Ethics and the Eye of the Beholder

A federal civil rights complaint claims that prominent Yale professor Thomas Pogge, a leader in the field of global ethics, has used his influence to manipulate young women.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: May 20, 2016
Length: 21 minutes (5,303 words)

Graduation Day: Five Stories About Commencement

If your commencement speaker disappoints, you can read these beautiful addresses from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ursula K. LeGuin and Joy Ladin.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 22, 2016

An Oral History of “An Inconvenient Truth”

The 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary on climate change originated as a slideshow. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the film’s director and producers trace the origin story, production, impact, and legacy of the film.

Source: Grist
Published: May 21, 2016
Length: 23 minutes (5,958 words)

The Puzzle Solver

The story of one man’s severe chronic fatigue syndrome and his father’s quest to decode the disease.

Published: May 20, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3,931 words)

The Same Story

“In this story, two young women are pregnant at the same time by the same man. One of the women is a musician and a writer and a feminist, and she sports tattoos and body piercings before they are cool. The other woman is an outdoorsy graduate student and a feminist, and she wears J. Crew sweater sets and Mary Janes.”

Roberts writes about being 24 and pregnant, grieving the loss of a parent and struggling to reconcile a view of the other woman who is also carrying her “on-again-off-again”‘s child.

Published: Sep 1, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,553 words)

How To Identify An Unidentified Body

A detailed portrait of the painstaking detective work necessary to identify the unidentified, relayed through intersecting narratives of the deceased, and the investigators who work to name them.

Source: Mosaic Science
Published: May 17, 2016
Length: 22 minutes (5,626 words)

The Bittersweet Victories of Women

The mystery of how sex was added to the list of characteristics to be protected from employment discrimination in the Civil Rights Act — and how the legal struggle to fight gender discrimination evolved in the years that followed.

Published: May 20, 2016
Length: 11 minutes (2,955 words)

The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut

Lhakpa Sherpa ​​has climbed Everest more than any other woman, but few people know her name. Part of the reason has been the media’s legacy of diminishing the accomplishments of Sherpa climbers, but also: “since 2004, she has been too frightened to speak to reporters.” That’s the year she says she was assaulted by her ex-husband, Everest summiter George Dijmarescu.

Source: Outside
Published: May 20, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,587 words)

Hold the Fort: How One Fort McMurray Family Built a Dream and Watched it Burn

Now, after the fire, all that’s left of the Frigons’ dream house is the foundation blocks it once stood on, a pile of rubble, and the blue trampoline their kids used to jump on out back.

From above, the damage left by the Beast—the nickname Fort McMurray fire chief Darby Allen has given to wildfire M-009—looks like a Rorschach test, with its blots and streaks of black. Officials say it’s burned more than 250,000 hectares now—three times the size of Calgary.

Source: The Walrus
Published: May 17, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,250 words)

Why Your Brain Is Nothing Like a Computer

A leading psychologist explains why our governing metaphor for the human brain — that it works like an information-processing machine — is all wrong.

Source: Aeon
Published: May 18, 2016
Length: 16 minutes (4,200 words)