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Reading List: Double Consciousness and Religion

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Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

1. “Two Decades After Crown Heights, What’s It Like to Be Black and Orthodox Jewish?” (Wayne Lawrence & Molly Langmuir, New York magazine, December 2012)

A gorgeous blend of photography and personal testimony give this piece on black Orthodox Jews its power.

2. “I Am Trans, and I am Beautiful: Haley.” (R.L. Stollar, Homeschoolers Anonymous, May 2013)

The conservative Christian evangelical homeschooling community can be a world of harsh legalism. Here, Haley relates her story of nonconformity for Homeschoolers Anonymous, a blog that shares stories of struggle and abuse within this subculture.  

3. “Muslim Women Converts Tell of Hijab Dilemmas, Family Rows and Negative Portrayal of Faith.” (Jessica Elgot, Huffington Post Religion, May 2013)

Elgort’s piece shares some of the The New Muslims Project study, in which subjects of all races and ages shared the beauty and pain of conversion to Islam.

4. “PK.” (Mary Mann, The Rumpus, January 2013)

Mann on her coming of age as the daughter of an Episcopal priest.

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Photo: zeevveez

Longreads Guest Pick: Julie Kliegman on 'Owning The Middle'

Julie Kliegman is a senior studying journalism and Spanish at Northwestern University. Come July, she’s headed to St. Petersburg to work for PolitiFact. She loves to travel, and has lived abroad for short stints in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico.

“This week I enjoyed reading ‘Owning the Middle,’ an ESPN story about WNBA star Brittney Griner. If their sleek online feature design (see: ‘Out in the Great Alone’) isn’t enough to woo you, Kate Fagan paints a compelling picture of life as a black, lesbian athlete. Griner developed a thick skin during childhood and her time at Baylor that now helps her deflect the bullies Fagan refers to as her ‘troll chorus.’ Reading this will make you want to be as badass as Griner—the proud owner of many tattoos and two snakes.”

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Six Stories for the Fantasy Newbie

Jorge Luis Borges. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She recently shared six stories for the science-fiction newbie, so next up, she’s tackling fantasy. 

George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series is a crossover hit. However, there are still skeptics who view fantasy as children’s fables and tales exclusively for young adults—or you might just find GRRM’s enormous tomes a little intimidating.

Luckily, fantasy short stories offer us the depth of narrative we require and the fantastic elements we crave. Here is a collection of my favorite new and old gems, available online for free. Read more…

Our Longreads Member Pick: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis

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This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains:

I first arrived in Libya at the end of February 2011, less than ten days after the uprising began when peaceful protests were attacked by Col. Qaddafi’s forces. I spent a few months there on that trip and witnessed the beginnings of the armed conflict and the NATO intervention and, accidentally, the inside of the Libyan prison system.  In September of 2011 I returned to report on the final phases of the war and the eventual execution of Qaddafi by rebel forces.

Like nearly every journalist who covered the conflict, and over 90% of the Libyan population, I had spent all my time in Libya on the Mediterranean coast. When I returned in February 2012 for the one-year anniversary of the uprising, I was determined to see more: the vast southern deserts had always fascinated me with their promise of oil-fields, tribal peoples, camels and oases. That month an age-old friction between the Tubu and Zwaya ethnic groups broke out into open battle in Kufra, some hundred miles north of the Chadian border. Despite claiming around 100 lives, it got almost no media attention, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go south. 

We—my Ukrainian colleague Vadim Naninets (whose photographs were in the piece), our driver and I—set out before the break of dawn to make the 620-mile drive south from Benghazi. Fully stocked with bread, cheese, dates, and many cigarettes and bottles of water for the trip, the only real concern we had was bandits on the road. Since fighting in the city had ended, and it was fully ‘liberated,’ under the control of anti-Qaddafi rebels, we didn’t worry about politics in town. That was our first mistake…

On arrival we were immediately taken to the military council headquarters, where the questioning started off fairly innocuously (‘where are you from,’ ‘what are you doing here?’). Within an hour or two we were being questioned separately, our answers transcribed. Local newspapers wrote of our detention, prompting anxious Facebook discussions and phone calls from the temporary consulate in Benghazi. Ten hours later we were released into the custody of the National Army, the Benghazi-based outfit which had come south to quell the battles. 

I quickly understood that in the Sahelian region of Libya—where lighter-skinned Zwaya and darker-skinned Tubu live together—the revolution had a very different meaning from the straight politics of the coast. Pro- and anti-Qaddafi factions were largely based on ethnicity and the history of relations between each ethnic group and the onetime Leader.

The ride home was much swifter and livelier than the ride down: National Army gave us a night-time lift in a C-130. In flagrant violation of any extant aviation law, we rode in the cockpit (I took a turn in the pilot’s seat), each of the ten or so men in the flight crew chain-smoking and explaining what all the dials were for, and pointing to distant red flares burning in the darkness which marked locations of oil fields. 

I was struck yet again by the unimaginable vastness of the deserts, and the sense that we can never fully know what goes on there.

Read an excerpt here

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'Freefall Into Madness,' from Students at Fresno State

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher will be helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s her inaugural pick:

There’s a lot of great writing on the Internet, but not as much great reporting. And that’s what we mean when we talk about “the death of newspapers.” It’s less about the end of a product and more about the dearth of watchdogs. Investigative reporting is expensive. It takes time, people and money. When it’s done well, it’s often upsetting, and not something that advertisers rally around.

