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A Fish So Coveted People Have Smuggled, Kidnapped, and Killed For It

Photo: Qian Hu

Emily Voigt | Scribner | May 2016 | 18 minutes (4,498 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The Dragon Behind the Glass, by Emily Voigt. This story is recommended by Longreads editor Mike Dang.

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Taiping, Malaysia, May 11, 2004

Chan Kok Kuan still wasn’t home. Too worried to sleep, his father, Chan Ah Chai, stood at the window watching for a sign of his son through the blinding downpour. The rain had started at midnight and was still pummeling the ground at 4:00 a.m.—flooding the streets and overflowing the lakes in the public gardens, where the century-old saman trees stretch their massive canopies over Residency Road.

A wiry, exuberant man of thirty-one, the younger Chan was not the type to stay out late without calling. He had been home for dinner that evening, as usual, after working all day at the aquarium shop he opened a few years back. Even as a child, he had loved anything with fins. Now he was expert in one species in particular: the Asian arowana, the most expensive tropical fish in the world.

In Chinese, the creature is known as long yu, the dragon fish, for its sinuous body plated with large scales as round and shiny as coins. At maturity, the primitive predator reaches the length of a samurai sword, about two to three feet, and takes on a multihued sheen. A pair of whiskers juts from its lower lip, and two gauzy pectoral fins extend from its sides, suggesting a dragon in flight. This resemblance has led to the belief that the fish brings prosperity and good fortune, acting as a protective talisman to ward off evil and harm. Read more…

Just Like Heaven? Four Stories About Nordic Countries

The bookstore where I work has a motto: “Get to know your world.” We’re a small shop, but visitors often marvel at the size of our travel section. Spend a few too many minutes near these shelves, and you’re researching flights to Iceland or the best time of year to hike the Appalachian trail (maybe that’s just me). Lately, I’ve noticed an increase in books about Nordic life—like The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell, to this past week’s release, The Nordic Theory of Everything by Anu Partanen. Why are we Americans so drawn to the Scandinavian Peninsula and beyond? Why do some Republicans speak of Sweden with disdain or horror, whereas left-leaning folks go starry-eyed? Does the recent influx of refugees to these countries mark the beginning of institutionalized xenophobia? Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Red, White, and Bruised

Cleveland's "Ten Cent Beer" riot in 1974. A security guard escorts Indians pitcher Tom Hilgendorf from the field after he was hit on the head with a folding chair. Photo via Cleveland State University. Michael Schwartz Library. Special Collections.

Kyle Swenson | Longreads | July 2016 | 14 minutes (3,440 words)

 

My hometown isn’t very good at stomaching bad news. The word on Tamir landed on an icebox Monday afternoon deep into December. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office must have been watching the calendar—and the Doppler radar. The announcement arrived in the patch of dead static between Christmas and New Year’s when most of the country is unplugged or has hit the mental snooze button. As Prosecutor Timothy McGinty started his press conference, a perfect storm of human error, a tragic accident, winter rain began soaking the city. That night, spot protests were small in number. But the word went out: tomorrow afternoon, downtown, be there. Read more…

Colson Whitehead: An Appreciation

Colson Whitehead
Photo by Madeline Whitehead

Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates.

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I was skipping around Google the other day and was reminded of a piece by Colson Whitehead called “How To Write.” You may have read it when it came out in 2012 and laughed and, if you did, I can assure you that if you reread it now you will laugh again. It starts with the observation that the “art of writing can be reduced to a few simple rules” and kicks off with this one:

Whitehead1

It is like putting your broken unicorn out there, isn’t it? Anyway, Whitehead’s new novel The Underground Railroad is coming out Sept. 13, and I’ve been counting down to it.

Read more…

Black Lives Matter: A Reading List

This week’s reading list has three parts. Part One features Black authors writing explicitly about anti-Black police brutality. Part Two features Black authors writing about subjects other than police brutality, because maybe it’s in your best interest not to subject yourself to more mental anguish than is necessary, and because Black people deserve to write about so much more than their deaths at the hands of police. Finally, I grouped together resources for non-Black POC and white people who want to stand in solidarity against police brutality and violence against the Black community. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo courtesy ProPublica

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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1. Busted

Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders | ProPublica | July 7, 2016 | 29 minutes (7,261 words)

Law enforcement across the U.S. use $2 kits to test for drug possession while out on the field, despite evidence showing that the tests routinely produce false positives. The effect on the lives of the falsely accused and convicted can be devastating.

