Family Animals

In an excerpt from her new memoir, The Body Papers, Grace Talusan fondly remembers the badly behaved dog that won her skeptical father’s heart.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 9, 2019
Length: 16 minutes (4,046 words)

What Remains

Studying glaciers has taught science about the Earth’s age and natural cycles. So what does the death of one California glacier tell us about our future?

Published: Apr 4, 2019
Length: 14 minutes (3,672 words)

An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning

When Benton MacKaye first conceptualized the Appalachian Trail, it was meant to be much more than a hiking route — it was the foundation of an economic and social restructuring of the East Coast.

 

Source: Places
Published: Apr 4, 2019
Length: 14 minutes (3,645 words)

In San Francisco, Making a Living From Your Billionaire Neighbor’s Trash

Amid the mansions and new tech money, an entire economy has developed to gather discarded items and resell them for a few hundred dollars a week, if they’re lucky. “It’s a civic service as I see it,” said Nick Marzano, who publishes a magazine about San Francisco trash pickers. “Rather than this stuff going to landfill the items are being reused.”

Published: Apr 7, 2019
Length: 5 minutes (1,424 words)

The American Worth Ethic

In other countries, “having piles of money” is not the same thing as “labor,” and “being a human who deserves to have their basic needs met” isn’t synonymous with “holding a job.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 9, 2019
Length: 13 minutes (3,374 words)

Base Culture

“An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American. The war is the society and the society is the war, and one who sees that war sees America.”

Source: n+1
Published: Mar 19, 2019
Length: 19 minutes (4,821 words)

The Canadians

For many teenagers living before the decline of traditional retail, everything important in life happened in the mall. For Canadian Sophie He, who was adapting to life in southern California without a green card, the mall was also the place that first cast her as an outsider.

Author: Sophie He
Published: Feb 27, 2019
Length: 13 minutes (3,283 words)

The Mobster in Our Midst

John Franzese, Jr. was an up-and-coming gangster, then a drug addict, then a rat who helped send his own father to prison, and finally “Mat Pazzarelli” — his witness protection name. Now he’s rebuilt his life, is out of witness protection and has one thing left to do — go see his dad.

Author: Zak Keefer
Published: Apr 1, 2019
Length: 25 minutes (6,350 words)

MACHO: On Black Holes, and the Fantasies of Men

In this personal essay, Frances Dodds recalls two men who laid bare the fragile lines between desire, pain and manipulation — and questions the framework of her own fantasies.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 8, 2019
Length: 22 minutes (5,636 words)

The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy. It Didn’t Go Well.

In 2009 the IRS created a special team to investigate when and how the extremely wealthy were avoiding taxes. Reporters Jesse Eisenger and Paul Kiel illustrate how that team was stymied using the case of the heir to a German automative parts fortune.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Apr 5, 2019
Length: 19 minutes (4,822 words)