Search Results for: Love

Sea Gulls Love In-N-Out. But Their Diet May Be Changing Their Channel Islands Home

Longreads Pick

“Usually it’s humans who are responsible for polluting natural ecosystems. But on Anacapa and Santa Barbara islands, gulls appear to be the ones spoiling the wild habitat with processed food and puked-up trash.”

Published: Oct 22, 2019
Length: 6 minutes (1,637 words)

My Family Story of Love, the Mob, and Government Surveillance

Longreads Pick

In this excerpt from his book, In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth, John Goldsmith considers the private costs of the invasive surveillance tactics the US government uses against its own citizens. “It wasn’t just the chilling effect on Chuckie’s freedom of thought, belief, and speech—an effect that stretched back decades, to the 1950s, when he first began to suspect that he was under surveillance. It was also, more painfully, the violence against his intimate spaces and relationships, and the annihilation of the stories he told himself and the world about these spaces and relationships, and thus of his power to define and shape his life.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Oct 7, 2019
Length: 21 minutes (5,424 words)

To Love and Protect Each Other — From Bigotry

Longreads Pick

After Jay Deitcher sits silent as his wife is verbally assaulted by his father’s racist friend, he grapples with the ways his family has been muted by trauma.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 27, 2019
Length: 10 minutes (2,743 words)

To Love and Protect Each Other — From Bigotry

CSA Images / Getty

Jay Deitcher | Longreads | September 2019 | 11 minutes (2,743 words)

After dating Annie for six years, it was no surprise to my family when we stomped the glass and jumped the broom in the same Albany, New York temple my parents were married in. Although we came from different backgrounds — I’m Ashkenazi Jewish, Annie’s Jamaican and Nigerian — my relatives fell for her as hard as I had. She visited my 102-year-old Aunt Marion in the nursing home, could cook a mean brisket (with a dash of jerk seasoning), and chose Judaism, eventually speaking better Hebrew than me. After Annie inspired me to quit smoking, she became my parents’ hero. She upgraded me.

Having witnessed anti-Semitism in the black community and racism coming from Jews, Annie and I made a contract: we’d protect one another. When her African-American friends referred to me as a “good Jew” — as if I were an anomaly — she said something. After the Ashkenazi guy greeted Annie in our temple lobby with a “Welcome, can I help you?” — watching her purse, as if she were going to shoot the place up — I said something, too. I attempted to show wrongdoers their errors, while Annie was an advocate of confrontation followed by ghosting the offender.

Weeks after our wedding, Annie and I went to an Italian spot for lunch with my dad and his friend Bill. Over the decades, Bill was my dad’s go-to fix-it man — initially helping around the house, later becoming one of my father’s closest non-Jewish buddies, one of his confidants. Bill had given us $300 — the most generous gift we received from someone who wasn’t related.

Over lunch, Bill shared his own family milestones, but while waiting for the leftovers to be boxed he dropped the N-bomb, over and over. “They call themselves it, why shouldn’t I?” he asked, smiling, looking directly at my wife. “I call a spade a spade.”

Annie’s eyes slit into tense pockets of rage. Her mouth twisted. Bill didn’t notice or care. Annie wasn’t only mad at Bill, who’d exposed his true self. It was my dad and I who were disappointing failures. A tension began forming between Annie and my father and me. With every word Bill uttered, it grew.
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My Love Affair with Chairs

Willian Justen de Vasconcellos, Getty

Keah Brown | An excerpt adapted from The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me | Atria Books | 2019 | 17 minutes (4,556 words)

 

My longest relationship has been with chairs. We are very happy together, committed and strong, in sickness and health till death do us part, etc. There are arguments and disagreements as in any other relationship, but we apologize and make up before nightfall so we don’t go to bed angry. The notion of love at first sight is a little cheesy but true. Chairs and I have traveled around the world and back again. We cuddled on the beach in Puerto Rico, shared stolen glances in the Virgin Islands, danced the night away in Grand Turk, and gave some major PDA in the Bahamas. My chairs are loyal, with vastly different personalities but an equal amount of appreciation for the butt of mine that sits in them. A few of them like to play it cool: they don’t want me to think that they care as much as they do, and I let them believe that it’s working. After all, sometimes you have to let your partner think they have the upper hand, to work toward the long game of the bigger thing you want later. However, you and I, dear reader, we know the truth. The chairs in my life love me, and I honestly can’t blame them. Read more…

Conversations with My Loveliest

Longreads Pick

A personal essay in which Melissa Berman recalls what was said, and not said, between her and her beloved aunt as they approached her final year.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 19, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,413 words)

Conversations with My Loveliest

Photo by Loverna Journey

Melissa Berman | Longreads | August 2019 | 10 minutes (2,413 words)

 

I saw her through the slit of the partially open bathroom door. She left it slightly ajar because she’d started thinking about these things.

She didn’t tell me so, but the slice of light peeking into the hallway said it all. We were taking that turn, the one I never thought would come, though, how could it not?

She was out of the shower now, drying herself off. I walked into the den to casually pretend I was oblivious to the whole thing.

“Can you come here please?” she called out.

So it is happening, I thought.

I looked over to the chest of drawers, the emergency call receiver with the red button — the HELP in such big white letters. The button was bigger than her hand. And the special alert pendant she was supposed to have around her neck, in case she fell or something, sat next to it. The cord was perfectly coiled, looking pathetic, like an ugly necklace no one would ever wear.

“Hell-lo?” her impatient voice curled around the cracked-open door and floated down the hallway.

I picked up the necklace and put it around my own neck.

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Woodstock: My Queer Love Story

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 15, 2019
Length: 7 minutes (1,800 words)

Woodstock: My Queer Love Story

Illustration by Mark Wang

Kate Walter | Longreads | Month 2019 | 7 minutes (1800 words)

“Want to go to Woodstock with me?” my boyfriend Joe asked.

“Yes!” I screamed at his offer. I was a 20-year-old student at a conservative Catholic women’s college in New Jersey. Joe was my guide into the radical 60s.

We’d met at the Jersey Shore when my sorority rented a house in Belmar, a party town. Joe was four years older than me, already out of school. He had a job, his own apartment, a motorcycle and long hair. My father disliked him. It didn’t help when my mother found my birth control pills in my dresser.

Joe was over six feet tall, with black hair and dark eyes, kinda hairy and a bit chubby, a bear — not my type at all. He had wire-rimmed glasses, like his idol, John Lennon, and wore vests with fringe. Since Joe was the music editor for The Aquarian, a popular underground newspaper, we became regulars at the Fillmore East. Nothing could have kept us two rockers from the three-day music festival in the lower Catskills.

That was so long ago, Joe and I were both still straight. Years later, in the 70s, we came out — first him, then me. (No wonder the sex wasn’t so hot.)
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For the Love of Orange

Longreads Pick

“But orange’s pop and fizz and alarming brightness still sparks in me — a reminder of how it feels to begin. It feels like joy, like the kick of a starting gun, like a banner flapping in the breeze.”

Published: Aug 13, 2019
Length: 9 minutes (2,376 words)