Longreads
Dec 21, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Under-Recognized Stories

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in under-recognized stories.

* * *

Michael J. Mooney
Dallas-based freelance writer, co-director of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.
You Are Not Going to Die Out Here: A Woman’s Terrifying Night in the Chesapeake (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post) Michelle’s Case (Annie Brown, California Sunday) Nameplate Necklaces: This Shit Is For Us (Collier Meyerson, Fusion) Mission: Burrito (John Birdsall, Bon Appétit) All the Petty Horse Shit (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, GQ) Why Men Fight (Thomas Page McBee, Quartz) Officer Steven Blakeney Terrorized the St. Louis Area. Why Did No One Stop This Very Bad Cop? (Doyle Murphy, Riverfront Times) Unfriendly Climate (Sonia Smith, Texas Monthly) Seeing Stars (Alex Ronan, Real Life Magazine) The Audition (Sydney Brownstone, The Stranger) Digital Pimps or Fearless Publishers? (Kate Knibbs, The Ringer) Sick Woman Theory (Johanna Hedva, Mask Magazine) Few Women Fight Wildfires. That’s Not Because They’re Afraid of Flames. (Darryl Fears, The Washington Post) The Snarling Girl (Elisa Albert, Hazlitt) Confessions of a Killer Policeman (Raghu Karnad and Grace Jajo, The Guardian) The Reckoning: The Story of Claire Wilson (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly) Animals Strike Curious Poses: On Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon (Chris Randle, Hazlitt) Chop Suey Nation (Anna Hui, The Globe and Mail) The darkness at the heart of Malheur: A Westerner traces the roots – and meaning – of the Oregon occupation. (Hal Herring, High Country News) Machine Bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.(Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica) Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City (Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine History in Wax: How a museum in Baltimore shapes African American history—in wax. (Alison Kinney, Lapham’s Quarterly) Dear Trump Supporter, Who Says They Love Me (Amanda Deibert, Medium) How Simple is That? At Home With Ina Garten (Sandra Allen, BuzzFeed) 13, Right Now, (Jessica Contrera, The Washington Post) Riding the Rails of the Underground Abortion Railroad from Texas to New Mexico (Taylor Prewitt, Broadly) What Bill Cosby Taught Me About Sexual Violence and Flying (Kiese Laymon, Literary Hub) The Earth Mover (Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker) Canvassing (Nikil Saval, n+1) The Long Rescue (Sonia Faleiro, Harper’s) “I Can’t Make You Love Me”: A 25th Anniversary Oral History (Ryan Lease, Stereogum) How Blac Chyna Beat the Kardashians at Their Own Game (Sylvia Obell, BuzzFeed) My Wife and I Are (Both) Pregnant (Alexa Tsoulis-Reay, The Cut) Fair Dancin’ Mad: A Scottish Town Fights Trump (Rebecca Donner, The Rumpus) The Storytellers (Amanda Feinman, Entropy Magazine) Why Am I So Fat? (Sara Benincasa, Medium) Confessions of a Porn Addict (Benjamin Obler, The Times of London, Sunday Magazine)

Visit
Share
183Likes

Longreads
Dec 21, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Business & Tech Reporting

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in business and tech reporting.

* * *

Jeremy Keehn
A features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.
My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard(Shane Bauer, Mother Jones) Everybody Goes Haywire (Anna Altman, n+1) My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard by Shane Bauer (Shane Bauer, Mother Jones) The Failure of Welfare Reform (Jordan Weissmann, Slate) My Brother’s Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family (Jessi Hempel, Time) Venezuela, A Failing State (William Finnegan, The New Yorker) The Cost of Caring (Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker) The Most Exclusive Restaurant in America (Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker) How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley (Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker) Theranos Whistleblower Shook the Company—And His Family (John Carreyrou, Wall Street Journal) The Clean (Lizzie Feidelson, n+1) Uncanny Valley (Anna Weiner, n+1)

Visit
Share
133Likes

Longreads
Dec 20, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Investigative Reporting

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in investigative reporting.

* * *

Francesca Mari
Senior Editor at The California Sunday Magazine.
My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard (Shane Bauer, Mother Jones) The Architect Who Became a Diamond (Alice Gregory, The New Yorker) Machine Bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.(Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica) Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City (Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard (Shane Bauer, Mother Jones) Pentagon: Special Ops Killing Of Pregnant Afghan Women Was “Appropriate” Use Of Force (Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept) Unearthing The Secrets Of New York’s Mass Graves (Nina Bernstein, The New York Times) Welcome to America — Now Spy on Your Friends (Talal Ansari and Siraj Datoo, BuzzFeed News) My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard (Shane Bauer, Mother Jones) Trump boasts about his philanthropy. But his giving falls short of his words. (The Reporting of David Fahrenthold & The Washington Post) The white flight of Derek Black (Eli Saslow, The Washington Post) David’s Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring Down the World’s Most Perfect Statue (Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine) The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife (Ariel Sabar, The Atlantic) Ghost Stories (Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker) ‘You Want A Description Of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem (Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion, Scott Glover, Los Angeles Times) Why Did It Take 9 Hours and 3 Emergency Rooms For This Woman to Get a Rape Kit? (Jillian Keenan, Cosmopolitan) Healing Hasidic Masturbators and Adulterers — With Psychiatric Drugs (Batya Ungar-Sargon, Narratively) Trump boasts about his philanthropy. But his giving falls short of his words. (The Reporting of David Fahrenthold & The Washington Post)

Visit
Share
172Likes

Krista
Dec 20, 2016cancer
Off-Time: Becoming a Widow at Age 36

A palliative-care doctor once told me that we die cell by cell until enough cells succumb that we cross over a line. But if you are watching the person you love the most die, you track their breaths, not cells. When someone is dying, their breath slows. Ever-widening gaps form between the end of the exhale and the beginning of the next inhale. In that space, you, the watcher, wait to find out if the unimaginable has happened. You don’t know if this breath is the last one, or if there is another to come. You only know it’s the last breath when it’s too late to go back and tell them you love them one final time.

