Search Results for: Esquire

The Writers’ Roundtable: Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad and Katie Kosma

Eva Holland | Longreads | April 2018 | 23 minutes (5,900 words)

A lifetime ago, it seems, I used to write fiction. I wrote little stories on scraps of paper as a young kid; throughout grade school, I filled my unused notebooks with attempts at novels; I wrote a few short stories in high school and college. But since I started freelancing full-time a decade ago, I haven’t written a single line of fiction.

For a few years now, I’ve been intrigued by the writers who manage to produce both fiction and nonfiction work — the ones who excel on both sides of the divide. How do they do it? Why? Do they prefer one to the other? Does one feed the other? I had so many questions, I finally decided to convene another writers’ roundtable (last time around, we talked freelancing) and I asked a few writers I admire to weigh in.

Benjamin Percy is a Minnesota-based writer of novels (most recently, The Dark Net), comics, and the nonfiction book Thrill Me: Essays On Fiction. His nonfiction stories have also appeared in the likes of GQ, Esquire, Outside, and Men’s Journal. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times, a contributor to GQ and many other fine magazines, and the author of a forthcoming novel. Mary H.K. Choi has written for Wired, GQ, The Atlantic, and more. Her first novel, Emergency Contact, recently debuted on March 27. Adam Sternbergh is an editor at New York magazine and the author of the novels The Blinds, Shovel Ready, and Near Enemy.

ORIGIN STORIES

Eva Holland: When I was younger, I admit I barely even understood that nonfiction writing existed, outside of daily hard news reporting. My understanding of “writing” was entirely “fiction writing,” and I only fell in love with magazines and narrative nonfiction much later. So, my first question is: What came first for you as a writer — fiction, or non?

Benjamin Percy: Growing up, my only doses of nonfiction came from The Oregonian, Time, Newsweek, Fangoria, National Geographic, and Archaeology Magazine. Most of my reading was devoted to novels — mass-market paperbacks with embossed titles and dragons on the cover — and that’s what I hoped to become when I stepped into my first creative writing workshop: a genre novelist. The first time I wrote something that resembled “creative nonfiction,” I was in my mid-20s and only attempted it because a magazine approached me about an assignment.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I was absolutely, definitely, without a doubt going to be a fiction writer or a screenwriter. And then I wasn’t! When I left NYU with a BFA in screenwriting, I realized I had zero version of a plan. I didn’t know what to do, so I got a job that was advertised in the New York Times classifieds (a fiction writer might call this foreshadowing). It was to work at a Soap Opera Magazine. I was still writing screenplays, but they weren’t good—they were cynical, in the way that ’90s screenplays were cynical. And I was taught how to write those things so that they would sell, not so they would be meaningful. So I worked at the soap opera stuff, and I wrote profiles of the actors. I was going to get back into fiction…one day. But it was always hovering in the background. It seemed very fancy to me, to write a novel. And very big and out of reach. I became a freelance writer after a time, and realized I couldn’t devote the amount of time to a novel that a novel would need because I couldn’t bet so many working hours on something that wasn’t a sure thing. Read more…

Bending the Straight Line of Queer History

 

Manuel Betancourt | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (2,170 words)

 

Confronted by a historical record that mostly excludes and often disparages them, queer communities have long been forced to write their own histories — or, more often, to scrub them clean. After all, such histories can be dangerous to write, and the act of memorializing can sometimes feel like just another burden to bear.

In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love warns against this, writing that “given the new opportunities available to some gays and lesbians, the temptation to forget — to forget the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history and to ignore the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization — is stronger than ever.”

Three recent novels, all of them decades-spanning narratives centered on LGBTQ characters, are attempts to connect recent queer history with contemporary gay life. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair, John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and Tim Murphy’s Christodora are each expansive visions of post-war queer life. Set in London, Dublin, and New York City respectively, they tell stories about men and women living in the decades before and after gay liberation, through the AIDS crisis, and into the present. They depict everything from restroom cruising encounters and gay conversion therapy appointments to ACT UP meetings and late-night Grindr hookups. And they ask us to consider how past traumas haunt the 21st century.
Read more…

Seeking a Roadmap for the New American Middle Class

The next American middle class
Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Livia Gershon | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (1,950 words)

Over the past few months, Starbucks, CVS, and Walmart announced higher wages and a range of other benefits like paid parental leave and stock options. Despite what the brands say in their press releases, the changes probably had little to do with the Republican corporate tax cuts, but they do reflect a broader economic prosperity, complete with a tightening a labor market. In the past couple of years, real wages hit their highest levels ever, and even the lowest-paid workers started getting raises. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Vox, “for the first time in a long time, the underlying labor market is really healthy.”

