How to Save the News

Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jun 1, 2010
Length: 36 minutes (9,132 words)

I Am Sorry to Inform You

In 2008 Joyce Carol Oates lost the husband—Raymond Smith—to whom she’d been married for 48 years. Her recollections of those harrowing early days of widowhood provide a glimpse of Oates as a teacher of writers and as caretaker of the literary magazine she and her husband kept in print for so long.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Apr 26, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,638 words)

The Next Empire

All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built, ports deepened, commercial contracts signed—all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose appetite for commodities seems insatiable.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 1, 2010
Length: 26 minutes (6,656 words)

Beating Obesity

By 2015, four out of 10 Americans may be obese. Until last year, the author was one of them.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 1, 2010
Length: 30 minutes (7,543 words)

Letting Go of My Father

His elderly father insisted that he could manage by himself. But he couldn’t. The author found himself utterly unprepared for one of life’s near certainties—the decline of a parent. Millions of middle-aged Americans, he discovered, are silently struggling to cope with a crisis that needs to be plucked from the realm of the personal and brought into full public view.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Apr 1, 2010
Length: 14 minutes (3,676 words)

Cyber Warriors

When will China emerge as a military threat to the U.S.? In most respects the answer is: not anytime soon—China doesn’t even contemplate a time it might challenge America directly. But one significant threat already exists: cyberwar.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 1, 2010
Length: 8 minutes (2,177 words)

The Great Grocery Smackdown

Will Walmart, not Whole Foods, save the small farm and make America healthy?

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 1, 2010
Length: 11 minutes (2,863 words)

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults.

Author: Don Peck
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 1, 2010
Length: 10 minutes (2,738 words)

How America Can Rise Again

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 1, 2010
Length: 10 minutes (2,744 words)

The Listener

For four hours every night, on holidays and weekends, George Noory is the voice in the darkness for millions of Americans. His show, Coast to Coast AM, has perfected a charged and conspiratorial worldview that now pervades American media.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 1, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,480 words)