‘A Town Without Pity’

Matt Lauzon was 14 when he says a police officer in Maine sexually abused him on multiple occasions. Other accusers came forward after he shared his story, but the city and police department have denied any wrongdoing.

Source: The Appeal
Published: Jul 1, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,000 words)

Love in the Time of Britney

One British man spent his adult life devoted to his favorite star. His personal collection tells us a lot about fandom—and about the life cycles of music ephemera.

Source: Topic
Published: Jul 2, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,300 words)

How the All-American Motel Became a Last Resort for the Country’s Most Vulnerable

Roadside lodging for motorists has a seedy reputation, but the motel is a shelter—a lifeline—for families with no place else to go

Source: MEL Magazine
Published: Jun 29, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,600 words)

The Lingering of Loss

My best friend left her laptop to me in her will. Twenty years later, I turned it on and began my inquest.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jul 1, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,000 words)

The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes

A personal essay in which Leigh Hopkins faces the hidden truth about the world’s most famous spiritual surgeon, and the irresistible desire to find “the cure.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 3, 2019
Length: 24 minutes (6,131 words)

The Invisible City Beneath Paris

Six hundred years of quarrying has left the great city with two hundred miles of subterranean tunnels and chambers. Curious, the author explores part of this damp, dark, claustrophobic network with a couple of anonymous urban explorers who belong to a subculture with its own codes of conduct.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 23, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,749 words)

Alix Ohlin: How to Write—and Not—About the Struggle to Have a Child

“The question What kind of writer are you? veered ever closer to the question What kind of woman are you? The world seemed to want to reduce the possibilities of my life to either/or categories—good writer/bad writer; mother/not mother—and I felt suspended somewhere in between.”

Author: Alix Ohlin
Source: LitHub
Published: Jun 26, 2019
Length: 4 minutes (1,160 words)

The Burdens We Carry

In this personal essay, Amy Scheiner reflects on her mother’s sudden death and what it means to be a woman in a world that is set up to bury them.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 1, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,695 words)

The Sorrowful Mysteries, or, Reasons I’m No Longer Catholic

A personal essay in which Kathleen McKitty Harris recalls the series of events which led to her departure from the Church.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 28, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,618 words)

Cain and Abel and Oil

This might strike you as a wildly self-serving theory: that the epic rift tearing apart this preposterously wealthy family was the fault not of the lifelong ne’er-do-well, who’d spent four decades partying his way through a family fortune, but of his outwardly much more responsible and sober brother, who had run the family business for over a decade. More than that: that the responsible, sober one was actually reckless, vindictive, manipulative, and untrustworthy even with those who knew him best. And even more: that the final break came when the supposedly responsible one engineered an elaborate conspiracy to frame his brother involving a henchman and two corrupt cops.

Author: Ian Frisch
Published: Jun 27, 2019
Length: 23 minutes (5,800 words)