But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? From the new college graduate facing an unstable contract job and mounds of debt to the 30-year-old in Detroit picking up an extra shift delivering pizzas this weekend, it just seems like we’re missing something we used to have.

In a 2016 Conference Board survey, only 50.8 percent of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 61 percent in 1987 when the survey was first done. In fact, job satisfaction hasn’t come close to that first reading in this century. We’re also more anxious and depressed today than we’ve been since the depths of the recession, and we’re dying younger — particularly if we’re poor.

So maybe this is a good moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers. Imagine for a moment that everything goes right. The long, slow recovery from the Great Recession continues, rather than reversing itself and plunging us back into high unemployment. Increased automation doesn’t displace a million truck drivers but creates new, more skilled driving jobs. The retirement of the Baby Boomers reduces labor supply, driving up wages at nursing homes, call centers, and the rest of the gigantic portion of the economy where pay is low.

Would this restore dignity to work and a sense of optimism to the nation? Would it bring back the kind of pride we associate with the 1950s GM line worker?

I don’t think it would. I think it would take far more fundamental changes to win justice for American workers. But I also think it’s possible to strive for something way better than the postwar era we often remember as a Golden Age for workers.

Let’s start by dispelling the idea that postwar advances for American workers were some kind of natural inevitability that could never be replicated today. Yes, in the 1940s, the United States was in a commanding position of economic dominance over potential rivals decimated by war. And yes, companies were able to translate the manufacturing capacity and technological know-how built up through the military into astounding new bounty for consumers. But, when it comes to profitability, business has also had plenty of boom times in recent decades, with no parallel advances for workers.

This is the moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country. Page through Working, Studs Terkel’s classic 1972 book of interviews with a broad range of workers, and factories come across as a kind of hellscape. A spot welder at a Ford plant in Chicago describes standing in one place all day, with constant noise too loud to yell over, suffering frequent burns and blood poisoning from a broken drill, at risk of being fired if he leaves the line to use the bathroom. “Repetition is such that, if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind,” he told Terkel.

The stable, routine corporate office work that also thrived in the postwar era certainly wasn’t as unpleasant as that, but there’s a whole world of cultural figures, from Willy Loman to Michael Scott, that suggest it was never an inherent font of meaning.

The fact that the Golden Age brought greater wealth, pride, and status to American workers, both blue- and white-collar, wasn’t really about the booming economy or the nature of the work. It was a result of power politics and deliberate decisions. In the 1930s and ‘40s, unionized workers, having spent decades battling for power on the job, at severe risk to life and livelihood, were a powerful force. And CEOs of massive corporations like General Motors were scared enough of radical workers, and hopeful enough about the prospects of shared prosperity, to strike some deals.

A consensus about how jobs ought to work emerged from these years. Employers would provide decent pay, health insurance, and pensions for large swaths of the country’s workers. The federal government would build a legal framework to address labor disputes and keep corporate monopolies from getting out of control. Politicians from both parties would march in the Labor Day parade every year, and workers would get their fair share of the new American prosperity.

Today, of course, the postwar consensus has broken down. Even if average workers are making more money than we used to, the gap between average and super-rich makes us feel like we’re getting nowhere. We may be able to afford iPhones and big-screen TVs, but we’ve got minimal chances of getting our kids into the elite colleges that define the narrow road to success.

And elite shows of respect for workers ring more and more hollow. Unions, having drastically declined in membership, no longer have a seat at some of the tables they used to. Politicians celebrate businesses’ creation of jobs, not workers’ accomplishment of necessary and useful labor. A lot of today’s masters of industry clearly believe that workers are an afterthought, since robots will soon be able to do anyone’s jobs except theirs.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about the Golden Age. As many readers who are not white men may be shouting at me by this point, there was another side to these mid-century ideas about work. The entire ideological framework defining a job with dignity was inextricably tied up with race and gender.

