Margaret Renkl

1 week ago | nytimes.com | Margaret Renkl

If you're ever booked into a Davidson County, Tenn., jail - no matter how minor the misdemeanor, no matter if your case is later dismissed - the jail's booking system automatically sends your arrest information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Under passed in 2024, local law enforcement agencies here are obliged to honor any resulting detention requests for 48 hours beyond normal release time.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Margaret Renkl

It's full-on springtime now. My blackberries are sending out new canes, and the passion vines have broken ground. The nestlings in the bluebird box are old enough for their cries to be heard across the yard. The front-stoop skinks are awake, the first lightning bugs are blinking in the trees, and the first ruby-throated hummingbird has migrated safely back to Tennessee from his wintering grounds in South America.

1 month ago | sltrib.com | Margaret Renkl

Tim Henderson was up late last Wednesday night, keeping an eye on the weather as catastrophic storms barreled across Tennessee toward Nashville. Around midnight, his email pinged. Amid overlapping National Weather Service alerts of damaging hail, tornadoes and flash floods, he read the message: Humanities Tennessee, where Mr. Henderson is the chief executive, had just lost all its federal funding. It's not as if Mr. Henderson didn't see this news coming.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Margaret Renkl

I am not, I admit, a disinterested party here. As editor of Chapter 16, I was an independent contractor, not involved in Humanities Tennessee's other operations. But I had a front-row seat to the crucial work a state humanities council does - work that most Americans never recognize. I can't even count the times that people arriving at the Southern Festival of Books, a Humanities Tennessee initiative, have asked me where the ticket booth is.

2 months ago | nytimes.com | Margaret Renkl

I think this is why social media has made young girls so deeply vulnerable. They are insisting on the right to explore their contradictions: a girl and a woman occupying the same rapidly changing body. How many strangers online see both their innocence and their emerging power? How many honor both? Very few, I think. Social media exposes these girls to the purposes of people who are in no way interested in their complexity.