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Longreads Best of 2018: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2018. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

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A Prescription for Forgetting

Andy Holmes / Unsplash, FeverPitched / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Diane Mehta | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,706 words)

“You’re dead,” said the meditation guide. “You’ve been dead a long time.” I start crying. “What do you see?” she asked. I whimpered, “My dad somewhere, cremated, maybe a river, gone for decades. My son is older. He has a family. He thinks of me sometimes. I can’t stand it.”

“They’ve been gone a long time. You’re fine. Part of the universe. The beginning of what you were meant to be. Does that beanbag chair in the house that you don’t like matter? What about your job and the argument you had with your boyfriend, that burger you had for dinner? Your dresses, your shoes, your jewelry, your house, your keys. Throw your keys away. Throw them into the magnetic sun. Whoosh. Do it again. Whoosh. How do you feel?”

I wiped my tears and scanned my imagination. Exploding galaxies to explore, strange dimensions, star clusters, sunbursts, Earthrise over our moon, star-forming nebula, cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang. What does a black hole feel like when you’re disembodied and inside of it? My mind was clear. A cool mist like summer rain while scuba diving underwater but without equipment. She continued to encourage me to throw things away. “It gets easier. Throw it away. Nothing matters. Whoosh.” I winced, then felt relieved, then felt horrible and finally caved and decided to be dead, dead, dead. As shock left me, I imagined looking around at my new home out in space: stars blinked on and off like fireflies, nearby yet distant, planets with inconceivable colors of lilac-brown and red-rust that hadn’t been refracted through an atmosphere and the curve of the turning Earth.

Everything gets easier according to everyone who believes that life is a positive cult. This guide said she used to have an argument with the world. She was angry at all corners of her soul. “I’m happier,” she said calmly. “You have a very open mind. You’ll do well here.” I panicked and came back to Earth. My feet reappeared, and my hands, which I’d watched burn away, per her instructions, grew back like a starfish regenerating its limbs. Whole again. Beanbag chair and teenager and dog and boyfriend, jobs and writing to do and the whole shebang of worries. I forced a breath out. She was wrong about me.
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Hating Big Pharma Is Good, But Supply-Side Epidemic Theory Is Killing People

Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zachary Siegel | Longreads | September 2018 | 20 minutes (5,459 words)

After breakfast each Sunday we had the option to attend a spiritual group. The facility’s spiritual counselor was a tall woman with greying frizzy hair who collected vaguely heart-shaped rocks, and always had several on her desk that she’d gift to patients who stopped by her office.

She wouldn’t give you just any old rock; no, the rock she’d choose for you had a story: its color, unique dents and chips resembled resilience, an ability to withstand harsh elements while retaining your heart’s shape. She insisted the Sunday group wasn’t religious. “Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell,” the popular saying around Alcoholics Anonymous goes. “Spirituality is for people who have already been there.” So we sang along to “Let it Be” by The Beatles.

We had mostly blamed ourselves for what landed us inside an addiction treatment facility. But we were young, so we also blamed our parents (thanks Obamacare!). The reason why we were all in treatment and not quarantined in jail is because we were mostly white and upper-middle class. It was the summer of 2012 and young people like me all over the country were developing opioid addictions. The difference between us and the vast majority of others was our family’s resources, namely insurance that covered the $1,000 per day cost for a residential stint at a spiritually tinged hospital-meets-lake-house just outside the Twin Cities (the land of 10,000 treatment centers). The campus edged Medicine Lake, which I always found cruel because the facility didn’t much like to use medicine at the time, medicine that would’ve eased my withdrawal and given me the best chance at kicking for good. “We don’t do that here,” I recall a nice Minnesota doctor saying.