2. Who Are All These Trump Supporters?

George Saunders | The New Yorker | July 4, 2016 | 41 minutes (10,419 words)

George Saunders goes on the road to attend Trump rallies to get a sense of why so many people support the controversial candidate, and an understanding of how America has become so divided.

3. The Last Nazi Hunter

Stav Ziv | Newsweek | July 7, 2016 | 16 minutes (4,074 words)

Before the Holocaust's last architects can die naturally of old age, one Jewish man continues to track them down in order to bring them to justice for their crimes. Now his 40-year crusade has led him to Lithuania, a country which murdered over 90 percent of its Jewish citizens. Needless to say, he isn't popular there.

4. The Most Terrifying Childhood Condition You’ve Never Heard Of

David Dobbs | Spectrum | July 6, 2016 | 18 minutes (4,648 words)

A look into childhood disintegrative disorder, a rare condition which causes a child to "suffer deep, sharp reversals along multiple lines of development."

5. A Diamond and a Kiss: The Women of John Hughes

Soraya Roberts | Hazlitt | July 5, 2016 | 33 minutes (8,447 words)

Revisiting the women of John Hughes' '80s teen films, whose complex characters were unable to avoid the trap of aspiring to domestic ideals.

A Reading List for the Fourth of July

In between bites of hot dog and sunscreen applications, you can read about police brutality, what the rest of the world thinks about the United States, one woman’s American wardrobe and so much more. Happy Independence Day, America!

1. “Quintessential American Fiction, According to the Rest of the World.” (Lit Hub, July 2015)

J.D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, Yiyun Li, Julie Otsuka and Annie Proulx are just a fraction of the authors cited by this “deeply unscientific survey of nearly 50 writers, editors, publishers, critics, and translators, representing 30 countries.” I feel patriotic just reading this list!

2. “How to Be Canadian on the Fourth of July.” (Stephanie Hallett, Pacific Standard, June 2016)

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo courtesy Elle Magazine

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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1. 11,431 Rape Kits Were Collected and Forgotten in Detroit. This Is The Story of One of Them.

Anna Clark | Elle | June 27, 2016 | 29 minutes (7,297 words)

Clark weaves the story of Ardelia Ali’s 1995 rape—one of 11,431 Detroit cases in which the rape kit had been left untested—into a profile of Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy, who took on the testing of those kits and the prosecution of perpetrators as a personal mission. Worthy, both the first woman and first African American to hold her position, is a rape survivor herself. Her commitment to women brave enough to report what happened to them is rooted, in part, in her own regret for not going to the police after her own experience, leaving her rapist possibly free to attack other women.

2. Refugees Encounter a Foreign Word: Welcome

Jodi Kantor, Catrin Einhorn | New York Times | June 30, 2016 | 22 minutes (5,511 words)

In Canada, ordinary citizens are clamoring to sponsor Syrian refugees and welcome them into their homes. The Times spent five months interviewing families and refugees about their experiences, which have been largely positive.

See also: "The Shadow Doctors" (Ben Taub, The New Yorker)

3. All the Greedy Young Abigail Fishers and Me

Jia Tolentino | Jezebel | June 28, 2016 | 12 minutes (3,203 words)

Tolentino explores the recent "Becky With the Bad Grades v. UT Austin" Supreme Court ruling through the lens of her own experience writing college essays for privileged white high school students.

4. The Fugitive, His Dead Wife, and the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory That Explains Everything

Evan Hughes | GQ | June 28, 2016 | 29 minutes (7,403 words)

Kurt Sonnenfeld became a suspect in the death of his wife and moved to Argentina to start a new life. When the U.S. government pursued extradition, Sonnenfeld began insisting to Argentinian media that the U.S. wanted him for ulterior motives related to 9/11.

5. Angels in America: The Complete Oral History

Dan Kois, Isaac Butler | Slate | June 28, 2016 | 68 minutes (17,161 words)

Twenty-five years after its premiere, the behind-the-scenes story of Tony Kushner's landmark play.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by James West for Mother Jones

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Read more…