From Prison to Ph.D.: The Redemption and Rejection of Michelle Jones

A feature, produced in a collaboration between The New York Times and The Marshall Project, about Harvard University’s eleventh-hour flip-flop on its acceptance of ex-convict Michelle Jones to its doctoral program in history. Jones, who spent more than two decades in prison for the murder of her four-year-old son, conceived non-consensually when she was 14, became a stellar academic and published scholar of American History while incarcerated. She was set to attend Harvard this fall, but after her acceptance, two professors questioned whether she had adequately portrayed her crime in her application — something that was not required. Jones will be attending NYU instead.

Author: Eli Hager
Published: Sep 13, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,522 words)

Hillary Clinton Looks Back in Anger

David Remnick’s ranging profile of Hillary Clinton, who has borne many titles: First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, Democratic Presidential candidate — the first woman to win a major party’s nomination — and author. Remnick interviews Clinton — and other players, both off-the-record and on — on the occasion of the publication of What Happened, her memoir of winning the popular vote but losing the more crucial electoral one to a crass, bigoted reality TV star.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 13, 2017
Length: 31 minutes (7,830 words)

For the National Parks, a Reckoning

When it was established in 1916, the National Parks Service was meant to provide natural attractions to visitors. But in the 1960s, A. Starker Leopold wrote a report that would change the future of the parks, transforming it from a tourist hub to a leading agency for ecosystem science. Today, park rangers are the first responders to the effects of climate change, tasked with preserving a wilderness that is “no longer behaving like it’s supposed to.”

Source: Undark
Published: Sep 13, 2017
Length: 24 minutes (6,000 words)

How Condé Nast Put the Squeeze on New Yorker Cartoonists

When Bob Mankoff retired from the New Yorker after twenty years as the Cartoon Editor, he left behind one of most successful new media models of the era: The Cartoon Bank. It was a database he founded in 1992 and ran from an apartment in Yonkers, and it helped cartoonists license their work for thousands of dollars a month. But when Condé Nast bough the Bank from Mankoff in 1997, the money began to dry up and the model began to fail.

Source: Paste Magazine
Published: Sep 6, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,800 words)

Undercover In Temp Nation

While the owners of Fiera Foods in Ontario, Canada get rich, the temporary workers who make its pastry dough do so in tight quarters, get paid in cash, have to ask to use the dirty bathroom, and risk their lives. After one young woman died on the job there, Toronto Star reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh worked undercover at the factory to tell the story of those still working the line in an exploitive economy.

Source: Toronto Star
Published: Sep 8, 2017
Length: 26 minutes (6,601 words)

The Case Against Civilization

Hunter-gatherers seems so primitive to modern human beings, especially as we read about them on our smart phones while waiting for the subway and eating a microwaved breakfast sandwich. But what if agriculture gave us more problems than progress?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 18, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,953 words)

Seven Days of Heroin

The Cincinnati Enquirer sends 60 reporters, photographers, and videographers into their communities to chronicle an ordinary week at the height of the heroin epidemic in Ohio and Kentucky.

Published: Sep 10, 2017
Length: 36 minutes (9,000 words)

Donald Trump Slept Here — And So Did I: A Visit to a Presidential Home in Queens

We don’t know where the world is headed, but we know where part of its problems began: in the bedroom on the second floor of a Tudor in Queens where Donald Trump was probably conceived. Now an Airbnb, one Newsweek reporter spends the night there to help understand… well, everything.

Source: Newsweek
Published: Sep 8, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,364 words)

Punk Poet Eileen Myles on Combating Trump, Capitalism With Art

A profile of punk poet Eileen Myles, who has a new memoir out, Afterglow, and whose first autobiographical novel, Cool for You, has recently been re-released with an introduction by I Love Dick author Chris Kraus.

Myles (who prefers gender-neutral pronouns) has been publishing since the 70s, but has lately been experiencing a new wave of popularity, and gathering new young fans, because of their Twitter presence, and also because of the character inspired by them on Transparent. Myles speaks with interviewer Helena Fitzgerald about the importance of poetry and art as forms of resistance right now, under the current U.S. presidential administration.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Sep 11, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,320 words)

Raising Brown Boys in Post-9/11 America

A personal essay in which half-Dutch, half-Pakistani author Sorayya Khan recalls racist threats to her young sons after the 2001 attacks, and worries about them as young men living in ‘Trumpistan.’

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 11, 2017
Length: 23 minutes (5,871 words)