Everyone Got The Pulse Massacre Story Completely Wrong

Over the course of Noor Salman’s trial for allegedly aiding her husband, Omar Mateen, in the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, a different narrative has emerged than the false one the FBI erroneously constructed, and which the media tragically bought into. Melissa Jeltsen points out that not only was there zero evidence it was a targeted hate crime based in homophobia, but there was also no evidence to support Salman’s coerced confession that she and her husband had staked out Pulse beforehand. What’s more, the prosecution was sadistic in making its false case against Salman, who had endured domestic violence and rape at Mateen’s hand. The good news is that she was acquitted. The bad news is that she has been endlessly traumatized, first by Mateen, then by the FBI, the prosecution and the press, not to mention additionally by spending more than a year in jail away from her child.

Source: HuffPost
Published: Apr 4, 2018
Length: 8 minutes (2,146 words)

A Betrayal

Henry, a high school student in Long Island, wanted to get away from MS-13, a Central American gang that trafficked in violence, so he became an informant, helping the police to identify and arrest gang members. Rather than protect Henry, authorities turned him over to ICE — endangering his life by detaining him with MS-13 members who are suspicious that he snitched on them.

Source: ProPublica
Published: Apr 2, 2018
Length: 29 minutes (7,267 words)

Japan’s Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women

Elderly Japanese women — many of whom live lonely lives even in the company of husbands and children — are turning to petty theft and are thriving in prison, a place where they find the companionship and security lacking in their lives on the outside.

Published: Mar 16, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,639 words)

The Real Story of the Hawaiian Missile Crisis

At 8:07 am on January 13, 2018, hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians confronted their darkest fear: What would you do with only minutes left to live? Sean Flynn counts down the 38 minutes that everyone in the state thought they were going to die: “Just as a nuclear war can’t be called off once it starts, neither can the warning of one.”

Author: Sean Flynn
Source: GQ
Published: Apr 2, 2018
Length: 28 minutes (7,000 words)

Sharp Women Writers: An Interview With Michelle Dean

Cultural critic Michelle Dean discusses her new book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. Topics covered range from emotionally fraught book reviews of Susan Sontag to male blowback against the famous first line of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer to how horrified Elizabeth Hardwick was by her friend Adrienne Rich’s feminism.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 4, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,014 words)

How Joan Didion Became Joan Didion

Joan Didion didn’t shy away from criticizing everything and everyone from The Sound of Music and J.D. Salinger, and she did it with flair and a voice all her own.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Apr 2, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,000 words)

Why good people turn bad online

Gaia Vince visits Yale University’s Human Cooperation Lab to explore how we can redesign social networks in ways that will help “further our extraordinary impulse to be nice to others even at our own expense.”

Author: Gaia Vince
Source: Mosaic Science
Published: Apr 2, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,371 words)

I Walked From Selma To Montgomery

The Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail is, at 54 miles, the shortest of America’s 19 National Historic Trails. It is also a hike in which the walking of it is a political act, and Rahawa Haile decides she has no choice but to hike it in the early days of the Trump Administration.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Apr 1, 2018
Length: 13 minutes (3,400 words)

‘Being Charlie’

“If sex had a defining feature in the 1990s, it was ubiquity.” Laura Marsh unravels the two-decade fallout of the way sex was perceived, reported on, and delighted in during the 90s, an era when pornstars, Sex and the City, Monica Lewinsky, Harvey Weinstein, dominated the news.

Published: Apr 1, 2018
Length: 13 minutes (3,400 words)

Why Is Angels In America Still The Most Prominent Story Being Told About AIDS?

There is no denying that Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America” is a profound work of art, but on the eve of yet another production (a Broadway run), Steven Thrasher raises a significant and frankly troubling question: as the play is (largely) filtered through the lens of white gay men, how many millions of experiences from gay people of color have been hidden from mainstream sight?

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Mar 30, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,288 words)