and this most intimate decision of our lives, between a woman and her doctor,” said Heather Booth, 76, who founded the underground abortion service provider known as the Service or Jane while a student at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. “So we have the popular support. The question is: Will that get converted into organization and action and election?” A recently released documentary, “The Janes,” and forthcoming feature film, “Call Jane,” chronicle the organization’s members and impact. Read Booth’s full interview through the link in our bio. (📷: @kk.ottesen)

To mark the one-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul, the magazine features a photo essay from photographer Lorenzo Tugnoli (@lorenzotug), who has been photographing Afghanistan since 2009 and recently documented life in the country since the Taliban returned to power. “People had returned to their jobs, and the rush-hour traffic was back to its usual madness — but much was different,” he writes. “Around the city, the symbols of the previous government had been erased. The blast walls of the former American Embassy, once covered with pro-government imagery, were now painted over with the Taliban flag and a new slogan: ‘Oh my country, congratulations for your freedom!’ Around the former so-called Green Zone, which used to be heavily patrolled by security forces and where photography invariably raised scrutiny, nobody minded my camera anymore.” The Taliban’s takeover has been difficult for him to process: “For the losing side, the long years of death, pain and struggle now seemed pointless; the U.S. promises of democracy and civil rights, particularly for women, rang hollow, as the old order and its institutions were quickly swept away.” Head to the link in our bio to view Tugnoli’s entire photo essay. (Pictured, Taliban militant at a checkpoint outside the former U.S. military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, in October. Writing outside the former U.S. embassy in Kabul in September. Vendors sell Taliban flags outside the Central Bank of Afghanistan. Images of women have been painted over outside many beauty parlors.)

“The second thing I was reminded of when I first re-watched ‘Boomerang’ this year was how good everyone looked,” writes columnist Damon Young (@damonyoungvsb). “Each man was uncommonly handsome. Not handsome in a physically striking way — although some were that too. (Has a man in a movie ever looked better than Eddie Murphy does here?) But handsome the way a woman from an earlier time might describe a man who looks like he smells good.” He continues, “The first thing I was reminded of is just how great a movie it is. The late ’80s and early ’90s were a boon for canonical romantic comedies. … ‘Boomerang,’ which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, doesn’t just exist in that category, it stands alone above it.” Young also thinks that the movie ruined him — and a generation of Black men. Read why through the link in our bio. (Photo illustration by @made.by.small. Photo: © Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection)

Historians estimate that 1 in 4 cowboys in this country in the 19th century was Black. Many Black people worked with horses and other livestock during slavery, and after Emancipation those skills allowed them to find employment as ranch hands and cowboys. Some became Buffalo Soldiers, working as part of the military and as National Park Service rangers. In westerns, however, there was little inclusivity: Few of the cowboys seen on TV and in movies were Black. At Baltimore’s City Ranch (@thecityranch.inc), Ahesahmahk Dahn tells students about Black cowboys, something they typically have not covered in school. Learn about the ranch teaching the next generation of Black horseback riders through the link in our bio. (Pictured, Sisters Morgan and Mariah Piper at City Ranch in Windsor Mill, Md. 📷@maansi.photo)

“[‘The Wire’] was a cautionary tale of how the dysfunction of America’s institutions can be crushing to the individual and self-destructive to the institution itself,” says Wendell Pierce (@wendellpcg), best known for his roles in the HBO dramas “The Wire” and “Treme.” “And are we not witnessing that now?” This fall, as “The Wire” celebrates its 20th anniversary, Pierce will star in the revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” becoming the first Black actor to take on the classic role of Willy Loman on Broadway. Read his interview through the link in our bio. (📷: @edmundfountain)

Charter companies manage relationships between political campaigns and vendors who supply the transports — like a mash-up of a matchmaker, a wedding planner and a crisis counselor. They are the behind-the-scenes logistics obsessives without whom a person running for national office would never be able to get anywhere they needed to be. Advanced Aviation Team (AAT) is possibly the biggest name in the national campaign charter circuit. In the past two presidential election cycles, FEC filings show, it has worked for the campaigns of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. “Missing an event is a travesty,” said Jonathan Tasler, vice president of Advanced Aviation Team. “You’ve got maybe tens of thousands of people who are accounting to see somebody, and now you’re not there? I mean, the level of disappointment is hard to compute. It is just a disaster in so many ways.” Head to the link in our bio to read tales from the airplane-chartering gurus. (Illustration: @roseph_jogers)

For a few years now, we’ve been hearing a lot about the fact that millennials and Gen Z drink much less than older generations, about the growing “sober-curious” movement, about large numbers of people reconsidering their relationship to alcohol, about Dry January, about the explosion of adult nonalcoholic beverages and about the legalization of cannabis and people choosing to go “Cali sober.” Many in the drinks industry have figured this all might be a fleeting reaction brought on by the pandemic, but it’s starting to look more and more like a lasting cultural shift. Writer Jason Wilson (@boozecolumnist) has covered wine and spirits for 15 years and is as much invested in America’s drinking culture as anyone, but he supports the idea of rethinking our relationship to alcohol. He is still somewhat bewildered by aspects of this cultural shift. He set out to see, more than a century after America’s original temperance movement, whether this new era of moderation is the gray area on drinking we’ve long sought. Read his piece through the link in our bio. (📷: @itsaprilgreer)

“Two months ago, when my wife and I noticed that our 6-year-old daughter was playing with a White baby doll with long blond hair, our immediate thought was ‘Wait … where did that come from?’” writes columnist Damon Young (@damonyoungvsb). “And then, after watching her dote on it for two days, our thoughts shifted. ‘So … how do we get rid of it?’” Young explains that “few things matter more to us than our daughter loving her features, her hair and her skin as much as we do.” They’ve surrounded her with reinforcements, which includes Black dolls. They haven’t officially banned White dolls, but “a decision to gift a White doll to our daughter … could communicate to her that we value those features more than hers.” Head to the link in our bio to read Damon’s full column. (Illustration: @made.by.small)

Christone "Kingfish" Ingram (@callmekingfish) is a generational blues talent who's coming along at a moment when there's no clear path for that talent to develop into a great bluesman. Kingfish is just 24 and already widely acclaimed as the future of the blues, and he has everything you could have asked for in a rising blues star: in addition to being a monster guitar player and an affecting singer, he's from Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta, he learned to sing in church, he's a prolific songwriter. But the blues is increasingly a historical genre. So how does he go forward? Read his story through the link in our bio. (📷: @jwestcottphoto)

In our latest photo essay, five photographers turned the camera on themselves as they experienced first-time motherhood during the pandemic. “When a firstborn comes into this world, we often forget that it is not only the birth of a child but also the birth of a mother,” writes Tori Ferenc (@toriferenc). “Pregnancy and first-time parenthood are riddled with doubts and fears. Will everything be okay with the baby? How will this new role change me? When I found out I was pregnant, these feelings were only heightened by the fact that a global pandemic was underway.” Ferenc’s sentiment is echoed by the other four photographers: Nadiya Nacorda (@nadiya_nacorda), Michaela Vatcheva (@mvatcheva), Lianne Milton (@lil_milty) and Danielle Villasana (@davillasana). Head to the link in our bio to view each photographers’ photo essay. Pictured, Ferenc and daughter Mila. Nacorda with her toddlers. Vatcheva’s son, Kai, watching a virtual birthday party. Milton floating in the ocean, “allowing the water to blanket me, releasing the weight of the stress and anxiety of the pandemic.” Villasana and her husband hug.