The Lost Children of Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’ Video

Elon Green looks back at the making of Soul Asylum’s 1993 hit video for “Runaway Train,” and the missing children who were featured.

Author: Elon Green
Source: MEL Magazine
Published: Nov 4, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,373 words)

California Dreaming

A profile of restaurant chef Jessica Koslow, who owns Sqirl, a hip L.A. restaurant that serves “grain bowls and hashes and salads” that “scream with acid and spice and herbs and the funk of fermentation.” Bull looks at the fetishization of “California food” and the lure of living in Southern California.

Source: Eater
Published: Nov 4, 2016
Length: 25 minutes (6,277 words)

The Holiday Lunch

Kim France—founding editor of Lucky magazine, and one-time writer for Sassy—on feeling like an outsider among fancier editors at Conde Nast, and dreading the annual company luncheon at The Four Seasons, especially when seated next to chairman Si Newhouse.

Author: Kim France
Source: Medium
Published: Nov 2, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,692 words)

My Murderer’s Futon

In order to highlight the powerful nonfiction that print literary magazines consistently publish in America, here is Sarah Viren’s essay from the Memphis-based journal The Pinch. It tells the strange story of a rich real estate heir who stood trial for murder, and how the author came to know him by inheriting his furniture. This essay won the journal’s annual nonfiction prize.

Source: The Pinch
Published: Dec 15, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,444 words)

On Nostalgia

Here is another fantastic essay from America’s small press. Winner of the 2015 Hrushka Memorial Nonfiction Prize from the Michigan-based journal Passage North, the author spins a complex weave about her life and family, Archimedes and science to explore the ways meaning accrues, the past endures, and emotional memory connects us to the past in ways that both brace and break us.

Source: Passages North
Published: Mar 1, 2016
Length: 24 minutes (6,050 words)

tronc If You Want to Save Journalism

The baffling story of what happened to a newspaper empire after a businessman named Michael Ferro took over.

Published: Nov 2, 2016
Length: 16 minutes (4,000 words)

Carl’s Jr., and the Thing That Happened There

“It was 1982. We were young. There was only one urinal.”

Source: Eater
Published: Nov 2, 2016
Length: 10 minutes (2,576 words)

Trump’s Inconvenient Racial Truth

“Regardless of how you feel about Trump, on this one thing he is right: The Democratic Party has taken black Americans for granted. “

Published: Nov 1, 2016
Length: 10 minutes (2,594 words)

How America Outlawed Adolescence

At least 22 states make it a crime to disturb school in ways that teenagers are wired to do. Why did this happen?

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Nov 1, 2016
Length: 26 minutes (6,537 words)

Seeing Stars

“It was comforting to think that when we look into the sky we’re seeing the past, since that’s where I wanted to be. ” Alex Ronan on grieving for her brother Mark and finding her place in the universe.

Source: Real Life Mag
Published: Jul 12, 2016
Length: 12 minutes (3,204 words)