We Are All Confident Idiots

David Dunning, the psychologist who gave the Dunning-Kruger effect (half) its name, reflects on our human propensity to wildly overestimate how much we know.

Published: Oct 27, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,929 words)

The Murdered Mayor of Bell Gardens

Daniel Crespo, the mayor of a small industrial city in southeast L.A. County, battered his wife for 28 years. She shot him the day he turned on their son.

Source: LA Weekly
Published: Jul 27, 2015
Length: 16 minutes (4,180 words)

Everybody Sucks

Vanessa Grigoriadis’s 2007 feature on Gawker Media, and “the rage of the creative underclass.”

Published: Oct 14, 2007
Length: 25 minutes (6,356 words)

No Room at the Inn for Innocence

There are more than half a million homeless children in California and budget motels have become the last resort for many families with nowhere else to go. Joe Mozingo profiles a group of kids growing up in the shadows of drugs and despair at a San Bernardino motel.

Published: Jul 22, 2015
Length: 7 minutes (1,908 words)

Cheer Empire

A single company (Varsity Brands, a for-profit business headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, with offices in Florida, California and Dallas) controls almost every aspect of elite cheerleading. They’re also fighting harder than anyone to keep cheerleading from becoming an official sport.

Source: Houston Press
Published: Jul 21, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,730 words)

Pope Francis, Urbanist

Every 25 years, Catholic pilgrims from around the world descend on Rome for a “holy year” known as the Jubilee. As the city prepares for the 2015 Jubilee, Simone d’Antonio looks at Pope Francis’s impressive, far-ranging record on urban issues.

Source: Citiscope
Published: Jul 21, 2015
Length: 8 minutes (2,000 words)

The Americans with Disabilities Act at 25

How one law fundamentally shifted the way Americans think about accessibility.

Source: curbed.com
Published: Jul 23, 2015
Length: 18 minutes (4,650 words)

‘The Truth of Life’: Paula Fox on the Re- (Re-) Release of Her 1970 Novel

Sari Botton talks to Paula Fox about Fox’s 1970 novel “Desperate Characters.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 27, 2015
Length: 5 minutes (1,250 words)

Desperate Characters

An excerpt from Paula Fox’s 1970 novel: Status-conscious Sophie and Otto Bentwood attend a dinner party in Brooklyn Heights in the late sixties, shortly after Sophie sustains a bite on her hand from a stray cat.

Author: Paula Fox
Source: Longreads
Published: Jul 27, 2015
Length: 16 minutes (4,046 words)

‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Bill Cosby Accusers Tell Their Stories

A photo shoot, and testimonials, from 35 of the women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault.

Published: Jul 26, 2015