The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This week, we’re sharing stories from Pamela Colloff, Jordan Smith, James Ross Gardner, Michelle Dowd, and Jaya Saxena.
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This week, we’re sharing stories from Pamela Colloff, Jordan Smith, James Ross Gardner, Michelle Dowd, and Jaya Saxena.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Alex Green | The 33 1/3 B-Sides | Bloomsbury Academic | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,044 words)
At Passover dinner in April 1990, our Seder came to the pivotal symbolic moment where we poured a cup of wine and opened the door for the Prophet Elijah. As if on cue, in walked a guy wearing ripped jeans and a black mask, holding a shotgun. It wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured him. I’d always thought skinny, long hair, a beard, maybe a robe…
“Sorry to barge in like this,” the guy said, “but we’re going to be taking some shit.” Then he whistled out the door and in walked an identical masked intruder with an equally menacing shotgun. The two of them tied my family up and then proceeded to ransack the house right in front of us, pulling out drawers, throwing around dishes, and kicking over plants as they searched for anything of value.

Terry Tempest Williams | Erosion | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2019 | 39 minutes (7,820 words)
“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves
We had just celebrated my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Louis Gakumba and I were driving back up to Jackson Hole. My husband Brooke texted me, “I love you. Pull over to the side of the road. Call me.” I knew it was Dan. I had been thinking of him as I was mesmerized by the immense cumulus clouds building in the west.
“Is Dan dead?”
“Yes.”

This week, we’re sharing stories from Will Evans, Tomi Obaro, Rachel Morris, Maya Kosoff, and Michelle Delgado.
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Relative to the time required to read them, #longreads take far longer to write. In the first episode for a new series on The Longreads Podcast, Head of Fact-checking Matt Giles interviews James K. Williamson and Tim Requarth about pieces they recently published after years of incubation, research, and writing.
Tim Requarth is a science journalist and a lecturer in science and writing at New York University. Longreads published his essay, “The Final Five Percent,” in October. Requarth worked on the story for 10 years. It chronicles his brother Conway’s brain injury and subsequent change in personality, as he becomes more violent and eventually lands in jail. Requarth weaves in his own PhD studies in neuroscience and the ramifications of bringing neuroscience into the courtroom. Read more…

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lakeidra Chavis, Jodi S. Cohen, Jennifer Smith Richards, Heidi Blake, Zandria F. Robinson, Michael Hall, and Eve Peyser.
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Editor-in-Chief Mike Dang, Contributing Editor Danielle Jackson, Culture Columnist Soraya Roberts, and The Believer’s Deputy and Co-Interview Editor Niela Orr share what they’ve been reading and working on.
This week, the editors discuss the gender politics of music criticism, how young womxn drive conversations around cultural figures, a new memoir by Whitney Houston’s best friend, and institutionalized discrimination in sport.
Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.
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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

On our November 15, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Head of Audience Catherine Cusick, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and visiting Nieman Foundation fellow and New York Times Styles Internet culture reporter Taylor Lorenz share what they’ve been reading and working on.
This week, the editors discuss the merits of TikTok, generational warfare, expanding the definition of patriotism, and the intersection of jazz and 60s rock and roll.
Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.
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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Alec MacGillis, Melissa Brown, Brendan I. Koerner, Christopher Mathias, and Yiyun Li.
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Fred Goodman | Why Lhasa de Sela Matters | University of Texas Press | November 2019 | 27 minutes (5,471 words)
A sorceress of the soul, the multi-lingual singer Lhasa de Sela captivated music fanatics around the world with her spellbinding songs and other-worldly performances. Yet ten years after her tragic death from breast cancer in Montreal at 37, America’s first world music chanteuse remains largely and inexplicably unknown here, an under-the-radar icon in her own country. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters, her first biography, charts Lhasa’s road to musical maturity. —Fred Goodman
The slowest nights for bars and clubs come early in the week, which is why many clubs are closed on Mondays, leaving Tuesday as the lightest night of the week. As a result, Lhasa de Sela didn’t waitress on Tuesdays. Instead, she found local Montreal bars that would let her sing a set a cappella. Wearing a black dress and a long knit hat, she cut a figure that was both striking and subdued.
Working on assorted standards and the Billie Holiday songs she loved, Lhasa was primarily focused on two tasks: overcoming her own shyness and learning how to hold a listener’s attention. She had a ways to go.
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