When You’re a ‘Digital Nomad,’ the World Is Your Office

On life at a Miami digital-nomad compound, which one resident describes as “a hybrid between a summer camp for adults and a reality-TV show without the cameras.”

Published: Feb 8, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,041 words)

Jimmy Buffett Does Not Live the Jimmy Buffett Lifestyle

The beach-bum version of Jimmy Buffett has become a huge brand® with financial interests in foodstuffs, hotels, casinos, and even adult living communities. Buffett is the original escapist who has long escaped his original slacker identity. A businessman wrapped in a Hawaiian shirt, he’s worth more money than Bruce Springsteen. (Not bad for a guy who only had one top ten song, compared to Springsteen, who has had 12.)

Published: Feb 8, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,474 words)

No One Told Babe Ruth He Had Cancer, But His Death Changed the Way We Fight It

How the legendary baseball player’s cancer treatment in the 1940s helped pave the way for how we treat cancer today.

Source: Popular Science
Published: Feb 6, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,786 words)

The Road

Brazil’s massive Amazon rainforest basin is the world’s last terrestrial frontier. Like all frontiers, it’s getting developed for profit and nation-building at the expense of first nations and the native ecosystem. Unlike other frontiers, it’s happening as the world struggles to address climate change. In this epic, in-depth story, Stephanie Nolen travels 1,200 miles on a single road, BR-163, to examine whether Brazil can utilize the Amazon to build itself into a first-world economy while protecting enough forest to honor its global ecological responsibility.

Published: Jan 26, 2018
Length: 41 minutes (10,491 words)

Unlearning Woody Allen

An essay of cultural criticism in which David Klion breaks down Woody Allen’s influence on the culture, romantic comedies, and Klion himself, and realizes the premises and attitudes in movies like Annie Hall and Manhattan aren’t so romantic after all.

Source: Jewish Currents
Published: Feb 1, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,419 words)

The Search for Jackie Wallace

When one of football’s greatest cornerbacks suggested a photojournalist to do a story about him, the man fans called The Headhunter was living under a New Orleans freeway overpass. So what happened to Jackie Wallace? The outpouring of support that resulted from the front page news story helped Wallace get back on his feet, only for him to disappear again.

Published: Feb 3, 2018
Length: 28 minutes (7,030 words)

Forensic Science Put Jimmy Genrich in Prison for 24 Years. What if It Wasn’t Science?

Forensic science — the kind that traces the grooves in bullets, the mark of a shoe, or the scrape of a tool — emerged in the early 20th century as a way to professionalize police work. But once its findings made their way into the court system, it became almost impossible to divide the good forensic science from the bad.

 

Source: The Nation
Published: Feb 6, 2018
Length: 46 minutes (11,700 words)

The Cities in Me

A personal essay in which novelist Sorayya Khan maps her family’s path from Islamabad to Solvay.

Published: Feb 7, 2018
Length: 8 minutes (2,085 words)

The Universe Has Been Outsourced

The production of big-name, high-budget games increasingly relies on outsourcing (or “external development,” if you prefer) for the creation of 3D art, level design, and other game assets. Michael Thomsen visited one of the firms that provides this work, the Shanghai-headquartered Virtuos Ltd. Thomsen draws out the tension between the demand for such work and the possibility for exploitation it creates, as well as the role that changing profit margins in the video game industry play in exacerbating that tension.

Source: The Outline
Published: Feb 6, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,911 words)

What Amazon Does to Poor Cities

Depressed cities hoping Amazon fulfillment jobs will lift them have been left wanting.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 1, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,353 words)