Usual Girls: An Interview with Ming Peiffer and Tyne Rafaeli

The Interval: In September, The Washington Post published a piece by Elizabeth Bruenig where she went back to her Texas hometown to investigate a rape that had occurred at her high school. The rape had taken place 12 years prior, to a girl she didn’t know—but who became school legend—a grade above her. All of these years later, she still remembered it and what the community had done—and not done. The following week, a 1993 Joan Didion piece for The New Yorker resurfaced. In the Didion piece, she went to Lakewood, California to investigate a series of high school rapes. Those two weeks in September were at the height of the Kavanaugh hearings. Both pieces became popular, I think, because they exploded the “he said/she said” trope to show how entire communities were implicated in these crimes.