The Crypto Family Farm

After a housing crash, a financial crisis, a security breach, and one too many government bailouts, a struggling family turns to mining crypto.

Source: Logic
Published: Aug 3, 2019
Length: 15 minutes (3,775 words)

The Nightmare in the Bahamas Is Far From Over

On September 1, 2019, Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas as a Category 5 storm. Reuters correspondent Zachary Fagenson reports from Great Abaco, which was nearly obliterated: “For the next three days, it would be our discomfiting task to point our recording equipment at piles of rubble that days earlier had been houses, and to extract stories from the occupants who’d abandoned them to the hurricane, who now were reduced to convulsive sobs at the sight of what had become of their homes and their lives.”

Source: Miami New Times
Published: Oct 1, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,108 words)

Am I Writing About My Life, Or Selling Myself Out?

After people repeatedly recognize Shannon Keating and her girlfriend from a personal essay she published about a lesbian cruise, and in the midst of the furor over Natalie Beach’s essay about her friendship with Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway on The Cut, Keating wonders about the line between writer and influencer, and the ethics of writing about our lives and the people in them.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Sep 30, 2019
Length: 24 minutes (6,053 words)

The Beating Heart

“Nothing convincingly explains the strange chemistry, the alchemy, that has kept the heart of a sullen, violent, tormented criminal beating for so long in a gentle mother’s chest…Yes, Eva Baisey got a murderer’s heart. But it was also a broken heart. It fixed her, and she fixed it.”

Published: Sep 30, 2019
Length: 44 minutes (11,011 words)

‘Everything That You’re Feeling Is Okay’

“Las Vegas’s death investigators witnessed the atrocities of the Route 91 shooting, then had to grapple with the difficult task of healing themselves.”

Editor’s note: This story was published in partnership with GQ.

Author: Ann Givens
Source: The Trace
Published: Sep 30, 2019
Length: 15 minutes (3,772 words)

Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers

Studies show a link between reading and a child’s home environment, but personality, class, and role models all play a complex role, as well as certain factors outside parents’ control.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 19, 2019
Length: 5 minutes (1,471 words)

Darkness on the Edge of Cougartown

On the brink of 50, Sarah Miller makes peace with being 10 years older than her boyfriend, and stops wasting time wishing she were younger.

Source: The Cut
Published: Oct 1, 2019
Length: 8 minutes (2,235 words)

Weather Reports: Voices from Xinjiang

The Chinese government denies the mass internment of the Xinjiang region’s Turkic and Muslim peoples, but this forty-page collection of oral histories offers evidence of an enormous humanitarian crisis, with abuses ranging from brainwashing and forced labor to torture.

Author: Ben Mauk
Source: The Believer
Published: Oct 1, 2019
Length: 88 minutes (22,013 words)

Hello, Forgetfulness; Hello, Mother

Peering into the mirror of her mother, Marcia Aldrich wonders whether she too is sentenced to dementia.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 2, 2019
Length: 19 minutes (4,770 words)

The pointing ape

A chimpanzee called Clint instigated a significant line of research into how chimpanzees use gestures to manipulate people.

Source: Aeon
Published: Oct 1, 2019
Length: 23 minutes (5,800 words)