The Terror Queue

“It felt like you were putting on a cape, working at Google, getting your free kombucha, sleeping in nap pods,’ she says. ‘But every once in a while, you’d have to see some disturbing content. Really, how bad could it be?’ She called her mom and said she was taking the job. She was 23 years old.”

Source: The Verge
Published: Dec 16, 2019
Length: 26 minutes (6,606 words)

What’s Wrong With Me?

Autoimmune disease occurs when the body attacks the very thing it was supposed to protect — you. Meghan O’Rouke found herself grappling with what remains one of the most mysterious categories of disease.

Published: Aug 26, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,258 words)

‘You’re My Present This Year’: An Oral History of the Folgers Incest Ad

Oh please, like you didn’t think it.

Source: GQ
Published: Dec 16, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,053 words)

The War Vet, the Dating Site, and the Phone Call From Hell

Jared Johns, a former soldier and father of two, thought he was swapping text messages with a pretty girl from a dating site. What he didn’t realize was that he was the victim of a scam that would cost him everything.

Source: Wired
Published: Dec 16, 2019
Length: 26 minutes (6,553 words)

Cryptocurrency Will Not Die

A close look at a global force that can’t be dismissed as a passing fad, but can’t be fully trusted either.

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 26, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,501 words)

In Orbit

Growing up in impoverished Cuba, one boy builds a spaceship from spare parts, but only years later recognize that his urge to leave the earth’s orbit is his attempt to escape his Communist island and himself.

Published: Dec 5, 2019
Length: 14 minutes (3,628 words)

From Kyiv to Kentucky

California native Katya Cengel contemplates whether living in Ukraine prepared her for life in the South.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 16, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,513 words)

Made in America

White House veterans helped a Gulf monarchy build a secret surveillance unit that was used to target human rights activists, journalists, and dissidents. It was called Project DREAD.

Source: Reuters
Published: Dec 10, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,500 words)

We Are All We Have

While caring for her mother post-surgery and her grandmother during her final days, Megan Stielstra wonders who’s really taking care of who.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 13, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,562 words)

Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question.

The heart-warming story of Holocaust survivors David Wisnia and Helen Spitzer, young lovers at Auschwitz, who got to meet one last time before she died at 100 last year. At the meeting, “Zippi,” as she was known then, revealed she’d used her position as a privileged inmate and a graphic designer at the camp five times to keep Wisnia from being shipped to a worse camp.

Published: Dec 8, 2019
Length: 14 minutes (3,543 words)