Addiction experienced in the first-person feels like watching a movie shot entirely in extreme close-ups. No matter how hard you try, you can’t see the world beyond the frame. A tolerance builds after a while and you grow used to the shaky, nauseating ride. We couldn’t have possibly known it at the time, that we weren’t the stars in our very own drama. The content of our stories differed in the details, but the tone was uncannily similar: how prescription painkillers first took hold; after pharmaceuticals became scarce and expensive, how we, as a generation in unison, playing a fucked up game of Red Rover, beelined toward heroin. Another thing we had in common was a lot of dead friends. Read more…

A Song for the River

VWPics via AP Images

Philip ConnorsA Song for the River | Cinco Puntos Press | September 2018 | 28 minutes (5,578 words)

By sheer dumb luck I happened to be facing the lightning when it struck: a livid filament that reappeared on my eyelids when I blinked. A blue puff of smoke bloomed skyward from the top of the ridge, superheated sap boiled to vapor in an instant. It dispersed on the breeze so quickly I wondered whether I had imagined it — whether, having become at last clinically pyromaniacal, I had willed the tree to catch fire and conjured the evidence to prove it.

I reached for the field glasses where they hung from a hook in the ceiling of the tower, an instinctual move made without looking away from the spot of the strike. I lifted the binoculars to my eyes, focused on the ridgeline. Waited. Remembered to breathe. Waited some more. Nothing amiss. Nothing new or different along the contour of the hill. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Brittany Packnett, Rahima Nasa, Jordan Smith, Scott Korb, and Chris Heath.

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The Imam’s Widow

Longreads Pick

As part of ProPublica’s “Documenting Hate” project, Rahima Nasa profiles the wife of a Queens imam who was murdered in 2016. Although there appeared to be no other possible motive, prosecutors failed to try the case as the hate crime it likely was.

Source: Pro Publica
Published: Sep 4, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,187 words)

Not Quite Democracy: Lucie Greene on the Civic Aspirations of Tech Giants

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Bradley Babendir | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (3,248 words)

 

At this point it seems self-evident that as the major technology companies like Facebook, Uber and Google continue to grow, they are gaining more influence over public life, while the ability of regular consumers or even governments to push back is diminishing. In Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What It Means for Our Future, a new book by Lucie Greene, the past and future consequences of this rapid change are laid out, and there’s plenty of bad news, from the decline of journalism to the rise of gender inequality, from endangered democracy at home to the new “tech imperialism” abroad.

Greene is a futurist for the in-house think tank at J. Walter Thompson, a historic advertising agency that is now a marketing communications company and a subsidiary of a multinational conglomerate, which has large and likewise historic accounts such as Unilever, Kraft, Nestlé and Kellog’s. Her professional focus is, as she put it, “connecting emerging cultural change in consumer sentiment to brand strategy” — that is, concerned more with stock futures than science fiction ones, and not typically the vantage point of someone you would expect to become a Cassandra warning against the deleterious effects of an entire industry on our civic life. Indeed, one could argue that throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, some of her company’s clients, or similar large multinantionals, have engaged in a great deal of political manipulation. But her argument — that the tenor of the tech companies’ rhetoric and goals are different, somehow more all-encompassing — is a compelling one. The book is a bracing read, and arguably her expertise makes her well-suited to write insightfully about the biggest brands with the most consumers.

Silicon States is a book fundamentally about the danger of concentrating so much power in so few hands. We spoke by phone about the people who have amassed huge amounts of wealth, the companies they run, what they’re doing with their money, and why they’re doing it. Read more…

The Man Without a Nose

A prosthetic nose is on display at the booth of the Nakamura Brace at the "OTWorld" orthopedics and rehabilitation technology trade fair in Leipzig, Germany, 13 May 2014. Photo by: Peter Endig/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

After experiencing chronic nosebleeds and severe congestion, humor writer Steve Bean Levy goes to the doctor and discovers he’s got Sino-Nasal Squamous Cell Carcinoma — a cancer that attacks the nose and sinuses. In a poignant (and graphic) personal essay at MEL Magazine, Levy recounts his treatment and what it’s like to live life without a nose.

