The Marathon Men Who Can’t Go Home

“Each had come to America with the hope of making life-changing money that they could send back home to their families. What they found was an often desperate existence in their adopted homeland.”

Author: David Alm
Source: GQ
Published: May 21, 2021
Length: 19 minutes (4,800 words)

Martin Bashir Inquiry: Diana, the Reporter and the BBC

“Like Lord Dyson, we have also seen internal BBC documents that not only show Bashir repeatedly lied, but also acknowledge that there was a serious breach of journalistic ethics and BBC rules.”

Author: John Ware
Source: BBC
Published: May 20, 2021
Length: 27 minutes (6,885 words)

There I Almost Am

“I can be a very generous sister—maternal, even—as long as I am winning.” Jean Garnett writes about envy and being a twin.

Source: The Yale Review
Published: May 19, 2021
Length: 19 minutes (4,933 words)

My Bizarre Reign as New York’s King of “Virgin Russian Hair”

“It was an irony that blonds for once — at least poor Slavic blonds — were the exploited, and not the exploiters. For someone like me, who had grown up in India, a place colonized and plundered by Europeans, this fact felt empowering in a way. Surely, it felt wrong too, sacrilegious even, but the writer in me was fascinated by the guilty pleasure of selling the very embodiment of whiteness: blond hair. This internal idea that I was embarking on an ambitious literary experiment made it easier to dispense with the ambiguous moral aspects of the venture.”

Source: Narratively
Published: May 13, 2021
Length: 20 minutes (5,167 words)

The Shot-in-the-Eye Squad

“As Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation, the rubber bullets and tear gas canisters started to fly. This epidemic of “blinding by police” inspired our unlikely network of survivors.”

Author: Wil Sands
Source: Narratively
Published: May 20, 2021

What My Korean Father Taught Me About Defending Myself in America

“And he said something I would never forget. ‘The best fighter in tae kwon do never fights,’ he said. ‘He always finds another way.”

Source: GQ
Published: May 14, 2021
Length: 14 minutes (3,680 words)

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

“One man’s quest to find his son lays bare the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli rule.”

Published: Mar 19, 2021
Length: 82 minutes (20,500 words)

Selfies, Surgeries And Self-Loathing: Inside The Facetune Epidemic

“We’ve been sinking deeper into this reality for a while now, but it has accelerated during the pandemic, when we’ve spent more time than ever on social media, and when our digital selves have for so long been the only version anyone has seen of us. The result is a body dysmorphia epidemic with increasingly unattainable beauty standards that — at the extremes — defy basic human physiology.”

Source: HuffPost
Published: May 20, 2021
Length: 28 minutes (7,182 words)

How Corporations Buy—and Sell—Food Made with Prison Labor

“The notion of work as punishment has enabled prison administrators to compel incarcerated people to work on farms and in dairies for low or no pay and without basic labor protections, sometimes in service of secretive billionaires they’ll never meet.”

Source: The Counter
Published: May 18, 2021
Length: 15 minutes (3,810 words)

The Ugly War Over Bob Ross’s Ghost

“For decades, Bob Ross has been a soothing presence in a world gone mad. But the real story behind the painter’s life, and especially his afterlife, reveals just as much madness.”

Source: The Daily Beast
Published: May 17, 2021
Length: 44 minutes (11,000 words)