The Love of a Thousand Muskoxen: Grieving a Love Lost to Time and Sickness

Years after spending a romantic month alone with a young photographer, Stephanie Land learns of his crippling chronic disease–and gets a glimpse of how much she meant to him.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 24, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,488 words)

Fear of a Feminist Future

Laurie Penny—whose feminist dystopian novel Everything Belongs to the Future was released this week—considers the alt right’s fear of women heroes in futuristic literature and film, not to mention real life.

Source: The Baffler
Published: Oct 17, 2016
Length: 11 minutes (2,797 words)

Miri Regev’s Culture War

A profile of Miri Regev, Israel’s brash, right-leaning minister of culture and sports. Regev is on a mission to uproot the country’s left-leaning, mostly Ashkenazi culturati to make more room for artists who share her Mizrahi (middle eastern Jewish) roots.

Published: Oct 20, 2016
Length: 23 minutes (5,848 words)

This is Not My Beautiful House

Former Lucky Magazine editor and Girls of a Certain Age blogger Kim France reflects on the miscalculation that her life would be perfect, and her marriage would work, if she lived in the perfect Brooklyn Brownstone.

Author: Kim France
Source: Medium
Published: Oct 18, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,634 words)

What Happened to Eastern Airlines Flight 980?

In 1985, Eastern Air Lines Flight 980 crashed into the side of a 21,112-foot mountain in Bolivia. No bodies were recovered at the crash site, and the plane’s black box was never found. More than 30 years later, two friends from Boston organized an expedition to figure out what happened.

Source: Outside
Published: Oct 18, 2016
Length: 29 minutes (7,296 words)

Interview with Dr. Susan Robinson, One of the Last Four Doctors in America to Openly Provide Third-Trimester Abortions

“I also think that people assume that women do this casually — that they’ve known they were pregnant for thirty weeks and then were on their way down to the hair salon and they saw the abortion clinic and they decided to just walk in to avoid the inconveniences of motherhood. That also is completely untrue. No matter how available birth control and first-trimester and second-trimester abortion is, you are always going to have the need for later abortions. A woman would never do this casually.”

Source: The Hairpin
Published: Sep 20, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,865 words)

Is Infidelity A Search for Identity? On Coupling: An Inventory

On a friend’s porch, someone has left behind a deer skull, beautifully intact, antlers and all, inside a wood crate set up against the wall. I consider the dead skull, the solid antlers, which won’t age for ages, which won’t die. The hollow sockets where eyes once looked for grass, the empty caves where a nose once bent to dirt. This deer must have lived in the woods behind here, in the fir and madrone, on the hillside taking a bed for its children, laying down in nights cold and rainy like this one. It makes me think about the wild in us all, how it stays tight, how we manage it or don’t, how we are animal in our marrow, our depth, our desire for sex as natural as the instinct to build a home, to shelter, to protect.

Published: Oct 20, 2016
Length: 20 minutes (5,129 words)

Becoming One of the World’s 65 Million Refugees

Majid Hussain keeps having to run. An excerpt from Cast Away: True Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis.

Source: The New Press
Published: Oct 3, 2016
Length: 21 minutes (5,452 words)

Welcome to Rao’s, New York’s Most Exclusive Restaurant

A behind-the-scenes look at a 120-year-old institution as it tries to preserve – and expand – its identity.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 10, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,312 words)

The Wall Is a Fantasy

Separating fact from fiction in the plan to build an impenetrable barrier along the Mexican-American border.

Published: Oct 14, 2016
Length: 9 minutes (2,436 words)