Paulette Jordan is Running for Governor. Who Will Follow Her?

Anne Helen Petersen profiles former state representative Paulette Jordan in her bid to capture the Democratic nomination for governor of Idaho. A member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, Jordan could be the first country’s Native American governor and Idaho’s first Democrat to hold the office since 1995.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Apr 26, 2018
Length: 28 minutes (7,022 words)

Who Killed Tolstoy?

If literature is the news that stays news, then it’s always a good time to revist Elif Batuman’s first book, The Possessed, about the people obsessed with Russia’s great authors. In this selection, Batuman gets a travel grant as a college student to investigate whether Leo Tolstoy was murdered. She examines his life for clues. She looks at his books and estate. She spends four days wearing sweatpants and flip-flops after her luggage got lost en route to the International Tolstoy Conference in Russia.

Source: Granta
Published: Apr 11, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,034 words)

A Killing at Donkey Creek

Jimmy Smith-Kramer, a former high school basketball star and a member of the Quinault Indian Nation in Taholah, Washington, was only 20 years old when James Walker mowed him down with his pickup truck. Was it a hate crime? Investigators aren’t sure.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Apr 26, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,131 words)

In the Place Where Prince Lived

A writer and a photographer visited the places Prince lived in his native Minneapolis, making a pilgrimage along what might be called The Purple Trail.

Source: Vogue
Published: Apr 21, 2018
Length: 18 minutes (4,615 words)

Hot Wet Goobers

Peanuts are essential to baseball games school lunches, state fairs, and even prison commissaries: the fascinating, sometimes ugly, history of the world’s favorite ground nut.

Published: Mar 13, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,481 words)

Barbra Streisand’s Singular Women

Mayukh Sen looks back at Barbra Streisand’s career as an actress, director and producer — shedding light on the sexist double standards in Hollywood that have led to her being portrayed as “difficult” for the kinds of demands and expectations her male counterparts are never called into question for.

Author: Mayukh Sen
Source: Hazlitt
Published: Apr 23, 2018
Length: 19 minutes (4,789 words)

A Lynching’s Long Shadow

The story of Elwood Higginbothom, a sharecropper and possible labor activist lynched in Oxford, Mississippi in 1935, is told to his descendants for the first time.

Published: Apr 25, 2018
Length: 32 minutes (8,018 words)

Where Spring Breaks Eternal

Jen Doll and photographer Eva O’Leary venture to the Lani Kai Island Resort in Fort Meyers Beach, Florida — a hotel known for choosing to host a seemingly never-ending stream of spring breakers to uncover how they not only survive, but manage to embrace the drunken debauchery of the spring break set — within reason, of course.

Author: Jen Doll
Source: Topic
Published: Apr 24, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,062 words)

The Mom Who Had an Abortion at 7 Months Pregnant

“I think the fact that this feels like a visceral horror to some women — though not all — and then is used as an excuse to write disgusting legislation is awful. But I don’t know that the solution is to not talk about it.”

Source: The Cut
Published: Apr 19, 2018
Length: 14 minutes (3,517 words)

Finding the Soundtrack to My Desert Life

A personal and critical essay in which Aaron Gilbreath recalls discovering the music of Friends of Dean Martinez in the ’90s, and the ways in which it helped him to appreciate life in his native Arizona.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 25, 2018
Length: 30 minutes (7,571 words)