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State of the #Longreads, 2014

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…

A Journey to Antarctica

I don’t think I was the only one who had trouble holding it together. We had come all this way and cashed in so much good fortune for the outside chance that we might see those eight Emperor penguins pick their way across the ice. And we did. In a world that can seem purpose-built and calculated for us, engineered for our safety and convenience, every part of that long-shot day, the entire lunatic trip, felt as fleeting as luck itself. That feeling is what I remember, and that’s why Antarctica remains impervious to memories and maps and the mental thumbtacks we might stick in them.

All of its settlements are temporary. Its borders migrate. Its landmarks are seasonal. Its ports are killer whales, and its capital cities are penguins.

Chris Jones goes to Antarctica for AFAR.

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More Jones in the Longreads Archive

Photo: marthaenpiet, Flickr

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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Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats

Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words)

 

1st

Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training.

Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the coming season. Each year it is another variation on the same theme: “This is Our Year” or “Is This Our Year?” or “Can the Royals Win it All?” or “Our Time” or “How Good are these Royals?” or “How Good are these Royals” or or or. It gets tiresome after growing up hearing it year after year, because the answer has always been the same. The answer is no. It’s not our time. It’s not our year. No, the Royals aren’t going to win it all. These Royals are not very good. No. Read more…

'Friendship': The Full First Chapter from Emily Gould's New Novel

Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book from WORD Bookstores

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The Story of H.M.: The Amnesiac Who Profoundly Changed the Way We Think About Memory

Sam Kean | The Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons | 2014 | 12 minutes (3,008 words)

 
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, a new book from science reporter Sam Kean looking at stories about the brain and the history of neuroscience. Here’s Kean:

In our minds, we more or less equate our identities with our memories; our very selves seem the sum total of all we’ve done and felt and seen. That’s why we cling to our memories so hard, even to our detriment sometimes—they seem the only bulwark we have against the erosion of the self. That’s also why disorders that rob us of our memories seem so cruel.

In the excerpt below, I explore one of the most profound cases of amnesia in medical history, H.M., who taught us several important things about how memory works. Perhaps most important, he taught us that different types of memories exist in the brain, and that each type is controlled by different structures. In fact, H.M. so profoundly changed our ideas about memory that it’s hard to remember what things were like before him.

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

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Falling in Love, 30 Years Later

At Vogue, Mira Jacob writes about watching her parents love 30 years after being paired up in an arranged marriage:

The night before I went back to New York, I came home to a sight so disquieting that I stood outside in the dark for a full five minutes, just watching. It was late. The television was on in our living room. In front of it, my father sat on the couch, my mother cradled in his arms. She was fast asleep, her cheek pressed to his chest.

I went inside. Though I hardly made a sound, my mother woke up. She blinked quietly, than sprang up with the realization that I was there. “I was asleep!” she said, as if I’d accused her of something. Then she got up and took herself to bed, disappearing down the hallway. My father gave me a funny grin and followed her. I stood alone in front of the television clutching my heart, which I suddenly realized was not a mere figure of speech.

Flying back to New York, I could not stop thinking one thing: Why now? Why this sudden attraction to someone who had been there the whole time? Sure, it’s a plot staple in American movies, where clumsy, high-cheekboned beauties regularly realize their “best friend” just happens to be Justin Timberlake, but in real life? In real life, my parents had bypassed that kind of irresistible attraction with almost three decades of houses, children, and pets. In real life, their marriage had proved to be a patchwork of incongruities, the kind that were bound to exist between a cosmopolitan girl from Bombay and a small-town boy from outside Madras.

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Photo: Cindy Funk

Yes, All Women Part II: A Reading List of Stories Written By Women

My last Yes, All Women reading list was a hit with the Longreads community, so here’s part two. Enjoy 20 pieces by fantastic women writers.

1. “When You’re Unemployed.” (Jessica Goldstein, The Hairpin, June 2014)

“The first thing to go is the caring…You develop a routine: changing out of sleeping leggings and into daytime leggings.”

2. “No Country for Old Pervs.” (Molly Lambert, Blvrb, June 2014)

Dov Charney, Terry Richardson…and the Iraq War? The 2000s were rough.

3. “For Writers with Full-Time Jobs: On the Work/Other Work Balance.” (Megan Burbank, Luna Luna Mag, June 2014)

Seven helpful tips for living practically and creatively. I’m particularly fond of “use your commute.”

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Calling Their Mothers From the Front Lines

And in the middle of this tumult, I came back to the relative calm of my hotel room in the Hotel Palestine. There was no electricity. Sunlight slanted horizontally into the dusty, dim corridors and I saw at the end of the passage, outside my room, two figures silhouetted against the white glare of the sun. As I approached I saw that they were soldiers, their uniforms stained with the mud of the Tigris valley, Americans, for they were cradling US Army assault rifles in their arms.

They were an intimidating presence. Until they spoke. “Sir,” one of them said, and there was a quiet, shy deference in his voice. I saw that they were young, achingly young, perhaps 19 years old, lettuce-fresh faces above long, lean, loose-limbed frames – no more than boys in the grown-up garb of desert camouflage. “Sir,” he went on, “we heard that there was a satellite phone in this room. We haven’t been able to call home in four months.”

They were the first in a little trickle of young US servicemen who would come to my room for this purpose in the weeks that lay ahead. What struck me with great poignancy was this – that almost always they phoned their mothers. From the other side of the room you would hear the phone sound in some far place in Kentucky or Idaho. The boy would say “Hi Mom!” and then you would hear the excited, disbelieving scream of delight echoing down the line.

BBC correspondent Allan Little recalls a memory from the spring of 2003, during his time covering the war in Iraq. Little’s essay explores the role of civilian correspondents from the battle front, as well as the “magnetic pull that war has on the young male imagination.”

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Image: “Paths of Glory” by Christopher Nevinson, via Wikimedia Commons. The painting, which depicts a World War I battlefield, was deemed bad for morale and immediately censored. 

Childhood Heroes: A Reading List

Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student from the Bronx named Donna Grace Moleta won the chance to meet Bill Nye “the Science Guy.”

“Meeting my childhood hero was one of the greatest experience of my life,” she told the Bronx Times. “It’s something I’ll never forget. He’s such a strong believer in what science and education can do.”

Inspired by Ms. Moleta’s experience, here’s a reading list of some of our childhood heroes:

1. Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. (Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine, 2014)

Getting to work with a celebrated comic artist:

…I emailed him the strip and thanked him for all his great work and the influence he’d had on me. And never expected to get a reply.

And what do you know, he wrote back.

Let me tell you. Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he’s communicating with me?

 

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