Bernadette Peters: Young and Cute, Forever and Never

Even Bernadette Peters, as talented and beloved and powerful as ever, has been underestimated for decades as both eternally cute and impossibly naïve. In honor of Peters’ 70th birthday, Victoria Myers — editor of The Interval, a website dedicated to promoting gender parity in theatre — celebrates Peters’ unparalleled career in Hollywood and on Broadway by lovingly recreating her extraordinary life story in one definitive profile.

Source: The Interval
Published: Feb 27, 2018
Length: 26 minutes (6,700 words)

How to Write a Memoir While Grieving

A personal essay in which Nicole Chung contemplates loss, adoption, and working on a book her late father won’t get to see.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 1, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,845 words)

How I Found My Way After an MS Diagnosis at Twenty-Seven

After getting diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at age 27, Meredith White comes to terms with the weight of knowing that diagnosis brings, and the uncertainties of living in a body with an incurable degenerative disease.

Published: Jan 23, 2018
Length: 8 minutes (2,224 words)

What I Learned Road-Tripping Across North America With One of Those Giant CD Binders

On a two-year road-trip, a couple let their trip memories affix themselves to music from their old CD collection. In the process, they discovered the value of this outdated digital medium ─ not records, not streaming services, but CDs ─ for a certain kind of deep listening.

Source: Pitchfork
Published: Feb 26, 2018
Length: 8 minutes (2,046 words)

Burning Out: What Really Happens Inside a Crematorium

As religious rules around cremation have relaxed, more and more Americans are turning to cremation as a cost effective way to deal with the dead. As Caren Chesler tours Rosehill Cemetery’s crematorium, she reports not on the process of cremation, but also on how loved ones often struggle to deal with the cremains of family members. Not knowing where to store them, urns end up in closets, garages, and in storage — liminal spaces that place the dead out of sight and out of mind.

Published: Mar 1, 2018
Length: 22 minutes (5,588 words)

This Route Doesn’t Exist on the Map

What would you endure to find safety and security? Now that Europe has slammed its doors shut to migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Nigeria, just to name a few countries, many are attempting to enter the United States via a long, arduous journey that includes crossing the Darién Gap — a treacherous forest without roads that connects Columbia and Panama.

Published: Feb 26, 2018
Length: 26 minutes (6,743 words)

The Case Against Tipping

Data shows how tipping in the restaurant industry fosters sexual harrassment, labor exploitation and racial profiling, and it widens the opportunity gap. Then again, anyone who’s worked in food service can tell you that. Why is America so committed to this damaging practice?

Source: Eater
Published: Feb 22, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,555 words)

Guantánamo, Forever

After nearly a decade, Gitmo detainee Haroon Gul believed he had a chance at freedom. Then came President Trump.

Published: Feb 28, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,100 words)

The Lonely Life of a Professional YouTuber

The London-based performer WillNE is a self-employed YouTube celebrity at age 21. Unfortunately, that success means he barely leaves the house.

Author: Joe Zadeh
Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Feb 22, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,971 words)

Monica Lewinsky: Emerging From “the House of Gaslight” in the Age of #MeToo

On the 20th anniversary of Ken Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky reconsiders her relationship with Clinton — 27 years her senior — through the lens of the #MeToo moment, and realizes that given their power differential, the word “consensual” might not perfectly apply.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Feb 25, 2018
Length: 14 minutes (3,522 words)