An Untamed State: The Opening Chapters from Roxane Gay’s New Novel

Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is out this week, and we’re excited to present the opening chapters with the Longreads community. Our thanks to Gay and Grove Atlantic for sharing it here.

Author: Roxane Gay
Source: Longreads
Published: May 8, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,742 words)

The History of ‘Boy’ and ‘Girl’ Toys: A Veteran Toy Designer Wrestles With the Industry’s Gender Divide

An interview with Stefanie Eskander, who has worked as a toy designer for more than 30 years, for companies including Mattel and Hasbro—and now works as the Design Manager for girls’ toys at Toys ‘R’ Us:

Pink is a funny thing. In the early days of the 20th century, pink was not necessarily a girl color. I’ve even heard that pink was considered a popular color for boys because it was a lighter version of red, which has always been seen as powerful and masculine. But as the 20th century went by, pink became a much more popular color for girls. I’ve heard they’ve done scientific studies that show that women and girls and even female babies are more attracted to redder colors than boys, but I take all of that with a grain of salt. I think girls’ attraction to pink is societal for the most part.

Published: May 8, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,571 words)

The Tor Project

As domestic abuse goes digital, shelters turn to counter-surveillance with Tor:

Sarah’s abuser gained access to every password she had. He monitored her bank accounts and used her phone to track her location and read her conversations. She endured four years of regular physical and emotional trauma enabled by meticulous digital surveillance and the existing support services, from shelters to police, were almost powerless to help her.

“We wish we could just stop the clock because we need to catch up,” said Risa Mednick, director of the Cambridge domestic violence prevention organization Transition House.

To fight back, Transition House and others turn to the same methods used by intelligence agencies in order to keep their clients safe.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: May 7, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,383 words)

Breaking the Silence About Sexual Assault on Campus: Our College Pick

Our college pick of the week, from UCLA.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 7, 2014

Childhood Lost

Sarah Brian says her two children were stolen by her own parents—with help from the state of Texas.

As a 25-year-old woman who’d grown convinced that her parents were trying to control her, Sarah saw her arrest and her daughter’s removal as stark displays of just how little power she had in her hometown. The court order mandated she was allowed to be with Zoe only if one of her parents supervised. But they fell gradually back into their old routines, Sarah making Zoe’s organic baby food in the kitchen and taking her daughter out for walks. Sarah and her parents often had heated fights over parenting questions—like whether the girl should eat peanut butter—letting Sarah’s father decide.

She placated her parents, they later claimed, by scheduling an evaluation with a doctor in Shreveport, Louisiana, later in 2007, but secretly she planned her escape. On the computer at home, while she watched her daughter and her mother watched her, Sarah discreetly researched other cities—weather, support networks, work prospects—and settled on Flagstaff, Arizona. Pictures of its forests and hills even reminded her a little of home.

Source: Texas Observer
Published: May 6, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,383 words)

On the Great Silk Road

Wracked with survivor’s guilt after a tragic car accident, a young woman finds herself looking for meaning in Uzbekistan:

One of the few Peace Corps pamphlets I ever read came to my home in Arizona about three weeks before my departure to Uzbekistan. I don’t think I read all the way through, but it told me that I should only bring what I could carry, so I arrived in Philadelphia for a three-day staging event before I would leave the country for two years with relatively few belongings. “What You Should Know About Uzbekistan” said that Uzbekistan got very cold in the winter, it being one of two doubly landlocked countries, the other being Liechtenstein, causing the seasons to be very extreme, with winters often below freezing and summers exceeding 100 degrees. But the hot Arizona summer of 2003 made me regard the prospect of cold weather as a down-right lie: I didn’t bring boots, nor a hat nor a scarf. I didn’t even bring a pair of jeans because the pamphlet said that Uzbek women wore skirts for daily attire, and I wanted to be just like the Uzbeks. I did, however, bring a laptop computer to document bits and pieces of my life (which I didn’t use until I got over my fear of electrical surges about four months into my service). Besides that, I had one traveling backpack and one suitcase, half of which contained books, mostly poetry books: Dunn’s Between Angels, Alice Notley’s Waltzing Matilda, and the 5 pound, 2000 page Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.

Source: The Smart Set
Published: Jul 2, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,626 words)

The Real House Candidates of Beverly Hills

Inside the race to represent California’s absurdly wealthy — and sometimes just absurd — 33rd District:

A few days later, I was sitting in Marianne Williamson’s home in Brentwood, a luxury apartment just off Wilshire Boulevard. It is a warm and vast space, filled with books, art and frantic activity. “Can someone hand me my glasses?” Williamson called out, and an aide quickly fetched them. She was sitting in her living room, Googling around for a quote from Thomas Jefferson that she wanted to share with me. “You know the one,” she said. “It’s on the monument.” She said she would email it to me.

Published: Apr 24, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,175 words)

What Killed My Sister?

The answer—schizophrenia—only leads to more perplexing questions:

Susanne Long was my sister, three years younger. She was funny and savvy. She was creative and kind and curious. She had a master’s degree, and she taught English as a second language in Washington, D.C., and later in Seattle. She spent two tours of duty in the Peace Corps, one in Liberia, the other in Morocco. She baked, cooked, knitted, quilted, played recorder. She took photographs. She loved to learn languages, and she loved to garden. She trained as a marathon runner. She was happily married, then unhappily married, then divorced. She was a great beauty, with high cheekbones and a Queen Nefertiti nose. She loved to hang out with her friends.

At the age of 32, never before, schizophrenia came to call. She began to hear nasty phrases hissed at her: We’re going to get you, etc. We may call them voices, but to her they were sentences spoken from the mouths of colleagues and passersby.

Published: Apr 1, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,923 words)

Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share the opening chapters of Grandma Gatewood’s Walk, the new book by Ben Montgomery about Emma Gatewood, the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone—and who did so at the age of 67.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 6, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,064 words)

My Journey Back to Ebola Ground Zero

A microbiologist’s story 40 years after investigating a deadly virus:

When we arrived in Yambuku on October 20 1976, we went straight to the guest house, which sat between the nuns’ and fathers’ convents. Three European sisters and a priest were standing outside, with a cord between them and us. They had read that in case of an epidemic it was necessary to establish a cordon sanitaire, which they had interpreted literally. A message hung from a tree, saying in the Lingala language that people should stay away as anybody coming any closer would die, and to leave messages on a piece of paper. When the sisters shouted in French, “Don’t come any nearer! Stay outside the barrier or you will die!” I immediately understood from their accent that they were from near my part of Flanders. I jumped over the barrier, saying in Dutch, “We are here to help you and to stop the epidemic. You’ll be all right.”

Author: Peter Piot
Source: Financial Times
Published: May 2, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,729 words)