Edible Complex

Trying pot chocolate on the third date leads Jen Doll and a man she’s just getting to know toward an unexpected trust exercise.

Author: Jen Doll
Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 15, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,598 words)

How To Lose Everything And Get Some Of It Back

The story of Daniel “Gus” Gerard, a promising late 1970s basketball star whose love affair with cocaine and booze cost him not only his career, but his kids and his marriage. Why? He was really just a lanky kid with thick glasses who really wanted to belong.

Source: Deadspin
Published: Apr 8, 2019
Length: 17 minutes (4,289 words)

Bracing for the Silence of an Empty Nest

In this personal essay, as her son finishes high school and prepares to leave for college, Michelle Cruz Gonzales looks back on his early years as a pianist, and anticipates a future without the sound of his playing.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 12, 2019
Length: 8 minutes (2,199 words)

‘The Unthinkable Has Happened’

Jayson Greene recounts the tragic day his 2-year-old daughter, Greta, was struck unconscious by a brick that fell from a windowsill and rushed to the hospital. An excerpt from Greene’s memoir, Once More We Saw Stars.

Source: Vulture
Published: Apr 10, 2019
Length: 20 minutes (5,233 words)

Shades of Black

The Guardian US’s “Shades of black” series of 27 pieces explores colorism within black and brown communities and highlights its connections to desirability and self-esteem.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Apr 8, 2019

Inside the First Afghan Women’s Ascent of Mount Noshaq

“In July, a group of Afghan women set out to climb 24,580-foot Mount Noshaq, their country’s highest mountain. No Afghan woman had ever reached the summit, and many challenges stood in their way, from hostile Afghan men who think that women shouldn’t exercise, to the terrorist attack in a district near the peak two days before the climb began.”

Source: Outside
Published: Apr 8, 2019
Length: 24 minutes (6,241 words)

Life and Death in West Virginia

“I’m in a haunted place, in my home and in my body.”

Published: Apr 5, 2019
Length: 20 minutes (5,203 words)

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out

The climate is changing. It will change our world irrevocably. If the scale of the change is too staggering, maybe we need something in addition to science: “But artists can register scale. They can transpose the fact of melting ice to inundated homes and bewildered lives, gauge it against long history and lost future.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Apr 9, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,095 words)

The Loneliness of Infertility

“[I]n framing infertile women as problematic consumers of technology that they despise, many contemporary feminists ignore the actual experience, the meat and pain, of infertility. They ignore the grief.”

Source: The Walrus
Published: Apr 8, 2019
Length: 17 minutes (4,318 words)

At the Maacher Bazaar, Fish for Life

A personal essay in which Madhushree Ghosh continues to honor her late parents’ memory…through the simple act of making fish curry.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 10, 2019
Length: 18 minutes (4,605 words)