Search Results for: The Nation

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.

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Straight Razors and Social Justice

Longreads Pick

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.

Published: May 31, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,094 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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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Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

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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'He Opened My Eyes to the Idea that Running Is Humankind's First Fine Art'

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:

Caballo was the first runner I’d ever seen who busted out big miles in skimpy sandals, and he opened my eyes to the idea that distance running is humankind’s first fine art; for most of our existence, it was the one natural weapon we had in a world dominated by creatures who could out-swim, out-sprint, out-climb, and out-fight us. I was certain when I went down to the Copper Canyons that I really had nothing to learn: I figured the Tarahumara were genetic freaks and my own running days were over due to chronic injuries. Then I meet Caballo, my eerie astral twin: we were the same height, the same shoe size, and the same age when we first encountered the Tarahumara, and he’d also struggled with broken-down legs. He took me into the hills, showed me a few things, and sent me home with the idea that maybe, just maybe, the Tarahumara were custodians of a transferable skill that even an overweight mope like me could master.

That’s why he has fans all over the world. But right when the rest of us were catching up to him, Caballo disappeared.

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More from Outside magazine

 Photo: doloripsum

Inside the 11-Story Building That’s Calling Itself the People’s Republic of Donetsk

Longreads Pick

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.

Published: May 21, 2014
Length: 7 minutes (1,957 words)

Thoughts From the Sexual Spectrum: A Reading List

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?

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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.

* * *

Read more…

How a Chris Rock Joke Led Melvin White To His Life's Work

“Martin Luther King stood for nonviolence,” says comedian Chris Rock in his live 1996 HBO special Bring the Pain. “Now what’s Martin Luther King? A street. And I don’t give a fuck where you are in America, if you on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there’s some violence going down.”

Later, Rock gives advice to anyone who finds themselves lost on an MLK-named street: “Run! Run! Run!”

Search any sizable town and there’s a good chance there’s a street named after King. Not all are awful, of course, but Rock’s generalization struck a national chord and made the street an emblem of everything gone wrong in America since the aspirational heights of the civil-rights era.

“The reality is that the street runs through some very damaged neighborhoods,” says Michael Allen, director of the St. Louis Preservation Research Office.

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.

Read the story here

More stories from The Riverfront Times

Photo of St. Louis’ Martin Luther King Drive via Flickr; Marjie