At The Globe and Mail, Christina Frangou writes on becoming a widow at age 36, after her husband Spencer died of kidney cancer, 42 days after diagnosis.

Read the story

Visit
Share
345Likes

Longreads
Dec 20, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Science Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in science writing.

* * *

Brendan Borrell
A freelance writer in Brooklyn.
The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort of) Rattled the Scientific Community (Jon Mooallem, The New York Times Magazine) The Billion Dollar Ultimatum (Chris Hamby, BuzzFeed) Austin, Indiana: The HIV Capital of Small-Town America (Jessica Wapner, Mosaic) Seeding Doubt: How Self-Appointed Guardians of ‘Sound Science’ Tip the Scales Toward Industry (Liza Gross, The Intercept) Intersex: Seeking the Beauty in Difference (Martha Henriques, Mosaic) If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots? (Nathan Heller, The New Yorker) You Want a Description of Hell? Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem (Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion And Scott Glover, The Los Angeles Times) Addicts For Sale (Cat Ferguson, BuzzFeed News) My Sister Made Her End-of-Life Wishes Clear. Then Dementia Took Hold. (Judith Graham, Stat News) Katharine Hayhoe, a Climate Explainer Who Stays Above the Storm (John Schwartz, The New York Times) Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them (Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker) Learning to Let the Wild Be Wild in Yellowstone (David Quammen, National Geographic) Speak, Memory (Casey Newton, The Verge) The Case for Leaving City Rats Alone (Becca Cudmore, Nautilus) Digging for Glory (Paige Williams, The New Yorker) NASA’s ‘Hidden Figures’ (Margot Shetterly, Al-Jazeera) The Empty Brain (Robert Epstein, Aeon) Breast-Feeding the Microbiome (Ed Yong, The New Yorker)

Visit
Share
125Likes

Michelle Koufopoulos
Dec 20, 2016rape
Doing Her Quiet Thing

Michelle Koufopoulos | Longreads | December 2016 | 13 minutes (3,257 words)

It was my birthday. I don’t mark the date with any kind of mental memorial anymore, or throw overly earnest celebrations like I did the year after, when I was still raw and grieving and thought that maybe, if I had all my closest friends clustered in my living room, decked out in silky dresses and party hats, I could erase what had happened the year before.

It’s been ten years. I’ve learned to compartmentalize. I focus on trivial things on my birthdays instead—Did I pick a bar too far afield? How many people will show up? And yet. I still obsess. I turn that night over and over in my mind, needing to examine it from every single angle, every single perspective. Tell it in a thousand different ways, and then again. I’m still trying to control the narrative. I’m still trying to understand.

Visit
Share
209Likes

Pam Mandel//Nerd’s Eye View
Dec 19, 2016longreads
My Favorite Animal Longreads of 2016

In November 2015, I adopted a dog. Harley. These 12 pounds of mostly shelter-raised animal cracked open the harder parts of my heart and I found myself sobbing into my coffee, almost daily, while reading the latest stories about rescue dogs. I’d gone so far as to set a Google Alert on “rescue dog,” and while I have calmed down — somewhat — I still find myself getting weepy when I read that a shelter has had its entire stable adopted or some flawed pooch got a new lease on life or … you get the idea.

I present my state of mind to explain why my favorite read about dogs this year was a Longreads exclusive by Richard Gilbert: “Why I Hate My Dog.” A year ago, I might have enjoyed this piece as an abstraction, but reading it after AD (After Dog) made it hit home in ways I would never have felt in my BD (Before Dog) era:

See what Belle brings out in me? The worst. My sadistic streak. Dogs are supposed to do the opposite. Would a good dog occasion such darkness? I think not.
Wisdom, A Bird (Kim Steutermann Rogers, The Fourth River) The Battle Over the Sea-Monkey Fortune (Jack Hitt, New York Times Magazine) Hook, Line, and Thinker (James McWilliams, Pacific Standard) When the Beasts Come Marching In (Jon Mooallem, This American Life) When my dog died, I didn’t understand why it felt like a human had died. Then I read the research. (Alvin Chang, Vox)

Visit
Share
518Likes

Longreads
Dec 19, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Political Analysis

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in political analysis.

