Public Banking Goes to Pot

Traditional banks won’t deal with money from California’s $7 billion legal weed industry, so some people in Oakland are rallying to create the first new public bank in a century. So what’s a public bank exactly?

Published: Apr 19, 2017
Length: 6 minutes (1,518 words)

The Trouble with Innocence

For nearly 40 years, Kerry Max Cook fought to clear his name after being wrongfully convicted in a murder case. So why did he ask for his conviction back? Michael Hall reports on what happened to an innocent man after spending years in prison.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Mar 16, 2017
Length: 54 minutes (13,748 words)

My Life As a Failed Artist

Jerry Saltz, New York‘s senior art critic, revisits his own short career as a Dante-obsessed artist in late-seventies Chicago.

Source: www.vulture.com
Published: Apr 17, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,391 words)

Going the Right Way

When the daughter of two Indian immigrants moves from the US to India, she perplexes many people, and she inhabits a gap between the Indian residents who know their culture but want out, and those who want to connect with their roots.

Author: Kanan Gole
Source: The Smart Set
Published: Feb 15, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,825 words)

‘The Ocean Is Boiling’: The Complete Oral History of the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill

On January 28th, 1969, crude oil erupted from a rig off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, triggering a worldwide alarm that energized the nascent environmental movement.

Published: Apr 18, 2017
Length: 32 minutes (8,030 words)

The Top 25 Food Moments From “Seinfeld”

Food — from the infamous chocolate babka to the “big salad” — figures heavily in the popular ’90s sitcom, Seinfeld. Eater offers 25 Seinfeld food “favorites, ranked based on their influence on pop culture, accuracy at mirroring real life, and overall hilarity.”

Source: Eater
Published: Apr 17, 2017
Length: 8 minutes (2,004 words)

The Currency of Cars: How to Leave a Husband

A rickety ’98 Volvo wagon doesn’t look like much, but it provides Debbie Weingarten and her children safe passage to a new life.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 18, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,609 words)

Coretta Scott King Kept Her Husband’s Spirit Alive

How racist tensions and discrimination in Memphis, Tennessee, created the environment in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and how Coretta Scott King’s “courage, dignity, and poise” in the face of horrific tragedy fuelled the Civil Rights Movement.

Author: Alexis Coe
Source: Lenny
Published: Apr 12, 2017
Length: 6 minutes (1,520 words)

The Fourteen Who Forgot

After overdosing, some opioid addicts are losing their memory and nobody really knows why. All doctors know is that each patient’s hippocampus — the area of the brain responsible for memory — becomes severely damaged. Are the opioids laced with an unknown toxin that targets the hippocampus? Does reduced respiration caused by opioid overdose damage the hippocampus?

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Apr 15, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,381 words)

The Blood of the Crab

Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel — biomedical companies bleed 500,000 of them every year. Can this creature that’s been around since the dinosaurs be saved?

Published: Apr 13, 2017
Length: 14 minutes (3,555 words)