The Fallout From Sportswriting's Filthiest Fuck-Up
Twenty years later, looking back at an infamous paragraph.
From Trump Aide to Single Mom
Last November, A.J. Delgado played a vital role in the presidential campaign. Then everything fell apart.
Children of Catholic Priests Live with Secrets and Sorrow
“If a life can have a crystallizing moment, for Jim Graham that 1993 meeting was it, discovering that his father might have been a Catholic priest, rather than John Graham, the distant man who raised him with scarcely a kind or comforting word.”
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer at large at The New York Times Magazine and a correspondent for Vice News Tonight.
“I make a pretty provocative argument about how Asian American identity doesn’t really exist—how it’s basically just an academic idea, and it’s not lived within the lives of anybody who’s Asian. Like you grow up, you’re Korean, you’re a minority. You don’t have any sort of kinship with, like, Indian kids. You know? And there’s no cultural sharedness where you’re just like, ‘oh yeah…Asia!’”
Thanks to MailChimp, "Mussolini’s Arctic Airship," and Blinkist and for sponsoring this week's episode.
The End of Sand
It’s one of our most in-demand natural resources, and it’s running out.
Down the Breitbart Hole
How dangerous is the media company that Steve Bannon called “the platform for the alt-right”?
How SB Nation Profits Off an Army of Exploited Workers
The underbelly of Vox Media’s success.
In the Future, Your Body Won’t Be Buried... You’ll Dissolve
The next big thing in the death business.
Lord of the WASPs
Life on an isolated island utopia.
The Liberation of Tam Minh Pham
In 1970, he was plucked from Saigon to attend West Point. He got his degree and went home to fight, but instead spent six years in a reeducation camp. Then, somehow, he ended up teaching high school in D.C.
After the Flame
What the 2016 Summer Games left behind in Rio.
Julian Assange, a Man Without a Country
A series of conversations with the WikiLeaks founder about his role in the 2016 presidential election.
The Longform Guide to Open Letters
Classics from Martin Luther King, Jr., Lindy West, James Baldwin and more.
Protest and Persist
“The true impact of activism may not be felt for a generation. That alone is reason to fight.”
You Are the Product
A critique of Facebook.
Who’s Afraid of Claire Messud?
A profile of the writer.
Angels & Demons
On June 4, 1989, the bodies of Jo, Michelle, and Christe were found floating in Tampa Bay. This is the story of the murders, their aftermath, and the handful of people who kept faith amid the unthinkable.
Unlearning the Myth of American Innocence
On coming to see your home country the way the rest of the world does.
The Rise of the Valkyries
The women of the alt-right.
The Endless Death of Kyle Dinkheller
Two decades later, a traffic stop on a country road is still teaching police officers about deadly force – and the cost of hesitation. Part 1 of “The Trigger and the Choice,” a 3-part series.
Fiction Pick of the Week: "Control Negro"
A professor conducts a lifelong racial experiment.
The Story of the DuckTales Theme
A woo-hoo heard around the world.
How Peter Thiel's Secretive Data Company Pushed Into Policing
“These documents show how Palantir applies Silicon Valley’s playbook to domestic law enforcement. New users are welcomed with discounted hardware and federal grants, sharing their own data in return for access to others’. When enough jurisdictions join Palantir’s interconnected web of police departments, government agencies, and databases, the resulting data trove resembles a pay-to-access social network—a Facebook of crime that’s both invisible and largely unaccountable to the citizens whose behavior it tracks.”
David Gessner is the author of ten books. His latest is Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth.
“The ambition got in my way at first. Because I wanted my stuff to be great, and it froze me up. But later on it was really helpful. I’m startled by the way people don’t, you know, admit [they care] … it seems unlikely people wouldn’t want to be immortal.”
Thanks to Casper, Squarespace, and MailChimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
Hiroshima
The lives of six people who survived the atomic bomb.
