America’s Covid Swab Supply Depends on Two Cousins Who Hate Each Other

“The pandemic brought the business opportunity of a lifetime to Puritan Medical Products of Guilford, Maine. But even a $250 million infusion from the U.S. government has done little to quell an epic family feud.”

Published: Mar 18, 2021
Length: 17 minutes (4,250 words)

The ‘No-Nos’ of Tule Lake

“Singled out for failing a ‘loyalty’ test, Japanese Americans incarcerated in a high-security U.S. prison camp during WWII are shedding the stigma and reclaiming their stories.”

Published: Mar 20, 2021
Length: 10 minutes (2,500 words)

Your Face Is Not Your Own

“When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open.”

Published: Mar 18, 2021
Length: 29 minutes (7,450 words)

Tuna’s Last Stand

“At stake is the future of these fish—which fuel the food chains of billfish, shark, and other larger tuna—and the future of a pantry staple that most North Americans take for granted as something that will always be one shopping trip away.”

Source: Hakai Magazine
Published: Mar 2, 2021
Length: 9 minutes (2,397 words)

The Kitchen Dad

“Place the oyster on a bed of ice and go to the next one. It’s possible to refine this technique to perfection. Like changing a diaper.”

Source: Popula
Published: Mar 22, 2021
Length: 19 minutes (4,769 words)

What Mr. Miyagi Taught Me About Anti-Asian Racism in America

In The Karate Kid franchise, writes Beth Nguyen, “Mr. Miyagi is the perpetual foreigner who exists to serve the whiteness that surrounds him.”

Source: Catapult
Published: Mar 23, 2021
Length: 13 minutes (3,495 words)

Disney’s Disembodied Black Characters

“Green, blue — Disney has no problem with characters that are different colors, it seems, as long as that color is not brown. What does it say to Black kids watching when the world’s biggest children’s entertainment company cannot give them even one animated film that features a Black person that stays a Black person throughout? What does this say about Blackness to kids who are not Black? About whose life is being portrayed as mattering? And whose does not?”

Published: Mar 23, 2021
Length: 21 minutes (5,395 words)

The Mystery of ‘Harriet Cole’

They’re wondering, more than 130 years later, how to describe the dazzling, jarring preparation, stripped of skin and pulled away from the bone. Whose body this is, and what would it mean if one of the university’s oldest fixtures never knew that she would spend her afterlife on display?

Source: Atlas Obscura
Published: Mar 18, 2021
Length: 33 minutes (8,253 words)

Doctor Fentanyl

“George Otto was a respected family physician with a bustling clinic in the northwest corner of the city. But he had a secret: after hours, he was running a booming fentanyl business. The untold story of the doctor who fuelled a drug crisis.”

Source: Toronto Life
Published: Mar 22, 2021
Length: 19 minutes (4,824 words)

We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide

“Why we must do everything differently to ensure the planet’s survival.”

Published: Mar 18, 2021
Length: 16 minutes (4,209 words)