Lost and Found

Robert Sanchez profiles members of NecroSearch, a Colorado-based volunteer organization made up of dedicated lab experts, scientists, and skilled technicians. NecroSearchers apply decades of specialized experience to help law enforcement officers locate dead bodies. Their reward? Bringing closure to the families of the deceased.

Source: 5280 Magazine
Published: Nov 1, 2017
Length: 20 minutes (5,206 words)

The Long Goodbye

One writer follows the trail of venerated poet Frank Stanford, searching his origins and papers to better understand Stanford’s dense work, one of a kid poetry, and separate fact from mythology.

Published: Jan 18, 2008
Length: 25 minutes (6,439 words)

Jean Rhys Had to Leave Her Home to Truly See It

The author of Wide Sargasso Sea was an eternal exile, but that otherness, and the Caribbean, deeply influenced her writing.

Source: LitHub
Published: Oct 26, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,962 words)

Language Acquisition

A personal essay in which author Diana Spechler recalls fleeing her life in New York City for a new one with a painter in his village in central Mexico.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 27, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,875 words)

What Would Sarah Polley Do?

Anna Silman profiles actor and director Sarah Polley, on the occasion of the premiere of her Netflix miniseries, “Alias Grace,” an adaptation of a 1996 novel by Margaret Atwood.

Published: Oct 26, 2017
Length: 16 minutes (4,020 words)

‘Reality Shrivels. This Is Your Life Now’: 88 Days Trapped in Bed to Save a Pregnancy

When Katherine Heiny’s water broke during her 26th week of pregnancy, her doctor told her that in order to save her baby she would have to be almost totally immobilized  “in Trendelenburg,” an aggressive form of bed rest in which her legs were raised above her head. She remained on bed rest for 88 days and found comfort reading the memoir of Steve Callahan, a sailor who survived adrift at sea for 74 days.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Oct 24, 2017
Length: 20 minutes (5,000 words)

How Does It Feel? An Alternative American History, Told With Folk Music

On Guthrie, Robeson, Seeger, Lomax, Dylan, the Red Scare, the fall of labor, and what folk music had to do with it. An excerpt from Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 25, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,937 words)

Pushing the Limit

How the U.S. Olympic Committee inadequately addresses sexual abuse in youth athletics, and what that tells us about how institutions enable predators.

Published: Oct 20, 2017
Length: 26 minutes (6,591 words)

Boko Haram Strapped Suicide Bombs to Them. Somehow These Teenage Girls Survived.

The New York Times interviewed 18 teen girls — all of whom were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria to become suicide bombers for their cause. Unwilling to hurt and kill innocents, these girls — some as young as 13 years old — bravely defied the militants and sought help from citizens and soldiers alike to remove the bombs strapped to their bodies before anyone could be harmed.

Published: Oct 25, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,105 words)

A Bakery in a War Zone

War has killed 10,000 people in Ukraine since 2014, but in a culture where bread is life, the loaves and sweet buns keep rolling out of this bakery on the front lines.

Author: Lily Hyde
Published: Oct 6, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,318 words)