“Hey, Can I Sleep In Your Room?”: Studying Love with Elizabeth Flock

An interview with Elizabeth Flock, author of The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, on the years she spent studying other people’s marriages in Mumbai.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 8, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,156 words)

The Billionaire Philanthropist

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 13, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,268 words)

Passing as Privileged

A personal essay in which Narratively deputy editor Lilly Dancyger writes about dealing with people’s mistaken assumptions about the economics of her upbringing. A high-school dropout who later worked her way through college and graduate school, Dancyger grew up poor — the daughter of a single mother who was a recovering heroin addict. In New York City media circles, people tend to make comments indicating they assume she comes from privilege. Here, Dancyger sets the record straight.

Source: The Rumpus
Published: Mar 5, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,639 words)

Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?

In this excerpt from her book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison recalls how in the early days of recovery, she examined the work of newly-sober writers like John Berryman and Charles Jackson for clues about how sobriety would affect her as a writer. It wasn’t until she read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that she found “proof that sober creativity was possible.”

Published: Mar 13, 2018
Length: 24 minutes (6,187 words)

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

The historic buildings around New York’s Union Square are not protected by landmark status, and the rise of the city’s tech industry now threatens them.

Published: Mar 7, 2018
Length: 27 minutes (6,796 words)

The Quest for the Collision Zone: An Arctic Expedition

Geologists on a mission to vindicate their theory of a lost mountain range discover something even more significant buried beneath the ice. An excerpt from A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice.

Published: Mar 13, 2018
Length: 19 minutes (4,848 words)

The Myth of Authenticity Is Killing Tex-Mex

It isn’t all sour cream and cheese. It isn’t just for white people. Don’t treat it like a joke. Tex-Mex is a distinct regional food tradition, and it deserves respect and wider appreciation, especially now that many traditional mom-and-pop forms of it are endangered.

Source: Eater
Published: Mar 7, 2018
Length: 19 minutes (4,827 words)

How to Make a Hit Song in 2018

The chorus is passé.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Mar 5, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,758 words)

A Storyteller, Unbecoming

On showing, telling, and finding one’s way as a literary writer of color.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 8, 2018
Length: 14 minutes (3,636 words)

The Perfect Man Who Wasn’t

Con man Derek Alldred met women on a dating site and swindled them out of more than a million dollars. The women found that there was little law enforcement could do to help them, so they banded together to take him down.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 5, 2018
Length: 27 minutes (6,786 words)