Amazon’s Last Mile

Who delivers Amazon orders? Increasingly, it’s plainclothes contractors with few labor protections, driving their own cars, competing for shifts on the company’s own Uber-like platform.

Source: Gizmodo
Published: Nov 16, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,332 words)

Kate’s Still Here

In an incredibly moving feature, journalist Libby Copeland spends time with a couple in their 60s, Kate and Deloy Oberlin, as they very consciously prepare for Kate’s death from metastatic breast cancer, and again in the aftermath of her passing. Deloy honors his wife’s wishes that once she’s gone, for three days while her body is chilled with dry ice and frozen water bottles, a gathering his held where family and friends can visit with her body. Afterward, also per her wishes, he delivers her body to a site where it is composted as part of a study in “green” burial.

Source: Esquire
Published: Nov 14, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,723 words)

When Will the Earth Try to Kill Us Again?

Soon, according to some geoscientists, and death will come not from asteroids but lava flows.

Author: Howard Lee
Source: Ars Technica
Published: Nov 9, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,387 words)

McMansion, USA

How the emblem of mainstream economic success came to represent the fragility of 21st-century consumer culture.

Source: Jacobin
Published: Nov 9, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,891 words)

The Afterlife of a Memoir

Novelist Aminatta Forna writes about the lingering effects, fourteen years later, of having written a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, about the political hanging of her father in Sierra Leone.

Published: Nov 13, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,371 words)

Finally Seeing the Forest for the Trees

A personal essay in which, after a spate of trauma and loss, Maura Kelly retreats to the woods of the Hudson Valley. There, she is converted into “a nature person.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 15, 2017
Length: 14 minutes (3,727 words)

Out Came the Girls

To find belonging, teen girls sometimes form obsessive friendships to fend off the isolation that puberty brings at the twilight of their childhood. In this exceptionally well-researched piece, Alex Mar recalls two real-life events in which teen-girl duos became murderous and why these obsessive friendships devolved into a pact to do evil.

Author: Alex Mar
Source: VQR
Published: Sep 22, 2017
Length: 38 minutes (9,522 words)

Regular, Degular, Shmegular Girl From the Bronx

Writer Allison P. Davis profiles New York hip-hop artist Cardi B., whose summer anthem “Bodak Yellow” unseated Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” for the number one spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Cardi B. became the first female rapper with a number one pop solo hit since Lauryn Hill in 1998.

Published: Nov 13, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,773 words)

Who Wins When a City Gets Smart?

Poor public transportation is linked with poor health, from increased anxiety to prenatal conditions. The Smart City Challenge granted Columbus, Ohio $50 million to improve mobility to improve vulnerable residents’ quality of life. Columbus is the fastest-growing metro area in the Midwest, yet it has neighborhoods with high unemployment, above average infant mortality and many single mother households with few cars. So will the city’s new developments help low-income residents access services and the booming economy, or is it just more empty rhetoric?

Source: CityLab
Published: Nov 1, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,198 words)

Love’s Road Home

A wedding day postscript to Chivers’ Pulitzer winning story about Sam Siatta, a Marine Corps veteran of the war in Afghanistan who returned home with PTSD and landed in prison after committing a crime he says he doesn’t remember.

Published: Nov 10, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,425 words)