I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.

“The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don’t normally speak to, and though my husband is white, I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage, even if my fantasies of these encounters seemed outlandish. I wanted to try.”

Published: Jul 17, 2019
Length: 24 minutes (6,220 words)

How a Predator Operated in Plain Sight

Lisa Miller makes a compelling argument that the male-dominated sexual revolution of the ’70s and the group-think it engendered led to the silence and tacit acceptance around Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of girls and young women. “A generation of entrepreneurial and ‘brilliant’ men took the job of defining the ‘erotic’ for everyone else,” she writes, “without consulting or including the interpretations of women, and then purveyed to the masses an eros that degraded women and girls while pitching it as ‘healthy.’”

Source: The Cut
Published: Jul 15, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,305 words)

The Launch

After two decades of research and development, WA 38 lands this fall. It could disrupt an entire industry. It’s an apple.

Published: Jul 18, 2019
Length: 20 minutes (5,200 words)

The New Prospectors

Every year, members of the Gold Prospectors Association of America pack up their RVs in search of adventure, friendship, and a bucketful of pay dirt.
Source: Topic
Published: Jul 15, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,200 words)

The Soviet Children Who Survived World War II

Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses, a 1985 collection of testimonials from then-Soviets who were children during the Second World War, has been translated into English and excerpted at the Paris Review. “It became connected like that in my memory, that war is when there’s no papa.”

Published: Jul 17, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,454 words)

Poetry and Prophecy, Dust and Ashes

“But twenty-three years after Genesis, Alter has completed his work: a finished Hebrew Bible, three volumes lovingly footnoted; an altogether worthier object of contemplation than some fantasy series, or Lyndon Johnson. And I, who am but dust and ashes, review it.”

Source: Plough
Published: Jul 16, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,712 words)

Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It.

A deeply upsetting object lesson in how the arcane details of inheritance and property law are used to strip black Americans of their land.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Jul 15, 2019
Length: 30 minutes (7,602 words)

Going Down the Pipes

For the “Journeys” issue of Topic, Anna Holmes shares a reprint of a 1996 New York Times Magazine piece by Darcy Frey originally titled, “Something’s Got to Give.” The piece is a wild, frenetic look at the fragile fraternity of air traffic controllers minding the busiest airspace in the United States. “Every hour around here is 59 minutes of boredom and 1 of sheer terror.”

Author: Darcy Frey
Source: Topic
Published: Jul 15, 2019
Length: 36 minutes (9,120 words)

Food Injustice

Does helping poor urban families access fresh vegetables reduce health disparities? Probably not, but universal health care sure would.

Published: Jul 16, 2019
Length: 19 minutes (4,985 words)

Is It Okay to Laugh at Florida Man?

“What it’s like to go viral as one of the Internet’s biggest memes — and the moral complications of laughing along.”

Author: Logan Hill
Published: Jul 15, 2019
Length: 25 minutes (6,268 words)