The Great Elk

You can learn a lot from a Missouri Bass Pro Shop about white America’s misperceptions and fantasies about the Osage Nation, if you’re really looking.

Source: The Rumpus
Published: Dec 26, 2016
Length: 7 minutes (1,872 words)

The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America

A response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “My President Was Black” from sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom: “My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 13, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2,150 words)

The Great A.I. Awakening

The story of how Google’s developed artificial intelligence to vastly improve its translation service, Google Translate, and what machine learning might be able to do in the near future.

Published: Dec 14, 2016
Length: 60 minutes (15,174 words)

Tragedy Made Steve Kerr See the World Beyond the Court

How the Golden State Warriors coach’s worldview was shaped by his family’s time in Beirut and the assassination of his father, Malcolm Kerr, while serving as the president of American University of Beirut in 1984.

Published: Dec 23, 2016
Length: 23 minutes (5,872 words)

Je M’Excuse: Guilty Memories From An Anglo Montreal Childhood

Even now, as someone who has lived in Toronto for almost two decades, I cannot shake the Quebec out of me. Both professionally and socially, I notice that my human bonds grow fastest and strongest with other members of the Quebec diaspora. Those multiply nested countercultures seem to give us a unique outlook on life—a combination of self-awareness, clannishness, polyglotism, and cosmopolitan posturing that often leaves us chatting alone, amongst ourselves in the kitchen, at parties in Toronto and Vancouver. The jokes we tell and the questions we ask may be in English. But the backstory comes with French subtitles.

Source: The Walrus
Published: Dec 22, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2,146 words)

‘We Have to Resist’: A Conversation with Rebecca Solnit

The difference between hope and optimism, and the dangers of activism without a plan.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 22, 2016
Length: 10 minutes (2,632 words)

What We Eat When We’re Eating at Christmastime: A Reading List

For many of us who celebrate Christmas, foods are as closely bound to the experience as gift-giving. And making fun of fruitcake has become a time-honored tradition — though thanks to the success of this dedicated fruitcake besmirchment campaign, I suspect many of us have never actually tasted, let alone received or re-gifted, a traditional fruitcake. This reading list celebrates oft-maligned holiday foods like fruitcake and mincemeat pie, along with unlikely new candidates like White Castle and KFC.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 21, 2016

Longreads Best of 2016: Under-Recognized Stories

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in under-recognized stories.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 21, 2016

Longreads Best of 2016: Business & Tech Reporting

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in business and tech reporting.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 21, 2016

The Man Who Cleans Up After Plane Crashes

A look at the work of Robert Jensen, who has built an unusual (and successful) career cleaning up after mass fatalities, from identifying bodies to returning personal belongings to families of the dead.

Source: GQ
Published: Dec 20, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,683 words)