Wrestling with Demons: The Story of Chyna’s Final Days

Joanie “Chyna” Laurer changed American professional wrestling. She was the first woman to combat men in the WWE, she won multiple championships, and helped women who struggled with body image by challenging America’s perception of female beauty. But she struggled, and her legacy risks being that of a reality show actress and Hollywood casualty.

Source: Broadly
Published: Feb 2, 2017
Length: 24 minutes (6,206 words)

Here Be Dragons: Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World

Maps are how we orient ourselves, and how we donate a place’s value — and by extension, the value of that place’s inhabitance. What does that means for the place still left un-mapped?

Source: VQR
Published: Jan 2, 2017
Length: 23 minutes (5,925 words)

High-Pressure Parenting

Parents spend far more time with their kids compared to previous generations. Are they driven by the pleasures of “quality time,” or by class anxiety?

Author: Ryan Avent
Source: 1843
Published: Jan 24, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,773 words)

The Makeover Trap

Contemporary culture is obsessed with makeovers — of bodies, homes, even entire neighborhoods. But this quest for transformative authenticity often has a dark side.

Source: Aeon
Published: Jan 24, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,800 words)

Portrait of the Artist as a Debut Novelist

An essay by Iranian-American novelist Porochista Khakpour (excerpted from Scratch: Writers, Money and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin) about the challenges of surviving financially in her early years as a writer. Her struggle was compounded by being a writer of color with an unusual name, from a country whose president was at odds with the U.S., and having to deal with clueless Americans attending her readings.

Source: LitHub
Published: Jan 27, 2017
Length: 13 minutes (3,488 words)

Reading Malcolm X in Texas

When Khirad Siddiqui began wearing a hijab at age 13 as a young woman in Texas seven years ago, she found “affirmation and reassurance” in the writings of Malcolm X, an American muslim who too felt that his “peers failed to understand him as a complete and multifaceted human being.”

Published: Feb 2, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,840 words)

America’s New Opposition

From Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, the left has been reborn. Can it find a way to harness the populist uprising that brought Trump to power?

Published: Feb 1, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,785 words)

The Misunderstood Genius of Russell Westbrook

Sam Anderson of the New York Times Magazine reports on Russell Westbrook, the Oklahoma City Thunder guard and the best player in the NBA. What’s extraordinary about this piece isn’t just Anderson’s insight (he wrote about the Thunder for the NYTM in 2012), or how his vivid descriptions of the utter ferocity and skill with which Westbrook plays—it’s that Anderson was likely allowed 10 or so minutes to spend actually interviewing Westbrook, a famously taciturn subject. The piece is a marvel of observational reporting.

Published: Feb 1, 2017
Length: 30 minutes (7,664 words)

Little Things

“Why should it be so fulfilling to see the detritus of everyday life made small?” Alice Gregory explores the world of miniatures.

Published: Feb 1, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,146 words)

The Hi-Tech War on Science Fraud

A team of researchers at Tilburg University’s Meta-Research Center in the Netherlands focuses full time on detecting misconduct and fabricated data in science.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Feb 1, 2017
Length: 22 minutes (5,529 words)