Our Picks
The Professor Wore a Hijab in Solidarity — Then Lost Her Job
A graduate of evangelical Wheaton College herself, journalist Ruth Graham writes about the ousting of its first tenure-track black professor, Larycia Hawkins, after she wore a hijab during Advent in solidarity with Muslim students.
Author:
Source: New York Times
Published: Oct. 13, 2016
Length: 25 minutes (6256 words)
My Friend Sam
A beautiful story about a friendship.
Author:
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct. 12, 2016
Length: 9 minutes (2274 words)
How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds
So much for assurances that harsh interrogation techniques used by the United States at Guantanamo Bay and in secret CIA prisons around the world wouldn’t cause lasting harm. New York Times reporters interviewed over 100 former detainees for this article on the never-ending psychological torment many of them live with years later.
Author:
Source: New York Times
Published: Oct. 9, 2016
Length: 24 minutes (6085 words)
The Prodigy Complex
Waylon Jenning's famous country music lyric "Mammas don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys" can be adapted to the tune of classical music prodigies, too.
Author:
Source: Van Magazine
Published: Oct. 6, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2005 words)
The Virtue of an Educated Voter
An educated nation is an empowered nation. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor details the place of public education in the founding fathers' vision of American democracy to argue that, even though their vision ignored African-Americans and women, we would benefit from thinking of education as a larger public good, not just an individual economic one.
Author:
Source: American Scholar
Published: Sept. 6, 2016
Length: 16 minutes (4186 words)
Dangerous Idiots: How the Liberal Media Elite Failed Working-Class Americans
Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict –- and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong.
Author:
Source: The Guardian
Published: Oct. 13, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3899 words)
The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin
A profile of the American writer and author, whose fiction helped transform the mainstream.
Author:
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct. 13, 2016
Length: 26 minutes (6658 words)
Butches, Femmes, and Mobsters: The Three Lives of Malvina Schwartz
"Moms Mabley? She was a very good friend of mine. We used to go to the Theresa Hotel, Frank’s Restaurant, and Johnny Walker’s—that was the one black gay bar, uptown. Billie Holiday used to come there, and Lionel Hampton, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan. Everything was accepted. You were just another freak, barking along."
Author:
Source: Hazlitt
Published: Oct. 12, 2016
Length: 19 minutes (4855 words)
I Was Pregnant, and Then I Wasn't
The aftermath of a miscarriage, immediate and raw: "It was an animal sadness born of the worst kind of disappointed expectation. The future stretched out before us, one torturous minute at a time. The sadness lived in me as an ache in my stomach, and it’s with me still."
Author:
Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Oct. 12, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3930 words)
Generation Adderall
Casey Schwartz spent years using Adderall, the stimulant and A.D.H.D. drug, to get through college, grad school, and the start of a career. Then she tried to stop.
Author:
Source: New York Times
Published: Oct. 12, 2016
Length: 19 minutes (4984 words)