My Drinking Years

An excerpt from Sarah Hepola’s forthcoming memoir Blackout.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jun 13, 2015
Length: 15 minutes (3,914 words)

Lost in a Broken System

Beauty left the streets of the Bronx and returned to her native Oklahoma to turn her life around. Old charges brought her forcibly back to New York, trapping her in an inflexible and overwhelmed legal system.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Apr 16, 2015
Length: 12 minutes (3,050 words)

The Disappeared

A Guardian investigation reveals that Chicago police kept a secret interrogation site where abuses occurred, including at least one detainee death.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Feb 24, 2015
Length: 11 minutes (2,753 words)

An Unlikely Bond

The writer reflects on how she became an unlikely foster mother at the age of twenty-three, while working as an editor at Vogue.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Nov 18, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,260 words)

My Life Under Armed Guard

An essay by Italian journalist Roberto Saviano about his life for the last eight years under armed guard. Saviano is famous for taking on the Neapolitan mafia in his book, Gomorrah and has faced death threats since the book’s publication.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jan 14, 2015
Length: 15 minutes (3,860 words)

The Murder that Has Obsessed Italy

In Italy, the 2011 murder of Yara Gambirasio has sent shockwaves through entire communities, prompting the police to launch the most complex investigation in the country’s history — an investigation that would end up exposing family secrets that had been buried for decades.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jan 8, 2015
Length: 20 minutes (5,235 words)

The Worst School in America?

A tiny, eccentric Chicago institution was just voted the worst college in America. But perhaps Shimer College offers far more than can be quantified.

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: The Guardian
Published: Dec 8, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,546 words)

The Big-Eyed Children

In the 1960s, Walter Keane was celebrated for his sentimental portraits of wide-eyed children, which sold by the million. However an epic art fraud was actually being executed behind closed doors—his wife Margaret was the real artist in the family, working night and day to maintain his success.

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: The Guardian
Published: Oct 26, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,557 words)

Nightmare at the Picasso Museum

Closed for the past five years and marred by scandal and crisis, the Picasso Museum is finally ready to reopen its doors. But has the bitter struggle for Picasso’s legacy been resolved?

Source: The Guardian
Published: Oct 16, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,075 words)

Mind the Gap

Can Rebekka Bay reinvent the Gap brand for an “anxious, uncertain” generation?

Source: The Guardian
Published: Sep 27, 2014
Length: 8 minutes (2,114 words)