From the start of the industrial revolution, employers used racism to divide workers. And union calls for respect and higher wages were often inseparable from demands that companies hire only white men. The Golden Age didn’t just provide white, male workers with higher wages than everyone else but also what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of a sense of racial superiority.

Just as importantly, white men in the boom years also won stay-at-home wives. With rising male wages, many white women — and a much smaller number of women of other races — could now focus all their energy on caring for home and family. For the women, that meant escape from working at a mill or cooking meals and doing laundry for strangers. But it also meant greater economic dependence on their husbands. For the men, it was another boost to their living standard and status.

Golden Age corporate policies, union priorities, and laws didn’t create the ideal of the white, breadwinner-headed family, but they did reinforce it. Social Security offered benefits to workers and their dependents rather than to all citizens, and excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were disproportionately black. The GI Bill helped black men far less than white ones and left out most women except to the extent that their husbands’ benefits trickled down to them.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country.

Today, aside from growing income inequality, unstable jobs, and the ever-skyward climb of housing and education costs, a part of the pain white, male workers are feeling is the loss of their unquestioned sense of superiority.

So, can we imagine a future Golden Age? Is there a way to make working for Starbucks fulfill all of us the way we remember line work at GM fulfilling white men? Maybe. With an incredible force of political will, it might be possible to rejigger the economy so that modern jobs keep getting better. It would start with attacking income inequality head-on. The government could bust up monopolistic tech giants, encourage profit-sharing, and maybe even take a step toward redistributing inherited wealth. We’d also need massive social change to ensure people of color and women equal access to the good new jobs, and men and white people would need to learn to live with a loss of the particular psychological wages of masculinity and whiteness.

But even all that would still fail to address one thing that made work in the Golden Age fulfilling for men: the wives. Stay-at-home moms of the mid-twentieth century weren’t just a handy status symbol for their men. They were household managers and caregivers, shouldering the vast majority of child-raising labor and creating a space where male workers could rest and be served. And supporting a family was a key ingredient that made otherwise draining, demeaning jobs into a source of meaning.

Few men or women see a return to that ideal as a good idea today. But try imagining what good, full-time work for everyone looks like without it. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser describes that vision as the Universal Breadwinner model — well-paid jobs, with all the pride and status that come with them, for all men and women. She notes that it would take massive spending to outsource childcare and other traditionally unpaid “female” work — particularly since those jobs would need to be good jobs too. It would also leave out people with personal responsibilities that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hand over to strangers, as well as many with serious disabilities. And it certainly wouldn’t solve the problem many mothers and fathers report today of having too little time to spend with family.

A really universal solution to the problem of bad jobs would have to go beyond “good jobs” in the Golden Age model. It would be a world where we can take pride in our well-paid jobs at Starbucks without making them the center of our identities. That could mean many more part-time jobs with flexible hours, good pay, and room for advancement. It could mean decoupling benefits like health care and retirement earnings from employment and providing a hefty child allowance. Certainly, it would mean a social and psychological transformation that lets both men and women see caring work, and other things outside paid employment, as fully as valuable and meaningful as a job.

As a bonus, this kind of solution would also make sense when we do fall back into recession, or if the robots do finally come for a big chunk of our jobs.

All this might sound absurdly utopian. We are, after all, living in a world where celebrity business leaders claim to work 80-plus hour weeks while politicians enthusiastically deny health care to people who can’t work.

But the postwar economy didn’t happen on its own. It was the product of a brutal, decades-long fight led by workers with an inspiring, flawed vision. And today, despite everything, new possibilities are emerging. Single-payer health care is a popular idea, and “socialism” has rapidly swung from a slur to a legitimate part of the political spectrum. Self-help books like The 4-Hour Work Week — which posit the possibility of a radically different work-life balance, albeit based on individual moxie rather than social change — have become a popular genre. Young, black organizers in cities across the country are developing their own cooperative economic models. And if there’s any positive lesson we can take from the current political moment, it’s that you never know what could happen in America. Maybe a new Golden Age is possible. It’s at least worth taking some time to think about how we would want it to look.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

 

The Olympian Who Believes He’s Always On TV

Mary PilonThe Kevin Show: An Olympic Athlete’s Battle with Mental Illness | Bloomsbury | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,775 words)

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you.” –The Velveteen Rabbit

As Kevin Hall stood onboard the Artemis, a 72-foot catamaran, trying to help his teammates dredge Andrew Simpson’s body out of the water, he wasn’t entirely sure if the scene unfolding before him was really happening or not.

