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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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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On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley, CA apartment by members of an urban guerrilla group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. Two months after she was abducted Hearst— the granddaughter of the real life “Citizen Kane,” publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst—had joined the SLA, adopted the the name “Tania” as her nom de guerre and was robbing a San Francisco bank with a M1 carbine. Hearst’s kidnapping and subsequent conversion riveted the nation—Was it Stockholm Syndrome? Brainwashing? The last gasp of sixties radicalism?
In October of the next year, Rolling Stone featured an explosive cover story, “Tania’s World: An Insider’s Account of Patty Hearst on the Run.” Below is a short excerpt from Howard Kohn and David Weir’s account of her life as a fugitive with the SLA, detailing her moment of conversion:
Patty was shown a long list of the Hearst family holdings — nine newspapers, 13 magazines, four TV and radio stations, a silver mine, a paper mill and prime real estate. Her parents clearly were part of the ruling elite. That’s why they had quibbled over the ransom money. That’s why they had handed out turkey giblets instead of steaks during the food giveaway that the S.L.A. had demanded. Money meant everything to the economic class of her parents. And the only power that could fight that money was the power that came out of the barrel of a gun. It was a political philosophy that had bored her when Weed and his doctoral student friends had discussed it in their Berkeley apartment. But Cinque’s rough eloquence was more persuasive than the abstract talk of graduate students. The S.L.A.’s motives made sense. They wanted to redistribute the Hearst wealth to more needy people. It was her parents — and the economic class they represented — who were to blame for her misery and the misery of countless others.
The S.L.A. members encouraged her radicalization. They hugged her, called her sister and ended her loneliness. Patty’s conversion was as much emotional as political.
Seven weeks after she was kidnapped, Patty asked to join the S.L.A. Despite their new respect for her, most of the S.L.A. soldiers were opposed. Patty would deprive them of mobility because her face was so easily recognized. She could not be counted on in emergencies. She did not have the guerrilla training the others had.
But Cinque wanted her to become a comrade in arms.

Eva Holland | Longreads | February 2015 | 10 minutes (2,458 words)
Ta-Nehisi Coates started blogging for The Atlantic on August 4, 2008. His first post was titled “Sullivan… McArdle… Fallows… Coates???” and it laid down his terms from the start: “My only rule, really, is simple,” he wrote. “Don’t be a jerk to people you disagree with.” He’d been hired to fill the slot left in the magazine’s roster of bloggers by Matt Yglesias, and he addressed how he’d be coming at the role differently. “Matt has a fairly amazing ability to comment, from a left perspective, on a wide range of issues… Knowing my own limits, I’ll take a different tack. On things I’m not so sure on, I’ll state my opinion rather gingerly and then hope my commenters can fill in the gaps.”
The blog would soon be widely lauded for the keenness and clarity of its ideas, the power of its language, and for its unexpected ability to host real, substantive conversations in the comments—an extreme rarity on big-name websites. Coates, then a relatively unknown writer, would go on to win a 2013 National Magazine Award for “Fear of a Black President,” an essay published in The Atlantic’s print edition, while a selection of nine posts from his blog would be named a 2014 finalist in the National Magazine Awards’ “columns and commentary” category.
So how did Coates foster a comment section in which—wonder of wonders—intelligent adults thoughtfully share ideas and knowledge, and where trolling, rudeness and bad faith aren’t tolerated? I asked Coates and other players in the blog’s success—editors, moderators and commenters—to look back on what makes it work. Read more…

Sari Botton | Longreads | February 2015 | 14 minutes (3,683 words)
Ed. note: Katherine Heiny will be in conversation with Sari Botton at McNally Jackson in New York on Wednesday, Feb. 11 at 7 p.m.
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In the fall of 1992, I found myself very much affected by “How to Give the Wrong Impression,” a short story in the September 21 issue of The New Yorker about a twentysomething psych grad student who’s trying hard to seem satisfied keeping things platonic between her and her handsome roommate.
To begin with, I had a lot in common with the protagonist, more than I’d have wanted to admit at the time. I was in my twenties, too—27 to be exact—newly divorced from the second person I’d ever so much as dated, and most importantly, I was very busy trying to seem satisfied keeping things platonic with a rakish “friend.” I didn’t just recognize that young woman, I was her at that moment in my life. Read more…

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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The author and environmental activist Edward Abbey, who passed away in 1989, would have been 88 today. Abbey—who Larry McMurtry dubbed “the Thoreau of the American West”—was known for his searing love of wilderness, particularly the deserts of the Southwest, and his progressive views. An excerpt from Desert Solitaire, his most famous non-fiction work, can be found here.
According to the historian Douglas Brinkley, “Abbey’s motto came from Walt Whitman—’resist much, obey little’–and he was delighted that everyone from the FBI to the Sierra Club derided him as a ‘Desert Anarchist.'” Below is an excerpt from a 2004 Outside magazine piece titled “Chasing Abbey,” written by Abbey’s close friend and fellow author and outdoorsman Doug Peacock:

Jon Irwin | Kill Screen | January 2015 | 17 minutes (4,253 words)
Below is a new Longreads Exclusive from Kill Screen, the videogame arts and culture magazine. Writer Jon Irwin goes inside the resurrection of the videogame classic Grim Fandango. For more from Kill Screen, subscribe.
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A profile of the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne from the New York Times magazine, circa 1987.

Mark Leibovich, in the New York Times, gets a rare look inside the life of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who’s now 37 in a league where few play past the age of 40. The result is some obsessive habits about caring for his body and the food he eats:
Every morning in the Bahamas, Brady undertook an intense regimen that included resistance drills, exercises with rubber bands and stretches designed to foster muscular flexibility. While traditional training in football emphasizes the building of muscle strength, [Body coach Alex] Guerrero also focuses on pliability, which Brady equates to sponginess and elasticity. “If there’s so much pressure, just constant tugging on your tendons and ligaments, you’re going to get hurt,” Brady told me. “Like with a kid, when they fall, they don’t get hurt. Their muscles are soft. When you get older, you lose that.”
After his vacation workouts, Brady joined his family for a late breakfast that — for him — consisted mainly of a protein shake that was also high in electrolytes and included greens like kale and collards. (Brady also likes to add blueberries to his concoctions, but some other berries are off limits because they are thought to promote inflammation.) I asked Guerrero at one point if Brady is ever allowed to eat a cheeseburger. “Yes, we have treats,” he said. “We make them.” Like what? “Usually raw desserts, like raw macaroons.” Ice cream made from avocado is another favorite, Guerrero said.
“Sometimes we’ll go over to Tom and Gisele’s house for dinner,” Brady’s father, also named Tom, told me. “And then I’ll say afterward, ‘Where are we going for dinner?’ ”

Maria Bustillos | Longreads | January 2015 | 15 minutes (3,706 words)
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