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This week, we’re sharing stories from Sandra Sidi, Lena Solow, Aubrey Hirsch, Noelle Mateer, and Amanda Hess.

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1. What I Wish I’d Known About Sexual Assault in the Military

Sandra Sidi | The Atlantic | September 9, 2019 | 26 minutes (6,650 words)

Sandra Sidi recalls the rampant sexual assault and harassment she and other female colleagues experienced when she worked as a civilian public affairs analyst for the military in Iraq in 2007.

2. The Scourge of Worker Wellness Programs

Lena Solow | The New Republic | September 2, 2019 | 10 minutes (2,519 words)

“The rise of the worker wellness program, along with the visceral backlash to it, has revealed the limits and small humiliations of this neoliberal approach to health care. It offers, in implicit contrast, an argument for a more humane strengthening of the social safety net—while demanding a collective worker-based response to the various ways employers affect our daily well-being.”

3. The Weather

Aubrey Hirsch | Gay Magazine | September 10, 2019 | 18 minutes (4,500 words)

“D’s depression is the weather in our house, except there’s no forecast. Some days we wake to sunny skies, gentle breezes. We talk and laugh. We eat and nap. We watch the baby the way one watches a campfire, not for any particular reason, but because it is there and strangely fascinating in its combination of predictability and surprise… Maelstroms form unexpectedly, seemingly out of nowhere. And on the days they don’t, even when we’re smiling, listening to music, rubbing lotion onto the baby’s chubby arms, I am watching the sky. That fluffy cloud, is it a bunny? Or a dragon? Or a gathering storm?”

4. Competitive Oyster Shucking Is Real, Decadent, And China’s Best Party

Noelle Mateer | Deadspin | September 11, 2019 | 14 minutes (3,725 words)

Inside the rise of oyster shucking competitions in China, a phenomenon with its roots across the Atlantic Ocean that has found a niche within the country’s most westernized pockets.

5. Tina Turner is Having the Time of Her Life

Amanda Hess | The New York Times | September 9, 2019 | 11 minutes (2,835 words)

A month before “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” comes to Broadway, Amanda Hess pays Turner a visit at “Chateau Algonquin,” as Swiss castle she rents with her husband, to profile the 79-year-old in all her retired glory.