Andrew “Bart” Simpson, whose body might or might not have been in the water, was a stocky British Olympic gold medalist with short, spiky chestnut hair and a wide smile. One of the world’s best sailors, Simpson knew what to do in emergencies, which made his being trapped underwater for ten minutes all the more incomprehensible. The $140-million Artemis was supposed to be a technological wonder, so it made no sense to anyone onboard that it had crumpled so quickly into a taco shell, trapping Simpson in its fold.

Finally, Kevin and his teammates were able to pull Simpson’s soggy two hundred pounds out of the water and onto a floating backboard.

The emergency responders began to perform CPR, one officer cutting open Simpson’s wetsuit so he could apply a defibrillator to his chest. They pushed, the sailors waiting for Simpson to breathe, to show some sign of life. But Simpson was dead. He was 36 years old.

Months of preparation and millions of dollars had gone into the design of the Artemis, a vessel that had stunned other sailors with its foils and gadgets and that had seemed almost to fly over the water. Kevin suddenly felt lost. What had happened? Who, if anyone, was to blame? And why had Simpson, of all the sailors on the boat, been the one to die? Kevin had known Simpson for years, their sailing careers often overlapping, intersecting, and running in parallel. Simpson had something that Kevin and some of the other men on board the Artemis did not — an Olympic gold medal — and he represented something that all of the men on board aspired to be: a champion athlete and family man with a kind heart and generous spirit, seemingly unfazed by the success that he had attained.

Kevin thought about all this and more as the emergency workers took Simpson’s body away and everyone went home. In the days that followed, part of him wanted to talk to his teammates about what had happened, but part of him dared not. Because, if he was honest, he still wasn’t entirely sure that the crash and Simpson’s death had really happened. It seemed too horrifying to be real. And for a few moments, there had been that flash.

The Director. Cameras. Actors. Scripts.

Kevin wondered: Had it all just been part of The Show?
Read more…

The Encyclopedia of the Missing

(James Hosking)

Jeremy Lybarger | Longreads | 4,160 words (17 minutes)

From the outside, it’s just another mobile home in a neighborhood of mobile homes on the northwest side of Fort Wayne, Indiana. There’s the same carport, the same wedge of grass out front, the same dreamy suburban soundtrack of wind chimes and air conditioners. Nothing suggests this particular home belongs to a 32-year-old woman whose encyclopedic knowledge of missing persons has earned her a cult following online. The FBI knows who she is. So do detectives and police departments across the country. Desperate families sometimes seek her out. Chances are that if you mention someone who has disappeared in America, Meaghan Good can tell you the circumstances from memory — the who, what, when, and where. The why is almost always a mystery.

A week after she turned 19, Good started the Charley Project, an ever-expanding online database that features the stories and photographs of people who’ve been missing in the United States for at least a year. She named the site after Charles Brewster Ross, a 4-year-old boy kidnapped in 1874 from the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. His body was never found, and his abduction prompted the first known ransom note in America. Like Charles Brewster Ross, the nearly 10,000 people profiled on Good’s site are cold cases. Many fit the cliché of having vanished without a trace, and if it weren’t for Meaghan Good, most of these cases would have faded into oblivion. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Under-Recognized Stories

Here are the best stories we thought deserved more attention this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

Sari Botton
Essays editor, Longreads

How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay (Porochista Khakpour, Catapult)

Women writers of color aren’t given enough opportunities, and too often when they are, the opportunity is limited. They’re asked, again and again, to write about aspects of their identity, and are rarely afforded chances to write about anything else. Writing in the second person, Porochista Khakpour helps the reader to imagine being an artist hemmed in by such limitations. She takes us through the arc of her career thus far: from deciding early on that she didn’t want to “write what you know,” as a mentor suggested; to becoming the Iranian-American essayist of choice every time certain publications wanted an opinion from that particular demographic; to deciding she was no longer willing to be limited in that way, but feeling conflicted nonetheless. As a fan of Kahkpour’s writing, I certainly hope this isn’t her last essay but instead marks the beginning of a new chapter in which she feels free to write about whatever she chooses.

