My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard

Bauer goes undercover as a private prison guard to investigate the inner workings of a for-profit prison in Winnfield, Louisiana run by the Corrections Corporation of America. He witnesses multiple stabbings, prisoners denied adequate care, and becomes unsettled by the way the job changes his behavior.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jun 23, 2016
Length: 145 minutes (36,384 words)

The State of the Domestic Goddess

Adventures in preparing recipes from the cookbooks of “domestic goddesses” Gwyneth Paltrow and Chrissy Teigen.

Source: Eater
Published: Jun 22, 2016
Length: 12 minutes (3,116 words)

The Dark Side of Longform Journalism

“In the field, we are actively, aggressively seeking to see with our own eyes the reality of war, famine, disaster—and who isn’t at least somewhat gratified when he discovers what he’s sought, at least somewhat disappointed when he doesn’t?”

Source: LitHub
Published: Jun 16, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2,208 words)

Day Care (and Its Discontents): A Reading List

Child care is a minefield of a topic, and navigating it inevitably detonates questions of class and gender, labor and social justice. It’s where politics and geography become not just personal, but also emotional (and, sometimes, heartbreaking). Here are eight stories about day care: a place working parents know all too well, but never quite well enough.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 22, 2016

Will Trump Swallow the G.O.P. Whole?

The Republican party is struggling to maintain party unity with Donald Trump as their presumptive presidential nominee.

Published: Jun 21, 2016
Length: 27 minutes (6,829 words)

Frankenstein, the Baroness, and the Climate Refugees of 1816

“In Frankenstein’s Creature, Mary Shelley offers us the most powerful possible incarnation of the loathed and de-humanized refugee.” Two hundred years ago, a period of unusual weather triggered a humanitarian crisis. This “Year Without a Summer” offers a lens through which to read Shelley’s classic novel.

Published: Jun 21, 2016
Length: 11 minutes (2,953 words)

The Ghosts of Fukushima

Five years after a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, only a small percentage of evacuees have returned to the Japanese town of Naraha, which the government has deemed safe following an expensive cleanup effort.

Published: Jun 20, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,539 words)

Home Is Where the Fraud Is

At the height of the housing crisis, one woman’s bureaucratic odyssey to discover who really owns her home leads her to startling revelations about the housing market.

Source: The New Press
Published: Jun 21, 2016
Length: 28 minutes (7,150 words)

A Crime Is Nothing If You Can’t Get Away

Source: White Noise
Published: May 6, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,426 words)

How Disgust Made Us Human

Our ancestors reacted to parasites with overwhelming revulsion, wiring the brain for morals, manners, politics and laws.

Source: Aeon
Published: Jun 6, 2016
Length: 31 minutes (7,845 words)