‘Soulful Vanilla Child’: When Pink Was Black

As a kid, the author mistook the pop/R&B artist Pink for a light-skinned black woman. In this reported essay, she takes a look at the cultural forces that encouraged that misconception.

Source: Jezebel
Published: Sep 12, 2019
Length: 15 minutes (3,975 words)

What College Admissions Offices Really Want

An investigation into the difference between the diversity colleges say they want, and what their bottom lines demand.

Author: Paul Tough
Published: Sep 10, 2019
Length: 36 minutes (9,030 words)

What Is Happening to My Body?

Devorah Heitner reflects on the ways she is reclaiming her relationship to her own body while grappling with the legacy of her mother’s poor body image and early death.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 12, 2019
Length: 15 minutes (3,869 words)

Why Women’s Soccer Players Are Worried About Their Brains

Dr. Ann McKee of the VA-BU-CLF Brain Bank has collected one hundred or so brains to be analyzed for CTE, and yet just five percent of those brains available for analysis by one of the nation’s preeminent CTE researchers come from women. Fader, a B/R Mag staff writer, examines concussions, CTE, and whether we are on the precipice of a rash of CTE diagnoses within women’s sports.

Source: B/R Mag
Published: Sep 10, 2019
Length: 17 minutes (4,448 words)

When Choice is 221 Miles Away

A post-Roe world is already here for women in Mississippi who need abortions.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Sep 11, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,014 words)

Competitive Oyster Shucking Is Real, Decadent, And China’s Best Party

Inside the rise of oyster shucking competitions in China, a phenomenon with its roots across the Atlantic Ocean that has found a niche within the country’s most westernized pockets.

Source: Deadspin
Published: Sep 11, 2019
Length: 14 minutes (3,725 words)

I Was Caroline Calloway

Seven years as an Instagram-famous writer’s right-hand woman.

Source: The Cut
Published: Sep 10, 2019
Length: 31 minutes (7,833 words)

Tina Turner is Having the Time of Her Life

A month before “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical” comes to Broadway, Amanda Hess pays Turner a visit at “Chateau Algonquin,” as Swiss castle she rents with her husband, to profile the 79-year-old in all her retired glory.

Published: Sep 9, 2019
Length: 11 minutes (2,835 words)

The Tale of Dirty, Old, Leaky Zalinski

Larry Pynn tells the story of United States Army transport ship Brigadier General M. G. Zalinski, one of thousands of ship wrecks under the sea leaking oil, contaminating our waters.

Author: Larry Pynn
Source: Hakai Magazine
Published: Sep 10, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,200 words)

The Weather

“D’s depression is the weather in our house, except there’s no forecast. Some days we wake to sunny skies, gentle breezes. We talk and laugh. We eat and nap. We watch the baby the way one watches a campfire, not for any particular reason, but because it is there and strangely fascinating in its combination of predictability and surprise… Maelstroms form unexpectedly, seemingly out of nowhere. And on the days they don’t, even when we’re smiling, listening to music, rubbing lotion onto the baby’s chubby arms, I am watching the sky. That fluffy cloud, is it a bunny? Or a dragon? Or a gathering storm?”

Source: Gay Magazine
Published: Sep 10, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,500 words)