Kate’s Still Here (Libby Copeland, Esquire)

I’ve reached an age where death — of friends, family, colleagues — has become a more regular occurrence. I’ve become slightly obsessed with it, but at the same time, remain afraid to discuss it and plan for it. It was refreshing and moving for me to read this feature by Libby Copeland about a couple who embraced the inevitable so boldly and lovingly. Copeland spends time with Kate and Deloy Oberlin as they consciously prepare for Kate’s death from metastatic breast cancer, and again in the aftermath of her passing. Deloy honors his wife’s wishes that once she’s gone, a gathering will be held where family and friends can visit with her body, chilled with dry ice and frozen water bottles. Afterward, he delivers her body to a site where it is composted as part of a study in green burial. I believe it might be impossible to get to the end of this piece without feeling warmed and shedding some tears.


Aaron Gilbreath
Contributing editor, Longreads

In the Land of Vendettas That Go on Forever (Amanda Petrusich, Virginia Quarterly Review)

Amanda Petrusich she traveled to Northern Albania to write about the culture of vengeance that guides the region’s sense of justice. Her story takes readers along rocky roads to mountain villages, but the real journey takes place inside the minds of the local people, whose ideas about justice require a vigilante, not the law, to kill a person who was involved in a murder. His eye-for-an-eye approach harkens back to early tribal times in the country. Perfectly mixing narration with analysis, the story ultimately asks philosophical questions: Does revenge really make up for a loss? What is justice? In a year when many of us eagerly watch special counsel Robert Mueller investigate a president who flaunts his disregard for the law, justice is on the forefront of our minds, except some of us want it to arrive through legal channels.


Matt Giles
Contributing editor and chief fact-checker, Longreads

Jumpin’ Joe (Robert Silverman, Victory Journal)

Much of sports discourse this year has centered on Colin Kaepernick. Thousands of words and hours of conversation have been unspooled on the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, his stance on athletes’ rights, and why the NFL has seemingly blacklisted the QB who nearly won a Super Bowl four years ago. But to understand the present, it helps to look to the past, and Silverman’s profile of Jumpin’ Joe Caldwell, a star forward with the ABA in the 1970s, is timely and worth highlighting. Caldwell was vice president of the league’s players union, and after a contentious episode with the management of the St. Louis Spirits, who believed Caldwell convinced Marvin Barnes, the team’s best player, to jettison to the NBA, Caldwell couldn’t land another contract in either league. Caldwell’s story is truly one of the first in which athletes sought the control they deserved from their employer, and though Silverman doesn’t overtly connect Caldwell’s situation to Kaepernick’s, the parallels are more than evident.


Ethan Chiel
Contributing editor and fact-checker, Longreads

The Immortal Life of John Tesh’s NBA Anthem “Roundball Rock” (David Roth, Vice)

The first time I heard John Tesh’s voice was in the passenger seat of my dad’s Mazda, driving through upstate New York as part of a road trip to visit colleges. Tesh was hosting his daily radio show and he was telling an interminable story with no point, but I ate that shit up. It was only later that I’d see the famous Red Rocks video David Roth mentions in his wonderful story about Tesh’s NBA on NBC anthem, or learn anything about that part of Tesh’s life. But through the story of that instrumental anthem — which remains a banger — and his conversation with Tesh, Roth manages to tease out the easygoing, very slightly anodyne, successful-yet-anonymous nature of Tesh’s work and life, as well as what makes him so bizarrely charming.


Ben Huberman
Senior editor, Longreads

The Age of Rudeness (Rachel Cusk, The New York Times Magazine)

Last February feels like centuries ago. There were still so many terrible things for us to endure in a year that had just started. Yet 10 months and 10,000 news cycles later, Rachel Cusk’s essay remains fresh and unsettling, like a prophecy in which the worst parts may or may not have already come true. Cusk looks at airport agents and shop assistants, Sophocles and Jesus, and yes, Trump makes an appearance too. Through this tangle of anecdotes, she channels something many of us have been feeling yet have failed to articulate: The sense that all previous protocols of basic social decency are broken, and that we’re still not sure how to handle the shards.


