Search Results for: This Magazine

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

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

New Neighbors

Longreads Pick

In our continued mission to bring attention to America’s print literary magazines, here is a powerful essay from the University of Florida’s journal Subtropics, about the way homophobia and transphobia ran one couple out of their new apartment, and into disarray. Unfortunately, this story is as timely as ever.

Source: Subtropics
Published: Jun 29, 2016
Length: 30 minutes (7,604 words)

A Reading List for Thanksgiving

Photo: Stacy Spensley/Flickr

Thanksgiving feels especially fraught this year. The stakes of the perfect holiday are high; better to abandon them altogether. Why does the intimacy of family breed conflict? I wish I had suggestions for battling the anxiety many of us are feeling around the table this year. As for me, I will try my hardest to speak truth if ignorance comes to a head, even if I am afraid. I will stay safe—my support systems at the ready, my journal and Klonipin in my bag, and my phone fully charged.

None of the following stories were written in 2016, but the themes of our contemporary American Thanksgiving traditions—family, identity, history—remain relevant. Read more…

Thank You, Jon Gnagy: An Appreciation of a Predecessor to Bob Ross

Ned Stuckey-French | Longreads | November 2016 | 9 minutes (2,204 words)

 

Growing up in the early 1960s I watched a Saturday morning television show called Learn to Draw hosted by a man named Jon Gnagy. He sported a neatly trimmed Van Dyke and exuded a comforting mix of calm and enthusiasm. The goatee was offset by a plaid flannel shirt. There was no beret or affected accent. He was artistic but not too artsy. Each show he taught us how to draw something new: a clown, a snow scene, or an ocean liner at dock. His hands flew as shapes and outlines turned magically into pictures. He lay the chalk on its side and shaded in order to achieve “effects” and talked continuously, identifying the light source and explaining the vanishing point.

I tried to keep up, but never could. At the end of each show, Gnagy would slap a frame on his drawing and declare it done, but I had to keep going, working on my version of “Mountain Lake” or “Boy Sledding” into the afternoon, sighing, starting over, and trying again and again to get it right. Hoping it would help, I convinced my mom to order me a Jon Gnagy Learn to Draw Art Kit that included a tablet, pencils, charcoal, kneaded eraser, and guidebook.

I never became an artist, but I like to draw and so does my ten-year old daughter Phoebe. Recently, when she and I were poking around on YouTube, I remembered Gnagy, searched his name, and, though he died in 1981, there he was once again. We clicked “play” and it all flooded back. Johann Strauss’s bouncy “Künstlerleben,” or “Artist’s Life,” is still the opening theme. Gnagy is wearing his plaid shirt, goatee and ready smile. Today’s scene of a boy sledding might look complicated, he says, but it isn’t. If you can draw four simple forms—the ball, cone, cube and cylinder—you can draw anything. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

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

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

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

What Comes Next: Confronting a Post-Election America

Like you, perhaps, I am in mourning for something that could have been. As a queer, non-binary person, I have received numerous inquiries about my well-being from friends and colleagues; I am simultaneously reckoning with the privilege my whiteness affords me. I am functioning—I go to work, I eat meals, I take most of my medications, I even go to bed on time—but I feel dead inside. Family members, former classmates and millions of people I’ve never met have written off my existence, as well as the rights of women, disabled people and people of color, and the safety of Muslims, Jews and immigrants. This week’s reading list is dedicated to those marginalized voices. Some of these stories were written in the wake of this year’s election; others came before. I hope you read these and feel if not heartened, then more determined than ever to protest evil, protect marginalized communities/yourselves and share your lived experiences. Read more…

On Wisconsin

Longreads Pick

In the wake of the Presidential election, it’s fitting to highlight this evergreen personal essay from the literary magazine Witness. In it, one man meditates on his home state, a cold place where a distrustful, resistant tribalism intersects with a history of early progressivism, harkening back to a time “when the Republican Party was on the side of the righteous” and to an unjust shooting.

Source: Witness
Published: Jan 1, 2015
Length: 20 minutes (5,098 words)

The Other Residential School Runaways

Longreads Pick

Nearly 50 years ago, two 12-year-old Ojibwe boys escaped from an Ontario residential school and froze to death. The Canadian federal government used to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children inside church-run schools. Over 3,200 kids died in them. Others died while fleeing. After famously telling one escapee’s story in 1967, Maclean’s magazine finally gets to tell two of the other boys’ stories.

Source: Maclean’s
Published: Oct 20, 2016
Length: 17 minutes (4,487 words)

An American in a Strange Land: A Journalist’s Tour of a Divided Country

After living abroad in cities like Beijing, New Delhi, and Rome and watching the United States from afar for more than a decade, New York Times correspondent Jim Yardley returns to find a country he doesn’t recognize.

This summer, I decided I wanted to explore this place that had become a foreign country to me. I didn’t understand what had happened since I left, why so many people seemed so disillusioned and angry. I planned a zigzag route, revisiting places where I once lived or worked, a 29-day sprint through 11 states (and four time zones). I knew I would be moving too fast to make any sweeping declaration about the state of America, and I wouldn’t ask people which presidential candidate they were voting for. I was more interested in why they were so anxious about the present and the future. I wanted to find out why the country was fragmenting rather than binding together. Most of all I wanted to see with my own eyes what had changed — and so much had changed.

Read the story