After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet

Nearly six months after the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, the family of one of the victims, 7-year-old Daniel Barden, grapples with what’s next:

“Daniel Barden. Seven. Dylan Hockley. Six. Ana Marquez-Greene. Six. Six. Six. Six. Seven. Six. How long could one minute last? Mark looked at the lawmakers and tried to pick out the three who already had refused to meet with the Newtown parents. Could he barge into their offices? Wait at their cars? Jackie counted the seconds in her head — ‘breathe, breathe,’ she told herself — believing she was holding it together until a lawmaker handed her a box of tissues. Hockley saw the tissues and thought about how she rarely cried anymore except for alone at night, unconscious in her sleep, awakening to a damp pillow.”

Author: Eli Saslow
Source: Washington Post
Published: Jun 9, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,433 words)

Reading List: Love in the Time of Context

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

Share your favorite stories in the comments.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 9, 2013

Freeway Rick is Dreaming

The writer, who has written about the notorious crack kingpin Freeway Rick for nearly two decades, profiles Ricky Ross once more as Ross attempts to legitimately hustle his way back to success:

“On the streets he once flooded with drugs, Freeway Rick is hawking weaves. A staple of the African American cosmetology industry, the weave—or ‘hair integration’ piece—inspires cultlike reverence: a beauty secret that transforms an age-old preoccupation into a declaration of fabulousness. Rick has no training in hair care, no affinity for it either, but he knows that weaves cost a fortune, more than the average customer can sanely afford. A 3.5-ounce bundle, depending on length, retails for $150 to $175, and most women need several bundles to achieve a full, versatile coif, which means $1,000 or more to have the whole thing anchored and styled. In Freeway Rick’s brain, that adds up to opportunity. ‘It could be milk, tires, fertilizer—I don’t care,’ he says. ‘They’re just products.'”

Author: Jesse Katz
Published: May 22, 2013
Length: 33 minutes (8,295 words)

When The Beautiful Game Turns Ugly

The writer travels to Verona, Italy to examine why racism is so prevalent in soccer:

“It was a little stadium, and Boateng could see their faces. Fifty or so people called him an animal. He locked eyes with them and could see the hate. He pointed to his head, to say, ‘You’re an idiot.’ The chants went on for 20 minutes: Oo — oo — oo — oo.

“Boateng had been abused before and had ignored it. This time, he kicked the ball at the fans, took off his jersey and walked to the locker room. His teammates followed. Something important happened at this moment, which didn’t get reported much in the frenzy that followed: Most of the stadium stood and applauded him. Only the small group of fans screamed and whistled. Some laughed.”

Source: ESPN
Published: Jun 5, 2013
Length: 39 minutes (9,793 words)

Our Longreads Member Pick: Among Murderers (Chapter 7), by Sabine Heinlein

This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Among Murderers, a new nonfiction book by Sabine Heinlein, published by University of California Press, examining the lives of criminals as they prepare to re-enter society. Heinlein, who was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her Iowa Review essay “A Portrait of the Writer as a Rabbit,” explains the origins of this chapter, which focuses on “Job Readiness.”

Published: Jun 7, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,132 words)

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.”

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Jun 7, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,667 words)

Beyond Recognition: The Incredible Story of a Face Transplant

A disfigured woman is given a face transplant, which currently remains an experimental procedure:

“In the US, there are five institutions — Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, UCLA, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University — that are now either performing face transplants or actively recruiting their first patient. And for the surgeons leading these charges, the process has long been an all-consuming one. ‘If you only knew how much work goes into every single one of these,’ says Dr. Kodi Azari, chief of reconstructive transplantation at UCLA. ‘You can’t even imagine.'”

Source: The Verge
Published: Jun 4, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,035 words)

Reading List: 6 Great Sci-Fi Stories About Robots

Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She also happens to love science fiction, so this week, she put together a #longreads list about robots.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 5, 2013

How a Convicted Killer Became My Friend

The writer on his friend Tony Davis, a middle-age man who was convicted of killing a 13-year-old boy when he was 18. Adapted from Stray Bullet, a new single from The Atavist:

“I first met Tony Davis in the early 1990s, when I was a young reporter for an Oakland-based alternative weekly. The city was a hot spot in the nation’s crack epidemic, and turf warfare had sent its homicide rate soaring. I wanted to put a human face on the issue of teens killing teens, which is how I met Tony, who was two years into an 18-to-life sentence for Kevin Reed’s murder. That shooting would become the focus of my 1995 book, Drive-By.

“We kept in touch, and somewhere along the way, Tony ceased to be my subject and became my friend. Over the years, we have exchanged probably a couple hundred letters and shared countless phone calls. Inmates sometimes ask him about the white man whose picture is on his cell wall. ‘He’s like the only real best friend that I’ve had in years,’ Tony tells them.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jun 4, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,108 words)

College Longreads Pick of the Week: ‘Code Red: Struggling for Wellness in Computer Science,’ from Kyla Cheung at Columbia University

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher will be helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick was reported and written by Kyla Cheung at Columbia University for The Eye.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 4, 2013