Catherine Cusick
Audience development editor, Longreads

The Selfie Monkey Goes to the Ninth Circuit (Sarah Jeong, Motherboard)

Humor never really felt like an option in such a serious year, but Jeong’s simian legal saga reminded me that humor shouldn’t be so disposable. Her story isn’t really about the monkey; it’s about who can rightfully be considered the “next friend” of an Internet-famous crested macaque. It’s about whether or not we can fight the good fight and giggle our way through it and still make a case for justice when it really matters. Bonkers things happened in 2017 — absurd, hilarious things — and not all of them were life-threatening or world-ending or rights-violating. (Unless monkeys have standing to sue under the Copyright Act. Then yeah, some violations went down.)

Humor is like taste-testing non-lethal poison: you never forget it. It’s what made Naruto stand out as the one monkey I clearly didn’t appreciate enough at the time. Most of what flew under the radar this year was probably funny, and I think missing out on that laughter cost us. But writing that has a punchline isn’t an indulgence, it’s a vitamin. We always need more of it than we think we do.


Emily Perper
Contributing editor, Longreads

Contemplating Death at the Edge of the Continent (Laura Turner, Catapult)

This year, I wrote rarely. Every time I put pen to paper or started to type, I began and ended in the same place, full of dread. Writing, which used to be a way to work through my fear, seemed only to reinforce it. And so I looked for writers who could say what I could not. Laura Turner was one of those writers. Her column at Catapult, “A Cure for Fear,” made me feel less alone. Every entry was poignant and true, in an eerie get-out-of-my-brain sort of way.

But my favorite essay of hers predates that column, and it’s called “Contemplating Death at the Edge of the Continent.” Maybe you, too, spiral into a panic when you think about the inevitability of dying. Many nights, I lie awake and hyperventilate while my partner sleeps peacefully next to me. Catapult published Turner’s essay on January 11, the week before Trump’s inauguration, and dying felt closer than ever this year. Would my death come via nuclear war with North Korea? Cancer I wouldn’t be able to treat when my healthcare disappeared? Assault at the hands of someone who hates trans people?

To come to terms with her own anxiety about The End, Turner sought out solitude at the New Camaldoli Hermitage on the Pacific coast. In addition to our shared chronic anxiety, Turner’s writing is infused with a Christian spirituality I recognize and appreciate deeply. I am a person of lapsed faith, but in these uncertain days, Christianity feels comforting in its familiarity. There are no neat answers. We have to sit with that — Turner in her quiet cell on the coast, me at my desk in my cold apartment. So I implore you to read Turner’s work — not just this essay, but her entire oeuvre about anxiety, because it is beautiful, authentic, and necessary.


Danielle Jackson
Contributing editor, Longreads

Eve Ewing: Other Means to Liberation (Kiese Laymon, Guernica)

This conversation between Laymon and poet and sociologist Eve Ewing on the publication of her well-received collection of poems Electric Arches, is spirited and wide-ranging. They talk through the policies that shaped the conditions of Chicago’s public schools, the migratory patterns of black Americans in the 20th century, and the case of Assata Shakur. What has stayed with me is how the sense of comfort and warmth between Ewing and Laymon makes space for them, and by extension, their audience, to imagine new ways of thinking, talking, and doing creative work.


Danielle Tcholakian
Staff writer, Longreads

How a Pearland Mom Changed Her Life to Save Her Transgender Child (Roxanna Asgarian, Houstonia Magazine)

It may seem strange to deem a story tweeted by the ACLU of Texas “under-recognized,” but Roxanna Asgarian’s feature on a devoutly religious, long-conservative Texas woman’s decision to give up her entire life — losing friends, family and community — and reconfigure her own identity to save her young transgender daughter’s life didn’t seem to generate the attention and discussion it deserved. Maybe it was because it came out in Houstonia’s December issue, maybe because the mother and daughter featured in it had also been written about by national outlets. But Asgarian did the crucial thing that local outlets do, after the national media parachutes in and back out again: She stayed on the story. Her account of Kimberly Shappley’s awakening and devotion to her daughter Kai spans years and is excruciating in its heartbreaking detail. I still wince and shudder thinking about the time Kimberly discovered Kai’s legs were cold while tucking her into bed, only to find her daughter — still called Joseph then — had taken too-small underpants from a toy doll and worn them herself, cutting off her own circulation. While national outlets heralded Kimberly’s heroism, Asgarian showed that their story, and their struggle, is far from over.

