Chicago Is a City Divided by Barbecue

Chicago has more regional fare to offer than char dogs and Italian beef sandwiches. On Chicago’s South Side, hot links and smoked rib tips define its barbecue. Too bad so few people on the North Side know about it.

Author: Kevin Pang
Source: Saveur
Published: Feb 8, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,078 words)

A Finder, No Longer a Keeper

Jenny Klion tries to make sense of her super power of finding lost jewelry where ever she goes, and reflects on how finding someone else’s engagement ring helped her let go of her own.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 14, 2018
Length: 8 minutes (2,134 words)

The Kid Is All Right: In Defense of Picky Eating

Kitchen karma comes for Irina Dumitrescu when her son turns into the picky eater she used to be.

Source: Serious Eats
Published: Feb 13, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,915 words)

The Man’s Man’s Kitchen

As American men started cooking more at home, companies started redesigning their appliances to capture their dollars. Unfortunately, insulting gendered ideas about “manly cooking” and women’s “natural way in the kitchen” still underlie this shift to clean steal surfaces and black-matte finishes.

Source: Curbed
Published: Jan 31, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,849 words)

Typing Practice

In Typing Practice, an excerpt from her book, Living with a Wild God, Barbara Ehrenreich looks back to keeping a notebook to make sense of growing up female in a dysfunctional family. The lessons she learned offer some hope for these trying times: “But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking.”

Source: Granta
Published: Jan 31, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,124 words)

How Lobbyists Normalized the Use of Chemical Weapons on American Civilians

Or, how we learned to stop worrying and love the gas. An excerpt from Anna Feigenbaum’s book, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today.

Source: Verso Books
Published: Feb 12, 2018
Length: 24 minutes (6,015 words)

The Unsung Songwriters Who Helped Make Appetite for Destruction a Classic

Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin weren’t the only ones whose songwriting contributions made Appetite for Destruction one of the biggest rock records in history. Thirty years after the album’s debut, here are the stories of the two Los Angeles musicians who co-wrote two of Appetite‘s songs and contributed to the band’s legacy.

Author: Matt Wake
Source: LA Weekly
Published: Jun 17, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,493 words)

Politics as a Defense Against Heartbreak

Minda Honey’s first in an original Longreads series on dating as a black woman in these times. Here, she assesses the deliberate choices and external factors affecting her romantic life.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 12, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,955 words)

Here’s What War With North Korea Would Look Like

Analysts and military officials describe the many likely scenarios that would play out before and during a war between North Korea, South Korea and the U.S. Nerve gas, smallpox, yellow fever, preemptive nuclear strikes, all of these scenarios are horrifying, because even though North Korea would lose, the civilian death toll would always be high.
Source: Vox
Published: Feb 8, 2018
Length: 21 minutes (5,389 words)

In Conversation: Quincy Jones

Living legend Quincy Jones tells it all and knows it all: how many songs Michael Jackson stole, which Beatles couldn’t actually play, everyone Marlon Brando slept with, who killed Kennedy, what happens when we die, and the moment God walks out of a room. David Marchese follows up on each fantastic digression in an interview with the world’s most virtuosic octogenarian.

Source: Vulture
Published: Feb 7, 2018
Length: 19 minutes (4,975 words)