The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community.
Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)
Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

Rose George | The Big Necessity, Metropolitan Books | 2008 | 28 minutes (6,900 words)
Below is a full chapter from The Big Necessity, Rose George’s acclaimed 2008 book exploring the world of human waste. The book will be reissued later this year with a new afterword. George’s 2013 book 90 Percent of Everything was featured previously on Longreads, and we’re thrilled to spotlight her work again. Read more…

Susan J. Palmer | University of Toronto Press | 2001 | 38 minutes (9,328 words)
The below article comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, and we’d like to thank the author, Susan J. Palmer, for allowing us to share it with the Longreads community. Read more…

Cris Beam | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | August 2013 | 23 minutes (5,787 words)
Below is the opening chapter of To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, by Cris Beam, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick. Thanks to Cris and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sharing it with the Longreads community.
* * * Read more…
An intimate look at the life of Caitlyn Pinto, a ten-year-old girl living in Canada who loves Justin Bieber and has thoughtful ideas about racism and bullying:
“Caitlyn has an iPod touch, which allows her to surf the Internet, though she uses it mostly for iMessage, and FaceTime, a kind of one-on-one video chat. She and her friends message several times a day, about dumb stuff: school, music, what are you eating, whatever. On Fridays, they group-message, with everyone texting online at once. The family rule is that Facebook is not allowed until grade seven, and Caitlyn is fine with that. After much discussion at school about cyberstalking and cyberbullying, the prospect of sharing too much in cyberspace makes her nervous. Friends talk about the suicide of Amanda Todd, the BC teen bullied so callously across the Internet and at school. Caitlyn has heard stories about grade seven girls being teased online, and this is scary: an electronic footprint fixes a young girl’s identity when she is most in flux, and it can’t be erased. ‘I like texting more than Facebook, because you know where it’s going. It’ll just go to one friend, and you can’t forward things.'”
(Related: Susan Orlean’s classic profile, “The American Male at Age Ten,” which was published in Esquire in 1992)

Sabine Heinlein | University of California Press | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,132 words)
Our latest Longreads Member Pick is a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prison, by Sabine Heinlein.
Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world. Read more…
In the first four years as the first black president, Obama has largely avoided addressing race directly. Some historical context:
Thus the myth of ‘twice as good’ that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. ‘Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,’ he said in his ‘More Perfect Union’ speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright’s ‘God Damn America’ remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race.
Whatever the political intelligence of this calculus, it has broad and deep consequences. The most obvious result is that it prevents Obama from directly addressing America’s racial history, or saying anything meaningful about present issues tinged by race, such as mass incarceration or the drug war. There have been calls for Obama to take a softer line on state-level legalization of marijuana or even to stand for legalization himself. Indeed, there is no small amount of inconsistency in our black president’s either ignoring or upholding harsh drug laws that every day injure the prospects of young black men—laws that could have ended his own, had he been of another social class and arrested for the marijuana use he openly discusses. But the intellectual argument doubles as the counterargument. If the fact of a black president is enough to racialize the wonkish world of health-care reform, what havoc would the Obama touch wreak upon the already racialized world of drug policy?
“Fear of a Black President.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
In the first four years as the first black president, Obama has largely avoided addressing race directly. Some historical context:
“Thus the myth of ‘twice as good’ that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. ‘Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,’ he said in his ‘More Perfect Union’ speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright’s ‘God Damn America’ remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race.
“Whatever the political intelligence of this calculus, it has broad and deep consequences. The most obvious result is that it prevents Obama from directly addressing America’s racial history, or saying anything meaningful about present issues tinged by race, such as mass incarceration or the drug war. There have been calls for Obama to take a softer line on state-level legalization of marijuana or even to stand for legalization himself. Indeed, there is no small amount of inconsistency in our black president’s either ignoring or upholding harsh drug laws that every day injure the prospects of young black men—laws that could have ended his own, had he been of another social class and arrested for the marijuana use he openly discusses. But the intellectual argument doubles as the counterargument. If the fact of a black president is enough to racialize the wonkish world of health-care reform, what havoc would the Obama touch wreak upon the already racialized world of drug policy?”

Molly Lambert is a writer covering pop culture at Grantland. (She’s also featured in our Top 10 Longreads of 2011)
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These are some Longreads I enjoyed this year:
• “The Bell Jar At 40”: Emily Gould on Sylvia Plath (Poetry Foundation)
• “The J in J. Crew”: Molly Young on Jenna Lyons (New York magazine)
• “The Recessionary Charms Of American Horror Story”: Tess Lynch (Grantland)
• “The Movie Star”: Bill Simmons on Ryan Reynolds and Will Smith (Grantland)
• “Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia”: Colson Whitehead at The World Series Of Poker (Grantland)
• “Crass Warfare”: Emily Nussbaum on Whitney and 2 Broke Girls (The New Yorker)
• “Frantically Impure”: Alex Carnevale on Susan Sontag (This Recording)
• “Beauty”: Durga Chew-Bose on Barbara Loden (This Recording)
• “God Knows Where I Am”: Rachel Aviv (The New Yorker, sub. required)
• “What Women Want: Porn and the Frontier Of Female Sexuality”: Amanda Hess on James Deen (GOOD)
• “‘Make Me Proud’: Does Drake Actually Care About Women?”: Emma Carmichael (The Awl)
• “Free The Network”: Allison Bland (The Awl)
• “The Celebrity Rehab Of Dr. Drew”: by Natasha Vargas-Cooper (GQ)
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See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >
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