Appropriate for a Seven-Year-Old Child

Marlo Mack’s podcast How To Be a Girl is a sensitive and honest exploration of the joys, fears, and struggles of raising of a transgender child.

Author: Marlo Mack
Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 5, 2015
Length: 7 minutes (1,880 words)

Valerie Bozeman Is Pardoned by Obama as America Wrestles With Fallout From the War on Drugs

Caught up in a cycle of drug use and abuse when she was sentenced to life in prison, Valerie Bozeman was no kingpin; she was just a woman struggling with addiction, dealing to further her own habit. President Obama commuted Valerie’s sentence in May, and she was free to go after serving twenty-three years. Since then, she has been struggling to adjust to life on the outside, and to understand the no-mercy laws that put her in prison in the first place.

Published: Sep 22, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,660 words)

Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin?

From “… Baby One More Time” to “Can’t Feel My Face,” meet the Swedish songwriter responsible for the biggest pop hits of the last 20 years.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 5, 2015
Length: 14 minutes (3,515 words)

A Criminal Mind

How a respected psychiatrist and loving father and husband became an uncaring drug dealer.

Published: Oct 2, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,630 words)

The Crossroads of Secular and Spiritual: A Reading List

The following four essays take on saints, proselytization, prayer and coincidence: abstractions that may have great impact on our everyday lives, regardless of faith tradition.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 4, 2015

The Great Surrender

A writer makes peace with the natural world after moving to Montana.

Source: GOOD Magazine
Published: Sep 28, 2015
Length: 15 minutes (3,930 words)

Children of the Yuan Percent

Why everyone hates China’s second-generation rich kids.

Published: Sep 30, 2015
Length: 13 minutes (3,490 words)

The Memory Thief

After being diagnosed with a brain tumor in his late twenties, a writer begins to lose his memories before undergoing surgery.

Source: Quartz
Published: Sep 30, 2015
Length: 27 minutes (6,870 words)

Mrs. Bundy

On the day of Ted Bundy’s execution, a reporter interviews his mother.

Published: Sep 3, 2015
Length: 21 minutes (5,438 words)

Stud: How to Have 106 Babies (and Counting)

Ed Houben is 46 and has fathered 106 children “of whom two-thirds were made the natural way (i.e., by sexual intercourse) and a third made via artificial insemination.” Women and couples come to him because they haven’t been able to have children on their own, and he offers his services to them for free.

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 1, 2015
Length: 24 minutes (6,000 words)