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I fucked up with Aunt Mimi, the first time I met her. I was greeted, I was shown the bird feeder where the birds came to keep her company, I was shown around the place. And then I said, “wow, I’ve never been in a trailer before.”

I meant it nicely. I liked trailers; I got a bit jealous, every time we saw them on vacations; I wanted to live in a house like that when I grew up, self-contained and mobile. It seemed vaguely magical to me. It did not, however, seem magical to Aunt Mimi.

She whipped around on me like a snake.

“Well,” she said, “la-dee-dahhh, missy. You enjoying yourself? Is this an experience for you, coming down to see the poor trailer folks? It’s such a treat, getting visitors from the palace.”

“The Percentages: A Biography of Class.” — Sady Doyle, Tiger Beatdown

More from Sady Doyle: “Ellen Ripley Saved My Life.” The Awl, Dec. 7, 2010

Longtime Republicans have been satisfied enough to have their candidates run down activist government as a campaign tactic, even as they themselves retained a more nuanced view of the federal government’s role (which is why a Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, managed to pass a Medicaidprescription-drug bill in 2003). But when you talk to them now, these same Republicans seem positively baffled that anyone could have actually internalized, so literally, all the scorching resentment for government that has come to define the modern conservative campaign.

“Does Anyone Have a Grip on the G.O.P.?” — Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine

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Featured Longreader: Pushcart Prize winner Elliott Holt. See her story picks from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Grantland and more on her longreads page.

The late Marjorie Williams on her cancer battle:

We have all indulged this curiosity, haven’t we? What would I do if I suddenly found I had a short time to live … What would it be like to sit in a doctor’s office and hear a death sentence? I had entertained those fantasies just like the next person. So when it actually happened, I felt weirdly like an actor in a melodrama. I had—and still sometimes have—the feeling that I was doing, or had done, something faintly self-dramatizing, something a bit too attention-getting. (I was raised by people who had a horror of melodrama, but that’s another part of the story.) In two months I will mark the finish of year 3 B.T.—my third year of Borrowed Time. (Or, as I think of it on my best days, Bonus Time.) When I was diagnosed with Stage IV(b) liver cancer in early July of 2001, every doctor was at great pains to make clear to me that this was a death sentence.

“A Matter of Life and Death.” — Marjorie Williams. Vanity Fair, Oct. 2005

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When she came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. By that time, I was up and looking at e‑mail, and we both quickly saw what the real problem was. In my inbox I found a message purporting to be from her, followed by a quickly proliferating stream of concerned responses from friends and acquaintances, all about the fact that she had been “mugged in Madrid.” The account had seemed sluggish earlier that morning because my wife had tried to use it at just the moment a hacker was taking it over and changing its settings—including the password, so that she couldn’t log in again.

“Hacked!” — James Fallows, The Atlantic

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At the end of his remarks, Obama turned to Warren and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled gamely, though if there are kisses a woman can do without, this was one of them. A Judas kiss, some would say. But if so, the betrayal was not just of Elizabeth Warren. In his remarks, Obama would hint at what had happened to Warren, commenting that she had faced “very tough opposition” and had taken “a fair amount of heat.” He also alluded to the powerful forces arrayed against her, and against the C.F.P.B.—“the army of lobbyists and lawyers right now working to water down the protections and reforms that we’ve passed,” the corporations that pumped “tens of millions of dollars” into the fight, and “[their] allies in Congress.”

“The Woman Who Knew Too Much.” — Suzanna Andrews, Vanity Fair

See more #longreads about Elizabeth Warren

Almost every morning, as Lyle was getting ready to take the dog for a walk along the bay, his wife would ask, “Are ye down the prom, then?” They had met and married thirty years before, in Vermont, when she was Mary Curtin and he’d thought her a happy combination of exotic and domestic. At sixty, after their life in the States, she still called herself a Galway girl; at sixty-seven, after two years of retirement in Galway, Lyle still considered a prom a high school dance, not two miles of sidewalk beside the water.

So he would say, “We’re going to walk along the bay,” and hope she’d leave it at that. When they had first come to Ireland, the exchange had had a bit of a joke to it, but he felt it now as unwelcome pressure. He had no intention of taking up Irish idioms — he’d have felt foolish saying “half-five” instead of five-thirty, “Tuesday week” instead of next Tuesday, “ye” for you. “Toilet” instead of bathroom was unthinkable. He called things by their real names — “pubs” bars, “shops” stores, “chips” French fries, and “gardai” police.

“The Man with the Lapdog.” — Beth Lordan, The Atlantic, Pen/O. Henry Prize 2000

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Featured Longreader: Writer/teacher/musician Matt Cardin. See his story picks from Gadfly Online, Wired, Chronicle of Higher Education and more on his #longreads page.

Here is what we know about the death of Sammy Wanjiru: It happened late in the early hours of May 15 at his posh home in Nyahururu, a Rift Valley town about 100 miles from Nairobi. Sammy fell from a second-story balcony — a drop of about 16 feet — and landed on the pavement outside. He lost consciousness. Hospital doctors could not revive him. 

Here is the mystery: whether Sammy fell, jumped, or was pushed.

“The Mysterious Death of Sammy Wanjiru.” — Anna Clark, Grantland

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The make-out game Seven Minutes In Heaven can evoke painful memories of awkwardly fumbling through puberty in a dark closet at a junior high boy-girl party. But Mike O’Brien, a former Chicago performer in his third season as a writer for Saturday Night Live, is slowly helping replace those memories with more enjoyable ones of Kristen Wiig, Amy Poehler, and Tracy Morgan hanging out with him in his closet in his new NBC web series, 7 Minutes In Heaven. O’Brien and director Rob Klein place celebrities in a small closet with cameras, suits, ties, hats, and only O’Brien. For a few minutes, they share the tight space with O’Brien as he asks them a barrage of quick-hitting, mostly nonsensical questions, such as “Please talk about ways that you are or are not similar to a horse.”

“Interview: Mike O’Brien.” — Katy Yeiser, Onion A.V. Club

See more #longreads from the Onion A.V. Club