Searching for the Good Life in the Bakken Oil Fields

A seven-year oil boom in North Dakota has drawn thousands of investors, laborers, and fortune-seekers. The author settles in behind the counter of a local truck stop to see for herself how much of the American Dream can be found in the Bakken oil fields.

Author: Maya Rao
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 29, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,887 words)

Why I Hope to Die at 75

Ezekiel J. Emanuel argues that we should rethink life after 75—that we’ve become obsessed with “the American immortal,” and that even if we are living longer, we’re not delaying aging.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 20, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,086 words)

The Afghan Girls Who Live as Boys

In Afghanistan, where sons are highly prized, some families dress their prepubescent daughters to look like boys. These children are colloquially known as “bacha posh.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 8, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,209 words)

Acting French

Ta-Nehisi Coates on learning a new language, scholastic culture, and the way we “border patrol” class and race.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 29, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,772 words)

Awakening

The advent of anesthesia fundamentally altered modern medicine, and its technology is often seen as infallible. However tens of thousands of patients each year in the United States alone wake up at some point during surgery. In working to eradicate this phenomenon, doctors have been forced to confront how little we know about anesthesia’s effects on the brain. But their studies have also led to a question just as pertinent to philosophers: What does it mean to be conscious?

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jan 3, 2013
Length: 31 minutes (7,995 words)

The Future of Iced Coffee

Blue Bottle CEO James Freeman wants to mass-produce coffee drinks without degrading its quality like other mega coffee brands, but can small artisan businesses maintain their integrity when they scale up to cater to mainstream consumers?

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 1, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,256 words)

Multiple Lovers, Without Jealousy

Polyamorous people still face plenty of stigmas, but some studies suggest they handle certain relationship challenges better than monogamous people do.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 21, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,504 words)

Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing

A data journalism professor’s experiment reveals a very big problem with standardized tests at the schools in Philadelphia.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 21, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,091 words)

The Power of Two

An excerpt from Shenk’s forthcoming book, Powers of Two, exploring creativity in pairs, and what made John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s collaboration so powerful.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jun 30, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,985 words)

Springtime in Tiananmen Square, 1989

While teaching English in Beijing, the author witnessed one of the most tumultuous protests in modern history.

We were young, and maybe a little naive, and we were angry at injustice. Whenever a group of us foreign teachers got together to share a meal or some beers, Chuck, the most cantankerous of our lot, would find an opportunity to say, “America is a toilet that flushes itself with five times more water than any other toilet in the world.” We were disenchanted with the me-first materialism of Reagan/Bush America. We wanted to live conscientiously. China in 1988 was a slumbering giant just beginning to awake. None of us expected our lives there to be easy, or profitable, or flashy like those of other young English teachers in trendier, booming Japan, but we were intrigued by the country’s recent reopening, and up for a challenge.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 29, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,657 words)