Before first grade started, Kai asked her mom a question. “She said, ‘Mommy, when I grow up and have really long hair, will I look weird that I have a penis?’” Shappley recalled. It started a long conversation between them about what makes someone beautiful, and about how everyone’s body is different. Kai seemed satisfied, but later, she followed up: Why, then, don’t princesses have penises?

“I said, ‘How do you know that? How do you know that Ariel wasn’t born with a penis? Because she didn’t like the body she was born in either, and so she changed her body to look like what she felt she was born to be.’”

Now, Shappley said, her and Kai’s “secret giggle-giggle” is that Ariel is transgender, and that other princesses might be, too, because “not everybody tells.”

“It’s constantly having to be an inventive parent, and being quick on your feet,” Shappley said. “But isn’t all parenting that way?”


Krista Stevens
Senior editor, Longreads

The Detective of Northern Oddities, (Christopher Solomon, Outside)

As someone who earns her living seated indoors, laptop in hand, I’m endlessly curious about people whose jobs are very different from mine. At Outside, Christopher Solomon profiles Kathy Burek, a veterinary pathologist who examines unusual deaths in the Alaskan animal kingdom. Elbow deep in bodily fluids, Burek works on everything from sea otters to polar bears, and her necropsies are revealing stunning evidence of climate change in the North that will soon find its way South. The fascinating science in Solomon’s beautiful prose made this a satisfying read.

When they captured her off Cohen Island in the summer of 2007, she weighed 58 pounds and was the size of a collie. The growth rings in a tooth they pulled revealed her age—eight years, a mature female sea otter.

They anesthetized her and placed tags on her flippers. They assigned her a number: LCI013, or 13 for short. They installed a transmitter in her belly and gave her a VHF radio frequency: 165.155 megahertz. Then they released her. The otter was now, in ­effect, her own small-wattage Alaskan ­radio station. If you had the right kind of ­antenna and a receiver, you could launch a skiff into Kachemak Bay, lift the antenna, and hunt the air for the music of her existence: an ­occasional ping in high C that was both solitary and reassuring amid the static of the wide world.


Michelle Legro
Senior editor, Longreads

The Painful Truth About Teeth (Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, The Washington Post)

Filling the Gap (John Stanton, Buzzfeed)

It’s almost hard to believe that the life and death battle over health care dominated the first half of this year, as stories about Medicare, Medicaid, pre-existing conditions, and outrageously expensive medications helped defeat the bill in Congress.

Among these dire stories there was a medical desperation still in the shadows: that of inadequate or nonexistent dental care. The Washington Post’s visit to an enormous mobile clinic on the Eastern Shore showed the lengths people were willing to go to in order to fix just one thing. And in a Mexican border town, John Stanton’s riveting reporting revealed a parallel economy thriving on the shoddy American healthcare system, one where patients — many of them Trump voters — cross the border for cheap dental procedures, if they can afford to make the trip. These stories were a stark reminder that medical care is about far more than life or death, it’s about living with dignity.


Mike Dang
Editor in chief, Longreads

Series on Children and Gun Violence (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post)

Whenever someone asked me for a story recommendation this year, I asked them if they were reading Cox’s Washington Post series on how children are being affected by gun violence in the U.S. They would either say “no” or would tell me, “Oh, I’ve seen that but haven’t gotten around to it yet.” Well, now is the time to read this stellar series that might have been overshadowed by so many other stellar reporting done this year.

Start here, and then go here, here, here, here and here. If you’ve only got time for one, in this piece Cox does a particularly good job of showing the trauma suffered by six teenagers following the Las Vegas shooting massacre. If I were on a committee handing out journalism awards, John Woodrow Cox would be on my list of honorees.

The Other People in Springfield

Photo by Alonzo via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Imran Siddiquee | Longreads | December 2017 | 15 minutes (3,638 words)

When I was 2 years old, my family moved from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Springfield, Illinois. My parents had come to Canada as graduate students in the early 1980s to attend the University of Manitoba, thousands of miles from their homes in Bangladesh. They were raising me and my two older sisters there when my dad received a job offer to teach economics at a small university in the middle of Illinois. So in 1987, they traveled across another border, embarking on a journey to becoming not only Americans, but Springfielders.

It was just a coincidence that soon after we had settled in the Land of Lincoln, around the same time I started at Carl Sandburg Elementary School, another family, much more famous than us, would move into a place called Springfield. Suddenly the name of our town would become synonymous with some larger American story, or at the very least, the absurdities of American culture.