* * *

Kiese Laymon
A Professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Mississippi, and author of forthcoming memoir, Heavy.
The Trouble With the Liberal Arguments Against Third-Party Voters—and What to Do About It (Josie Duffy Rice, The Daily Kos) Donald Trump: He Was Made in America (Kirsten West Savali, The Root) Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City (Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine) Sweet ’16: Notes on the US Election (Benjamin Kunkel, Salvage) Trump May Bring A Republican Recalibration, Not A Realignment (Julia Azari, Five Thirty Eight) Could Hillary Clinton Become the Champion of the 99%? (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New York Times Magazine) Hillary Clinton vs. Herself (Rebecca Traister, New York Magazine) The Obama Administration Just Granted Henry Kissinger a Distinguished Public Service Award (Greg Grandin, The Nation) Revenge of the Forgotten Class (Alec MacGillis, ProPublica) Hillary Clinton vs. Herself (Rebecca Traister, New York Magazine) Autocracy: Rules for Survival (Masha Gessen, The New York Review of Books) Hillary Clinton Didn’t Shatter the Glass Ceiling. This Is What Broke Instead.(Rebecca Traister, New York Magazine) My President Was Black (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic) History classes are our best hope for teaching Americans to question fake news and Donald Trump (Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Quartz Magazine)

Visit
Share
113Likes

Longreads
Dec 19, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Arts & Culture Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in arts and culture writing.

* * *

Tobias Carroll
Freelance writer, managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn, and author of the books Reel and Transitory.
Michael Jackson: Dangerous (Jeff Weiss, Pitchfork) The Fight of Your Life (Lyra McKee, Mosaic Science) What Is The Best Night Any Celebrity Has Ever Had At Madison Square Garden? (Sam Donsky, The Ringer) Is Everything Wrestling? (Jeremy Gordon, The New York Times Magazine) What Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’? (Alex Mar, Atlas Obscura) Ripping the Veil (Britt Bennett, The New Republic) Winona, Forever (Soraya Roberts, Hazlitt) Speak, Memory (Casey Newton, The Verge) The Secret Life of Tumblr Teens (Elspeth Reeve, New Republic) By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead (John Hofsess, Toronto Life) Why the Literati Love Muhammad Ali (Janan Ganesh, Financial Times) Prince’s Women and Me: The Collaborators Who Inspired a Generation (Porochista Khakpour, The Village Voice) Sex, Drugs, And Bestsellers: The Legend Of The Literary Brat Pack (Jason Diamond, Harper’s Bazaar) “This Is Just What Success Looks Like”: The Illuminating Work of Saeed Jones (Molly McArdle, Brooklyn Magazine)

Visit
Share
121Likes

Longreads
Dec 16, 2016longreads
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *
1. My President Was Black 2. ‘I Feel Like a Fraud’: Confessions of a Broken-Down Domestic Violence Lawyer 3. A.: Only Through Death Will You Learn Your True Identity 4. Heat, Hunger and War Force Africans Onto a ‘Road on Fire’ 5. Chongqing’s Number One Noodle Obsessive

Visit
Share
210Likes

Longreads
Dec 16, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Food Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in food writing.

* * *

Rachel Khong
Former executive editor at Lucky Peach magazine; author of the novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, forthcoming in July 2017, and the cookbook, All About Eggs.
Citizen Khan (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker) At Tampa Bay Farm-to-Table Restaurants, You’re Being Fed Fiction (Laura Reiley, Tampa Bay Times) Inside the Gentrification of Grand Central Market (Jesse Katz, L.A. Magazine) Dinner at Tao with the “FoodGod” Jonathan Cheban (Joshua David Stein, G.Q.) Escaping the Restaurant Industry’s Motherhood Trap (Amanda Kludt, Eater) California Dreaming (Marian Bull, Eater) Guilty At Thomas Keller’s Per Se, Slips and Stumbles (Pete Wells, The New York Times) Guilty In Sickness, in Health, in White Castle (Allison Robicelli, Food52) Changing of the Tide: The Galician Sisters Chipping Away at the Patriarchy, One Barnacle at a Time. (Matt Goulding, Slate) Carl’s Jr., and the Thing That Happened There (Chris Onstad, Eater) The State of the Domestic Goddess (Emily Gould, Eater) Pete Wells Has His Knives Out (Ian Parker, The New Yorker) The Unrecognizable Genius of Guy Fieri (Jason Diamond, Esquire)

Visit
Share
152Likes

Longreads
Dec 16, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Sports Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in sports writing.

* * *

Erik Malinowski
NBA/features writer at Bleacher Report.
The Art of Letting Go (Mina Kimes, ESPN The Magazine) The Official Coming-Out Party (Kevin Arnovitz, ESPN The Magazine) Money in the Bank: The Story of Pro Wrestling in the Twentieth Century is the story of American Capitalism. (Dan O’Sullivan, Jacobin Magazine) What the World got Wrong About Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Jay Caspian Kang, The New York Times Magazine) Michael Jordan has not left the building (Wright Thompson, ESPN The Magazine) I postponed open-heart surgery for the Cubs (Wayne Drehs, ESPN) After The Process: Meet Sam Hinkie 2.0 (Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated) Gridiron Gangster: How a Vigilante Gambler Took Down an Alleged Crime Boss (David Amsden, Rolling Stone) The Art of Letting Go (Mina Kimes, ESPN The Magazine) Mamba Out (Ramona Shelburne, ESPN The Magazine) The Best African American Figure Skater in History is Now Bankrupt and Living in a Trailer (Terrence McCoy, The Washington Post) Why Are So Many BASE Jumpers Dying? (Andrew Bisharat, National Geographic) Too Fast to Be Female (Ruth Padawer, The New York Times Magazine) The Secret Life of Tiger Woods (Wright Thompson, ESPN The Magazine) After the Process: Meet Sam Hinkie 2.0 (Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated) Vertical Descent: Adventures in Synchronized Swimming (Elisabeth Donnelly, Virginia Quarterly Review)

Visit
Share
144Likes

Krista
Dec 16, 2016refugees
Every Wartime Snapshot is Also a Family Photo

Today, more than twenty years after my parents and I left Bosnia, there are still refugees in the world—hundreds of thousands of them, in fact. The current refugee crisis, fuelled by wars in Syria and across the Middle East, has been immortalized by photos of families just like mine: men, women and children sitting in bus stations waiting for food, trapped behind border fences and holing up in dilapidated refugee camps. Every day, countless times a day, photographers will walk up to a family and take their picture. This picture may then be posted on Facebook and printed in newspapers, or flashed across television screens. These images of suffering are used to prompt or prevent political action, to inspire pathos or anger, to inform and entertain. But these aren’t just documents of historical events, they are family photographs, each containing memories. I couldn’t help but wonder what other refugees see when they look at themselves staring back.

At Maisonneuve, Seila Rizvic reflects on contacting Staton Winter 20 years after he photographed her at age two, along with her parents as Bosnian refugees.

Read the story

Visit
Share
197Likes

Longreads
Dec 15, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Crime Reporting

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in crime reporting.

* * *

Jessica Lussenhop
Senior staff writer for BBC News.
Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered (Michelle Dean, BuzzFeed News) Framed (Christopher Goffard, LA Times) A Positive Life: How a Son Survived Being Injected with HIV by His Father (Justin Heckert, GQ) A Positive Life: How a Son Survived Being Injected with HIV by His Father (Justin Heckert, GQ) The Reckoning (Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly) Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered (Michelle Dean, BuzzFeed News) In Death, an Artist and a Young Woman Meet (Sarah Weinman, The Guardian) The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff, The Atavist) Trump Boasts About His Philanthropy. But His Giving Falls Short of His Words. (David Fahrenthold, The Washington Post) Apocalypse Meow: How a Cult That Believes Cats Are Divine Beings Ended Up in Tennessee (Bob Smietana, Nashville Scene) Innocents (Rachel Nolan, Harper’s) Inside Italy’s ultras: the Dangerous Fans Who Control the Game (Tobias Jones, The Guardian) Body on the Moor (Jon Manel, BBC News) Death by Fentanyl (Darren Foster, Cristina Costantini, Fusion) The First Time Texas Killed One of My Clients (Burke M. Butler, Texas Observer) The Crotchgrabber (Mary Karr, The New Yorker)

Visit
Share
141Likes

Longreads
Dec 15, 2016longreads

In China, Searching for Mysterious Gaps in the Family Tree

Veronique Greenwood | Atlas Obscura | December 2016 | 19 minutes (4,867 words)
Our latest Exclusive is a new story by Veronique Greenwood, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

In southern China, not far from where the rice paddies fade into the urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta, there is a place that used to be called the Four Counties. It’s farming country still, even in this age when everyone seems to be heading to make their fortunes in the cities. Small villages of low, tile-roofed houses speckle the landscape. People carry bamboo baskets full of root vegetables on their backs. Stray dogs trot purposefully through the village lanes, eyes alert for kitchen scraps. In the summer, the subtropical sun is like a hammer; in the winter, cold rain sweeps the fields.

It was to this place that Imogene Lim came in 2009. She had just a little bit of information to go on. But Lim, a Canadian anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to Tanzania to observe tribes of former hunter-gatherers, was on a voyage of discovery. And with the help of local authorities, she soon reached the object of her quest. She returned this year for a visit. In a Guangzhou hotel room this fall, having recently arrived from the Four Counties (now five, after a redrawing of borders), she took out a photocopied booklet. The cover showed a calligraphic title, proclaiming it to be a genealogy, and inside were page after page of branching diagrams. It had been given to her by a cousin in the village.

Visit
Share
153Likes

A. N. Devers
Dec 14, 2016kelly link
The Great American Housewife Writer: A Shirley Jackson Primer

Shirley Jackson celebrated her 100th birthday this month. We are publishing this post from A.N. Devers in her honor.

* * *

Like so many readers, I loved and was gutted by Shirley Jackson’s famous New Yorker short story “The Lottery” from the first time I read it, and I have read it so many times since then that I don’t remember when I was first introduced to it. I was young. I have a couple of prime suspect English teachers who might have been the gift-givers. But until about nine years ago, I hadn’t read any of Shirley Jackson’s novels. I was only vaguely aware of one of them, her famous ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House.

Visit
Share
285Likes

Ben Huberman
Dec 14, 2016food
Chongqing’s Number One Noodle Obsessive

One version of my perfect day would consist of nothing but walking from one spicy-noodle stand to another, consuming so much chili oil and Sichuan peppercorns my mouth would no longer feel like it’s connected to my body. At Roads and Kingdoms, Josh Freedman made that dream reality, following Mr. Lamp — Chongqing’s most devoted noodle explorer — around the city, in search of the ultimate bowl of xiaomian.

Lamp steps out to take a call; he returns to tell me it is a reporter for one of China’s national newspapers. The article written about me the day before has been published in the local morning paper, under the headline “American Guy Loves Chongqing Noodles So Much He Flies All the Way to Chongqing to Eat Noodles and Learn About the Ingredients.” Within hours, the article was reposted by the flagship state-run paper, the state newswire, and dozens of aggregators. The article about me writing an article was such a big hit that the national press wanted to redo it for the international edition.

I look around the table, uncomfortable with the attention, thinking about the xiaomian stories that link each person together. Mrs. Lamp and her sister-in-law sit to our right, drinking sugary iced tea and gossiping. Across the simmering hotpot, Ms. Hu and her husband propose a toast to the table. They run a store called Fat Sister’s Noodles, named, they quickly add, after Ms. Hu. They operate the store themselves, with little help, starting before dawn every morning; rarely do they have a free moment to go out and eat with friends. After several rounds of toasting and laughter, Ms. Hu’s cheeks have turned bright red, almost as red as the hotpot broth on the table between us. Brother Lamp sits back, soaking it all in, watching connections borne of noodles grow into friendship and camaraderie. He has started smoking again.

Visit
Share
259Likes

Longreads
Dec 14, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Essays & Criticism

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism.

* * *

Kiese Laymon
A Professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Mississippi, and author of forthcoming memoir, Heavy.
Chicago State of Mind (Derrick Harriell, LA Review of Books) On Domestic Disobedience (A.N. Devers, The New Republic) Advanced Search (Franceska Rouzard, Real Life Magazine) Southern Fried Pride: What Hattiesburg’s First Pride Means in the Deep South (Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Medium) More Than Coffee: New York’s Vanishing Diner Culture (George Blecher, The New York Times) H.: On Heroin and Harm Reduction (Sarah Resnick, n+1) Perhaps Having Kids Saves You From Mourning the Person you Might Have Been (Laura Hazard Owen, Medium and tinyletter) The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Buzzfeed) Who are All the Trump Supporters? (George Saunders, The New Yorker) My Son, the Prince of Fashion (Michael Chabon, GQ) Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid (Rufi Thorpe, Vela) Champagne in the Cellar (John Temple, The Atlantic) My Last JDate (Esther Schor, Tablet Magazine) What I Pledge Allegiance To (Kiese Laymon, The Fader) The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale: How Ayahuasca, an Ancient Amazonian Hallucinogenic Brew, Became the Latest Trend in Brooklyn and Silicon Valley. (Ariel Levy, The New Yorker) Reefer Momness: I Got High With My Mom at Hempcon (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, GQ) What Goes Through Your Mind: On Nice Parties and Casual Racism (Nicole Chung, The Toast) 427: Ten Years Without Jen, Twenty-Six With (Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com)

Visit
Share
161Likes

Emily Perper
Dec 13, 2016longreads
Behind the Scenes of Children’s Television: A Reading List

Children’s television programming is always colorful, sometimes educational, and often bizarre. A human-sized hamster wheel? A talking chair? Grown men going to bat for a herd of rainbow-colored ponies? These stories explore the art and economics of making television for kids.
1. “‘It Smelled Like Death’: An Oral History of the Double Dare Obstacle Course.” (Marah Eakin, A.V. Club, November 2016)

Nickelodeon’s hit game show, Double Dare, aired in the late ’80s and early ’90s (with a season-long remount in 2000), and one of its biggest draws was its obstacle course. The A.V. Club spoke to host Marc Summers, the producers and a variety of set designers about the gallons of whipped cream, baked beans and Gak it took to make the messiest show on TV. Pro tip: Don’t eat while reading this.
2. “Friendship is Complicated.” (Maria Bustillos, Longreads, January 2015)

A Longreads original story about the tricky economy of “merch-first” children’s television and the integrity of the creators and communities behind these hit shows.
3. “The Art of Pee-Wee.” (Eric Ducker, The Verge, March 2016) 4. “The Clean, Green and Slightly Bonkers World of CBeebies.” (Sophie Elmhirst, The Guardian, May 2016)

Visit
Share
232Likes

Mark Armstrong
Dec 13, 2016The Atlantic
‘For Eight Years Barack Obama Walked on Ice and Never Fell’

Obama was born into a country where laws barring his very conception—let alone his ascendancy to the presidency—had long stood in force. A black president would always be a contradiction for a government that, throughout most of its history, had oppressed black people. The attempt to resolve this contradiction through Obama—a black man with deep roots in the white world—was remarkable. The price it exacted, incredible. The world it gave way to, unthinkable.

-From Ta-Nehisi Coates’s history of the Obama presidency, in The Atlantic.

Visit
Share
305Likes

Longreads
Dec 13, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Under-Recognized Books

We asked our contributors to tell us about a few books they felt deserved more recognition in 2016. Here they are.

* * *

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
A writer whose memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, is due from Ecco/Harper Collins in February.
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (Randa Jarrar, Sarabande Books) Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Ocean Vuong, Copper Canyon Press) Surveys (Natasha Stagg, Semiotexte) The Black Wave (Michelle Tea, Feminist Press) Vow of Celibacy (Erin Judge, Rare Bird Books) Nine Island (Jane Alison, Catapult) Harmony (Carolyn Parkhurst, Pamela Dorman Books) Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (Sarah Hepola, Grand Central Publishing) The Next: A Novel of Love, Revenge and a Ghost Who Can’t Let Go (Stephanie Gangi, St. Martin’s Press) The Story of a Brief Marriage: A Novel (Anuk Arudpragasam , Flatiron Books) The Penny Poet of Portsmouth: A Memoir Of Place, Solitude, and Friendship (Katherine Towler, Counterpoint) The Ghosts of Birds (Eliot Weinberg, New Directions) Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Frances Wilson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Poor Your Soul (Mira Ptacin, Soho Books) The Telling (Zoe Zolbrod, Curbside Splendor Publishing)

Visit
Share
168Likes

Longreads
Dec 12, 2016longreads

Longreads Best of 2016: Our 25 Most Popular Exclusives of the Year

Thanks to funding from Longreads Members and a generous match from WordPress.com, we were able to publish another fantastic year of original reporting, essays, book excerpts, and exclusives in partnership with other publishers and some of our favorite writers. If you like what we do and want to support us, considering becoming a Longreads Member today.

Below are the 25 most popular exclusives we published this year. You can see all of our stories here.

* * *
1. Your Phone Was Made By Slaves: A Primer on the Secret Economy (Kevin Bales) 2. STAT: My Daughter’s MS Diagnosis and the Question My Doctors Couldn’t Answer (Maria Bustillos) 3. The Life and Murder of Stella Walsh, Intersex Olympic Champion (Rob Tannenbaum) 4. Borges and $: The Parable of the Literary Master and the Coin (Elizabeth Hyde Stevens) 5. Truther Love (Sabine Heinlein) 6. My Dinner With Rasputin (Teffi) 7. Playing with History: What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’ (Kanishk Tharoor and Kill Screen) 8. Women Were Included in the Civil Rights Act as a Joke (Gillian Thomas) 9. A Loaded Gun: The Real Emily Dickinson (Jerome Charyn) 10. Mass Extinction: The Early Years (Ashley Dawson) 11. “BRAAAM!”: The Sound that Invaded the Hollywood Soundtrack (Adrian Daub) 12. Home Is Where the Fraud Is (David Dayen) 13. A Fish So Coveted People Have Smuggled, Kidnapped, and Killed For It (Emily Voigt) 14. On Female Friendship and the Sisters We Choose for Ourselves (Chloe Caldwell) 15. Can an Outsider Ever Truly Become Amish? (Kelsey Osgood and Atlas Obscura) 16. What Ever Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’? (Alex Mar and Atlas Obscura) 17. Why I Hate My Dog (Richard Gilbert) 18. The Secret Nazi Attempt to Breed the Perfect Horse (Elizabeth Letts) 19. What Ever Happened to Planet Vulcan? (Thomas Leveson) 20. Our Well-Regulated Militia (Alexander Chee) 21. The Invisible Forces Behind All of Our Decision-Making (Jessica Gross) 22. When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman (Chris Jennings) 23. The Mystery of Carl Miller (Sarah Miller) 24. A Conversation With Dan Ariely About What Shapes Our Motivations (Jessica Gross) 25. Kidnapping a Nazi General: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Perfect Heist

Visit
Share
162Likes

Longreads
Dec 11, 2016longreads
Longreads Best of 2016: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2016. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday.

* * *
To Catch a Rapist Inside the Snitch Tank The Man Who Solved His Own Murder The Plot to Steal the Color White From DuPont Life Below the Poverty Line in Banktown, USA The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens A South Florida Boxing Rivalry Leads to Cold-Blooded Murder The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin Last Men Standing A Marine’s Convictions Death by Gentrification: The Killing That Shamed San Francisco Fight Grieving In America, Rebuilding In Nigeria The Fire Inside The Secret History of Tiger Woods Madness ‘You Want A Description Of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem Private Schools, Painful Secrets The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut Sunk Citizen Khan Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker Interview With a Woman Who Recently Had an Abortion at 32 Weeks My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard 11,431 Rape Kits Were Collected and Forgotten in Detroit. This Is The Story of One of Them. Busted The Tamir Rice Story: How to Make a Police Shooting Disappear Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All ‘How’s Amanda?’ ‘I Have No Choice but to Keep Looking’ Is America Any Safer? Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered A Family Matter Inside the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards Came Tumbling Down Patagonia’s Philosopher-King Ghost Stories How Massive Cuts Have Remade The Denver Post Travels in Pornland How U.S. Torture Left a Legacy of Damaged Minds What Happened to Eastern Airlines Flight 980? The Writer Who Was Too Strong To Live Trump’s Inconvenient Racial Truth Revenge of the Forgotten Class With Child The Power of Will ‘They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals’ My President Was Black The Great A.I. Awakening The Fighter

Visit
Share
223Likes

Longreads
Dec 9, 2016longreads
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *
1. ‘They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals’ 2. The Last Unknown Man 3. Intake 4. Prince’s Closet Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories 5. Fighting for the Poor Under Trump

Visit
Share
260Likes

Adrian Daub
Dec 8, 2016music
“BRAAAM!”: The Sound that Invaded the Hollywood Soundtrack

Adrian Daub | Longreads | December 2016 | 15 minutes (3,902 words)

You walk into a local multiplex a few minutes after the lights have dimmed. You find your seat to the first trailer, some confection involving superheroes or zombies. As the light flickers over you, strings churn from the speakers, interrupted at certain intervals by a massive blast of indistinguishable brass, like an alphorn next to an amplifier.

Does this sound familiar? At some point movies started braying at us like ships lost in a fog, and we have come to accept that as perfectly normal. Variations on this sound sequence — a simple string motif interrupted by sudden bursts of non-melodic noise — are everywhere in film soundtracks and trailers. It is the noise that goes with people in spandex standing in a Delacroix-style tableau, or so Hollywood has decided. It is the sound we know is coming when a trailer intercuts CGI objects slamming into each other with portentous fades-to-black.

Visit
Share
228Likes

Spenser Mestel
Dec 6, 2016Prep
Unprepared: The Difficulty of Getting a Prescription for a Drug That Effectively Prevents HIV Infection

Spenser Mestel | Longreads | December 2016 | 23 minutes (5,642 words)

I’m sitting on the examining table at Student Health in Iowa City, digging a nail into the cuticle of my right thumb, waiting for Robin, the physician’s assistant. Over the course of my grad school career, she’s walked me through a half dozen of these STI checks—swabbed my throat and rectum, handled my urine, drawn liters of blood, and sat patiently to answer my many questions.

She opens the door and sighs. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

Visit
Share
220Likes

Sari Botton
Dec 5, 2016New York magazine
Elizabeth Gilbert on Putting Her Privilege to Work

At The Cut, Jessica Pressler interviews Elizabeth Gilbert, best known as the author of self-discovery travelogue Eat, Pray, Love, who more recently produced the creativity self-help “manifesto” Big Magic. Among other things, the two discuss how privilege factors into Gilbert’s story and success—an angle she’s often challenged on. She offers what strikes me as a pretty valid response:

“Privilege” still comes up in the Q&A session of almost every talk Gilbert gives. “I want to talk about privilege,” one audience member says at the BRIC, although this is the entirety of her question, and it doesn’t lead to a super-interesting discussion. Still, it’s something Gilbert has definitely thought about and formulated a response to: “I think there’s huge validity in acknowledging differences in privilege,” she said in Central Park. “If that conversation is being had in a serious way, then it’s absolutely a valid conversation. But if that conversation is being had as a way of dismissing somebody’s work, it’s a ridiculous conversation. I mean, the most extreme privilege that I inhabit is that I was born as a woman in this moment in history, in this culture,” she went on, in a voice that suggested she was about to go into a sermon. “I’m the first woman in the entire history of my family who had a public voice. I’m the first woman who had autonomy over her body. I’m the first woman who had autonomy over money. My mom was trying to open a checking account in 1974 in Connecticut, when I was 5 years old, and she was told that she couldn’t do it without her husband’s signature. But I guess my question would be ‘What do you want me to do instead? Do you want me to not become a writer? Or do you want me to use my privilege to create the most interesting body of work that I possibly can, to live the broadest possible number of experiences that I can, to reach out to the most number of women who I could reach?’ ”

Read the story

Visit
Share
235Likes

Emily Perper
Dec 4, 2016longreads
Why We Resist: Seven Stories About Protest

I’ve found it hard to think of little else other than our country’s future, by which I mean the futures of my friends of color, my queer friends, my disabled friends—the list goes on. I am grateful for Twitter, where writers and activists I admire remind me that what is happening is not normal, that we must resist as long as it takes. There are stories here about the Native-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, folks standing up to Donald Trump and his white supremacist cronies, and prisoners striking against their miserable living conditions in a racist system. As journalist Masha Gessen writes, “The citizens have posted guard.”
1. “Why We Must Protest.” (Masha Gessen, LitHub, November 2016)

Masha Gessen is one of the writers I’m thankful for. Yesterday I read her essay in the New York Review of Books, “Trump: The Choice We Face.” Gessen writes about her great-grandfather, a member of a Nazi-appointed Jewish council in his home ghetto, relating his position to the complicity we Americans may come to understand sooner than we think. I cried as I read. The NYRB essay led me to the one I’ve highlighted here, where Gessen examines and defends protest for the sake of protest.
2. “Protesting the NPI: A Case Study in Living the Unreal.” (Abbey Mei Otis, Full Stop, November 2016)

Like Masha Gessen, Abbey Mei Otis emphasizes the importance of preserving the integrity of our imaginations:
3. “The Dakota Access Pipeline Protest Is Unprecedented — And 150 Years In The Making.” (Anne Helen Petersen, BuzzFeed News Reader, September 2016) 4. “This Week May See the Largest Prison Strike in US History” and “At Least 24,000 Inmates Have Staged Coordinated Protests in the Past Month. Why Have You Not Heard of Their Actions?” (John Washington, The Nation, September & October 2016) 5. “Fight Trump: Stop Deportations By Any Means” (George Ciccariello-Maher, Verso, November 2016) and “Cities Vow to Fight Trump on Immigration, Even if They Lose Millions” (Jennifer Medina & Jess Bidgood, The New York Times, November 2016).

