The Mutilated and the Disappeared

A visit to the only shelter in Mexico for migrants who have been mutilated along the migrant trail.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 31, 2018
Length: 21 minutes (5,284 words)

I Got an IUD, and I Got Pregnant

“Now, unwillingly pregnant at age 37, I had no idea if I was capable of either option: another baby, or ridding myself of a pregnancy. Each option felt equally terrifying.”

Source: The Cut
Published: Jan 22, 2018
Length: 5 minutes (1,412 words)

The Month of Giving Dangerously

Elizabeth Greenwood decides to give everything: time, money, praise, forgiveness. But when does generosity become a mania for giving?

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 31, 2018

It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

Tactics that erode trust and attention have become the new censorship. They may not be breaking any existing laws, but they are effectively upending many conceptual, legal, and ethical assumptions we have around free speech.

Source: Wired
Published: Jan 16, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,600 words)

What Does It Mean to Die?

Though she was declared brain-dead by the hospital that treated her, Jahi McMath has remained on a ventilator for four years. Her family and a neurologist argue that she’s still very much alive, challenging the long-held notions of what it means to be dead.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 29, 2018
Length: 36 minutes (9,000 words)

A Toxic Tour Through Underground Ohio

A booming injection well industry is pumping toxic waste deep into the earth in Ohio’s rural towns.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 30, 2018
Length: 14 minutes (3,538 words)

To Be, or Not to Be

A personal essay in which Russian emigre Masha Gessen ruminates on the culture’s tendency to privilege those who’ve suffered for a lack of choice — in becoming refugees, in picking their gender — and the choices (her own, and those of her parents and ancestors) that have impacted her life.

Published: Jan 29, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,037 words)

The Countess and the Schoolboy

Daniel Mendelsohn’s writing career started with the help of septuagenarian French dancer whose embrace of simple pleasures helped teach him to engage with the world differently.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 6, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,802 words)

Send the Barbarian in First

Bullied as a child in school in the ’80s, Canadian poet George Murray once found solace in the make-believe world of Dungeons & Dragons, where he could become “a seven-foot-tall warrior who could punch the face off a troll.” At The Walrus, Murray writes of the role-playing game’s renaissance — about how it helped his blended family bond — and about how he’s “playing it forward” by acting as dungeon master for local families who want to learn to play.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Jan 23, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,382 words)

Big Trouble in Little Cambodia

Hurricane Harvey decimated a small Texas Cambodian community’s houses and farmland. When white far-right groups arrived to help them rebuild, tensions mounted between FEMA and the volunteers, whose vocal, Neo-Confederate politics raised many questions about what they wanted with a group of Buddhists.

Source: Texas Observer
Published: Jan 22, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,901 words)