Health Care and the Profit Motive

Author: Avik Roy
Published: May 12, 2010
Length: 25 minutes (6,433 words)

Net-Worth Obsession

Joey Kincer’s highest achievement in record gathering is contained in a Quicken file, where he has tracked his personal finances for 16 years, ever since he was in 11th grade.

Author: Ron Lieber
Published: May 12, 2010
Length: 11 minutes (2,894 words)

How to Save the News

Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jun 1, 2010
Length: 36 minutes (9,132 words)

The White House’s Dinner Theater

A White House state dinner can serve as diplomatic overture, fund-raising tool, or cultural statement. As Obama social secretary Desirée Rogers discovered, it can also be a P.R. fiasco.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jun 1, 2010
Length: 36 minutes (9,041 words)

Black, Brown, and Beige

Duke Ellington’s music and race in America.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 17, 2010
Length: 24 minutes (6,069 words)

Whatever Happened to NWA’s Posse?

The cover of the 1987 album N.W.A and the Posse does not look like something released by one of the most important rap groups of all time. … Stare for a moment and you can see a myth about to be born. That myth, gangsta rap, enabled four guys in this picture — Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and Eazy-E — to titillate and terrify America as Compton-based rap group Niggaz With Attitude.

Source: LA Weekly
Published: May 11, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,436 words)

Why Is this Woman Smiling?

She’s been heckled, threatened, and placed on Sarah Palin’s hit list. Yet Democratic Congresswoman Betsy Markey is raking in campaign money and still thinks she can hold the traditionally conservative 4th District come November.

Source: 5280 Magazine
Published: May 1, 2010
Length: 22 minutes (5,531 words)

Uniqlones

[Not single-page] Seemingly out of nowhere, their cheap, skinny rainbow-colored basics became a kind of New York uniform. Just how did the Japanese discount brand become the hottest retailer in the city?

Published: May 9, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,486 words)

Lessons of the Spill

Poised for dramatic expansion, high-tech offshore drilling was considered ultrasafe. Then came BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. What the company—and the industry—must do to bounce back

Source: Businessweek
Published: May 6, 2010
Length: 14 minutes (3,681 words)

To Be or Not to Be?

More people die of suicide in King County than from traffic accidents or murder, but no one likes to talk about it. A few words about the history, meaning, and practice of suicide, from third-century Christian death cults to the Aurora Bridge.

Source: The Stranger
Published: May 4, 2010
Length: 22 minutes (5,696 words)