After the Storm

As Mary Heglar remembers Hurricane Katrina — which hit the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till — she considers how racism and climate change are inextricably linked.

Published: Oct 22, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,400 words)

An Oral History of Hard-Shell Tacos

Taco Bell popularized this taco style, Anglicizing what was once truly Mexican cuisine, but where did tacos dorados originate? And how did they become synonymous with gringo fast food?

Source: MEL Magazine
Published: Oct 8, 2019
Length: 8 minutes (2,076 words)

Inside the Phone Company Secretly Run By Drug Traffickers

When you’re a criminal, naturally, you need a secure, private means of communicating to further your illicit activities. So what do you do? You make your own encrypted, untraceable phones at your own phone company and sell them to other criminals as part of your enterprise.

Author: Joseph Cox
Source: Motherboard
Published: Oct 22, 2019
Length: 11 minutes (2,796 words)

How to Mourn a Glacier

Essayist Lacy M. Johnson attends a funeral in Iceland for “Okjökull” — once a glacier 16 square kilometers in surface, and now “only a small patch of slushy gray ice.” In personifying shrinking masses of ice — key geographical features of the area, and the planet — officials hope to impress upon people the dire extent of climate change, and the need for humans to stop living in ways that threaten all life forms.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 20, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,322 words)

My Own Private Iceland

When an island nation of 300,000 residents receives more than two million tourists a year, radical change is inevitable — but is it all negative?

Source: Vox
Published: Oct 21, 2019
Length: 26 minutes (6,733 words)

The Untold Story of the 2018 Olympics Cyberattack, the Most Deceptive Hack in History

As the opening ceremonies of the 2018 winter olympics began in Pyeongchang, a cyberattack targeted the games’ digital infrastructure, jeopardizing WIFI connections, event tickets, and even the official Olympics app, packed full of information on event schedules, maps, and hotel reservations. Andy Greenberg examines who was behind the attack and why they wanted to publicly embarrass South Korea.

Source: Wired
Published: Oct 17, 2019
Length: 32 minutes (8,126 words)

The Great American Press Release

America has many ways of reminding Black people that the Constitution and American Dream were not created for them.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Sep 3, 2019
Length: 13 minutes (3,346 words)

Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction

As people accuse fiction of presumption, vanity, appropriation, and putting words in peoples’ mouths, one of our most brilliant writers shows us what fiction does best, which is compassionately imagining ourselves as other people, so we can understand who they, and human beings, truly are.

Published: Oct 17, 2019
Length: 24 minutes (6,137 words)

You Talk Real Good

Alison Stine confronts the ways in which being hard of hearing has made her job search more difficult.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 21, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,469 words)

Breaking the Family Silence on Alcoholism

Alicia Lutes contemplates her family’s history of addiction, her mother’s failing liver, and the effect it’s all had on her generation.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 18, 2019
Length: 17 minutes (4,426 words)