A Photographic Chronicle of America’s Working Poor

Writing Dale Maharidge and photographer Matt Black traveled through Maine, Ohio, and California for this piece updating the landmark study of the American working poor, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men.

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Dec 15, 2016
Length: 22 minutes (5,590 words)

Off Our Butts: How Smoking Bans Extinguish Solidarity

An impassioned essay on ways anti-smoking legislation is, and always has been, about social control — bans that target and dehumanize the poor in the name of public health.

Source: The Baffler
Published: Dec 15, 2016
Length: 11 minutes (2,836 words)

The Garden of Refugees

The story of Eh Kaw Htoo, a Karen refugee from Myanmar — a man who “extolled the redneck’s work ethic” — helping to build a community of 150 Karens who sustain one another by living frugally and sharing the bounty of the land in the rural community of Comer, Georgia.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Jan 30, 2017
Length: 8 minutes (2,222 words)

How Black Books Lit My Way Along The Appalachian Trail

Eritrean-American essayist and short story writer Rahawa Haile writes about hiking the Appalachian Trail and traveling through trail towns as a black woman alone. She brings along books by black authors and leaves them behind for others to find at shelters along the way. In keeping with her 2015 Short Story of the Day effort to garner exposure for underrepresented writers, she writes, “This year, I created a library of black excellence along the Appalachian Trail.”

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Feb 2, 2017
Length: 8 minutes (2,159 words)

The Tiny-House Revolution Goes Huge

To understand the tiny house movement, Mark Sundeen attends its big annual gathering—the National Tiny House Jamboree in Colorado Springs—to learn from its luminaries.

Published: Dec 26, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,732 words)

How a stressed woman found solace through looking at birds

In this interview, author Kyo Maclear talks of birds and bird-watching as an “ode to the beauty of smallness, of quiet, of seeing the unique in the ordinary,” “in an age in which bombastic noise often triumphs over quiet contemplation.”

Source: Maclean’s
Published: Jan 22, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,637 words)

Why Grandpa is Homeless

On the aging homeless population of California and how something seemingly innocuous — like forgetting to renew your driver’s licence on time — can instigate a downward spiral into poverty and homelessness that skyrocketing rent and street-inflicted trauma can extend — sometimes indefinitely.

Published: Jan 9, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,799 words)

M.I.A.

In 1968, an American soldier named John Hartley Robertson disappeared in the jungles of Laos after his helicopter was shot down. His body was never found—until 2008, when a Christian missionary discovered a man in Vietnam who claimed to be Robertson.

Source: The Atavist
Published: Jan 26, 2017
Length: 36 minutes (9,200 words)

Where Europe Begins?

In our era of increasing geopolitical tensions between Europe, Russia and the US, one journalist is traveling the hazy, disputed border between Europe and Asia, searching for clues about where one ends and the other begins, and why we bother splitting the world into East and West. In this story, he travels from Bulgaria to Georgia, which claims to be and to have always been European, despite conflicting indicators, like not belonging to the EU.

Published: Jan 30, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,145 words)

It’s Goodbye Girls

Lena Dunham’s (often groundbreaking, often controversial) show gets its own oral history, days before its sixth and final season is about to start.

Author: Lacey Rose
Published: Feb 1, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,581 words)