But exposing injustice, malfeasance, waste, fraud, courage, humanity, and truth are the most important things journalists can do with their talents, skills and platforms. With that in mind, we selected an investigative piece as the inaugural #college #longreads selection.

Students at Fresno State, under the guidance of former Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Arax, produced “Freefall Into Madness: The Fresno County Jail’s Barbaric Treatment of the Mentally Ill.” Through their reporting, the team learned that Fresno County Jail denies medication to mentally ill inmates. “Because they are not mentally competent to stand trial, they bounce back and forth in a perverse revolving door between the county jail and state mental hospitals, costing taxpayers even more money,” the article notes in a chilling early paragraph.

Students interviewed inmates, judges, lawyers, and elected officials—on the record, a rarity in itself—for a piece published in the independent monthly paper, The Community Alliance. In a note that accompanied the story, editor Mike Rhodes wrote: “This is our best argument that even in the world of the Internet, Facebook and smartphones, quality journalism will survive. I believe readers need and will continue to demand in-depth information about the world around them.”

We agree.

Freefall into Madness: The Fresno County Jail’s Barbaric Treatment of the Mentally Ill

Reported and written by Fresno State journalists Sam LoProto, Damian Marquez, Angel Moreno, Jacob Rayburn, Brianna Vaccari, Liana Whitehead and their professor Mark Arax.

May 2013 | 43 minutes (10,556 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

“The Oral History of NY1.” Hannah Miet, Complex

Reading List: What's In A Dream? Writers Explore New York


Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

As my service year winds down and I begin to look for jobs, I’m simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by the New York mythos. Here are four pieces that explore the romance, the real estate, the heartbreak and the hard-at-work.

1. “Here is New York.” (E.B. White, 1949)

White discusses the “nearness of giants,” the essential alone/never alone dichotomy and general spectacle of New York, N.Y.

2. ”Goodbye to All That.” (Joan Didion, 1967)

The yin to White’s yang, here is Didion’s quintessential emotional examination of New York.

3. ”I Want This Apartment.” (Susan Orlean, The New Yorker, February 1999)

The cutthroat Manhattan real estate market calls for a sharp-eyed guru. Enjoy pre-recession prices and capitalization of the word “internet.”

4. ”At Home on the Church Steps.” (Mindy Lewis, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, February 2013)

As apartment buildings are converted to condos, Lewis watches a dear neighbor become homeless and wonders at “a future where compassion is always trumped by enterprise.”

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Photo: JWPhotography2012

Longreads Guest Pick: Elise Foley on 'The Girl Who Turned to Bone'

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Elise Foley is an immigration and politics reporter for The Huffington Post.

“My favorite longread this week was Carl Zimmer’s ‘The Girl Who Turned to Bone’ in the Atlantic, which is about a very rare disease that causes people to form a second skeleton. It reminded me, in a great way, of ‘The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly’ in the New York Times last year—both of them are stories about dealing with a rare disease on your own, then finding a doctor and network of people like you that make you feel like you’re not alone. The entire piece is a fascinating look at the science behind the disease and the people who helped to discover it.”

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articles read & loved no. 53

dietcoker:

Emily Perper!

Reading List: 6 Stories for the Science-Fiction Newbie

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Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She also happens to love science fiction, so she put together a #longreads list for sci-fi newbies.

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Have you heard? Science fiction is “in”—nerds at the movies, nerds everywhere. This is thrilling if you are familiar with the genre, but what if you never got into sci-fi in the first place? Where would you start?

Since its inception (ha), speculative fiction has worked as social commentary, satire, and a creative answer to the question “What if?” Here are my personal picks to get you started.

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1. Nightfall, Isaac Asimov (1941)

No sci-fi list is complete without Asimov, and not only due to his creation of the Laws of Robotics. If you like this story, I would suggest moving straight on to his “robopsychologist” Susan Calvin stories.

2. The Veldt, Ray Bradbury (1950)

Bradbury, of Martian Chronicles fame and beyond, writes here about the danger of integrating technology too far into human developmental psychology.

3. Bloodchild, Octavia Butler (1995)

A look at the symbiotic relationship between aliens and humans. If you’ve seen any horror movie featuring extraterrestrials, you’ve pretty much seen them all, but sci-fi stories like this one explore more “alien” ideas than the simple “monster from space” trope.

4. Robot, by Helena Bell (2012)

Robots! Here’s a short and wicked story from Bell, a contemporary sci-fi writer who touches on slavery, mortality, and the horror of a slow decline in life.

5. The Country of the Blind, H.G. Wells (1904)

Wells (War of the Worlds, Time Machine) is the oldest pick on my list, and this story imagines just what its title implies.

6. Understand, by Ted Chiang (1991)

Chiang addresses PTSD, advancements in medical science, and the horror of not trusting your own mind. This story is probably one of the best “straight” sci-fi examples on this list—the clear “What if?” develops steadily, and pushes the reader along to its surprising conclusion. Entire novels have been written in this style—Max Barry’s Machine Man is my personal favorite.

Bonus Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Suggestions

I also recommend this list for more great reading material, and if you want to start with something cyberpunky, look out for Neal Stephenson or William Gibson—they’re mostly novelists, and definitely worth your time.

(cover via umbc.edu)