The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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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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.
* * *

Here are nine stories about modern-day sex education and our history with bad sex ed classes.
Ready to get angry? In a recent Last Week Tonight segment, John Oliver lambasted abstinence-only sex education, which features celibacy as the only method to prevent pregnancy. Dianna Anderson, feminist blogger and author of Damaged Goods, goes in-depth on the sorry state of sex ed in the United States. Thanks to Title V, tens of millions of dollars are funneled toward conservative teaching methods that do more fear-mongering than educating. Recently, the House of Representatives ratified a bill that will give even more money to abstinence-only “education.” This is federal and state funding, not private revenue. And parents who want their kids to have a holistic, comprehensive sex education in their schools face a bureaucratic nightmare. Read more…

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…

Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student from the Bronx named Donna Grace Moleta won the chance to meet Bill Nye “the Science Guy.”
“Meeting my childhood hero was one of the greatest experience of my life,” she told the Bronx Times. “It’s something I’ll never forget. He’s such a strong believer in what science and education can do.”
Inspired by Ms. Moleta’s experience, here’s a reading list of some of our childhood heroes:
Getting to work with a celebrated comic artist:
…I emailed him the strip and thanked him for all his great work and the influence he’d had on me. And never expected to get a reply.
And what do you know, he wrote back.
Let me tell you. Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he’s communicating with me?

Let’s be honest: Humans never should have been allowed behind the wheel in the first place. There’s so much that can go wrong, so much room for negligence—it’s incredible to think that we managed human-controlled cars for as long as we did.
Here’s a reading list covering the past, present and future of transportation. Read more…

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.
* * *

–Veteran toy designer Stefanie Eskander, in Collectors Weekly, on the gender divide in the toy business, and why it still exists. Read more from Collectors Weekly in the Longreads Archive.

-Hunter Oatman-Stanford, in Collectors Weekly, with a brief history of soda consumption in America. Read more from Collectors Weekly.

In a new essay for Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford and Peter Norton, author of Fighting Traffic, examine the history of the automobile in America, and how our perception of city streets changed:
Our latest story comes recommended by Ben Marks, senior editor for Collectors Weekly.
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