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Appropriate for a Seven-Year-Old Child

Photo: Marlo Mack

Marlo Mack’s podcast How To Be a Girl is a sensitive and honest exploration of the joys, fears, and struggles of raising of a transgender child. Earlier this year, Marlo and her seven-year-old daughter M (both pseudonyms) met transgender actress Laverne Cox (“Orange Is the New Black”). The story and photos of that meeting had a brief flare of online virality. In a recent episode of the podcast, Marlo (who also blogs at gendermom) talked about what happened after that meeting, as M began to understand that the world can be a difficult, even dangerous, place for transgender people like her. Below is a transcribed excerpt of that podcast. Read more…

Atomic Summer: An Essay by Joni Tevis

Operation Teapot, the Met Shot
Operation Teapot, the Met Shot, a tower burst weapons effects test April 15, 1955 at the Nevada Test Site. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Joni Tevis | The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse  | Milkweed Editions | May 2015 | 28 minutes (7,494 words)

 

Below is Joni Tevis’s essay “Damn Cold in February: Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the A-Bomb,” from her book The World Is On Fire, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. This essay originally appeared in The Diagram. Read more…

‘We Value Experience’: Can a Secret Society Become a Business?

Absolute Discretion
Photo by Bill Gies

Rick Paulas | Longreads | September 2015 | 31 minutes (7,584 words)

 

The bespectacled man with short-cropped hair stood up.

“Can I ask a question!” the man shouted, vocal cords straining. The audience turned. They were all members of The Latitude, a secret society based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more…

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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Coming to America and Coming of Age

Longreads Pick

After escaping gang violence in Honduras and crossing the border as an unaccompanied minor, a 19-year-old must grapple with a new country, high school, and immigration court, all on his own.

Published: Sep 1, 2015
Length: 12 minutes (3,000 words)

Ancient Myths, Trigger Warnings, and Our Unsafe World

Italian Renaissance relief. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this year, an op-ed written by members of Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board argued that Ovid’s Metamorphoses should be taught with a trigger warning because the myths of Daphne and Persephone “include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault.” Needless to say, a lot of people had thoughts about this. In a recent essay-cum-open-letter for Oregon Humanities, poet Wendy Willis issued an unusually nuanced response. Read more…

A Reading List for My 25-Year-Old Self

Photo: Omer Wazir

This week I’m turning 25 and have decided (based on anxiety attacks and several recent horoscopes) to say what I really want: to pursue writing seriously. It terrifies me, because I’m having the following thoughts: 1) now it’s no longer a secret and everyone will see me fail; 2) my best writing samples are several years old; 3) so many folks I know who are younger and far, far more talented than me are Living Their Best Lives Now, and I feel hopeless in the face of so much talent. What do I have to offer? What can I say that hasn’t already been said?

But then I read something, and I realize I do have opinions and original thoughts. I can contribute to a larger conversation. I only need to commit to my potential and take risks. I need to contact the folks who’ve made offers I was too scared to accept, and I need to seek out these opportunities for myself. I need to believe in my value, and I need to hold myself accountable.

This list is a birthday gift to myself and, I hope, of use to you, too. It’s a mix of practical advice for freelancing, things that make me feel good, and examples of excellent writing. I included advice from professional women who get shit done, slideshows, links to YouTube videos, interviews with my favorite celebs, and other stuff. (Oh, and a post from Arabelle Sicardi’s Tumblr that makes me cry and is always open in my tabs.) Read more…

The Art of Humorous Nonfiction: A Beer in Brooklyn with the King of the A-Heds

Barry Newman, in the monastic republic of Mount Athos, in the 1980s.

Mary Pilon | Longreads | August 2015 | 10 minutes (2,724 words)

 

“Why wait until the next story about coagulated fat in sewers comes along when you can read this one now?”

“All the world’s Grape Nuts come from a dirty-white, six-story concrete building with steam rising out of the roof here in the San Joaquin Valley.”

“With a WeedWacker under his arm, Dan Kowalsky was at work trimming the median strip of U.S. Route 1 in suburban Westport, Conn., when he was asked, above the din: Why not use a scythe?”

