Pilgrim at Tinder Creek

Life as an audition: the job market, the dating market, and the way we construct ourselves to impress.

Author: Andrew Kay
Source: The Point
Published: May 8, 2017
Length: 41 minutes (10,466 words)

Fighting With Their Fists to Put a Period in a Basket

“Hockey has no reason for being. Rather, hockey’s one of those things that give reason to being.”

Source: n+1
Published: May 5, 2017
Length: 16 minutes (4,055 words)

How The Whitest Singer Of The ’70s Became An Icon In The Philippines

Karen Tongson — named after the ’70s soft rock music icon Karen Carpenter — immigrated to the United States from the Philippines soon after Karen Carpenter died in 1983, at age 32. As she returns to the country of her birth, Karen examines what fuels the Carpenters’ huge continuing popularity in her home country and how their music has had affected her life.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: May 9, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,606 words)

Walk the Lines

From Iain Sinclair to Lauren Elkin and W. G. Sebald, the meditative stroll, based on the dérive or ‘drift,’ is a popular literary form in England. When one young writer considers his own stroll, he maneuvers through the form’s past, present and future.

Author: Will Wiles
Source: Aeon
Published: Apr 12, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,300 words)

How the Aztecs Predicted the Apocalypse

But then it didn’t happen. Or did it?

Author: Sam Kriss
Source: The Outline
Published: May 8, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,447 words)

Forum: Poets and Borders Part Two

In response to the President’s proposed wall along the Mexican-American border, poets from all over the world are having an extended conversation about the ways their identities, style and influences cross borders, about living along physical borders, and how poetry knows no bounds. You can read the forum’s first part here.

Published: May 6, 2017
Length: 33 minutes (8,309 words)

The Queen Bee of Downtown Durham

A profile of fifth-generation beekeeper Leigh-Kathryn Bonner, whose startup, Bee Downtown has 100 sponsored hives on the roofs of old tobacco warehouses in Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The hives house thousands of bees who do their part to pollinate the cucumber, apple, and berry crops that are staples of North Carolina’s economy. Bonner is not only helping the local economy and the environment, she’s bucking convention in the traditionally male-dominated apiary industry.

Published: May 9, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,324 words)

An Incomplete List of My Failures

In this installment of Mouthful — a monthly column at Hazlitt about the author’s relationship with food, ten years into recovery from anorexia and bulimia — Sarah Gerard examines failure. She recounts failing a stranger, a failed project, and her failed marriage and considers how these experiences have affected her outlook on life and her ongoing recovery.

Source: Hazlitt
Published: Apr 27, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,536 words)

Rules of Ascent

For mountaineers, it’s not enough to get to the top – it must be done a certain way. But why is the harder way better?

Author: Paul Sagar
Source: Aeon
Published: May 8, 2017
Length: 14 minutes (3,540 words)

Palm Beach Van Dyck

A “willingness to flout the laws of space and time” help painter Ralph Cowan form relationships with the kind of people who will pay for a portrait of themselves with a lion, at the mast of a ship, or gliding through a Venetian dreamscape.

Source: Oxford American
Published: May 2, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,781 words)