Will We Ever Grasp the Enormity of the Pandemic?

“As long as we focus on deaths and statistics, the bigger story of Covid-19 will go untold.”

Source: GEN
Published: Mar 11, 2021
Length: 26 minutes (6,564 words)

How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation

“The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.”

Author: Karen Hao
Published: Mar 11, 2021
Length: 26 minutes (6,600 words)

How to Practice

“I wanted to get rid of my possessions, because possessions stood between me and death.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 1, 2021
Length: 23 minutes (5,822 words)

Becoming a Parent During the Pandemic Was the Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done

“I spoke with a number of mental-health experts, many of whom told me that rates of postpartum depression have gone up significantly since the pandemic began. “It’s gotten really, really bad,” Juli Fraga, a psychologist in San Francisco, told me. “I hear about the isolation, and how it feels like Groundhog Day; the heartache of not knowing when you’re going to see your family; and the anxiety of bringing home a new baby … and not being able to have any support, especially early on in the pandemic.””

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 10, 2021
Length: 14 minutes (3,660 words)

John Muir in Native America

“Muir’s romantic vision obscured Indigenous ownership of the land—but a new generation is pulling away the veil.”

Source: Sierra Magazine
Published: Mar 2, 2021
Length: 16 minutes (4,210 words)

Bad Reputation: An Oral History of the Freaks and Geeks Soundtrack

“Judd Apatow, Paul Feig, Michael Andrews, and the cast and crew turn things up to 11.”

Published: Mar 8, 2021
Length: 38 minutes (9,600 words)

‘My Body is Unserviceable and Well Past Its Sell-By Date’: The Last Days of Avril Henry

“In his bestselling 1994 book How We Die, Dr Sherwin Nuland observed that, by the logic of hospital administrators and the US Department of Health and Human Services guidelines, “it is illegal to die of old age”. Instead, “everybody is required to die of a named entity”: cancer or heart attack, stroke or traumatic injury. Plain old age – the natural wearing down of systems, the exhaustion of finite cellular life spans, the loss of internal equilibrium – did not count as a cause of death and was never a checkbox option on official paperwork.”

Source: The Guardian
Published: Mar 9, 2021
Length: 18 minutes (4,580 words)

We Had Marlon Brando’s Island Utopia to Ourselves

“Dad liked everything that lived on this island,” his son Teihotu told a filmmaker in 2016. “We did a lot of stargazing on the beach, we sailed on the full moon. A lot of not talking. Just looking. At this place, you have all the answers.”

Source: Outside
Published: Mar 1, 2021
Length: 18 minutes (4,587 words)

All That We’ve Lost

“One year on from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s still too early to explain all the whys of that which has been taken from us. We still need to name the what—loved ones, but also jobs, relationships, big breaks, last chances—and the what is vast.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Mar 10, 2021
Length: 29 minutes (7,281 words)

My Parents Got Sick. It Changed How I Thought About My Marriage

“All the pain of the past year taught me something: the true nature of intimacy.”

Source: GQ
Published: Mar 2, 2021
Length: 12 minutes (3,068 words)