Search Results for: Love

True Love Will Find You: My Afternoon in Daniel Johnston’s Dining Room

Longreads Pick

During his punk band’s first tour, a high school musician visits the home of underground artist Daniel Johnson, one of his musical heroes, and someone who also suffers from manic depression. The experience is the realization of a dream, and it gave the author perspective that stayed with him for years.

Source: Catapult
Published: Jul 19, 2017
Length: 14 minutes (3,577 words)

A Search for the Flavor of a Beloved Childhood Medicine

Longreads Pick

One person searches for the flavor of the pediatric amoxicillin that, despite the pain of the ear infection it treated, endeared itself to so many of us. It’s what you might call a pharmaceutical travelogue, following a different sort of chem-trail.

Author: Julie Beck
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 18, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,932 words)

The Strange Alienation of Being a Latina Who Loves Hiking

Longreads Pick

A personal essay about loving hiking as a Latinx — in both Ecuador, where author Amanda Machado’s family members see it as un-classy and unladylike, and the United States, where hiking has largely been the domain of upper-class whites.

Source: Vox
Published: Jul 10, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,765 words)

Serena Williams’s Love Match

Longreads Pick
Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jun 27, 2017
Length: 19 minutes (4,905 words)

Love and Death

Longreads Pick

When a controlling Canadian neurosurgeon was charged with murdering his wife, a brilliant family doctor, Canada had to stare in the violent face of the patriarchy one more time.

Source: Toronto Life
Published: May 17, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,626 words)

Was It a Story of Love or Exploitation? It Was Both, and More

Photo illustration via The Atlantic

Reality is always ambiguous, and that is something stories do not want to be.

In real life, people are riddled with conflicting motives, emotions, and ideas. We can both love and hate our families with equal intensity. We can make choices not for one reason, but for a multitude of reasons, sometimes in opposition to each other. Our identities are inevitably, and infinitely, hyphenated.

Stories, by their nature, tend to resist ambiguity. A story is a kind of model of the world, a map rather than the terrain, and therefore they tend toward simplification. This is especially true in journalism, which in its most basic form asks “what happened?” with the expectation that there will be a single, knowable answer.
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A Love Affair with a Prince Soundtrack

Photo by @DrGarcia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Catapult, Michael Gonzales offers an account of Prince’s career of hits with a touching personal history of the writer’s own years as a music journalist and his eight-year romantic relationship with publicist Lesley Pitts. The couple bonds over a shared love of books, cocktails, and, of course, Prince, before Pitts’ untimely death in 1999.

Playing a silly game with myself, I calculated that in 1999 I would be thirty-six years old, which to my then-nineteen-year-old self sounded ancient, dusty as an old record. If I’d had access to a crystal ball, what exactly would I see in my future? Would I be a famous novelist chatting with Dick Cavett on PBS? Would I be married to my college girlfriend Denise and living in Long Island with our badass kids? Or who knows, maybe Prince was on some Nostradamus shit and the sky really was going to turn purple, followed by destruction.

In the real 1999, while the planet didn’t perish that year, for me and the small world I inhabited, it all came to a screeching halt on August 3rd, two months after my thirty-sixth birthday, when I was riding in the back of the ambulance with my long-time girlfriend Lesley Pitts. Lying on a gurney, she was being rushed from our first-floor Chelsea apartment on 22nd Street to St. Vincent’s Hospital, after she complained of a headache and shortness of breath. Leaning over her, I grunted something reassuring.

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Love in the Age of Prince

Longreads Pick
Source: Catapult
Published: May 2, 2017
Length: 14 minutes (3,630 words)

The Love and Terror of Nick Cave

Longreads Pick

When musician Nick Cave’s son Arthur died, Cave dealt with his grief the only way he knew how: by continuing to write music. “Songwriting is an immensely positive act,” Cave said, “nothing to do with sadness or depression, no matter what you’re writing about.” A film made about the new album’s recording offers a penetrating portrait of tragedy, creation and grief.

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 27, 2017
Length: 29 minutes (7,286 words)

‘But Islam Does Not Forbid Love’: How Young Muslims Define ‘Halal Dating’

a pink rose surrounded by smaller white roses
Photo by Susanne Nilsson via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At NPR Code Switch, Neha Rashid reports on how careful use of language and a peck of dating apps for young Muslims are helping them find love while observing Muslim beliefs that forbid sex before marriage.

For young couples like them, the idea of dating is common, and it means balancing their religious views with their desire for emotional intimacy. But the term “dating” still invites an offensive suggestion for many Muslims, especially older ones, irrespective of how innocent the relationship may be. Dating is still linked to its Western origins, which implies underlying expectations of sexual interactions — if not an outright premarital sexual relationship — which Islamic texts prohibit.

One way that some young Muslim couples are rebuking the idea of dating being offensive is by terming it “halal dating.” Halal refers to something permissible within Islam. By adding the permissibility factor, some young couples argue, they are removing the idea that anything haram, or prohibited, such as premarital sex, is happening in the relationship.

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