The Wild Ones

People said that women had no place in the Grand Canyon and would likely die trying to run the Colorado River. In 1938, two female scientists set out to prove them wrong.

Source: The Atavist
Published: Oct 31, 2019
Length: 46 minutes (11,500 words)

Cornhole Is a Pro Sport Now

The American Cornhole League wants to turn a game that’s typically played with one hand holding a beer—and possibly named for an indecent part of the human body—into an international spectator sport.

Source: Outside
Published: Oct 31, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,200 words)

I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb

When reporter Allie Conti got a call from her Airbnb host 10 minutes before she was supposed to check in to her rental in Chicago, “Andrew” claimed the toilet had backed up, making the unit unavailable. The good news, he said was that he had a larger place he managed nearby. Little did Allie know that she stumbled on an Airbnb scam involving nearly 100 property listings in eight cities.

Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Oct 31, 2019
Length: 23 minutes (5,753 words)

The Wrong Goodbye

On July 29th, 2018, the family of Frederick Williams said a tearful goodbye as a man was taken off life support following a suspected drug overdose at St. Barnabas, a facility run by Hospice of New York. It wasn’t until the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, as part of routine procedures, ran fingerprint tests and discovered a grave error.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Oct 31, 2019
Length: 30 minutes (7,659 words)

Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes: On Novelist Nettie Jones and the Madness of ‘Fish Tales’

Edited by Toni Morrison, the 1983 novel ‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones was supposed to set the literary world on fire. It didn’t.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 29, 2019
Length: 23 minutes (5,959 words)

Forgotten: The Things We Lost In Kanye’s Gospel Year

“We have forgotten that black gospel music was fashioned by the courageous inventiveness of black migrants from Southern states to places like Chicago and Detroit. The style they created had within it a political and economic critique of racial capitalism: One need only peruse the lyrical content about joblessness, motherlessness, despair, to see it. But we forget that this lyrical content, like what Zora Neale Hurston said about the Sanctified Church, was also sounded out in a register that marked its difference from established Christian denominations. In this way, black gospel was not fundamentally about utopian otherworldliness and the sweet by-and-by, even when the lyrics were.”

Source: NPR
Published: Oct 23, 2019
Length: 15 minutes (3,833 words)

Ten Years Ago, I Called Out David Letterman. This Month, We Sat Down to Talk.

Comedy writer Nell Scovell — who quit her job on Late Night with David Letterman in 1990 after just five months because of sexism and “sexual favoritism,” and who called out Letterman in another Vanity Fair piece 10 years ago, following the revelation that he was cheating on his wife with various women who worked for him — sits down with a newly chastened Letterman, and receives a genuine apology from him.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 30, 2019
Length: 14 minutes (3,510 words)

Translation and the Family of Things

In this beautiful and poignant essay, the writer Crystal Hana Kim considers how translating her grandmother’s poems from Korean to English helped her appreciate the imprecision of language not as barrier to be transversed, but as an opportunity for new connection between herself, her mother, and her grandmother.

Published: Oct 29, 2019
Length: 8 minutes (2,202 words)

Why I Discuss My Son’s Autism on Social Media

A personal essay in which Alysia Abbott writes about the importance of presenting her autistic son on social media — fostering inclusiveness, normalizing his differences, connecting with other parents with similar children — and confesses her tendency to often only show him in the most flattering light.

Source: Dame Magazine
Published: Oct 30, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,316 words)

A Startup Just Announced the World’s First Fake-meat “Steaks” Made from Fungi. Are We Ready?

They are: pink, amenable to searing, dense and juicy. They’re not: meat, or vegetables, or even mushrooms. An ambiguous foodstuff creates ambiguous feelings.

Published: Oct 29, 2019
Length: 11 minutes (2,973 words)