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Our annual Summer Reading Contest invites teenagers around the world to tell us what New York Times pieces get their attention and why. This week, the third of 10, we received 889 entries. Thank you to everyone who participated, and congratulations to our winner, who would like to be known as E., as well as to the runners-up and honorable mentions we honor below.
Scroll down to take a look at the variety of topics that caught the eyes of our participants, including disinformation, chatbots, the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, the saga of the Titan submersible, and reflections on the television shows “Breaking Bad” and “The Bear.” You can read the work of all of our winners since 2017 in this column.
Remember that you can participate any or every week this summer until Aug. 18. Just check the top of our contest announcement to find the right place to submit your response.
(Note to students: If you are one of this week’s winners and would like your last name published, please have a parent or guardian complete our permission form [PDF] and send it to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com.)
Winner
E., 16, from Vancouver writes about T Magazine’s “The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature”:
My bookshelf at home is a glass closet; Woolf and Wilde next to anthologies about Stonewall.
But it wasn’t always like this. My love for queer literature started with my ninth grade English teacher recommending Whitman and Lorde. Poems printed out. pocketed so they couldn’t be seen by anyone else. The shove of a book into my bag when met with a “whatcha reading?”; paperback covers creased with shame.
I read “Stone Butch Blues” in my tenth grade socials class, slamming my laptop shut any time anyone asked what I was doing. “Giovanni’s Room” was the only Baldwin my school library didn’t have, and my face was warm when I asked our librarian to buy it for me.
Pride overtook my shame, eventually, but I spent a lot of my (relatively short) life feeling alone in my body and experience as a queer person. Like the writers in this article talked about, I found something so powerful in literature’s capacity for helping me phrase my thoughts and shape my understanding of my identity.
Today, when someone asks me what I want to study in university, I’ll tell them I want to minor in Gender Studies. I’m usually met with laughter, which is why I want to study it in the first place. These stories, though formative to me and to the six interviewees of this article, are obscure to most. So is our history. I wonder what growing up would have felt like if I or anyone else had been told more stories about girls like me.
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Runners-Up
In alphabetical order by the writer’s first name.
Celia L. on “When Doctors Use a Chatbot to Improve Their Bedside Manner”
Dante C. on “How It Feels to Have Your Life Changed By Affirmative Action”
Isabella C. on “The Beautiful Chaos of the Notes App”
Jerry W. on “The Myth That May Have Doomed the Titan”
Olivia on “I Thought No One Had Felt Grief Like Mine. Then I Saw ‘The Bear.’”
Sunwoo C. on “Restaurant Review: Okdongsik Serves Two Things, and Both Are Outstanding”
Vera Hsiang on “‘I Can’t Continue This Fight Any Longer’”
Yaqing on “The Art of Being a Flâneur”
________
Honorable Mentions
Ashley on “A Wellness Chatbot Is Offline After Its ‘Harmful’ Focus on Weight Loss”
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