The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: doug88888, 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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Photo: doug88888, 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.
* * *
A history professor examines the deep roots and empowering evolution of black barbershops:
In a country where institutionalized racism has been the norm for centuries, black barbershops remain an anomaly. Though initially blocked from serving black patrons, these businesses evolved into spaces where African Americans could freely socialize and discuss contemporary issues. While catering to certain hair types may have helped these businesses succeed, the real secret to their longevity is their continued social import. For many African Americans, getting a haircut is more than a commodity—it’s an experience that builds community and shapes political action. As both a proud symbol of African American entrepreneurship and a relic of an era when black labor exclusively benefitted whites, black barbershops provide a window into our nation’s complicated racial dynamics.

Photo: Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for Al Jazeera America
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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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Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community.
Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)
Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)
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In 2006, Christopher McDougall set off on an adventure in search of the Tarahumara Indians, a reclusive running tribe in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. On that journey, later to be chronicled in McDougall’s book, Born to Run (and also later documented in a 2012 New York Times story by Barry Bearak), McDougall befriended the Caballo Blanco—real name: Micah True—a nomadic ultrarunner living among them. Several years later, after hearing the Caballo had disappeared in the Gila National Forest, he and other runners embark on a quest to find their friend:
Photo: doloripsum
The Kafkaesque saga of a reporter trying to gain access to the world’s smallest—and quite possibly most bureaucratic—nation.
When I first arrived in Donetsk (the city) a Russian journalist who has been stuck covering this place since May 9 advised me and my photographer Max Avdeev to go and get accredited with Donetsk (the people’s republic). The PRD has been in existence for just over a month and is fighting for its survival. But it is also rigorously accrediting journalists.
To get into the country—which is basically just the seized Soviet-era building that once housed the Donetsk city administration—Max and I had to get through a series of checkpoints set up in the adjacent square, now piled high with tires, barbed wire, and signs decrying fascism, Kiev, America, the E.U., and, weirdly, Poland. At each of the three checkpoints, Max showed his Russian press card and I showed my New Republic business card to an endless series of sun-burned, black-fingernailed men in Adidas track pants.

The following writers straddle the line between explanation and expression. Here is my piece. It is personal.
Lauren Morelli’s piece especially touched me. An ex-boyfriend once told me he consulted with his pastor and his wife to see if he should be concerned; would my “healthy fascination with bisexuality” (his words, which I don’t necessarily hate or disagree with) be a deterrent to a serious relationship? The pastor’s wife told him that I should be completely sure I wouldn’t leave him for a woman, should we get married (P.S. we were both 22). These people had never met me, but they were trying to articulate my complex relationship with myself and the people I love. At the time, I brushed that pain aside; now I am hurt and angry. I have never written about this before, but the bravery of Lauren Morelli’s piece dares me to. It dares all of us to face our lives with rugged honesty.
These pieces aren’t about me, though—they are about profound, unique experiences. But they are opportunities to put names with faces, to make the abstract real, and what is more important than that?

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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—Danny Wicentowski, in the Riverfront Times. Wicentowski profiled Melvin White, whose St. Louis-based nonprofit “Beloved Streets of America” aims to improve not just the Martin Luther King Drive of his native St. Louis, but also ailing Martin Luther King streets across America.
More stories from The Riverfront Times
Photo of St. Louis’ Martin Luther King Drive via Flickr; Marjie
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