Longreads Best of 2013: Most Urgent Story, Award for Outstanding Reporting

Raphael Pope-Sussman (@AudacityofPope) is the managing editor of News Genius and a founding co-editor of BKLYNR

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Eva Holland (@evaholland) is a freelance writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 7, 2013

Longreads Best of 2013: Best Life Lessons from Lindsay Lohan in a Feature Story

Jason Fagone (@jfagone) is the author of Ingenious, a book about modern-day inventors; his stories this year appeared in Wired, Philadelphia, Grantland, Men’s Journal, and NewYorker.com.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 6, 2013

Fast Food, Minimum Wage, and an Industry Engineered for the ‘Interchangeability of Workers’

Thomas Frank on striking fast-food workers, many living in poverty:

Now, everyone knows how poorly fast-food jobs pay. They also know why this is supposed to be okay: fast-food workers are teenagers, they don’t have kids or college degrees, and it’s an entry-level job. Hell, it’s virtually a form of national service, the economic boot camp that has replaced the two years our fathers had to give to the armed forces.

Every one of these soothing shibboleths was contradicted by what I saw in North Carolina. These days, fast-food workers are often adults, they often do have children, and I met at least one college grad among the protesters in Raleigh. Why are things like this? Because a job is a job, and in times as lean as ours, the Golden Arches may be the only game in town, regardless of qualifications and degrees.

What people who repeat these things also don’t know is how much effort has gone into keeping fast-food pay so low, despite the enormous profits raked in by the chains.

Published: Dec 6, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,605 words)

Don’t Be Cruel: A Brief History of Elvis-Hating in America, Our Member Pick

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share “Don’t Be Cruel: A Brief History of Elvis-Hating in America,” from Ned Stuckey-French and The Normal School

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and support our service. You can also now buy Longreads Gift Memberships to send this and other great stories to friends, family or colleagues.

Published: Oct 1, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,999 words)

‘The first time I shaved my eyebrows was in fifth grade’

Edith Zimmerman on the mystery of the eyebrow—and why we have mirrors:

I can’t remember the first time I plucked my eyebrows, but the first time I shaved them was in fifth grade. My stepbrother had been making fun of my unibrow, which until then I hadn’t known I’d had. “Well, at least I have two eyebrows,” he said, ending whatever stupid fight we were having with a comment that was both confusing and clearly an insult, so I said something like, “Whatever, fuck you,” and ran off to the bathroom to check my face, on the unlikely chance that one of my eyebrows had literally fallen off, leaving a single strip over one eye. But looking in the mirror, I realized he meant that mine joined in the middle.

A few minutes later, I dragged my stepmother’s plastic razor down my forehead between my eyes (is there a name for that area?), slightly off-center.

Source: Into the Gloss
Published: Dec 5, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,230 words)

Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Sentence I Read This Year

Catherine Cloutier is an online producer at The Boston Globe’s Boston.com.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 5, 2013

The Secret Life of Grief

The writer on losing his mother to cancer, and on the science of grieving:

My mom died on July 18, 2013, of pancreatic cancer, a subtle blade that slips into the host so imperceptibly that by the time a presence is felt, it is almost always too late. Living about 16 months after her diagnosis, she was “lucky,” at least by the new standards of the parallel universe of cancer world. We were all lucky and unlucky in this way. Having time to watch a loved one die is a gift that takes more than it gives.

Psychologists call this drawn out period “anticipatory grief.” Anticipating a loved one’s death is considered normal and healthy, but realistically, the only way to prepare for a death is to imagine it. I could not stop imagining it. I spent a year and a half writing my mother a goodbye letter in my head, where, in the private theater of my thoughts, she died a hundred times. In buses and movie theaters, on Connecticut Avenue and 5th Avenue, on crosswalks and sidewalks, on the DC metro and New York subway, I lost her, again and again. To suffer a loved one’s long death is not to experience a single traumatic blow, but to suffer a thousand little deaths, tiny pinpricks, each a shot of grief you hope will inoculate against the real thing.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 3, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,466 words)

Longreads Best of 2013: My Favorite Stories About Taxes (and Twist-Ties)

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a writer and an editor at The New Inquiry.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 4, 2013

Welcome to the Memory Hole

Envisioning a not-too-distant future in which whistleblowers’ leaked information can be “disappeared” from the Internet:

Google – and since Google is the planet’s number one search engine, I’ll use it here as a shorthand for every search engine, even those yet to be invented – is in this way amazing and looks like a massive machine for spreading, not suppressing, news. Put just about anything on the web and Google is likely to find it quickly and add it into search results worldwide, sometimes within seconds. Since most people rarely scroll past the first few search results displayed, however, being disappeared already has a new meaning online. It’s no longer enough just to get Google to notice you. Getting it to place what you post high enough on its search results page to be noticed is what matters now. If your work is number 47,999,999 on the Snowden results, you’re as good as dead, as good as disappeared. Think of that as a starting point for the more significant forms of disappearance that undoubtedly lie in our future.

Source: TomDispatch
Published: Dec 4, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,300 words)

Tavi Gevinson’s December Editor’s Letter

On what it’s like to be between the ages of 13 and 17:

I remember liking a new boy, and thinking he liked me too, and then he didn’t, and I decided that this was better, because now I could listen to Heart and Carole King records and light candles and gaze out my window and feel sorry for myself.

I remember my 16th birthday, dancing to my favorite songs with my new friends under the pink balloons and silver stars that clouded our dining room, eating waffles made of cake batter, and then taking a communal clothed bath at Claire’s (my friend Claire’s house, not Claire’s the store). We fell asleep in a pile and woke up dreading the walk home because even though it was a beautiful spring day, it meant the night was over.

Source: Rookie
Published: Dec 2, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,761 words)