What Did ‘Authenticity’ in Food Mean in 2019?

If your restaurant serves a European cuisine, you can have tablecloths and silverware. Anything else, you have to be a hole in the wall with plastic stools. In the next decade, can “authenticity” be less racist?

Source: Eater
Published: Dec 3, 2019
Length: 13 minutes (3,477 words)

How Racism Ripples Through Rural California’s Pipes

Race and economic class have everything to do with who gets fresh water and who does not.

 

Published: Dec 26, 2019
Length: 6 minutes (1,648 words)

My Backcountry Prescription Experiment

Mathina Calliope goes off her antidepressant and into the woods.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 2, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,134 words)

Does Who You Are at 7 Determine Who You Are at 63?

In 1964, filmmaker Michael Apted first interviewed 14 children from varying socio-economic demographics n England to investigate the maxim, “Give me a child until he is 7, and I will give you the man.” He’s returned to interview the original subjects every seven years to see how their lives have turned out. What’s been called “the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema” has discovered that the maxim is false; as we all know, life is far more complicated than that.

Published: Nov 27, 2019
Length: 34 minutes (8,730 words)

“Your Honor, Can I Tell the Whole Story?”

A murder in New Orleans, a trial that lasted less than a day, and the lives they entangled for the next three decades. Published in partnership with The Lens.

Source: The Atavist
Published: Dec 1, 2019
Length: 40 minutes (10,000 words)

Bad Romance

“What happened to the National Enquirer after it went all in for Trump?”

Published: Nov 28, 2019
Length: 23 minutes (5,925 words)

The Quiet Protests of Sassy Mom Merch

A look at performative motherhood, where stress and alcohol play proud roles, and identity and commodity blur.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 27, 2019
Length: 8 minutes (2,120 words)

Why Mr. Bauer Didn’t Like Me

As a child, Blaise Allysen Kearsley tried, in vain, to win over a white friend’s father.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 29, 2019
Length: 8 minutes (2,056 words)

Before Syracuse, There Was Mizzou

“‘It’s Little Dixie,’ Little told me. When he was driving down from Chicago with his father and uncle to start his master’s program, he said his uncle told him: ‘Stay away from white women down there.’ Little figured this was mostly a joke, but he knew there was some seriousness behind his uncle’s words. ‘I knew the history of Little Dixie and the University of Missouri being this hotbed of racist events,’ he said. He mentioned Lloyd Gaines and Lucile Bluford as well as Jon Burge, the former Chicago police chief, who attended Mizzou for one semester before returning to Chicago, where he was later accused of torturing hundreds of brown and black people in the ’70s and ’80s. (Though Burge was fired from the force in 1993, he was never prosecuted for the alleged crimes because of the statute of limitations.)

Author: Tomi Obaro
Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Nov 26, 2019
Length: 26 minutes (6,696 words)

Behind the Smiles

Amazon’s internal injury records expose the true toll of its relentless drive for speed.

Author: Will Evans
Source: Reveal News
Published: Nov 25, 2019
Length: 24 minutes (6,000 words)