Most Women In Publishing Don’t Have The Luxury Of Being Unlikable

An excerpt of Manjula Martin’s essay anthology, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Gould addresses one of the many double standards in publishing: women authors must be “nice,” accommodating and virtually boundary-less, while men authors suffer no consequences for being real–or even rude.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Jan 6, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,835 words)

Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama

Have “postmodern” and “postwar” have become outmoded as classifications for novels? Lorentzen suggests it’s more useful to look at trends in fiction relative to the administration they were released under. During Obama’s, he says, novelists looked to answer questions of authenticity. During Trump’s, he anticipates dystopian narratives.

Published: Jan 11, 2017
Length: 22 minutes (5,640 words)

The Mysterious Disappearance of Keith Davis

Fisheries observer Keith Davis monitored fishing vessels on international waters, devoting his life to protecting the seas — until he went missing.

Author: Sarah Tory
Source: Hakai Magazine
Published: Jan 4, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,500 words)

She Loved Him, and He Died in the Holocaust. Now Her Son Is Bringing His Music Back to Life

A son spends years trying to learn what happened to a talented young musician whom his mother loved and never forgotten, and recovers some of the music he left behind.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Jan 5, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,398 words)

The Dream of Ara: Inside the Rise and Fall of the World’s Most Revolutionary Phone

After generating incredible buzz among designers and gadget geeks, Project Ara — Google’s groundbreaking modular smartphone — was suspended in 2016, concluding a three-year, bang-to-whimper arc.

Source: VentureBeat
Published: Jan 10, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,515 words)

Sweet Bitter Blues

When an American writer visits Tokyo to see a Mississippi Blues musician perform, she tries to figure out why Japan has a particular fondness for American Blues, the ways cultures metabolize each other, the place of Black America in Japan, and the complex forces that draw foreign people, and their music, together.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Jan 6, 2017
Length: 24 minutes (6,217 words)

Syria and the Left

Jacobin‘s Yusef Khalil conducted an wide-ranging interview with Yasser Munif, a Syrian scholar of grassroots movements, to break down the key moral and political issues feeding the Syrian war.

Source: Jacobin
Published: Jan 9, 2017
Length: 47 minutes (11,819 words)

How Albert Woodfox Survived Solitary

A profile of Albert Woodfox, a man originally sentenced to 50 years in prison for robbery. A member of the Black Panthers and the Angola 3, Woodfox spent over four decades in solitary confinement, despite a stunning lack of evidence against him in a prison murder.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 16, 2017
Length: 45 minutes (11,296 words)

The Concussion Diaries: One High School Football Player’s Secret Struggle with CTE

Zac Easter, a former “smashmouth” high school football player, took his own life in the aftermath of suffering five diagnosed concussions during his football career.

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 10, 2017
Length: 34 minutes (8,624 words)

Against Confession: On Intersectional Feminism, Radical Catholicism, and Redefining Remorse

Laura Goode investigates her Catholic identity—the radical, feminist, social-justice-oriented version she discovered upon encountering the mysteries of marriage and motherhood—years after her departure from the guilt-stricken, conservative Catholicism of her upbringing.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 10, 2017
Length: 23 minutes (5,818 words)