Can Video Games Replace the Outdoors?

“Maybe not in our hearts, but certainly in our brains. Plus, they can make you love the indoors far too much—which is why there’s now a full-fledged, woodsy rehab center for joystick addicts who need a soothing pathway back to a normal life.”

Source: Outside
Published: Oct 8, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,676 words)

Dancing at Lizzo’s Wedding

“[N]o matter how wildly inventive and unconventional I know the people involved to be, there’s always some degree of this absurd clichédness to the ceremony and the beginning of the party when they make all of the speeches, and dance like everyone’s watching (because they are), and throw bouquets and underthings. It’s about tradition, after all. But then—there’s the dance party.”

Published: Sep 23, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,000 words)

Five Dimes

Online betting made an American expat named Sean Creighton into one of the richest people in Costa Rica, and a savvy business strategy helped him avoid detection from authorities. But after he was kidnapped, no one can say for sure if he was taken for ransom, or if he faked his death in order to keep running his business.

Author: David Hill
Source: Victory Journal
Published: Oct 3, 2019
Length: 20 minutes (5,099 words)

Intelligent Ways to Search for Extraterrestrials

The move to formalize this inherently speculative project has many scientific advantages, including securing funding. But it requires researchers be less bound to their earthly ways of thinking.

Author: Adam Mann
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 3, 2019
Length: 11 minutes (2,897 words)

On Finding the Freedom to Rage Against Our Fathers

“Growing up, my mother taught us three girls how to read our father’s moods like the weather, how to discern their ever-shifting winds. How to carve out a childhood at the base of an active volcano. How to survive the flash flood that was my father’s temper, rage like water rising fast. He’d yell, he’d berate, he’d snarl. He’d snatch sentences from our mouths before we could finish them and twist them against us. This was at home. This was at school. This was without notice.”

Source: LitHub
Published: Oct 7, 2019
Length: 13 minutes (3,297 words)

The Often Perilous, Sometimes Lucrative, and Ever-Evolving Business of Being a YouTube Star in 2019

“Really, the digital creator class’s legitimacy is arising out of the passage of time. YouTube fame isn’t novel to Gen-Zers. It simply is.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 7, 2019
Length: 19 minutes (4,956 words)

The Teenager Married Who’s Been Married Too Many Times to Count

“Despite being illegal in Iraq, the BBC found that mutaa marriages were widely available in Kadhimiya. Out of 10 clerics approached by a BBC undercover reporter, eight said they performed them. Of those eight, we had further conversations with two who agreed to approve them for girls as young as nine.”

Source: BBC
Published: Oct 4, 2019
Length: 14 minutes (3,554 words)

Bong Joon-ho’s Dystopia Is Already Here

Bong Joon-ho’s work reflects anxieties he feels every day—about the climate crisis, the widening income gap. “My films generally seem to have three components: fear, anxiety, and a kekeke sense of humor,” he says, using the Korean equivalent of “ha-ha.” “Humor comes from anxiety, too,” he adds. “At least when we laugh, there’s a feeling that we’re overcoming some kind of horror.” In his view, our world is already a dystopia, and all tragedy and comedy flows from this fact.

Source: Vulture
Published: Oct 7, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,200 words)

My Family Story of Love, the Mob, and Government Surveillance

In this excerpt from his book, In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth, John Goldsmith considers the private costs of the invasive surveillance tactics the US government uses against its own citizens. “It wasn’t just the chilling effect on Chuckie’s freedom of thought, belief, and speech—an effect that stretched back decades, to the 1950s, when he first began to suspect that he was under surveillance. It was also, more painfully, the violence against his intimate spaces and relationships, and the annihilation of the stories he told himself and the world about these spaces and relationships, and thus of his power to define and shape his life.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Oct 7, 2019
Length: 21 minutes (5,424 words)

Irish Butter Kerrygold Has Conquered America’s Kitchens

This is the story of how this unassuming yellow, salty, grass-fed import seduced a nation that produces more than enough of its own cream.

Published: Oct 2, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,357 words)