The Emotional Toll of Witnessing 278 Death Row Executions

For more than a decade, Michelle Lyons’s job at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice required her to witness the state’s executions. “I started thinking about it all in very personal terms after I had a child, and that was my downfall.”

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Aug 23, 2014
Length: 37 minutes (9,409 words)

‘Jared Lorenzen and I Are in Love with the Same Woman’

Tommy Tomlinson meets Jared Lorenzen, a former New York Giants quarterback whose struggles with weight gain meant an early end to his NFL career.

Source: ESPN
Published: Aug 23, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,678 words)

The Moral Dilemmas of Narrative

Bill Marvel on journalism and the quest for empathy in telling other people’s stories.

Source: Gangrey
Published: Aug 23, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,662 words)

A Brutal Dictator, and the Wall Street Hedge Fund That Gave Him $100 Million

How Robert Mugabe, the notorious president of Zimbabwe, raised money from Wall Street to violently crush his opposition.

Published: Aug 22, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,311 words)

The Spy Who Loved Me

Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest in 1984, when she was twenty-two. Their son was born the next year. Two years after that, Bob disappeared from their lives, seemingly without a trace. In this piece for The New Yorker, Lauren Collins investigates who Bob Lambert really was: a British police officer part of a massive undercover operation, whose officers— known as “deep swimmers,”—spent years surveilling different radical groups.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Aug 25, 2014
Length: 35 minutes (8,783 words)

SeaWorld’s Most Rewarding and Traumatic Job

Animal care workers, who tend to the health of mammals at SeaWorld and other marine parks, have unrivaled access to the animals—and the challenges of captivity. They are on the front lines of the debate over marine mammals in captivity, and their stories are fascinating and deeply troubling. Here, three former employees go on the record about their experiences.

Source: Outside
Published: Aug 19, 2014
Length: 34 minutes (8,603 words)

Football in Ferguson

Despite the turmoil tearing apart their small Missouri town, the boys of the McCluer High School football team still have their first game of the season Friday. Sports Illustrated‘s Robert Klemko follows the team and their coach, as they try to make sense of the madness around them as well as their “city’s conflicted past, its tumultuous present and its uncertain future, and what it all means for the people of Ferguson.”

Published: Aug 19, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,992 words)

‘SNL”s Political Secrets: An Oral History

Impersonations, political cameos, and the skit that never made it to air: An excerpt from the newly expanded oral history by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.

Published: Aug 21, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,267 words)

The Man Who Hid from the World for Nearly 30 Years

Michael Finkel tracks down the man known as the North Pond Hermit: Christopher Thomas Knight lived in a secret camp in the woods of Central Maine, stealing food and supplies from nearby homes. “I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”

Source: GQ
Published: Aug 20, 2014
Length: 30 minutes (7,500 words)

If Only They Had Treated Him Before

When Will Bruce killed his mother in 2006, he believed she was an al Qaeda agent. Bruce suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and after seven years in a psychiatric hospital he is slowly reintegrating back into society with the help of his father. Together, they question why the American mental health system is unable or unwilling to help potentially violent patients before tragedy occurs, and advocate for change.

Source: CNN
Published: Aug 15, 2014
Length: 37 minutes (9,300 words)