I Can See Your Future: Six Stories About Psychics

Stories about looking for clues about the future.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 15, 2016

Can Poetry Matter?

California poet laureate Dana Gioia’s classic essay on poetry’s diminishing place in American culture. The essay sparked a firestorm of debate and discussion when it was published in 1991, and it remains just as relevant today, a quarter-century later.

Author: Dana Gioia
Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 1, 1991
Length: 31 minutes (7,996 words)

Walmart: Thousands of Police Calls. You Paid the Bill.

“When it comes to calling the cops, Walmart is such an outlier compared with its competitors that experts criticized the corporate giant for shifting too much of its security burden onto taxpayers.”

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: May 12, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,673 words)

When Do You Give Up On Treating a Child With Cancer?

Two parents prepared for their son to die after he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. Then something astonishing happened.

Published: May 12, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3,862 words)

Postwar New York: The Supreme Metropolis of the Present

Forty labor strikes on one day, French existentialists on the loose, and a 50-foot G.I. blowing enormous puffs of REAL smoke.

Author: David Reid
Source: Pantheon
Published: May 12, 2016
Length: 34 minutes (8,514 words)

Three Short Moments in a Long Life

“She didn’t belong. And, secretly, I feared that I didn’t belong, either.” A beautiful, surprising, and funny short story by John L’Heureux.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 9, 2016
Length: 22 minutes (5,522 words)

Private Schools, Painful Secrets

From the Globe’s Spotlight Team: An investigation into the sexual abuse of hundreds of students by private school staffers in New England spanning decades.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: May 6, 2016
Length: 24 minutes (6,188 words)

Mark Haddon: ‘Ultimately, There Is No Narrative Without Death’

An conversation with the author about his new dark short story collection, The Pier Falls.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 11, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,709 words)

Remote Year Promised to Combine Work and Travel. Was It Too Good to Be True?

A look at the failed promise of travel start-up Remote Year, and its world-traveling inaugural class.

Source: Atlas Obscura
Published: May 5, 2016
Length: 16 minutes (4,131 words)

The Homemade Abortion: A Caged Bird, a Quinceaneara, and the American Dream

“It was naïve of me to believe that the ideology Esperanza expressed in class during our debates would carry over into real life. That I would even think to intervene in a family, especially between a mother and daughter, and about a topic as sensitive as abortion, was presumptuous—maybe even unethical.”

Published: May 3, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,388 words)