Every Parent Wants to Protect Their Child. I Never Got the Chance.

In a heartbreaking reported essay, Jen Gann writes about raising a son who suffers from incurable cystic fibrosis that will likely lead to his early death, the midwife practice that neglected to warn her that she and her husband were carriers, and the likelihood that she and her husband would have chosen to terminate the pregnancy if they had warned her.

Author: Jen Gann
Published: Nov 26, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,813 words)

Why a Generation in Japan Is Facing a Lonely Death

With a population of 127 million, Japan has the most rapidly aging society on the planet. Elderly individuals often live in extreme isolation, albeit only a few feet from neighbors on all sides, “trapped in a demographic crucible of increasing age and declining births.” Their fate? A “lonely death” where their body may remain undiscovered in their small government apartment for days (or even years) because family is distant both physically and emotionally, and friends have all long since passed away.

Published: Nov 30, 2017
Length: 29 minutes (7,455 words)

Black American Princess in Training

In this warm and lighthearted personal essay (and excerpt from a forthcoming memoir), writer Glynn Pogue recalls the moment in her pre-teen years that she found comfort and belonging with a group of girls in black, upper middle class Brooklyn.

Published: Nov 16, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,959 words)

The Recruiters: Searching For The Next Generation Of Warfighters In A Divided America

Ride along with members of the U.S. Army’s Mid-Atlantic Recruiting Battalion to see the frontlines of recruitment, in person and on social media, and how the military is working to eliminate unethical recruiting practices.

Source: Task & Purpose
Published: Nov 28, 2017
Length: 40 minutes (10,051 words)

To Give a Name To It

Navneet Alang weaves together the story of an ex, his Sikh-Canadian family’s Christmas traditions, and the history of Punjab together to explain why baby names can mean so much, even if they’re just hypothetical.

Source: Hazlitt
Published: Nov 27, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,529 words)

Jay-Z and Dean Baquet

Hip hop artist and activist Jay-Z sits down with Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, for a wide-ranging conversation about O.J. Simpson, therapy, race, misogyny, and sexuality, with annotations by Times culture writers Reggie Ugwu and Wesley Morris.

Published: Nov 29, 2017
Length: 29 minutes (7,355 words)

Where Millennials Come From

Millennials have been blamed for destroying the world they were born into, killing entire industries simply because they can. They don’t consume like the generation before because they don’t make money like their parents did. But this isn’t because they’re lazy and irresponsible. Rather, as the most productive generation, the more millennials give, the more the world takes.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 28, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,800 words)

Forgiving the Unforgivable: Geronimo’s Descendants Seek to Salve Generational Trauma

After generations of resistance and trauma, the descendants of Geronimo, an important leader of the Chiricahua Apache, travel to Mexico to perform a ceremony of forgiveness. But it’s difficult to forgive a nation that built itself on genocide.

Source: LitHub
Published: Nov 20, 2017
Length: 26 minutes (6,705 words)

Trapped: The Grenfell Tower Story

The untold story of what it felt like to fight that fire and to flee it — a story of a thousand impossible decisions and the people who dared to make them.

Author: Tom Lamont
Source: GQ
Published: Nov 28, 2017
Length: 28 minutes (7,010 words)

How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire

Some people never leave college behind; the philosophies you develop as an undergrad can stay with you a lifetime. For Peter Thiel, that means checking on periodically on his 30-year-old love child, The Stanford Review, to make sure the magazine he founded still has an independent streak of disrupting the status quo of campus ideologies.

Published: Nov 27, 2017
Length: 22 minutes (5,500 words)