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The Simpsons debuted in 1989 when I was 5 years old, less than a year after my baby brother was born in Springfield. I recall my parents being wary of any of us watching this strange cartoon with its adult humor and reputation for vulgarity. But by the time I was in fourth grade I had managed to record a couple episodes on VHS, and my brother and I would occasionally watch life unfold in the fantasy Springfield in between chapters of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

By then The Simpsons was a global phenomenon, and regardless of whether you watched the show or not, its influence was pervasive. There were the enviable “Cowabunga” t-shirts at the mall, the ubiquitous TV ads featuring Homer being Homer, and the persistent echo of “D’Oh” and “Don’t have a cow, man” on the school playground. Lots of little boys wanted to be Bart and I was no exception, repeating risqué lines from a show I didn’t really understand. Even when we would visit family in Bangladesh, I remember people asking me about that strange-looking family from Springfield. Is that what’s it’s really like there?

But of course, in the real Springfield, in its classrooms and shopping malls, football games and state fairs, we were the strange-looking ones. And in truth, I was never going to be as rebellious as Bart, or be allowed to complete that journey across the border which my parents had set out on in the 80s. Because, when it came down to it, I was already someone else in the imaginary Springfield, the imaginary America.

As Hari Kondabolu explains in his new documentary The Problem With Apu, my family and I had been assigned a role by white culture — the foreign, strange, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon — as people like us had been assigned many times before, and would continue to be assigned many times after. On those same playgrounds, kids would soon ask me to do the famous accent or to nod my head from side-to-side like Apu did. I would learn that in order for white people to remain in their roles — people whose bumbling inadequacy never quite moves them from the center of American life — they needed me and my family to remain in the Kwik-e-Mart.

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Longreads Best of 2017: Profile Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in profile writing.

Seyward Darby
Executive editor, The Atavist

A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, GQ)

There was no piece of journalism in 2017 more honest or more raw than Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s profile of Dylann Roof for GQ. Its brilliance began with an enviable lede—”Sitting beside the church, drinking from a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, he thought he had to go in and shoot them” — and persisted for the duration of what proved to be an unlikely profile. Unlikely, because Kaadzi Ghansah didn’t set out to write it. She went to Charleston to cover Roof’s murder trial, planning to report on the families of his victims, but found herself drawn to the young man who sat, angry and silent and unfazed, day after day in the courtroom. She decided to profile a black hole, an absence, because she couldn’t not.

The story is unlikely, too, because of its style. Ghansah winds through Roof’s life like a criminal profiler. She collects evidence, data, interviews, and observations, then pieces them together for readers, showing where the connective tissue resides. She is an essential presence in the story, which is no easy feat to pull off, and the result is wholly organic. This is a story about race, class, anger, bewilderment, and division. It is also, as the headline “A Most American Terrorist” attests, a story about the current political moment. You come away from it knowing who Dylann Roof is, who Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is, and what America is—or, really, what it has always been.


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Longreads Best of 2017: Investigative Reporting on Sexual Misconduct

Photo treatment by Kjell Reigstad, Photos by Jeff Christensen (AP) and Joel Ryan (AP)

It was a year in which investigations loomed over us as we woke up each day and absorbed the news. Former FBI director Robert Mueller began investigating whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had any links to the Russian government and its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The opioid crisis was covered by a few outlets wondering who, exactly, is profiting while countless people are dying. But it is the investigations into sexual misconduct perpetrated by powerful men across several industries that has had the most significant impact in 2017. And much of the reporting has been led by The New York Times. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Sports Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in sports writing.

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Mary Pilon
Contributor to The New Yorker, Esquire, and Vice. Previously on staff at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Author of The Monopolists and The Kevin Show (March 2018)

Is This the NFL’s First Female Player? (Lars Anderson, B/R Mag)

I’m a sucker for high school sports stories, but Anderson’s examination of Becca Longo isn’t just a showcase of a plucky talent, it also challenges long-held assumptions about the league’s recruitment pipeline. Longo is the first woman to earn a football scholarship to a Division I or Division II school, and Anderson offers a fascinating window into the training and psyche required to become be an ace-level kicker. In lesser hands, the story could have been mawkish or puffy, but Anderson’s prose is sharp, layered, and will likely be reread when we see Longo in the Super Bowl one day.

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