Just Like Heaven? Four Stories About Nordic Countries

Why are we Americans so drawn to the Scandinavian Peninsula and beyond? Why do some Republicans speak of Sweden with disdain or horror, whereas left-leaning folks go starry-eyed? Does the recent influx of refugees to these countries mark the beginning of institutionalized xenophobia?

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 17, 2016

The ‘Shaman’: A Committed Solo Traveler Struggles to Reconcile Being Raped While Abroad

As an avid solo traveler—and proponent of the empowerment traveling alone can offer women—Laura Yan has been conflicted about revealing she was raped in Bolivia.

Author: Laura Yan
Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 14, 2016
Length: 12 minutes (3,035 words)

‘Hope is a​n embrace of the unknown​’

In a year in which one calamity seems to follow another on a daily basis, Rebecca Solnit re-examines the meaning of hope in dark times.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 15, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,714 words)

Allergic to life: the Arizona residents ‘sensitive to the whole world’

High in the Arizona desert, a community of people suffering from a clinically unproven condition called “environmental illness” have gathered to seek a pure life unpolluted by modernity’s poisons, from wi-fi to plastics, car exhaust to cologne, and to support each other as they battle an infirmity many people discount. When two journalists went to report the story, they became part of it.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 11, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3,773 words)

The Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group

Migrant and refugee students write poems that tell their untold stories of loss and trauma.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 14, 2016
Length: 17 minutes (4,443 words)

The Mysterious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close

Not just a fascinating profile of the legendary artist—undergoing major life changes at 76—but also a lovely tribute to late-stage creativity and a glimpse of how Hilton navigated what he should and shouldn’t disclose about Close’s illnesses and relationships.

Published: Jul 14, 2016
Length: 30 minutes (7,512 words)

The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear

How the grand jury process, and decisions by prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty, allowed government officials to ensure there would be no indictment against police officers in the shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

Author: Sean Flynn
Source: GQ
Published: Jul 14, 2016
Length: 29 minutes (7,483 words)

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless

How wellness and self-care turned into a sinister (and expensive) ideology.

Source: The Baffler
Published: Jul 8, 2016
Length: 9 minutes (2,433 words)

How Writing an Advice Column Changed Heather Havrilesky’s Life

Julie Beck talks to Heather Havrilesky about her new book How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly’s Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life, a collection of her “Ask Polly” advice columns on New York Magazine‘s The Cut blog (originally at The Awl) plus some that haven’t been published before.

Author: Julie Beck
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 14, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,723 words)

Champagne in the Cellar

A man searches for a doctor who hid with his parents in a cellar in Budapest, under the feet of German soldiers, during World War II.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 13, 2016
Length: 38 minutes (9,517 words)