The Longreads Blog

Reading List: Believe in Your Selfie

Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

I’m tired of middle-aged white dudes critiquing my generation as selfish and narcissistic. Often, the selfie is held up triumphantly as the very symbol of our self-degradation. Here, four other, more intelligent perspectives on selfie culture:

1. “A Good Angle is Hard to Find.” (Sarah Hepola, The Morning News, September 2013)

The author, a self-identified “selfie enthusiast,” simultaneously critiques and defends the selfie phenomenon. She explains that selfies allow her to capture her solitary travels and control how her life looks, while acknowledging the complaints of narcissism.

2. “The Young-Girl and the Selfie.” (Sarah Gram, Textual Relations, March 2013)

Gram looks at selfies in light of capitalism: “In an economy of attention, it is a disaster for men that girls take up physical space and document it, and that this documentation takes up page hits and retweets that could go to ‘more important’ things. And so the Young-Girl must be punished, with a disgust reserved for the purely trivial.”

3. “Snaps of America.” (Larissa Pham, Full Stop, September 2013)

A cross-country road trip, a modern-day archivist, a Wendell Berry poetic analysis—Pham marvels at the Midwest and stakes her claim to memory in this piece.

4. “In Praise of Selfies: From Self-Conscious to Self-Constructive.” (Casey N. Cep, Pacific Standard, July 2013)

This piece touches briefly on several aspects of the discussion surrounding selfie culture, including its roots in self-portraiture, the opportunity to escape the male gaze and the tension between aspiration and authenticity.

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Photo by Larissa Pham

Longreads Guest Pick: Briana Bierschbach on 'Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing, and Death'

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Girl reporter for Politics in Minnesota. Mother of Dragons.

It was a great week for longreads in America (see: Reuters’ ‘The Child Exchange’ investigation and Rolling Stone’s interactive story on hackers who will probably save the world), but one piece was passed around on my social media feeds more than any other: ‘Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing and Death,’ by Shane Morris. This piece doesn’t exactly exemplify any traditional journalistic values, nor would mom approve of it (warning, this story contains swears), but it’s also the most educational thing I’ve read all week. Did you know that the ‘rise of Molly can be traced back to German Shepherds?’ Did you know that cartel tactics are being used to traffic Molly? No, I bet you didn’t. It’s like ‘Breaking Bad,’ but real. Added bonus: Morris’s writing style is amazingly accessible. It feels like you’re listening to the confessions of a friend, that is, if you have friends that do/sell a lot of drugs.

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What Life Was Like for an Executioner’s Family in the 16th Century

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad.

Joel F. Harrington | The Faithful Executioner, Farrar, Straus and Giroux | March 2013 | 15 minutes (3,723 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book The Faithful Executioners, by Joel F. Harrington, which was recently featured as a Longreads Member Pick. Thanks to our Longreads Members for making these stories possible—sign up to join Longreads to contribute to our story fund. 

Read more from Harrington on how the book came together. Read more…

College Longreads Pick: 'The Red & Black Comes Back to Life' by David Schick, University of Georgia

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Student publications have always served as simulators for journalists in training. Your college paper is where you learn to write, to edit, and to challenge authority. You fall in love there, both with journalism and at least one of your co-workers. It’s a safe space to experiment and a gentle place to screw up. But more than ever before, today’s student newspapers face the same challenges as their professional counterparts. In his thorough story for Flagpole magazine, David Schick, a student at the University of Georgia, examines the troubled Red & Black student newspaper a year after the staff walked out after management oversight demanded more “good” news. One overthrow later, today’s staff struggles with the same mundane business issues that affect all newspapers: a rough transition to a digital-first publication schedule and reduced ad revenue for the online product. It’s too bad there’s so much verisimilitude.

The Red & Black Comes Back to Life

David Schick | Flagpole Magazine | 8 minutes (2,010 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.

Reading List: Interviews with Awesome Women Authors

Margaret Atwood with her first Italian publisher Mario Monti. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The best interviews with authors make you want to read—not just their work, but read in general, and read all the time, and read with a new fervor.

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1. “The Art of Not Belonging: Dwyer Murphy Interviews Edwidge Danticat.” (Guernica, September 2013)

Danticat gives a beautiful interview, discussing her book Claire of the Sea Light and what it’s like living on the hyphen between American and Haitian.

2. “‘Who survives, who doesn’t?’ An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” (Isabel Slone, Hazlitt, August 2013)

The “wise witch” of Canada discusses technology, military history, and the reception of Canadian literature.

3. “One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Malinda Lo.” (Julie Bartel, YALSA, June 2013)

Lo didn’t dig her teenage years, yet she’s a successful YA author. She calls two of her books “love letters to the X-Files.” She co-directs a website about diversity in YA literature and believes in honoring each letter of LGBTQ. Read more about this genre-bending maven.

4. “An Interview with Disability Activist and ‘Good Kings Bad Kings’ Author Susan Nussbaum.” (Caitlin Wood, Bitch Magazine, August 2013)

Nussbaum’s debut novel is a fine work of intersectional storytelling, relating the experiences of differently disabled Chicago teens. In this interview, Nussbaum talks about a new vocabulary for disability politics, the importance of sexually active disabled characters, and research for Good Kings Bad Kings.

