I Ship It: Six Stories About Fanfiction

OTP: You and this reading list. I’ve wanted to share writing about fanfiction for some time. Fanfiction is often ridiculed (Why can’t the authors keep from inserting themselves into the story? Why is everyone having sex? Why does 50 Shades of Grey exist?!), but it’s a legitimate creative outlet. Fanfiction has played a small but significant role in my own life, and I’ll elaborate in my list.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 15, 2015

Is It Fair to Ask the Internet to Pay Your Hospital Bill?

Looking at the ethical issues that come with crowd funded healthcare.

Author: Cari Romm
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 12, 2015
Length: 8 minutes (2,100 words)

Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Prep,’ 10 Years Later

Sittenfeld’s smart debut novel about social dynamics at an exclusive boarding school remains relevant—and not just as a “coming of age novel”—a decade after it was first published.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 14, 2015
Length: 17 minutes (4,440 words)

Porntopia

A trip to the Adult Video News Awards with Grantland‘s Molly Lambert.

Source: Grantland
Published: Mar 10, 2015
Length: 43 minutes (10,900 words)

A Girl, A Shoe, A Prince

Cinderella contains multitudes, and her evolutions are myriad. A brief cultural history.

Source: NPR
Published: Mar 13, 2015
Length: 19 minutes (4,860 words)

The Wrong Way

On Oct. 3, 2013, 34-year-old Miriam Carey drove through a White House checkpoint while her one-year-old daughter sat in the back of her car. A car chase ensued, and Carey ended up dead. Gonnerman traces the incident, revealing that Miriam had been diagnosed with “postpartum depression with psychosis” and showing how a media circus distorted the tragedy as it occurred.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Mar 12, 2015
Length: 20 minutes (5,003 words)

The Making of ‘Mad Men’: An Oral History

Heading into its final season, creator Matthew Weiner, studio execs and cast members reflect on the early days of the show and how it ended up on AMC.

Published: Mar 13, 2015
Length: 18 minutes (4,515 words)

Disney’s $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband

Disney has spent a billion dollars engineering, testing and implementing the MagicBand at Disney World. The deceptively simple looking rubber wristbands connect wearers to a vast and powerful system of sensors throughout the park. Their aim is to remove all the friction from the theme park experience: you can swipe onto rides, avoid long lines, and even purchase a soda, all with a flick of the wrist. Is this the future?

Source: Wired
Published: Mar 10, 2015
Length: 16 minutes (4,090 words)

The Twisted History of Your Favorite Board Game

An interview with Mary Pilon about her new book, The Monopolists, which uncovers the real story about how Monopoly became the game it is today.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 12, 2015
Length: 16 minutes (4,113 words)

Fall

A meditation on fall, the fall and falling:

Fall. Here is my favorite reading of the word: to have its proper place: The accent falls on the last syllable. There is a beauty in that, a symmetry. It remakes the whole idea of fall, not as a careening or a tumbling, but as a stately inevitability, as if it had been there all along.”

Source: The Rumpus
Published: Mar 1, 2015
Length: 7 minutes (1,960 words)