The Jumpsuit That Will Replace All Clothes Forever

Heather Radke writes about JUMPSUIT, a political art project by The Rational Dress Society’s Abigail Glaum-Lathbury and Maura Brewer. Glaum-Lathbury and Brewer aim to call attention to the ills of late capitalism — and to “make America rational again” — by manufacturing non-gendered, nearly shapeless jumpsuits, and encouraging people to wear them to the exclusion of all other fashion choices. Radke spends three weeks in one, and finds a surprising freedom in this particular fashion — or, anti-fashion — dictum.

Published: Mar 21, 2018
Length: 14 minutes (3,543 words)

Midwestern Gothic

When the author’s high school friend supposedly dies from accidental drowning, he doubts the official story, but his academic mind soon leads him down a dark path, and through an examination of conspiratorial thought itself.

Source: The Believer
Published: Feb 8, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,037 words)

Seeking a Roadmap for the New American Middle Class

Could Starbucks be the new GM? Or could the American worker make it even better?

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 21, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,950 words)

Death Rattle: The Body’s Betrayals

In this moving lyric essay on grief, pain, and the body’s frailty, Ellen Wayland-Smith recalls, with heart-wrenching intimacy, how bodies have failed and fallen in her own life, and reflects on various literary and historical reckonings with the finality of death and the inevitability of the fall.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 21, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,127 words)

Taming the Mighty Mississippi

The Mississippi is the second longest river in the United States. Unfortunately, the aging levees, locks and dams that make life and industry possible have degenerated, and no one seems able to initiate improvements.

Source: Washington Post
Published: Mar 14, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,882 words)

‘Forgive Yourself. And Forgive Me.’

A personal essay in which reporter Alice Driver considers what lessons to take from a late uncle’s life.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 19, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,574 words)

Let’s Talk About Guns and Video Games

In his introduction to a weeklong series on the relationship between games and guns, Waypoint Editor-in-Chief Austin Walker outlines the need to reflect on how violence in games often transforms from an act into something else, a mode of being, and the need to reflect empathetically and critically on that transformation.

Source: Waypoint
Published: Mar 19, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,680 words)

Courage Before the Thaw

From toxic shellfish to melting permafrost, Alaska is suffering the effects of climate change so profoundly that no Alaskan remains unaffected, be they scientists or Indigenous subsistence hunters. Here’s how six women are dealing with these changes.

Published: Mar 5, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,058 words)

Outside Voices

After never knowing a moment’s privacy, Sloane Crosley finally moves into the one-bedroom apartment of her dreams in the city that never sleeps. And then she never sleeps again, because all of her windows face Jared.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 16, 2018
Length: 25 minutes (6,250 words)

The Friend That Got Away

A personal essay in which Beverly Donofrio looks back on a friendship she hadn’t expected to make — or to lose.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 16, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,860 words)