Narratively

How one Australian woman found her niche cleaning up after murders, suicides and other traumatic situations.

Today Bushwick is synonymous with hipster cool but thirty-five years ago it was the epicenter of America’s mafia-fueled drug trade.

An ex-Orthodox Jewish woman takes a dip in the ancient ritual bath to see if it really will make her—and her marriage—pure.

She thought she’d found the perfect condo, and then—nearly a decade after their breakup, and in a city of 3.8 million—her ex moved in next door.

After an abuse-filled upbringing, the author left home for good at thirteen, legally emancipated herself from her mother, and had to take control of her own life.

Determined to quit his tired government job, one D.C. office drone saves $25,000 by renting his apartment nightly and secretly sleeping on the office floor.

I was on track, according to a slap-dash Excel budget, to resign in a year. An extra $1,350 a month was flowing into my coffers. Although it wasn’t raining cash, I was matching what I made with what I saved by paring down my lifestyle expenses. The final factor in my favor was that my plan coincided with Airbnb’s asymptote-like upsurge in popularity. After receiving my first batch of positive reviews, the reservations poured in. Sleep came easier on my camping mat, and I dreamed in eighties montages about being a runaway Airbnb success story.

But there is a reason it’s not called Murphy’s Theory.

The son of a circus clown discovers what’s beneath the painted-on smiles:

I remember she’d blink open her eyes and study the image in the mirror: the inverted music notes under her eyes; the triangles above them; the exaggerated, untiring smile bending up into her cheeks. It was a smile that reminded all who chanced upon it that the hilarity would not relent, that the jokes would not stop, that the comedy would not end—for what happens when the comedy ends? What happens when the laughter dries up, and the mouth reverts to its resting state?

Brown is a 50-year-old British man who took a class on positive psychology when he “smelled bullshit”—a widely cited paper published in American Psychologist claiming there was a “positivity ratio” for happiness:

He had been poring over the original papers that informed Fredrickson and Losada’s 2005 article—papers written or co-written by Marcial Losada. They seemed “sketchy,” Brown says. In his research on business teams, for instance, “the length of the business meetings weren’t even mentioned.”

“Normally you have a method and the method says we selected these people and we picked these numbers and here’s the tables and here are the means and here’s the standard deviation,” Brown says. “He just goes: ‘Satisfied that the model fit my data, I then ran some simulations.’ The whole process was indistinguishable from him having made the data up.”

A look back at the movie “Kids,” two decades later:

“The kids were a crew of about sixteen, maybe forty if the outer circle was around. The core clique was all in Kids, with roles ranging from starring to un-credited. Their surrogate parents were Rodney Smith, Eli Morgan Gesner and Adam Schatz, the then twenty-something founders of Zoo York. Previously, Rodney had founded SHUT, the first local brand to design boards that could withhold the blow of curbs, rails, and jumps to accommodate the changing face of New York skating. Zoo York’s Meatpacking District headquarters was their clubhouse, and Eli, a club promoter, was the crew’s link to New York nightlife—he developed the skating ramp inside the infamous Tunnel nightclub.”

This week, we’re excited to share a Member Pick from Narratively, the New York-based (and Kickstarter-backed) storytelling site that launched last fall and has been featured on Longreads in the past.

“Watch Dog,” by Kerri Anne Renzulli, will be published in a two weeks, and they were kind enough to make the story available early to Longreads Members. Renzulli, a journalist and Columbia grad student, investigates the difficult task of training guide dogs for New York City—and helping develop relationships between the dogs and their future owners.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.