Medium Playback

This week’s Playback gets into the psyche of some big-money overlords — the ones who can’t make it to Mars with Elon, anyway. In his wildly popular story “Survival of the Richest,” researcher Douglas Rushkoff starts off writing about an invitation he received last year to give a keynote speech to some wealthy investors at a deluxe private resort. On the face of it, they wanted Douglas’s advice on how to escape environmental collaps...

This week's Playback features an investigative showdown. Journalist Ben Blum looks into the reality of the most famous psychology study to ever be conducted, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and makes some shocking discoveries himself. Embedded in Blum's story, you'll hear clips from his interviews with psychologist Philip Zimbardo and participants, as well as real archival audio from the experiment Blum uncovered in his reporting. ...

This week, Playback is a throwback, but the story timeless. Society is fine-tuned for hardworking women — executives, moms, daughters, creatives, and yogis alike — to get drunk. In “Enjoli,” writer and former Amazon employee Kristi Coulter constructs a diary that turns into a radical reframing of what a “having it all” culture actually looks like: socially accepted forms of alcohol dependence in overspent women. “I’m newly sober an...

Episode three is all about Jesus Christ and his superstars. In his piece “Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas,” writer Jonathan Parks-Ramage discovers Reality L.A., an evangelical Christian church that attracts the lost kids of Hollywood with top 40-like ballads and an attractive promise of love and absolution. Unfortunately, the gospel is not so sweet for Jonathan — the hip-seeming church is truly conservative, and non-belief, abortion, pr...

For the first episode of our first-ever podcast, there was only one guest we had in mind: bestselling author Roxane Gay. Her powerful and devastatingly honest essay “What Fullness Is” is one of the most read stories on Medium this year. In the piece, Roxane discloses her decision to undergo bariatric surgery — from the instant in her car when she made up her mind, to the painfully awkward moment with the nurse post-surgery, to her ...