The Prisoners Who Care for the Dying and Get Another Chance at Life

How some inmates serving life sentences in prison work 10-15 hours a day, seven days a week so that terminally ill fellow prisoners do not have to die alone.

Published: May 16, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,841 words)

The Blood Ritual That Lives on YouTube

A controversial cyber-pagan ceremony conjurs issues of self-empowerment, solidarity, and heaven on earth.

Source: Gizmodo
Published: May 15, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,194 words)

Leaving Herland

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland, women create a utopia without men and start to reproduce asexually. As the #MeToo Movement gathered steam, this novel led journalist Nora Caplan-Bricker to examine other feminist utopias and the limitations of binary ideology. As Caplan-Bricker puts it, “envisioning a world without sexual harassment—without its many tendrils invading every corner of our lives—is not a simple act of imagination.”

Source: The Point
Published: May 1, 2018
Length: 26 minutes (6,578 words)

Andouni: The Shared and Unshared Songs of Armenian Exile

“I don’t know if it was true or not, but it was part of the story.”

Published: May 11, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,052 words)

Driven to Despair

Doug Schifter waged a one-man campaign to stop Uber from putting his fellow black-car drivers out of business. Then he decided to take his own life.

Published: May 16, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,188 words)

What’s That Smell You’re Reading?

Words are not always what hold book lovers captive: old book smell is real.

Published: May 15, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,326 words)

“Parrot Isn’t Hungry”: On Family, Food, Fasting, and Ramadan

Living many states away from her parents and much of her extended family during the holy month of Ramadan, writer Gulnaz Saiyed remembers the food and flavors of home.

Source: Catapult
Published: May 15, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,864 words)

Why I Still Fast During Ramadan

The poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib on the rituals of his faith that have, for him, fallen away, and those that have endured.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: May 15, 2018
Length: 8 minutes (2,082 words)

The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

At Wired, Garrett M. Graff reports on how serving in Vietnam instilled a discipline and relentlessness in Robert S. Mueller that underpins his approach to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Source: Wired
Published: May 15, 2018
Length: 33 minutes (8,279 words)

The Rage of the Incels

“In America, to be poor, or black, or fat, or trans, or Native, or old, or disabled, or undocumented, among other things, is usually to have become acquainted with unwantedness,” writes Jil Tolentino. But none of these people ever felt that because they were outside the sexual marketplace, they were ever owed sex. Incels are the result of a violent misogyny, one that has little to do with sex and almost everything to do with power.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 15, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,940 words)