Longreads Guest Pick: Christine Kim on 'What's Killing Poor White Women?'

Christine Kim is a civil rights advocate studying at Duke University School of Law.

My favorite longread of the week is ‘What’s Killing Poor White Women,’ by Monica Potts, in The American Prospect. Health care is on the national stage. From Obamacare to health care costs to new state-run health exchanges, it seems that each news day is packed with analysis of our governmental strategy on health care. The stories of the individuals and minority groups who are suffering and—in this story—passing away without clear explanation do not often make it to the front page. Monica Potts discusses the alarming drop in life expectancy of low-income white women with humility, candidness, and understanding. Her story makes the research and data accessible all while reminding the reader to remember the women being affected. My close friend recently lost his mother suddenly without any warning or explanation. While the article is not entirely consoling, it places our grief into a greater context and made me realize that more information may be revealed to us in the future through further study and research.

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Longreads Member Pick: The Last Freeway, by Hillel Aron

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

This week’s Longreads Member Pick comes recommended by Longreads contributor Julia Wick: It’s “The Last Freeway,” a story by Hillel Aron, published in Slake in 2011, about the construction of a freeway interchange and a judge whose decisions shaped its scope. Aron explains:

“Well, my friends Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa had this great quarterly called Slake, and I wanted to write something for them, so we sat down and talked about it… I think maybe I pitched it to them, I can’t remember. I’d was just always fascinated by freeways, growing up in Los Angeles, and I loved that Reyner Banham book, The Architecture of the Four Ecologies. When I was kid, I was completely enchanted by that 105 / 110 interchange, the carpool lane one, which towers above the city. It’s basically like a rollercoaster. Actually it kind of sucks—since I wrote the piece, they’ve turned that carpool lane into a “toll lane,” so normal carpoolers can’t use it anymore without one of those fast pass things. At any rate, I did some research and it turned out that (a) the 105 was the last freeway built in Los Angeles—the end of an era, really. And it was so tough to build that it basically set a precedent of not building freeways anymore. And (b), there was this nutty judge who turned the whole thing into a New Deal-style public works program to benefit the communities that were being bisected by this massive beast of a freeway. And he also ordered them to stick a train in the middle of it, which didn’t quite go to the airport, but that’s a different story…”

Read an excerpt here.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

College Longreads Pick: 'Without Rules: The Untold Story of the Johnny Bright Incident' by Kyle Fredrickson, Oklahoma State University

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Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Journalism requires a relentless focus on the now and the next. But in order for journalists to give their audience any sort of context, they must always have a sense of the past. It’s not enough to know where we are today; we have to explain how we got here. That’s one reason that “whatever happened to” stories are so much fun to do and to read. Sometimes journalists can uncover new information, as did University of Nebraska-Lincoln students in 2005 when they re-reported the Kansas murders that made Truman Capote famous for In Cold Blood. Other times, as in this week’s College Longreads selection, we hear an alternate perspective on a story we thought we knew. Oklahoma State University alumnus Kyle Fredrickson, who now interns for the Dallas Morning News, sought out 82-year-old Wilbanks Smith last fall to learn how he remembers an ugly hit on a football field in 1951 that was portrayed at the time as racially motivated. What he found was an old man who remembers that day with grief.

Without Rules: The Untold Story of the Johnny Bright Incident

Kyle Fredrickson | The Daily O’Collegian | 19 minutes (4,756 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 Woman Who Counted Fish

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jon Mooallem | Wild Ones, Penguin Press | May 2013 | 11 minutes (2,605 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of Jon Mooallem’s book Wild Ones, as recommended by Maria Popova. Read more…

Reading List: Travel and Self-Discovery

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

“One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things,” wrote Henry Miller. Travel changes the traveler, obviously. Here, authors look at themselves, their societies, and their conceptions of home.

1. “Fat and Happy: Living Body Positive in Indonesia.” (Emily Anderson, August 2013)

I’ve followed Anderson’s adventures as she’s navigated the weird waters of serving abroad and intersectional feminism. Here’s her latest, a beautiful, articulate exploration of how fat is treated in Indonesia.

2. “Last City I Loved: Abu Dhabi.” (April Xiong, The Rumpus, August 2013)

A dreamy meditation on travel and what makes a home. Xiong studies film in Abu Dhabi, but isn’t sure if she’ll ever belong there, or anywhere.

3. “On Seeing England for the First Time.” (Jamaica Kincaid, 1991)

“My nose was pressed up against a glass window all right, but there was an iron vise at the back of my neck forcing my head to stay in place.” Kincaid describes the problematic relationship between her Antiguan childhood and England’s colonization thereof.

4. “Nine Airports.” (Armin Rosen, August 2013)

Rosen documents his adventures in different—you guessed it—airports in Africa and the Middle East, from the eerie Somalian stopover to the grandiosity of Jordan.

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Photo by Kate Ter Haar