On March 2, 2017, Blackwell and his team performed a schnozophomy. That’s Yiddish for rhinectomy, which is English for cutting your nose off. I was in surgery for 12 hours, from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. They removed my nose, my tumor, my upper gums, all of my upper teeth and two-thirds of my upper palate. Soon thereafter, in preparation for radiation treatments, the majority of my bottom teeth were also removed. I was left with a total of four teeth, all on the bottom.

But for the moment, I want to tell you about the hole in my face. I want to tell you about The Wound.

And I can really look IN there. There’s a vast space here. This was my sinus cavity! This is the interior of my skull! To examine The Wound for the first time, I began by removing my plastic nose. It’s more of a nose-shell, really, with a nose-shape in the center, partial plastic cheeks and a bit of upper lip. Beneath the shell, I was delighted to find that Dr. Blackwell had built a very realistic nose out of gauze! It was a little crude, but quite nose-like, really very well done. He had built it skillfully, and I imagined, quickly and expertly, the way a seasoned balloon-artist might make a balloon animal, finishing off with a flourish, saying, “There ya go, little fella, it’s a nose!”

As I disassembled the gauze-nose, I was again impressed, this time by the sheer quantity of gauze that Blackwell used; there was enough for five noses. I became a vaudeville magician, “The Wizard of Gauze,” performing my take on the Endless Handkerchief Trick. The more gauze I unraveled, the more there was to unravel.

Today, I’m like Eleanor Rigby — I wear a face that I keep in a jar by the door. Actually, I keep mine in a pile in a drawer, but McCartney has written the superior lyric. We’ve all heard a woman say, most likely in an old-timey TCM movie, “I have to go back inside to put my face on.” I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked out the front door without my nose and had to turn back and go inside to “put my face on.” Nor can I count the number of times we’ve been about to head out, and I’ve had to say to Caroline, “Honey, have you seen my nose anywhere?”

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My Year Without a Nose

Longreads Pick

Steve Bean Levy recounts this past year as a man without a nose, after undergoing treatment for Sino-Nasal Squamous Cell Carcinoma — a rare form cancer that attacks the nose and sinuses.

Source: MEL Magazine
Published: Aug 13, 2018
Length: 14 minutes (3,721 words)

Long Live the Oddly Charming Poetry of the Mail-Order Catalog

Image by Mike Mozart (CC BY 2.0)

In this age of near-universal despair, could America’s longest-running mail-order retailer be the sleeper hero we didn’t even know was still among us? At Chicago Magazine, Nick Greene makes a compelling case that Hammacher Schlemmer, founded in 1881, might just be the goofy, retro anti-Amazon we need.

The catalog’s most obvious hook might be the ridiculous gizmos and novelty items — motorized unicycle, anyone? — that appear on its cover. But what I found especially endearing is the level of care the catalog’s makers invest in the product descriptions.

Beyond being older, today’s prototypical Hammacher Schlemmer customer is also wealthy and educated. “They would definitely be considered top 10 percent in household income, a lot of postgrads,” Farrell says. “That’s why we feel the copy is important.” Where else can one find a backpack described as “Brobdingnagian” or a walking stick crafted from “sustainably coppiced blackthorn (Primus spinosa)”?

The text is matter-of-fact, with odd literary flourishes, and the titles are concise, yet deceptively clever. “I could go on for hours talking about titles,” says John Gagliardi, who, as Hammacher Schlemmer’s senior creative manager, oversees the catalog’s unmistakable copy. “We agonize over titles.” The company employs two full-time copywriters and a stable of contributors to write the extensive product descriptions.

The NASA Strength Sun Hat harnesses “the same technology used in space suits.” That galactic selling point doesn’t overshadow the product’s earthly benefits, like the “wide brim” and a “radiant barrier” that “imparts a UPF 50+ rating to the hat.” If a product is unisex (the sun hat is), then that will always be noted, as will whether or not it requires batteries (it does not). At 153 words, the hat’s description is about the average length for Hammacher Schlemmer. A standard catalog is 88 pages long, give or take, meaning that, at four products per page, there are roughly 53,856 words in every issue. That’s more verbose than The Great Gatsby (47,094 words).

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