Reading List: A Little Help From My Friends

This week’s picks from Emily and her friends include stories from MIT Technology Review, Creative Time Reports, The Los Angeles Times, and InFocus.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 22, 2013

Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: New Questions About a Legendary Tennis Match

Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 21, 2013

What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies

How a colleague’s death affects an office:

Story after story, they’re all like this, proximity aspiring to intimacy, and it’s clear that no one here knew him, not the people in his department, not his managers, not the people he had lunch with and traveled with. They talk about his cluttered desk, his e-mail forwards, his cocktails at the Christmas party. They try to pull a person out of the time he spent here and they can’t.

“I always said hi to Colin when I passed him in the hall,” says someone on the video.

Naomi stops crying. She makes a little sound like she’s surprised, like she’s discovered the exact borders of her compassion. She takes a shallow breath, puts her purse on her lap, starts looking through it for tissues.

Source: The Billfold
Published: Dec 21, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,566 words)

The Welfare Queen

A deep dive into the life of Linda Taylor, a con artist who was villainized in the 1970s by Ronald Reagan as being a “welfare queen.” Her crimes were much worse than that:

In another Tribune story, Bliss and Griffin noted that Linda Taylor had been arrested twice in the 1960s for absconding with children, though she wasn’t convicted in either case because the little ones were returned. The reporters also laid out a possible motive. “Chicago’s welfare queen,” they wrote, “has been linked by Chicago police to a scheme to defraud the public aid department during the mid-1960s by buying newborn infants to substantiate welfare claims.”

This theory is a little hard to believe. Given Taylor’s ability to fabricate paperwork, acquiring flesh-and-blood children seems like an unnecessary risk if all you’re looking to do is pad a welfare application. Her son Johnnie believes his mother saw children as commodities, something to be acquired and sold. He remembers a little black girl—he doesn’t know her name—who stayed with them for a few months in the early 1960s, “and then she just disappeared one day.”

Author: Josh Levin
Source: Slate
Published: Dec 19, 2013
Length: 68 minutes (17,038 words)

Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn’t Read Until This Year

Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page.

Author: Mark Lotto
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 20, 2013

Appetite of Abundance: On the Benefits of Being Eaten

This week’s Longreads Member Pick comes from Orion magazine and J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World.

Thanks to Orion and MacKinnon for sharing it with the Longreads community. They’re also offering a free trial subscription here.

Source: Orion Magazine
Published: Dec 20, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,875 words)

Longreads Best of 2013: Story That Should Not Be Overlooked

Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) teaches media studies and writes Scandals of Classic Hollywood for The Hairpin, amongst other things.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 19, 2013

Solving an Old Problem: Our College Longreads Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 19, 2013

Tyler Hadley’s Killer Party

An account of house party thrown by a troubled teen in Florida:

During Justin’s game of beer pong, the ball bounced to the floor and rolled beneath the table, where it came to rest in a sticky, thick brown substance. Justin was mildly grossed out, but didn’t think much of it. He carried the ball to the kitchen sink and rinsed it under the faucet. Then he resumed the game.

As Mark Andrew was leaving the party, Tyler asked if they could speak privately. Tyler went outside and ordered all the kids standing there to get back into the house, so that his neighbors wouldn’t call the cops. Once everyone was inside, Tyler turned to Mark.

“Dude, I did some things. I might go to prison. I might go away for life. I don’t know, dude, I’m freaking out right now.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Dec 18, 2013
Length: 30 minutes (7,692 words)

Shit Actually

A scene-by-scene reassessment of Love Actually. It’s not positive:

Okay. Seriously. Is this Colin Firth storyline actually about human trafficking? Colin Firth shows up in France and this woman just gets dropped off at his house and he “falls in love with her” even though they cannot communicate and the only thing he knows about her is that he’s really, really into her butt. But it’s “love”! So he just “has” her now! She’s “his”! Colin Firth decided they should be together without ever saying a single word to each other, and so that’s what happens. Congratulations, now you have a weird stranger who lives in your house and fat-shames you in Portuguese. “Love.”

This entire movie is just straight white men acting upon women they think they “deserve.” This entire movie is just men doing things.

Also, who writes their novel on loose pages on a typewriter in an open-air shack next to a pond?

Author: Lindy West
Source: Jezebel
Published: Dec 18, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,015 words)