“You Can’t Recover If You’re Dead”

Overdose-prevention spaces save lives, but are curiously excluded from the American approach to addiction recovery. An investigation into why.

Source: The Ringer
Published: Aug 6, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,745 words)

Such Perfection

An examination of beauty, objectivity, and disability.

Source: The Believer
Published: Jun 1, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,695 words)

44 Years. 41 Allegations. Now the Past Is Catching Up.

“It’s like finding out the Wizard of Oz is only this guy behind the curtain, and instead of getting courage, a heart or a brain, you found out he was a child predator and abused you 40 years ago.”

Source: ESPN
Published: Aug 1, 2019
Length: 40 minutes (10,198 words)

The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison

“For decades Morrison has reflected back to us what it’s meant to be on the other side of this country’s approved history. When young white men again sing songs about lynching black men without being able recall who taught them those songs, and the hateful origins of the N-word are erased by a convenient amnesia to allow its constant use by outsiders, who will tell the stories we don’t tell ourselves?”

Published: Apr 8, 2015
Length: 30 minutes (7,562 words)

Finding My Father

At age thirty-two, after years working as an exotic dancer, the daughter of a mysteriously absentee father finally puts together the pieces that had been missing her whole life.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 5, 2019
Length: 30 minutes (7,527 words)

Gone

Journalist Mark Arax sifts through the aftermath of California’s deadliest wildfire to expose the governmental negligence, forest mismanagement, unregulated urban growth, and PG&E’s corruption, that put thousands of people in the path of the blaze.

Author: Mark Arax
Published: Jul 31, 2019
Length: 46 minutes (11,658 words)

Towards Chinatown

In this personal essay, faced with the possibility of losing of her mother, Melissa Hung contemplates another loss — of her mother tongue.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 5, 2019
Length: 13 minutes (3,316 words)

Athleisure, Barre and Kale: The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman

“Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony.”

Source: The Guardian
Published: Aug 2, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,545 words)

Alan Dershowitz, Devil’s Advocate

“The noted lawyer’s long, controversial career—and the accusations against him.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 29, 2019
Length: 55 minutes (13,878 words)

How “Summer Girls” Explains a Bunch of Hits—and the Music of 1999

LFO’s breakout song is remembered today primarily as an ode to Abercrombie & Fitch and the girls who wore it. But there’s a deeper story behind the light-hearted song—one that includes tragedy and paints a picture of what music was like at the turn of the century.

Source: The Ringer
Published: Jul 29, 2019
Length: 23 minutes (5,800 words)