What Happens If a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off in Manhattan?

Researcher William Kennedy, who along with Andrew Cooks, is mining data from past tragedies such as the 1917 Halifax Explosion, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina to run computer simulations studying how humans would respond after a nuclear attack on Manhattan, New York.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 15, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,710 words)

Into The Woods: How One Man Survived Alone in the Wilderness For 27 years

An excerpt from The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit — Michael Finkel’s book on Christopher Knight, the man who simply walked away from the modern world into the woods of rural Maine in 1986 — without any real plan for survival. Living alone for 27 years in a makeshift camp, Knight survived by stealing food, clothes, and provisions from neighboring camps and cabins. Knight committed over 1,000 break-ins during his self-imposed exile — stymying law enforcement and homeowners alike for nearly three decades.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Mar 15, 2017
Length: 16 minutes (4,022 words)

A Town Under Trial

What an unsolved double murder in Kentucky reveals about America’s military-industrial complex.

Author: Nick Tabor
Source: Oxford American
Published: Mar 2, 2017
Length: 57 minutes (14,490 words)

In Praise of Cash

Cash might be grungy, unfashionable and corruptible, but it is still a great public good, important for rich and poor alike.

Source: Aeon
Published: Mar 1, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,700 words)

Choose Your Own Rachel Cusk

A profile of feminist author–memoirist, novelist–Rachel Cusk, and the many contradictions contained within her, and her writing.

Published: Mar 14, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,312 words)

The Stubborn Optimist

A profile of late author and activist Grace Paley, and her perseverance in fighting uphill political battles, on the page and in real life.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 14, 2017
Length: 8 minutes (2,018 words)

My Week at Sea with Canada’s Alt-Right

If its sounds like a nightmare to be stuck on a boat full of followers of Canada’s conservative media provocateur and Breitbart acolyte Ezra Levant, well, you’re in luck: one liberal writer took that trip so you won’t have to.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Mar 10, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,824 words)

Internet Warriors: Inside the Dark World of Online ‘Trolls’

Three years ago, filmmaker Kyrre Lien became curious about what drives people to make hateful comments online. He pored over 200 online profiles and traveled the world to interview internet trolls in person to uncover why they say the things they do. The results are fascinating and terrifying at the same time.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Mar 10, 2017
Length: 6 minutes (1,575 words)

A Conversation With Ariel Levy About Writing a Memoir That Avoids ‘Invoking Emotional Tropes’

So let’s talk about your realization, or your narrative persona’s realization, through the course of the book, that the rules do apply. They do apply, although—

Well only one: nature, mortality, age, the body. There is that: nobody gets out alive. Like, that. Part of that is your fertility: your fertility will expire, particularly if you’re female; your body will deteriorate, you will age. That is never going to change, that’s life as a human animal. And I think that that’s one of the things that it means to be a grown-up is to slowly, slowly realize that. Remember when you’re a little kid and you’re like, “Yyyyeeeah, I’m actually not gonna die”?

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 14, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,391 words)

Outsmarted

A fantastic essay by Rick Perlstein, on the cult of “smart” in America and how it distorted the ideals of our democracy. “Even as we moderns spend enormous amounts of our conscious energy making evaluations about who is sophisticated and who is simple, who is well-bred and who is arriviste, and who is smart and who is dumb, these are entirely irrelevant to the only question that ends up mattering: who is decent and who is cruel.”

Source: The Baffler
Published: Mar 6, 2017
Length: 20 minutes (5,168 words)