The Lives Upended Around a $20 Cheeseburger

“A cash-strapped rancher, a virus-stricken meatpacker, an underpaid chef, a hungry engineer: the journey of a single burger during a pandemic.”

Published: Jul 7, 2020
Length: 15 minutes (3,868 words)

The Hero of Goodall Park

In 2018, a car careened onto a baseball field in Sanford, Maine, killing one spectator. Fifty years before, in upstate New York, a car had hit and killed a little girl. The two incidents were part of the same remarkable story.

Author: Tom Junod
Source: ESPN
Published: Jul 7, 2020
Length: 61 minutes (15,287 words)

Nature’s Revenge Porn: Animal Documentaries at the End of the Earth

“From the emergence of the form, documentaries have sought out and fictionalized the most extreme points of contact between ‘humanity’ and ‘the wild,’ not only reflecting back but actively promoting a set of myths that license oppression, extractivism, mass eviction; the histories of documentary, exploitation, and wilderness conservation are darkly intertwined.”

Source: The Drift
Published: Jun 24, 2020
Length: 23 minutes (5,750 words)

Pitchfork Sunday Review: Pure Moods, Vol. 1

“Even those most irony-poisoned among us can wrap ourselves around the fullness of Pure Moods as a pop object that’s completed its natural tour of meaning: a curio first taken in earnest, then as a joke, now as a museum fixture that holds both forces in its heart at once.”

Source: Pitchfork
Published: Jun 28, 2020
Length: 11 minutes (2,893 words)

Pregnant in a Pandemic

Letters from four women to their unborn children, written in an uncertain world.

Published: Jun 30, 2020
Length: 7 minutes (1,762 words)

My Child Is Transgender: This Is How I Know

“I thought I had a daughter. Then I thought I had a tomboy. But now I know: I have a son.”

Author: Alex Bliss
Published: Feb 2, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,300 words)

What Happened In Bethel, Ohio?

How a Black Lives Matter protest rocked a small town, exposing divisions few people wanted to see.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Jul 5, 2020
Length: 23 minutes (5,900 words)

Michaela the Destroyer

“How a young talent from East London went from open-mic nights to making the most sublimely unsettling show of the year.”

Published: Jul 6, 2020
Length: 23 minutes (5,941 words)

“Nothing in a church or in a family stays hidden forever”

A megachurch pastor kept his son’s attraction to children secret. Then his other son blew the whistle.

Published: Jul 6, 2020
Length: 13 minutes (3,425 words)

Stories in the Shine

‘Few things say “hillbilly” in that condescending Hollywood way than the word “moonshine.” But when you visit the new breed of legal shiners in West Virginia, you learn how they fill every barrel with the complex, distinctive stories of Appalachia.’

Published: Jun 30, 2020
Length: 25 minutes (6,398 words)