This week, we’re sharing stories from Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Rachel Sugar, Kate Knibbs, Mark Arax, and Anna Wiener.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *
1. The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah | The New York Times Magazine | April 8, 2015 | 30 minutes (7,562 words)
“For decades Morrison has reflected back to us what it’s meant to be on the other side of this country’s approved history. When young white men again sing songs about lynching black men without being able recall who taught them those songs, and the hateful origins of the N-word are erased by a convenient amnesia to allow its constant use by outsiders, who will tell the stories we don’t tell ourselves?”
2. The Great Escape
Rachel Sugar | Vox — The Goods | August 7, 2019 | 20 minutes (5,177 words)
The explosion in popularity of escape rooms makes total sense in a world mostly without order.
3. “You Can’t Recover If You’re Dead”
Kate Knibbs | The Ringer | August 6, 2019 | 22 minutes (5,745 words)
Overdose-prevention spaces save lives, but are curiously excluded from the American approach to addiction recovery. Why?
4. Gone
Mark Arax | The California Sunday Magazine | July 31, 2019 | 46 minutes (11,658 words)
Arax sifts through the aftermath of California’s deadliest wildfire to expose the governmental negligence, forest mismanagement, unregulated urban growth, and PG&E corruption that put thousands of people in the path of the blaze.
5. The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
Anna Wiener | The New Yorker | August 8, 2019 | 24 minutes (6,226 words)
How two moderators are trying to make a popular Silicon Valley forum a thoughtful and productive space to have a conversation.
Get the Longreads Weekly Email