This week, we’re sharing stories from Ijeoma Oluo, Patricia Lockwood, Michael Shaw, Mairead Small Staid, and Adriana Gallardo.
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1. The Color of Money
Ijeoma Oluo | Topic | February 19, 2019 | 6 minutes (1,706 words)
After her book, So You Want to Talk About Race, becomes a bestseller, Black author Ijeoma Oluo offers to build her white mother a home with her earnings and learns how race can affect the ways adult children care for their aging parents.
2. The Communal Mind
Patricia Lockwood | London Review of Books | February 13, 2019 | 27 minutes (6,896 words)
Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet in this piece, first delivered as a lecture at the British Museum in February 2019.
3. The True Story Behind an Iconic Vietnam War Photo Was Nearly Erased — Until Now
Michael Shaw | The New York Times Magazine | February 19, 2019 | 24 minutes (6,054 words)
In February 1968, John Olson took a famous photo of a wounded Marine named Alvin Grantham. Or was it actually of another Marine named James Blaine? Michael Shaw examines the evidence to discover the truth.
4. Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
Mairead Small Staid | The Paris Review | February 8, 2019 | 8 minutes (2,180 words)
Twenty-five years after Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, which of his concerns now plague our digital world?
5. The Lucky Ones
Adriana Gallardo | ProPublica | February 19, 2019 | 13 minutes (3,261 words)
In sharing the story of each of her tattoos and their meaning, journalist Adriana Gallardo — who was once an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — recounts her family’s hard won-luck at life in America, a luck they earned by back-breaking janitorial work and sheer determination.
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