With physical distancing the order of the day as COVID-19 spreads, cultural locales — sites for communal experiences, like museums and theaters — are emptying out. What are we sharing if we’re not sharing these spaces? And were we really sharing them to begin with?
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10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2020
Stories by Edwidge Danticat, Etgar Keret, Valeria Luiselli, and more.
The Final Five Percent
If traumatic brain injuries can impact the parts of the brain responsible for personality, judgment, and impulse control, maybe injury should be a mitigating factor in criminal trials — but one neuroscientist discovers that assigning crime a biological basis creates more issues than it solves.
How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance
In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
15 True Crime Longreads and the Questions We Should Ask Ourselves When Reading Them
By bringing new dimensions to an unjust process, a well-told story has the power to impact some of our most flawed systems.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we’re sharing stories from Jody Rosen, Reeves Wiedeman, Rebecca Liu, Sara Rimer, and Will Hodge.
A Town Split By a Play About the 1980s AIDS Epidemic
Sometimes art can challenge viewers enough to change them. Sometimes art just makes the narrow-minded angry.
Funk Lessons in Sonic Solitude
“Joi’s recorded performances embodied all the funkiness my little soul had been waiting for.”
Sign On the Dotted Line to Ensure Your Own Destruction
New York’s court system aids and abets predatory lenders who prey on small business owners.
Regarding the Pain of Oprah
She gets a mansion and she gets a boat and she gets a jet! And you get to suffer and then maybe pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you’re lucky enough and bare enough of your private pain.

