American Pimps

Many NFL players are recognizing that their sports careers are lies, because the owners don’t care about players’ health or longevity, or validate their identity as black men in America. Seeing American professional football through the lens of the pimp game makes clear the power, exploitation, collusion and immorality at the heart of a business that treats players like property and gaslights the viewer.

Source: The Baffler
Published: Nov 22, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,718 words)

A Movement Against the Melting Pot

Inspired by the idea that the “most supportive places to grow old remind people of where they’re from,” some directors of elder care centers are trying to offer aging immigrants a warmer, more culturally-specific feeling of home.

Published: Dec 12, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,300 words)

Generation Screwed

Take an epic journey through the broken safety net, compounded student debt, contracted jobs, zoning, the end of homeownership, and the hollowing out of retirement, all of which have crashed together to create an untenable present and an uncertain future for the millennial generation, which is faced with a crisis of daily living not seen since the Great Depression.

Published: Dec 14, 2017
Length: 36 minutes (9,000 words)

Portugal’s Radical Drugs Policy Is Working. Why Hasn’t the World Copied It?

Portugal’s drug epidemic started in the 1980s, and HIV and overdoses skyrocketed. After decriminalizing all substances in 2001, the country started focusing on harm-reduction instead of punishment, but it was cultural shifts that truly improved the country’s situation. Is Portugal’s success too culturally bound to work elsewhere?

Source: The Guardian
Published: Dec 5, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,840 words)

The Human Cost of the Ghost Economy

A reported personal essay in which Melissa Chadburn writes about her work, under cover, as a temp, and considers the effects of temporary employment on those who have limited power and little choice but to work for low wages with no job security. With support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 13, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,090 words)

Spies, Dossiers, and the Insane Lengths Restaurants Go to Track and Influence Food Critics

When a glowing review can catapult a restaurant into stardom and a bad one can spell its doom, owners increasingly resort to a mainstay of political campaigns: opposition research.

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Dec 6, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,413 words)

This Moment Isn’t (Just) About Sex. It’s Really About Work.

Rebecca Traister looks below the surface of this moment in which so much sexual misconduct has been coming to light, and finds at the root of it troubling, longstanding, gender-based workplace power dynamics.

Published: Dec 10, 2017
Length: 16 minutes (4,242 words)

My Editor Was Black

Debut author Naima Coster writes about her experience working with African American editor Morgan Parker on her first novel, Halsey Street, and also touches on the whiteness of publishing, and literary self-determination.

Source: Catapult
Published: Dec 11, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,359 words)

The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster

Climate change is real, but the Paris Climate Agreement’s goals for keeping global tempurature from rising 2°C relies on a dubious greenhouse gas mitigation technology called BECCS.

Source: Wired
Published: Dec 10, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,951 words)

Cat Person

[Fiction] A young woman goes on a bad date with an older man.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 4, 2017
Length: 28 minutes (7,200 words)