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.
* * *

— The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates on his difficulty with learning French, and how he adapted while growing up in a mostly black and poor section of Baltimore that lacked the kind of social and academic capital that can create high achieving students.
Photo: via YouTube/The Atlantic

— Daniel Vaughn, on what it’s like to work as Texas Monthly’s full-time barbecue editor.
Photo: Heather Cowper

— Ann Gibbons in National Geographic on how our diets have evolved and whether returning to a “Stone Age diet” would help prevent high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
Photo: Dollen

Douglas Haynes | Orion | Summer 2014 | 22 minutes (5,391 words)
OrionThis Longreads Exclusive comes from the latest issue of Orion magazine—subscribe to the magazine or donate for more great stories like this.Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)
“It’s like this here every day,” Dayani Baldelomar Bustos tells me as her dark eyes scan the packed alley for an opening. People carrying baskets of produce on their heads press against our backs. Read more…

–In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles Beard, who has helped confront the online and Twitter abuse that women face. (Beard’s full lecture is here.)
Photo: YouTube

Empathy, the word Lee Hancock murmured that morning, is more difficult. Because empathy requires that we approach our subjects from the inside. We try to enter into the emotions, thoughts, the very lives of those we write about. We try to imagine what it must be like to be them. Only by living in their skin at least briefly, by walking in their shoes, can we begin to see that person as he or she is. This requires moral imagination. It is what the good fiction writer does. And it is, I argue, what we writers of nonfiction must do.
There are learned people who will argue that this is impossible, and they may be right. How can we ever fully know another person? But the impossibility does not erase the obligation to try. That obligation demands that our actions as journalists not only be ethically sound, but — taking a word from Janet Malcolm — that they be morally defensible. Ethics is the rules of the game: fairness, honesty and disclosure. Morality is what we owe one another, not as writer and subject, but as fallen human beings. It demands self-knowledge, humility, and charity.
This, I think, sets the bar on its highest peg.
–At Gangrey, Bill Marvel reflects on the ethical questions of narrative journalism.
Photo: shuttercat7, Flickr
Impersonations, political cameos, and the skit that never made it to air: An excerpt from the newly expanded oral history by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.

-From the newly expanded oral history of Saturday Night Live, by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.

Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words)
Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS app.
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