How Astrology Took Over The Internet

Astrology has been around since before Jesus Christ, but thanks to platforms like Twitter and Snapchat, it’s taking a new form online.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Sep 6, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,883 words)

How the Meat Industry Thinks About Non-Meat-Eaters

The Atlantic talks to the editor of a meat industry trade publication about American meat production and publishing for a niche reader.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 31, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,498 words)

Weighing Justice With a Jury of Her ‘Peers’

While serving as foreperson on a grand jury in Alabama, Susana Morris confronts power and privilege in the criminal justice system.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 8, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,997 words)

The Japanese Origins of Modern Fine Dining

How kaiseki — Japan’s formal dining tradition — became a major (though often unacknowledged) influence on modern haute cuisine.

Source: Eater
Published: Sep 7, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,977 words)

The Resegregation of Jefferson County

Gardendale, Alabama’s attempt to secede from its school district shows that despite the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, there are still white communities organizing to keep their schools segregated.

Published: Sep 6, 2017
Length: 37 minutes (9,279 words)

The First White President

In his latest for the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates posits that white identity politics forms the foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 7, 2017
Length: 32 minutes (8,086 words)

What Happens When a Science Fiction Genius Starts Blogging?

After giving up writing fiction at age 87, fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin has started a blog. Internet citizens may want to know: does she write about her cat, Pard? Why yes, yes she does — while examining the human condition, of course.

Published: Sep 7, 2017
Length: 6 minutes (1,734 words)

How Jackson Hole Survived the Eclipse

Two years before the total solar eclipse, a professor warned Jackson Hole that their position within the path of totality would flood the town with thousands of eclipse-chasers, and that the town was unprepared. Here’s what happened next.

Source: Outside
Published: Aug 30, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,190 words)

Forrest the Butcher: Memphis Wants to Remove a Statue Honoring First Grand Wizard of the KKK

The City Council of Memphis, a majority black city that is the 25th largest in the US, wants to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. But the Tennessee legislature requires a governor-appointed commission to approve all changes to military and historical monuments throughout the state. Last year, the commission denied the city’s request to remove the monument to Forrest, who made a living in the slave trade and led a massacre of black Union soldiers during the Civil War.

Source: The Intercept
Published: Sep 2, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,401 words)

Peak Peaks

Twin Peaks: The Return is a show that clearly aimed to render weekly recaps impossible. That didn’t stop Sarah Nicole Prickett, whose Artforum mini-essays — now collected into one mammoth post — also challenge what it means to write about a TV show as it airs.

Source: Artforum
Published: Sep 2, 2017
Length: 91 minutes (22,976 words)