For 43 years, this is how Barry Newman has opened his stories. As a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, Newman developed a niche as the “King of the A-Hed,” the front page, below-the-fold feature story that had become one of journalism’s more peculiar corners since its inception in the 1940s. On a front page filled with the dryness of the bond market, the gravity of war casualties or the enduring egotism of Wall Street, the A-Hed was an homage to the ridiculousness of the world, a favorite among readers, reporters and editors, its existence constantly under threat. Read more…

A Commercial Surrogacy Gone Wrong in Thailand

It seems as if everyone is a victim in this story: The commissioning parents, the surrogate mother and the baby, too. Maneenuchanert disagrees. “I don’t feel sad for them,” she says. “Patidta is the only victim here, because they don’t allow her to see the baby. They see the baby as a product that comes from the supermarket. They’re only sad because their product has been damaged. And now they’re trying to intimidate her, tell her she’ll end up in prison if she doesn’t honor her contract.”

Bud Lake and Manuel Santos deny all of this. They’re getting ready to fight for Carmen the only place they can—in a Thai court. They hope to show that they’re better parents to Carmen than Kusongsaang would be, more financially and emotionally stable. Lake gives the example of a post on Kusongsaang’s Facebook page where she’s cradling a pistol. He says he’s been encouraged by the meetings he’s held with Thai Social Services who seem sympathetic. Still, Lake says all the lawyers they’ve talked to say their chances of winning in a Thai court are less than ten percent.

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And the thing that gets lost here—because of the Baby Gammy case and that of the Japanese Johnny Appleseed too—is that commercial surrogacy in Thailand has worked for many people, people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to have children or afford to hire a surrogate. And it has worked for many surrogates too. Better regulation here—any regulation here—might have helped prevent both the Baby Gammy case and that of the Japanese Johnny Appleseed. But instead of regulation there’s now prohibition.

—from Michael Sullivan’s recent story “Outside the Womb,” part of the podcast series “Life of the Law.” Sullivan tells the nuanced tale of a gay couple whose surrogate mother reneged on her contract in Thailand, where the military-led government banned commercial surrogacy for international couples earlier this year. The Atlantic’s “The Hidden Costs of International Surrogacy,” by Darlena Cunha, dug into the industry last year.

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Michael Paterniti on Eating at the World’s Most Influential Restaurant

Juli Soler, the Spanish restaurateur who helped turn El Bulli into the most influential restaurant of its time, died on July 6 at age 66. “Without Juli, El Bulli wouldn’t have existed,” its famous chef, Ferran Adrià, told the Spanish newspaper El País. The restaurant closed in 2011. Michael Paterniti’s 2001 Esquire story captures what it was like to eat there:

In Ferran Adrià’s restaurant, nothing is for certain once his food crosses the Maginot Line of your mouth. He feeds you things you never thought existed, let alone things you’d think to eat: a gelatin with rare mollusks trapped inside (it was so odd, the cool, sweet jelly parting for salty pieces of the sea, that it tasted primordial and transcendent at once), tagliatelle carbonara (chicken consommé solidified and cut into thin, coppery, pastalike strands that, once glimmering on the tongue, dissolved back into consommé that poured down the throat), cuttlefish ravioli (the cuttlefish sliced with a microtome, then injected with coconut milk, another sweet explosion that seemed to wrap the fish in a new sea), rosemary lamb (we were told to raise sprigs of rosemary to our noses as we munched on the lamb, both of us now with rosemary mustaches, the smell of rosemary becoming the lamb as if the two were the same) … and it went on like this.

I will tell you: We were happy. We were served an eighty-year-old vinegar pooled in an apple gelatin with ginger, and vinegar has never tasted so gentle, so perfectly between sweet and sour, with a trace of gin, so unlike vinegar that it redefined vinegar. I would drink that vinegar every day, if I could, to start every day with a little pucker and smile. There was dessert, too … a first dessert and a second dessert and then more snacks. At the end, when we went to him, Ferran waved us off, saying, “Today you eat, tomorrow we’ll think.”

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