The Hidden History of the Laundry Chute

Dead bodies, thieves, skulls, and historical bits of ephemera that fly out of pockets on the passage down are just some of the hidden secrets that laundry chutes reveal.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 16, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,925 words)

Fifty Shades Darker: A Spoilereview

A blow-by-blow recounting of an awful, retrograde sequel.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 10, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,338 words)

Eating Toward Immortality

For nutritionist and intuitive eating advocate Michelle Allison, diet culture is just another way of dealing with the fear of death.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 7, 2017
Length: 8 minutes (2,004 words)

How to Build an Autocracy

The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism.

Author: David Frum
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jan 30, 2017
Length: 32 minutes (8,248 words)

America’s Great Divergence

A growing earnings gap between those with a college education and those without is creating economic and cultural rifts throughout the country.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jan 30, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,811 words)

The Hermit Who Inadvertently Shaped Climate-Change Science

Billy Barr moved into a remote part of the Rocky Mountains in search of solitude over 40 years ago. To avoid boredom, he documented snow levels, animal sightings, and the date flowers first bloomed. “…collectively his work has become some of the most significant indication that climate change is rearranging mountain ecosystems more dramatically and quickly than anyone imagined.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jan 12, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,883 words)

In Defense of Facts

The essay is a flexible, accommodating form of writing based in fact. Writer William Deresiewicz takes writer John D’Agata to task for what he believes is D’Agata’s misleading account of the essay’s history, its form and its modern incarnation, and he skillfully dismantles the vague but inaccurate concept of the essay that D’Agata’s three large essay anthologies promote. This is no literary feud. In times like ours, where the media and science are under attack, the President-elect lies without concern for fact-checking, and many Americans discount truth itself, this debate concerns those of us outside academia.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jan 1, 2017
Length: 17 minutes (4,352 words)

Beyoncé’s Year of Peace and Misunderstanding

An analysis of the ways in which Beyonce’s “Formation” and “Lemonade” bore reflections of America’s divisions, and of the polarized views of those works held by people and politicians on the right.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 29, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2,092 words)

The Problem With Obama’s Faith in White America

A response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “My President Was Black” from sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom: “My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 13, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2,150 words)

My President Was Black

A history of the first African American White House, as Coates examines Obama’s successes and failures — and what came next.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 13, 2016
Length: 67 minutes (16,875 words)