The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: The New York Times
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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Photo: The New York Times
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.
* * *

— In The New York Times Magazine, Ruth Padawar looks at the growing trans community at schools like Wellesley and Mount Holyoke and how they’re sparking a discussion for policy changes at colleges that have been historically all-female.
Photo: Wen Zeng

By the time Simon Rich graduated from Harvard, where he served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, he had a two-book deal from Random House. Less than a decade later, the humorist has written four short story collections and two comic novels. He also spent four years writing for Saturday Night Live (he was the youngest writer SNL ever hired) and about two years at Pixar, and is now at work on a film and a television series.
Rich’s level of productivity, impressive as it is, takes a backseat to the quality of his humor writing. His stories are crystalline, eccentric, and universally hilarious. Many of the stories in his new collection, Spoiled Brats are built on an unusual premise, or told from a surprising angle. In “Animals,” a hamster narrates his wretched existence as a class pet at an elementary school. In “Gifted,” a mother insists that her son—born as a monster, with horns and a tail—is exceptional. And in “Distractions,” a writer believes the whole world is out to get him, and they really are.
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Well, I always loved to write. As early as kindergarten, I plagiarized Roald Dahl stories that I would try to pass off as my own. But I think it sort of shifted around when I was 17. That’s when I started writing every single day, whether or not I had an idea. Until then, I would only sit down and write a story if one occurred to me, and then I started to wake up every single day and write for a few hours whether or not I had anything worthwhile to say.

Profiling documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras for The New Yorker, George Packer writes of her latest film, “Citizenfour,” which tells the story of N.S.A. whistleblower Edward Snowden. Packer describes the documentary as a political thriller in three acts, with the second act chronicling Snowden’s time in Hong Kong. Over the course of eight days Poitras filmed Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room for twenty hours, and “the act proceeds chronologically through the eight days in the hotel room, taking up a full hour of the hundred-and-thirteen-minute film.”
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A special night of storytelling with
This Land
Featuring:
Mark Singer (The New Yorker)
Rilla Askew (author, “Fire in Beulah”)
Ginger Strand (author, “Inventing Niagara”)
Kiera Feldman (writer, “Grace in Broken Arrow,” “This Is My Beloved Son”)
Marcos Barbery (journalist and documentarian, writer, “From One Fire”)
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby Street
New York, NY 10012
Bios
Mark Singer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1974. Singer’s account of the collapse of the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City appeared in The New Yorker in 1985 and was published as a book, Funny Money.
Rilla Askew is an Oklahoma-born writer and author of the novel Fire in Beulah, set against the backdrop of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
Ginger Strand is the author of Inventing Niagara, the untold story of America’s waterfall. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Harper’s, The Believer, The Iowa Review, and the New York Times. Her articles for This Land magazine span fracking, Oklahoma’s water wars, and homicidal truck drivers.
Kiera Feldman is a Brooklyn-based reporter whose story “Grace in Broken Arrow” earned Longreads’ Best Non-Fiction article of the year in 2012. She’s written for n+1, The New York Times, Mother Jones, and a number of other publications.
Marcos Barbery is a journalist and documentarian. His This Land article “From One Fire” tells the story of an unlikely civil rights leader in the Cherokee Nation.
Photo by Jesse Chan-Norris (Flickr)

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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–Sean Wilsey, in his 2003 essay for the London Review of Books, edited for his anthology More Curious, and reprinted on BuzzFeed
Photo: fotologic, Flickr

September feels like a month of changes, to me. Growing up, the first day of school was my New Year. I made resolutions; I felt like a new person, at least for a little while. Today, I chose six stories about (possibly, eventually, hopefully, revolutionary) changes in television, fashion, religion and more.
I’m still naive enough to think cartoons will always be lighthearted, despite the crudity of Family Guy and South Park. When the credits rolled on BoJack Horseman, I turned to my boyfriend, close to tears, and said, “That … that was really sad.” And that’s not a bad thing.
Seeing the fashion blogger I used to follow in my tween years on the front cover of the style section of the Globe and Mail is a little surreal. Slone delivers an excellent piece on supermodel Brown-Young (a.k.a. Winnie Harlow), who has vitiligo and rocked the runway this September.

In our latest Longreads Exclusive, Kiera Feldman and Tulsa-based magazine This Land Press went deep into the downfall of the Oral Roberts family dynasty—how Richard Roberts went from heir to the televangelist’s empire, to stripped from his role at Oral Roberts University.
Feldman, a Brooklyn-based journalist, and This Land Press have worked together before—her story “Grace in Broken Arrow” was named our top pick for Best of Longreads 2012, and it explored another scandal inside a religious institution, sex abuse at a Tulsa Christian school. I exchanged emails with Feldman to discuss the making of the Oral Roberts story, and her start in journalism.
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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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