A Comet Called Raji

“Fusion” had already become a dirty word by the time Raji Jallepalli made a name for herself. It connoted confused attempts to patch together different cooking languages under the patina of multiculturalism, as if two worlds jostled for dominance on a plate. Raji disentangled fusion from the gracelessness that the label implied.

Author: Mayukh Sen
Published: Nov 5, 2019
Length: 14 minutes (3,700 words)

How Do You Reclaim a Massacre?

Greensboro didn’t have a “shootout” and Tulsa didn’t have a “race riot.” But it took decades of work for language to catch up to history.

Source: GEN
Published: Nov 5, 2019
Length: 15 minutes (3,900 words)

What Do We Do With Robert E. Lee?

For over thirty years, Ted Delaney, a professor at Washington and Lee University, wandered in the shadows cast by Confederate monuments and statues. After Charlottesville, he was both fired up and exhausted; reluctant and motivated to finally take on the legacy of a Confederate god who’d haunted him all his life.

Published: Nov 4, 2019
Length: 27 minutes (6,750 words)

Stammer Time

Barry Yeoman, a man with a lifelong stutter, suggests that while society mostly views a stutter as a disability, stammering really isn’t the problem at all. The real problem that needs to be cured is the assumption that those who stutter are somehow deficient.

Source: The Baffler
Published: Nov 5, 2019
Length: 15 minutes (3,864 words)

Things That Can Only Be Found in the Darkness on the Edge of Town

The queerness of Bruce Springsteen.

Source: The Nation
Published: Nov 6, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,000 words)

The Rise (and Stall) of the Boba Generation

Boba Life came to stand for modern Asian-American identity, but sometimes it was more sugar than substance.

Source: Eater
Published: Nov 5, 2019
Length: 19 minutes (4,929 words)

My Year of Concussions

Nick Paumgarten recounts what beer-league hockey has given him over the years: occasional bragging rights, countless happy sud-soaked memories, a feeling of camaraderie, and three concussions whose lingering after effects caused him to leave the game.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 4, 2019
Length: 15 minutes (3,878 words)

The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People

Laura Lippman, admittedly a rotten friend, is bummed by the ways in which friendships end as one gets older.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 6, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,147 words)

When Authenticity Means a Heaping Plate of Tex-Mex

The food of our childhood means more to us than its credibility among the masses.

Published: Oct 31, 2019
Length: 6 minutes (1,618 words)

B is for Bastard

As a boy, after the trauma of learning he is not his father’s biological son, Brian Gresko finds his sense of himself is shattered.

Published: