Longreads

9. The Semplica-Girl Diaries George Saunders | The New Yorker | October 8, 2012 | 35 minutes (8,979 words) A father uses his lottery winnings for an extravagant birthday party for his teenage…

Here’s one last exercise in democracy for 2012: a collection of the most popular magazine stories on the site this year, as determined by the combined clicks of the Internet electorate.…

May 12, 2008

STEVEN SHAPINon Cătălin Avramescu’s Intellectual History of Cannibalism. Brazilians cook human flesh … © (1671) From Nieuwe en onbekende weereld by A. Montanus, Courtesy…

When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago. There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.

Remembrances of the first year of high school, and advice for getting through your own, from some of our favorite grown-ups. Joss Whedon: "Rule One: DON’T BE LIKE THEM. I knew I was going to be mocked as an outsider and a weirdo, so I established my weird cred before anyone had time to get their mock on. Our study area was a great room ringed by tiny wooden cubicles (called 'toys,' in both the plural and the singular—Know Your Notions!), about 50 to a room. On the first day of term I posted a notice outside my toys that was pure nonsense, a portentous abstraction that conveyed the simple message that ridiculing me would not only be weak and redundant, but might actually please me in some unseemly way. As boy after boy read the notice and either laughed or puzzled, I could feel a small patch of safe turf firm up under my feet."

(Fiction) One day you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks. I’m a Spokane Indian boy, an Interior Salish, and my people have lived within a hundred-mile radius of Spokane, Washington, for at least ten thousand years. I grew up in Spokane, moved to Seattle twenty-three years ago for college, flunked out after two semesters, worked various blue- and bluer-collar jobs, married two or three times, fathered two or three kids, and then went crazy.

It's one of those raw, wrung out Yonge Street Saturday mornings. The smog-gray sky is just congealing into blue over the buildings and concrete. A dozen or so kids in denim are lollygagging outside…

"Dear Sugar, About eighteen months ago, I got pregnant. In a move that surprised both my boyfriend and me, we decided we wanted to keep the baby. Though the pregnancy was unplanned, we were really excited to become parents and the child was very much loved and wanted. When I was six and a half months pregnant, I miscarried. Since then, I’ve struggled to get out of bed."