Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

Source: Salon
Published: Sep 16, 2009
Length: 16 minutes (4,169 words)

The God in the Machine

President Barack Obama during his first months in office seldom has missed a chance to liken the country’s healthcare system to an unburied corpse, which, if left lying around in the sun by the 111th Congress, threatens to foul the sweet summer air of the American dream. The prognosis doesn’t admit of a second or third opinion. Whether on call to the Democratic left or the Republican right, the attending politicians and consulting economists concur in their assessment of the risk posed by the morbid emissions.

Published: Sep 1, 2009
Length: 11 minutes (2,919 words)

Why Capitalism Fails

The man who saw the meltdown coming had another troubling insight: it will happen again

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Sep 13, 2009
Length: 10 minutes (2,506 words)

A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City

Osaka’s robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician’s fantasy metropolis

Published: Sep 11, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,656 words)

Dear President Bush,

Americans want, and need, to move on from the debate over torture in Iraq and Afghanistan and close this tragic chapter in our nation’s history. An open letter to President George W. Bush

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Oct 1, 2009
Length: 35 minutes (8,752 words)

Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering

Jennifer Hall-Massey knows not to drink the tap water in her home near Charleston, W.Va. In fact, her entire family tries to avoid any contact with the water. Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the bathwater — polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals — caused painful rashes. Many of his brother’s teeth were capped to replace enamel that was eaten away.

Published: Sep 12, 2009
Length: 19 minutes (4,849 words)

It Happened One Decade

What the Great Depression did to culture.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 21, 2009
Length: 15 minutes (3,860 words)

Ghost with the Most

A Summertime Hit Puts Hunk-with-a-Heart Patrick Swayze Back in the Saddle Again

Source: People Magazine
Published: Aug 6, 1990
Length: 7 minutes (1,967 words)

The Life and Death of Online Communities

How online communities are born — and what happens when they die.

Published: Sep 3, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,624 words)

Life In (and After) Our Great Recession

Dashed hopes, less sex, even more Sisyphean labor for women—what the histories of the Depression era tell us about middle-class families in crisis, both then and now

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Oct 1, 2009
Length: 10 minutes (2,592 words)