Unprotected

Katie Meyler founded the More Than Me Academy in Liberia to educate girls and get them off the street. She also hired the man who would rape dozens of MTM’s 11 and 12 year old students, impregnating some and leaving others HIV positive.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Oct 11, 2018
Length: 54 minutes (13,700 words)

A Woman, Tree or Not

In this essay from our Fine Lines series about age, Terese Marie Mailhot questions the value of Native coming of age ceremonies she missed out on.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 11, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,419 words)

My Great Grandfather the Bundist

Writer and artist Molly Crabapple tells the story of her late great grandfather, self-taught artist Sam Rothbort, and of the Bund, the revolutionary anti-Zionist Jewish political party he joined in Vilna in 1898.

Published: Oct 6, 2018
Length: 22 minutes (5,627 words)

Are You Sitting Down?

In this excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, She Wants It: Desire, Power and Toppling the Patriarchy, “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway recalls the incident that led to the Amazon Prime series: her father coming out to her as transgender.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 7, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,907 words)

Tennessee Williams Made Paintings. They Were About Love and Loss, Too.

Michael Adno examines the paintings of American playwright Tennessee Williams, who used the visual medium to explore what it meant to be gay in America during the ’70s.

Published: Sep 21, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,518 words)

‘Dallas’ at 40: The Inside Story Behind the Show That Changed Texas Forever

The definitive oral history of a timeless TV series.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Oct 1, 2018
Length: 38 minutes (9,662 words)

The Ghosts of the Glacier

As Alpine glaciers recede in alarming speed, they reveal more and more bodies of people who’d died tragically on the ice, some of them considered missing for decades.

Author: Sean Flynn
Source: GQ
Published: Oct 4, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,138 words)

My Fathers and Hip-Hop Taught Me About Self-Care as A Black Man

“Embracing mortality, in this sense, is to prepare a way for my future children. If this cancer is hereditary, is it not also my responsibility to do everything within my humanly power to ensure, my children nor I, have to suffer?”

Source: Catapult
Published: Oct 9, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,093 words)

How I Learned to Love Bonsai

Unsatisfied with his own efforts at growing Ficus religiosa, bonsai enthusiast Harley Rustad totes his too-tall tree to Ontario to seek advice from Canadian bonsai expert Nigel Saunders. Saunders tends over 180 bonsais and has attracted a cult following for his instructive YouTube videos — his miniature lemon tree alone has earned 1.5 million views.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Oct 5, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,146 words)

Checkpoint Nation

ICE is bad, but as that agency gets the bulk of critics’ ire, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency legally operates within 100 miles of the border, where it needs neither warrents nor explanations to search and detain American citizens. Civil liberties are in danger. How did this happen?

Source: Texas Observer
Published: Oct 8, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,074 words)