Search Results for: The Nation
‘My Body Stopped Speaking to Me’: The First-Person Account of a Near-Death Experience
Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.
“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995.
Reading List: 21 Outstanding Stories from Women's Magazines and Websites

Are women’s magazines avoiding “serious journalism”? Guess it all depends on who’s deciding what’s serious.
The New Republic asks that question in a new article, and our biggest problem with this debate (and, to be honest, the term “longform journalism”) is that it can often run everything through a male-skewed filter of what counts as “serious journalism.” We’ve seen serious storytelling in both.
The other problem is that we’re still relying on National Magazine Awards and print-only publishers to reflect the zeitgeist. I’ve mentioned that 65% of all #longreads started out in print, but we also should spotlight the work of online publishers who are pursuing in-depth storytelling.
So, here’s a start: 21 stories from women’s magazines and sites that we’ve featured on Longreads. On Twitter, Rebecca Traister is curating some of her favorite serious work. And we’d love for you to add your favorite women’s magazine stories in the comments.
Allure
• The F Word, Jennifer Weiner
Marie Claire
• The Big Business of Breast Cancer, Lea Goldman
Tiger Beatdown
• The Percentages: A Biography of Class, Sady Doyle
O, The Oprah Magazine
• ‘I Will Never Know Why’, Susan Klebold
• ‘We Thought the Sun Would Always Shine on Our Lives’, Paige Williams
• Promises of an Unwed Father, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Is Ecstasy a Viable Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?, Jessica Winter
Rookie
• Higher Learning, Staff
XO Jane
• How A Gun-loving West Texas Girl Learned to Fear Assault Weapons, Haley B. Elkins
• It Happened To Me: My Parents Adopted a Murderer, Amity Bitzel
More
• How I Lost $500,000 for Love, Aryn Kyle
Vogue
• Notes on a Scandal: Jenny Sanford Vogue Interview, Rebecca Johnson
• Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw at the Revolution, Kevin Conley
• Susan Rice: She’s Got Game, Jonathan Van Meter
Elle
• I’m For Sale, Genevieve Smith
The Hairpin
• My Brother, My Mother, and a Call Girl, Mara Cohen Marks
• He’s So Unusual, Jane Marie
• A Goodbye to Ambien in Dubai, Amy Schumer
• The Evolution of Ape-Face Johnson, Carolita Johnson
Glamour
• Relationship Violence: The Secret That Kills 4 Women a Day, Liz Brody
Jezebel
• What Can a Civilian Possibly Say to a Wounded Soldier?, Chloe Angyal
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Share your picks in the comments
Our Longreads Member Pick: The Skies Belong to Us (Chapter 5), by Brendan I. Koerner

This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner‘s new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who’s been featured on Longreads in the past, explains:
“On the morning of October 11, 2009, I encountered the 616-word newspaper story that would change my life. It was a New York Times report about a man named Luis Armando Peña Soltren, a former Puerto Rican nationalist who had helped hijack a Pan Am jet to Cuba in 1968. After spending the next 41 years living in Fidel Castro’s socialist ‘paradise,’ he had decided that he could no longer bear to remain apart from the wife and daughter he had left behind. So at the age of 66, Soltren had voluntarily returned to the United States. He had been arrested the moment he stepped off his plane at JFK Airport; he now faced a possible life sentence if convicted of air piracy.
“I was first struck by how much Soltren’s longing for his family had slowly swelled as the years flew by; it had taken him over four decades to muster the courage to risk his freedom for a chance to see his wife and daughter again. (I’ve always been drawn to tales of fugitives and exiles, who must often pay a steep psychological price in order to reinvent themselves.) But the more I thought about Soltren’s predicament, the more I was intrigued by its historical element—namely, the fact that he and two comrades had actually managed to hijack a Boeing 707 to Cuba in the first place. The New York Times piece gave the impression that such crimes were run-of-the-mill during the Vietnam Era. Given the airport security gauntlets we’re forced to endure these days, that seemed an almost unfathomable notion.
“Yet using a little Google-fu, I unearthed a lengthy list of dramatic skyjackings from the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time period I have romanticized ever since watching Mean Streets. There were plenty of fascinating characters who seemed to beg for deeper study, such as the Marine who fled to Rome to escape a court-martial, or the Mexican immigrant who just wanted to give a 34-minute speech about his troubles. But there was one name that tugged at my heart more than any other: Catherine Marie Kerkow.
“Why her? Well, for starters, she was a woman—skyjacking was almost exclusively a male pursuit. She was also high-school classmates with legendary miler Steve Prefontaine. But most important, she didn’t seem to have any obvious reason for getting involved in a spectacular hijacking—she was, by all accounts, just an aimless 20-year-old kid with no political ties, nor any history of criminality.
“So why did Cathy Kerkow turn her back on everything she’d ever known in order to hijack Western Airlines Flight 701? As my infinitely patient wife and kids can attest, my obsession with answering that question has now gobbled up a significant chunk of my life. The Skies Belong to Us is what I have to show for all those countless hours holed up with the keyboard, surrounded by teetering piles of marked-up documents.”
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“Weaponize the Media”: An Anonymous Rapper’s War on Steubenville
The story of the man who led the Anonymous campaign against the Steubenville rapists:
“As KYAnonymous, Lostutter had already won some renown for KnightSec by attacking revenge-porn king Hunter Moore and helping shut down a Westboro Baptist Church protest. But the decision to take on the Steubenville case unleashed more powerful forces than he had ever encountered before: international outrage, legions of vigilante followers, and a glaring media spotlight.
“It was KnightSec that would obtain the video of a Steubenville teen joking about the rape, turning an alcohol-blurred local crime into a visual that cable news could loop like disaster footage, crystallizing public opinion against the offenders. It was also KnightSec that helped create a toxically false, conspiratorial dossier on innocent parties surrounding the case.”
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat
An examination of Margaret Thatcher’s life as chronicled in the authorized biography by Charles Moore:
“It’s depressing to suppose that fortune favours the people who can keep going longest. But it does. That is one of the clear lessons from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as they do. But she is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps chopping and changing long after they have gone home. She didn’t outsmart or outperform her enemies. She outstayed them.”
Dirty Secrets of the Worst Charities
Reporters from the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting spent a year scrutinizing 5,800 charities nationwide that pay for-profit telemarketing companies to solicit donations on their behalf. As much as 90 cents for every dollar of those donations go directly to pay for the for-profit companies that are “dialing for dollars”:
Part One: Dirty Secrets of the Worst Charities
Part Two: A Failure of Regulation
Part Three: The Reynolds Family Empire
Reading List: Love in the Time of Context

