On a recent trip to the 630-square-mile Addo Elephant National Park, dense thickets of spekboom (a fleshy shrub with purple stalks and leaves like bloated ticks) made it hard to spot the elephants, lions and rhinos that call this slice of paradise home. Driving home from the park, however, I passed through mile upon mile of yellowed grassland dotted with sheep and goats. Not realizing it then, my drive was actually a form of time travel.

The first time I saw Rajesh sloshing in the mud, his face was lit up with joy. He was building his future home at Sristi, in Thazhuthali village in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. A few months later, the 160-square-foot handcrafted house was ready, built completely by the men at Sristi — a nonprofit organization that helps intellectually challenged people lead self-reliant lives — using local materials.

Fair and Equal: An OZY series on fixing the skewed scales of American justice. Fair and Equal: An OZY series on fixing the skewed scales of American justice. Lady Justice is blind. At least, that’s how the saying goes. Too often though, she is not color-blind.

“Who’s the fat guy?” It was me who was doing the asking, watching 17-year-oldGary Aprahamian roll into the Olympia Gym in Ridgewood, Queens, New York, in 1979. He was a little over 6 feet tall and about 380 pounds. Calling him “fat” made total sense. But then he loaded up a 45-pound bar with 810 pounds, shook out a hand towel and draped it over the back of his neck before ducking under it all and doing squats. Yes, plural.

“The hotel here is dirty with bugs.” Omar told us this when we get off the bus at Beni Mellal. “My mother is not at her apartment. All yours. I’ll show you around later.” He speaks perfect English.He’s dressed in khakis and a pressed white shirt. We settle into his mother’s house and then he and some friends drive us on hairpin turns up the Atlas Mountains, past an emerald green lake.

After two decades of rocking a tight skin fade — including twice-weekly shape-ups on an undergrad budget at Syracuse University — Nick Wright did something crazy this summer: He grew out his hair. “Everyone thought I was bald,” says Wright, the polarizing boy wonder cohost of FS1’s morning show, First Things First, kicking back in his Midtown Manhattan office. “We got a lot of tweets about hair plugs.

The reviews came in swift and harsh. “Dull, dreary and dubiously written,” declared USA Today. A “disappointing creation,” said Entertainment Weekly. The show the press was scolding wasSuccession. Once critically derided, the HBO show is now among the most acclaimed television series of recent years.

It’s a sunny October afternoon and Grip is on daddy duty.The 30-year-old father of two often picks up and cares for his elder daughter after school, and today is no different. “I’m just stepping out for an interview, I’ll be back,” he reassures inside of his East Atlanta home. Donning a triplet set of gold chains, white-T and a scruffy beard, Grip is your regular, everyday guy to the unexpecting eye.

I was pretty aware that my family was “different” from the time I was about 2 or 3 years old. I knew there was more to it all than just the weird decor and the fact that my family would go on outings in a black limousine with our driver and bodyguard, Tony. Being the grandson of the man who started the Church of Satan was incredible though.

I hated Halloween. I never was one for cartoons or make-believe, I was a “what you see is what you get” kind of person.But I was just back in New York City, and I was going to go to a Halloween party and so, I needed a costume. Stat. I think Halloween is like bungee jumping. You either love it or hate it — there are no in-betweens. And I just couldn’t get into being stared at and looking foolish.