How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

Companies like Nestlé and PepsiCo are aggressively marketing their processed food products in developing nations like Brazil and India. The result: a global epidemic of obesity-related illnesses, where instead of malnutrition and hunger, more people are now obese than underweight.

Published: Sep 16, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,553 words)

Writing the Monsignor

A personal Essay in which young adult author Mary O’Connell reflects on her early writing endeavors, with a local priest’s scandals and her own questioning of faith as her “material.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 18, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,609 words)

Dirty Laundry: An Investigation

After a six-month investigation, Annie Hylton uncovers third-world working conditions and rampant sexual harassment at industrial laundry facilities serving Manhattan hospitals, hotels, and restaurants. Workers — who went without health and safety training — routinely handled linens contaminated by human blood, urine, vomit, and feces. When workers weren’t dealing directly in others’ sh*t, they were forced to endure it. One manager routinely preyed on migrant women workers who had little English and less recourse; women were subject to unwanted touching and lewd suggestions. And after they finally stood up to complain? Retaliation, of course, in the form of reduced hours and more strenuous duties.

Source: Dissent
Published: Jun 21, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,715 words)

The Accidental Mountaineer

Seeking solace and transformation after multiple traumas, Los Angelean Ana Beatriz Cholo started mountain-climbing and set her sights on Denali, North America’s highest peak.

Published: Sep 8, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,027 words)

How a Tax Haven is Leading the Race to Privatize Space

Luxembourg is a small but savvy nation. With few natural resources — besides a long line of grand dukes, a legacy of skirting tax loopholes, and a valuable national sovereignty — the country has looked to the stars for its next big venture: asteroid mining. The only problem? The 1967 Outer Space Treat explicitly prohibits countries from claiming ownership of any object in space, including asteroids.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Sep 15, 2017
Length: 21 minutes (5,300 words)

How Motherhood Affects Creativity

Despite the very American idea that the artistic impulse and the parenting impulse are fundamentally opposed, writer and mother Erika Hayasaki looks at science and mothers’ experience for the truth: That becoming a mother makes many women more, not less, creative.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 13, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,686 words)

Taking Up Smoking at the End of the World

A personal essay in which John Sherman makes a case for picking up a cigarette habit in his late 20s, despite everything he was ever taught about them.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 15, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,250 words)

A Universe of Print: Inside the Last Days of Parkett

From commissioning limited edition prints to designing issues so their spines combined to create a single image, for thirty-three years this bilingual arts journal aimed to engage and shape arts culture in a more active way than most magazines.

Source: Village Voice
Published: Aug 29, 2017
Length: 8 minutes (2,052 words)

Summer in the Heartsick Mountains

This sweet and lyrical read will make you fall in love with fireflies and think much harder about how we are everyday chipping away at the world that made us.

Source: Jezebel
Published: Sep 14, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,322 words)

Deep Six: Jamele Hill and the Fight for the Future of ESPN

Bryan Curtis profiles Jamele Hill, the ESPN Sportscenter host under fire on Twitter, and from the White House, for calling President Donald Trump a white supremacist.

Source: The Ringer
Published: Sep 13, 2017
Length: 22 minutes (5,600 words)