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.
One reason I admire longform journalism is its ability to tell stories. Some of these stories gain national attention. Some are perfected in an MFA workshop. Some are written on the backs of receipts, after waking in the middle of the night, while in traffic.
Most longform stories are written with love: toward craft and toward subject. These four are no exception. They focus on falling in love with chance encounters and with self-acceptance. They are about a love of career and a love of potential. They are about the struggle-love of family. That is the loyalty of longform: to a love of context.
1. “Owning the Middle.” (Kate Fagan, espnW and ESPN The Magazine, May 2013)
Women’s basketball superstar Brittney Griner makes strides on the court and in LGBTQ athletic culture. Be sure to check the video interview and gorgeous portraits by Cass Bird.
2. “Growing Up With Sailor Moon.” (Soleil Ho, Interrupt Magazine, May 2013)
In the midst of her parents’ emotional divorce, a young Ho discovers and relies upon the subversive gender-empowering message of Sailor Moon.
3. “A Ruckus of Romance.” (Rachel Howard, Narrative.ly, February 2013)
They fall in love on the dance floor: Emily Hall Smith plays matchmaker to the artsy, queer women of New York City.
4. “Butch in the Airport.” (Kate, Autostraddle, May 2013)
The seemingly innocuous airport can be place of great anxiety for those whom identify as genderqueer. Here, Kate reflects on such practical and emotional difficulties.
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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.
Photo: Rosa Middleton
3 Stories from Young Journalists Honored at the Livingston Awards

The Livingston Awards are handed out every year to celebrate outstanding work from journalists under 35. Here are this year’s winning stories, honored this week in New York:
“Slavery’s Last Stronghold” (John D. Sutter & Edythe McNamee, CNN.com)
International Reporting winner: A trip to Mauritania, where an estimated 10% to 20% of the population lives in slavery.
“The Things They Leave Behind” (Rachel Manteuffel, Washingtonian)
National Reporting winner: A closer look at the letters, mementos and other artifacts left behind at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
“In God’s Name” (Alexandra Zayas and Kathleen Flynn, Tampa Bay Times)
Local Reporting winner: An investigation into the abuse of children at unlicensed religious group homes in Florida.
The Guilty Man
Michael Morton, who spent 25 years wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his wife, takes the stand again, against the real killer:
“The jury regarded him with what appeared to be both sympathy and fascination. One of the many strange aspects of The State of Texas v. Mark Alan Norwood was that at no point during the eight-day trial would the jurors hear that Michael himself had previously been found guilty of the crime, or that he had spent nearly 25 years behind bars. Before the trial, state district judge Burt Carnes had granted a request from the prosecution to exclude testimony about Michael’s conviction. Because his exoneration had wiped his record clean, he no longer had a criminal history, and the prosecution argued that any mention of his wrongful conviction might unfairly prejudice the jury against its star witness. To the people in the courtroom who were familiar with Michael’s odyssey, however, it was a mind-bending omission.”
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