Alexis Madrigal got a chance to visit the fascinating town of Castle, a roads-only city constructed by Waymo for the sole purpose of developing self-driving cars. Read the rest

Despite Trump's denial of climate change the the ghastly attacks on climate science and mitigation in the new proposed budget, the Carbon Bubble -- which overprices hydrocarbons and the industries that rely on them, as though we'll be burning all of them with impunity -- is about to pop. Read the rest

Much has been said of Donald Trump's presidency, which begins today with his sparsely-attended inauguration in Washington, D.C. If there's one thing I found insightful and well-geared to the historical context of the moment, however, it's this thoughtful and ruminative longread from Tom Freeman. Read the rest

Tennie White is a lab owner who became a relentless crusader for environmental justice for black towns and neighborhoods where giant corporations dumped toxic chemicals and walked away scot free; her work resulted in one giant company, Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation restructuring (under Lehmann Brothers' guidance) into a company that held all its pollution and pension liabilities (which went bankrupt) and a profitable division that held onto the assets built through all that pollution, which was sold off, erasing all responsibility for the executives who'd poisoned their workers and black communities. Read the rest

[Editor's note: Kater Cheek was one of my Clarion 2007 students, and has been vigorously writing and publishing ever since. She has graciously offered us the opportunity to publish the opening chapter of Parasitic Souls, her latest novel -Cory]

The predominantly white police of predominantly black and Latino, Tea-Party-governed Kern County, California kill more people per capita than any other force in America. The Guardian's Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland and Mae Ryan have produced an amazing, deep, interactive profile of a force whose killings are investigated internally and cursorily recorded in a poor, remote area with high unemployment and a meth epidemic. Read the rest

U Penn political scientist Marie Gottschalk has a new book out, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, in which she expands on her prodigious work on the root causes of America's astounding rate of incarceration. Read the rest

Ta-Nehisi Coates's longread in the Atlantic, "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" is a stupendous piece of serious journalism, tracing the long history of system racism in America to the present day condition: America imprisons more people than any other country in the world; it imprisons more people than at any time in its history; and it imprisons black people, especially black men, at a rate that beggars belief. Read the rest

Quinn Norton's "long form data journalism" piece on the American prison system paints a bleak picture of a nation that feasts on its poorest and most vulnerable with a boundless, venomous cruelty.

Martin Douglas's "The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show" is a fascinating longread about race, culture and class, partly a memoir of Douglas's life as a young black kid in a North Carolina housing project who loved indie rock; partly a critique of the way we think about what blackness, whiteness and culture are.

The black kids of my generation and the ones before it were raised with the notion that it’s essential to hold onto one’s “blackness,” and that venturing outside of those boundaries meant you were trying to assimilate to white society, to “be more like one of them.” But essentially every African-American child growing up has an intimate knowledge of some version of the black experience, and the way we dress or the music we listen to still won’t hide the color of our skin. I never saw my interest in alternative culture as a way to obfuscate my racial identity. Aside from the annoyance of being typecast as a fan of a band purely based on superficial concerns, that conversation overlooked the one substantial reason why there are a lot of black people who relate to TV on the Radio’s music: They are a band primarily consisting of African-American men who often explore what it means to be African-American. For a generation of alternative music fans made to believe we were betraying “what it means” to be black, a band had finally come along that made that very idea a theme in its music.

But as TV on the Radio started to grow in notoriety, it still created a schism in my initial attraction to rock music; here was a band that was, for all intents and purposes, “socially acceptable” for black people to like.

Read the rest

Longform.org has a list of their favorite long science articles of 2011. Included are some of my favorites, as well: Daniel Engber's Slate.com story about the problem with research mice; Susan Dominus' NYT mag story about conjoined twins who might share a single mind; and Noah Shachtman's WIRED expose on the deeply flawed investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks.  Read the rest