This article about Kristen Bell. The description of a hypothetical marriage with her is unexpectedly touching.
5 Things They Never Told Us, a simple but successfully crushing article for students to read to prepare them about the loss of youthful energy, the anticlimactic realization that you are an adult but still have no idea how life works, and summer going from three months off of freedom to just a simple change in the weather for you.
The 5 Most Useless Pieces of Advice Everyone Gives has one passage that hits a little too close to home for many when dismantling the common refrain of "You just need to have confidence!" from people who've never struggled with self-doubt:
"So in your case, Chad, you have confidence to ask girls out because they have always responded to you in a certain way. You don't know what I'm talking about, because you have never had it any other way. But go back to being a toddler and relive your life as the weird kid, or the fat kid, or the poor kid. Reach age 12 or 13 and see a group of females give you the same look they give to a spider they found in the bathtub. Go back and get familiar with that body language that says, 'No one will be happy or relaxed until you leave.' Go back and live your life in a universe that bites your hand when you try to reach out to it, then see what your confidence is like at age 23."
Paul K. Pickett: The rest of us can only hope that in that situation, we'd do the same. And then we can pray that we never have the chance to find out we're wrong.
4 Things You Learn Quickly About Internet Hate, particularly the part where Wayne Gladstone mentions being legitimately touched by a mentally handicapped person's plight he saw on the street to the point of shedding actual tears, but went on, connecting to the current point that people generally don't get involved in a tragedy until after it's already ended.
"My only contribution was my worthless tears. Look how good I am. I cried. And kept walking. Because it's easiest to cry when you keep walking."
6 Shocking Realities of the Secret 'Troubled Teen Industry'—as described in the opening, "an industry dedicated to taking America's at-risk youth and fucking them up in the worst way possible." The author, a victim of one of these facilities, relates stories of forced physical labor, deprivation of sleep/food/etc., and the off-chance that a child might die in one of these facilities... all because a parent doesn't like what their child has become (usually an attempt to weed out delinquent behavior, but stories crop up of kids being sent there because they don't follow the parents' religion, are gay, or in the case of the author—formulating your own identity; in her case, she got into heavy metal music).
5 Life Lessons You Learn From Being Bullied isn't much of a tear jerker in the article itself, but the comments are heartbreaking as you read story after story for people for whom it didn't get better.
6 Things Nobody Tells You About Working At Disney World has a particularly horrifying moment when the author talks about how the people in the full-body costumes would meet lots of kids... many of whom had cancer or other fatal diseases. While being Mickey (who all the kids would ask to meet) was bad, it was even worse for the people playing the Fairy Godmother- they had to meet dying kid after dying kid who would ask 'Fairy Godmother' to cure them.
Robin Williams and Why Funny People Kill Themselves takes a very serious look at the high incidence of depression and suicide among comedians and comedy writers. While Robin Williams turned out not to be an example, Jason Pargin was far from off the mark with his words:
Back behind the wall, Chris Farley was a scared, lonely, awkward fat kid who couldn't even pay someone to hold his hand when he died. 'Don't leave me.'
5 Things I Learned As A Sex Slave In Modern America can best be summed up by "Jane"'s final line: "People need to know that slavery in America never ended, we just got better at hiding it." Note that this is one of the few articles to include a content warning, not for containing NSFW pictures, but just because of the true events described.
NOTE: We don't have a policy of putting trigger warnings on articles, but if there exists anywhere on Earth an article that needs such a warning, here it fucking is. In fact, if this doesn't disturb you, there is a good chance you are a crazy person.
6 Things I Learned as an Innocent Man on Death Row: The #1 thing on the list is how Nick Yarris became used to his horrible life in prison, even after leaving it. He gets headaches from fresh air because he's now allergic to it. He can't digest real food properly. So he had to eat bread for months to avoid getting sick. And he's so used to arguments ending in murder, that he gets extremely worried that his family will kill each other during arguments and is shocked when they don't.
5 Reasons Life with Epilepsy is Weirder Than You Think: Rachel's symptoms sound very unpleasant. She sustains a lot of injuries. Her epilepsy makes everyday tasks potentially dangerous. She can't drive after a seizure because her mind isn't all there afterwards. She's also constantly worried about having another seizure.
5 Weird Realities Of Suicide (Thanks To Twitter). The description of how hard it can be when a loved one's death is taken over by a completely misleading viral campaign is pretty heart-wrenching, especially when reading about the ignorant comments people made at the funeral.
This is coupled as a minor (in the face of the major Nightmare Fuel and Tearjerker above) Heartwarming, as practically every comment on the article includes a plea for an update on "Azime"'s status if/when Cracked staff find out. For "Azime", this doubles as a Moment of Awesome, as despite being reasonably afraid for her life, she spoke out and shared her experiences.
Creepiest 'Where Are They Now' Ever: The Power Rangers Curse is a disturbingly long list of all the actors from the Power Rangers franchise who have died (or in the case of two actors, committed murder; one of which got the the death penalty). Not only were the bulk of them from the first series, all except two died prematurely. It doesn't help Jason David Frank has died since. Luis Prada closes his story out with this depressing bit of text:
So, there you go. I hope your childhood is now as completely buttfucked as mine, because it at least makes me feel a bit better that I'm not going through this trauma alone. If you read this thing with even a fraction of what I experienced in researching and writing it, we're now forever connected. But if you don't mind, I'd like to be alone right now. I'm going to go sit in my closet with the door shut and cry until I black out from the emotional stress.
6 Ways Being A Child Star Is Way Darker Than You'd Think is just heartbreaking from start to finish. Spare a thought for the kids like "Kathy", who had an eating disorder by the time she was seven thanks to her abusive stage dad.
Tom:There's no message of hope. Things don't get better.
Caption: Not every sad story gets an inspirational ending. Sometimes, tragedy simply stays tragic.
6 Dark Places Tastelessly Turned Into Tourist Traps has its top two examples of humanity at its worst. #2 has tourists at the slums, leading to a picture of two tourists taking a photo of a poor kid like an animal in the zoo. #1 has people taking pictures at recent disaster zones, where human decency is apparently non-existent.
In late 2017, the site lost a number of its most popular contributors. Daniel O'Brien, Katy Stoll, Cody Johnston, Luis Prada, Katie Goldin, David Bell, Tom Reimann, Ian Fortey, Robert Brockaway, and Carmen Angela were all unceremoniously laid off, while Michael Swaim and Soren Bowie had left of their own accord not long before. For longtime fans of the site, the loss of so many of the people who helped make the site as successful as it became is nothing short of devastating.
6 Realities of Growing Up Expecting the Apocalypse. It looks at the mindset of people who thought the world would end from the perspective of one now-adult man who had a mother that earnestly believed it. In addition to a young child being Conditioned to Accept Horror, when the world inevitably didn't end, the kid was mercilessly made fun of by his classmates. His mother basically went into a catatonic level of sadness, and his parents divorced.
Your Neighbors Try To Murder You: 6 Realities In A Genocide, is as bleak as it sounds. A Bosnian Muslim witnessed his fellow Yugoslavs turn on him and kill his family in a matter of weeks. Even sadder is that the genocide succeeded — if not in eradicating Islam in Bosnia, then at least in crippling it for a long, long time — as the survivors and his fellow Bosnians never rebuilt their community, which became majority Serb.
Subdin: "They lost this kind of feeling which we all have of being at home. This kind of feeling is the same for everybody — to be at home, to be happy, to have a family. And this is the most expensive thing in the world. This is happiness."
about Kristen Bell. The description of a hypothetical marriage with her is unexpectedly touching.