Visit
Share
299Likes

Longreads
Dec 2, 2016longreads
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *
1. The Power of Will 2. The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn 3. Geek Love 4. ‘Gosh, It’s Beautiful.’ 5. For Deaf Tennis Player, Sound Is No Barrier

Visit
Share
256Likes

Longreads
Dec 1, 2016longreads
Hidebound: The Grisly Invention of Parchment

Keith Houston | The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time | W. W. Norton & Company | August 2016 | 18 minutes (4,720 words)

Below is an excerpt from The Book, by Keith Houston. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Visit
Share
252Likes

Krista
Nov 30, 2016AIDS
Geek Love: On Nerditry as Salvation in ’70s Small-Town Canada

When Tom became sick in the winter of 2003, we revisited the subject of quantum entanglement. It was early winter, and we sat in his small, comically messy apartment in Toronto, surrounded by jagged lightning-bolt towers of piled books. Dead insects and tendrils of cobweb and cat dander were heaped up in giant fuzzy swaths along the baseboards; the carpet erupted with geysers of dust at the slightest touch. The windows admitted only a diffused glow even at midday.

He wanted me to understand the concept of entanglement — how, once two subatomic particles have been part of the same nucleus, even if they’re subsequently separated by an enormous distance, they remain in a kind of sympathy with each another. A change in one produces an instantaneous change in the other. The notion captures the attention of quantum-physics enthusiasts because it suggests a kind of indivisibility of matter. It also seems to contradict Einstein’s insistence that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed of light.

At The Walrus, Kevin Patterson writes on how his fraternal twin brother embraced nerditry to navigate the homophobia of small-town Canada in the ’70s.

Visit
Share
258Likes

Sabine Heinlein
Nov 29, 2016longreads
Truther Love

Sabine Heinlein | Longreads | November 2016 | 18 minutes (4,602 words)

She named her avatar DancingDark after a Lars von Trier movie and Björk, a beloved singer. DancingDark isn’t much of a showoff. “Super skinny. Nice, straight teeth,” she tells me. “My mom’s called me a radical, my dad’s called me a conspiracy theorist, none of my friends even know what I’m talking about.” DancingDark and I talk via Skype, but I can’t see her because she has taped-off the camera on her computer. She is pretty damn certain that the American government is spying on her. Whenever she mentions a certain country (which, for obvious reasons, she asked me not to name) her computer crashes. DancingDark is proud of her intellect. “I’m an intelligent being and I want to learn and be intellectual. That’s more of my foreplay than just being dirty online.”

Witty and personable, DancingDark’s frequent giggles easily turn into tears. As a Truther, the 37-year-old is committed to doubting “mainstream narratives.” When 9/11 happened, things just didn’t add up. There were suspicious delays in the media coverage and some dude down at the World Trade Center mumbled, “Bin Laden, Bin Laden…” Is it possible that the American government had staged the attack to legitimize its invasion of Iraq and take all their oil?

Visit
Share
324Likes

Ben Huberman
Nov 23, 2016ethics
Whose Body Is It, Anyway?

We tend to think of our body as an integrated whole that belongs to one person: the “I” that speaks whenever we open our mouth. But throughout history, people have been losing pieces of themselves — to war, disease, or accidents — and the fate of those missing parts is often decided on without the input of the original owner. In Aeon, Alice Dreger explores the strange afterlife of bodily leftovers, and the tension between our emotional connection to our body and the demands of science, ethics, and religion:

Maybe it’s because I’m an atheist ex-Catholic that I find it difficult to relate to people who are highly ritualistic and dogmatic about how remains are treated. I find it baffling that humans will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to recover the remains of people we know are dead at the bottom of the sea. I find it maddening that Theresa Stack was for 15 years denied a Catholic funeral mass for her late husband because there were no known remains of him. Fire Battalion Chief Lawrence T Stack had died at Ground Zero on 11 September 2001. Only this year, when his family realised there was still a blood sample from him — taken back when he had offered himself to a stranger as a possible bone-marrow donor — was the family able to provide just enough of him to a priest to have their mass.

Yet.

Visit
Share
424Likes

Emily Perper
Nov 23, 2016longreads
A Reading List for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving feels especially fraught this year. The stakes of the perfect holiday are high; better to abandon them altogether. Why does the intimacy of family breed conflict? I wish I had suggestions for battling the anxiety many of us are feeling around the table this year. As for me, I will try my hardest to speak truth if ignorance comes to a head, even if I am afraid. I will stay safe—my support systems at the ready, my journal and Klonipin in my bag, and my phone fully charged.

None of the following stories were written in 2016, but the themes of our contemporary American Thanksgiving traditions—family, identity, history—remain relevant.
1. “Native Intelligence.” (Charles C. Mann, Smithsonian Magazine, December 2005)

I learned more about 17th-century-era encounters betwixt Native Americans and the English from this essay than from 13 years of public school and four years of liberal arts education.
2. “Making a Place at the Table for Grief on Thanksgiving.” (Saeed Jones, BuzzFeed LGBT, November 2013) 3. “Sherman Alexie: Thanksgiving is a Story of Survival.” (Sarah Mirk, Bitch, November 2014) 4. “Korean Thanksgiving.” (Mary H.K. Choi, Aeon, November 2015) 5. “The Interloper.” (Kashana Cauley, Catapult, November 2015) 6. “The Problem with Being Palestinian on Thanksgiving.” (Zaina Arafat, BuzzFeed News, November 2013)

Visit
Share
365Likes