Why Are Palo Alto’s Kids Killing Themselves?

Two recent suicide clusters by high school students have rocked a community in Palo Alto, a San Francisco Bay area city. Diane Kapp talks to students, family members, psychiatrists, and community leaders to get a sense of why the suicides occurred and what’s being done to prevent them.

Author: Diana Kapp
Published: May 15, 2015
Length: 24 minutes (6,095 words)

Will Art Save Our Descendants from Radioactive Waste?

In the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Energy recognized an ethical obligation to store nuclear waste in a manner that would protect future humans from its health hazards. But there was a catch—low-level plutonium remains hazardous for 24,000 years; our best containment systems will only last for 10,000 years. Two decades later the government found an unlikely solution: they commissioned two teams of anthropologists, artists, linguists and semioticians to develop “markers” that would warn humans ten millennia into the future—when no known languages and cultural symbols are expected to remain.

Source: JSTOR Daily
Published: May 13, 2015
Length: 8 minutes (2,100 words)

Elon Musk’s Space Dream Almost Killed Tesla

“In late October 2001, Elon Musk went to Moscow to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile.” An excerpt from Ashlee Vance’s new book, on how Musk almost went bankrupt trying to keep both SpaceX and Tesla afloat, all while his personal life was unraveling.

Published: May 15, 2015
Length: 35 minutes (8,873 words)

The Last Day of Her Life

Sandy Bem discovered she had Alzheimer’s and resolved to end her life before she lost her mind.

Published: May 14, 2015
Length: 32 minutes (8,149 words)

Tested Under Fire

A detailed account of the events surrounding the 1981 attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. After Reagan was shot, Al Haig famously declared that he was “in control,” but it was the vice president from Texas who calmly took control of the situation.

Published: May 13, 2015
Length: 26 minutes (6,625 words)

Will We Ever Understand the Beginning of the Universe?

A deep exploration of cosmology and the issues we face when it comes to understanding what we still don’t know: “Cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it.”

Source: Aeon
Published: May 14, 2015
Length: 36 minutes (9,200 words)

Q. Sakamaki and the Art of the Socio-Photo-Documentary

“Here, I see many barriers, many conflicts—between class, between race, between cultures, between ideologies, between jobs.”

Source: Longreads
Published: May 14, 2015
Length: 15 minutes (3,806 words)

Blue Bell’s Rocky Road

After a series of recalls, the future of Texas’s favorite ice cream is in doubt.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: May 11, 2015
Length: 12 minutes (3,050 words)

Theorizing the Drone

What does the rise of the drone mean for justice, for the ethics of heroism, for psychology? Most important of all, who is dying and why?

Source: Longreads
Published: May 13, 2015
Length: 30 minutes (7,693 words)

Casualties of Conservation

Tanzania’s ecotourism industry may be saving the country’s animals, but it’s threatening indigenous peoples.

Source: Vice Magazine
Published: May 10, 2015
Length: 38 minutes (9,710 words)