Longreads Best of 2015: Essays & Criticism

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism. Read more…

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism. Read more…

Here are five people who influenced the world in powerful ways in 2015.
Over the eight months that followed [the 50th anniversary of the march at Selma], DeRay’s fame grew in a manner unprecedented for an activist. From showing up at protests from Charleston to Baltimore to Minneapolis, to getting an audience with multiple presidential candidates, to increasingly having the ear (or eye) of those in many corners of the social-media-consuming public (from the followers to the haters to the famous), his impact in 2015 has been undeniable.

Ryan Bradley | Kill Screen | December 2015 | 13 minutes (3,122 words)
Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a new essay from Ryan Bradley and Kill Screen, the videogame arts and culture magazine. Kill Screen is currently wrapping up a Kickstarter campaign to reinvent their print magazine, so donate here.
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No one wore stripes that spring and summer in Leavenworth. Stripes were for rule breakers, and no one was breaking the rules. “Baseball As A Corrective” read the front page of the New York Times that May. It was 1912 and “the magic of baseball” had “wrought a wonderful change in the United States Penitentiary.” For the first time in Leavenworth’s history, for months at a time, everyone behaved, because everyone wanted to play or watch the baseball games. “Chronic trouble makers began to be so good that the officials were startled,” the Times reported. Prison guards were planning more amusements for the winter, “such as vaudeville entertainments and moving picture shows, to keep the men on their good behavior.” Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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In 1881, Eunice White Bullard published All Around the House, Or, How to Make Homes Happy, a 468-page manual on everything a head of household needed to know to keep things in order. Bullard, the wife of Henry Ward Beecher, dedicated chapters to everything from managing laundry to pickling, washing flannel, and cooking a goose. Read more…

Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major cultural force.” But what exactly is a lyric essay?
The term lyric essay was popularized in the ’90s by the writer John D’Agata (a Graywolf author) to describe a hybrid form of nonfiction that accommodates verse, memoir, and criticism. But its origins go back at least as far as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, journalist-critics whose work is magnetically personal. Its present-day progeny is more diverse and more direct, answering to a very modern hunger for well-worded social arguments rooted in identity and experience. It’s a rapidly expanding niche, where Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay can turn painful confessions into powerful exhortations while — in a different mode — Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti can make universal claims out of private stories. On this shifting ground, Graywolf’s poet-critics are punching above every weight class.

In 2014, two 12-year-old girls stabbed a friend, arguing that they did it for a fictional internet horror creature named Slender Man. Lisa Miller tries to understand why in New York magazine:
By the age of 8 — and definitely by 12 — psychologists agree, most children are as able as adults to sort out what’s real from what is not. What sets children and adolescents apart from adults is a mental task psychologists call “discounting” — the rational inner voices that can subdue overheated emotional responses to the imagination’s powerful projections and that come with the maturing of the frontal lobe by around age 25. That’s why a 50-year-old can finish rinsing her hair even as she recalls the shower scene from “Psycho,” while a 16-year-old will find herself with a racing heart, soapy and dripping on the mat. But the feeling of being in the thrall of a fantasy (even a morbid one) can be seductive as well, as comforting as getting high, as mesmerizing as Minecraft.
In this way, the friendship of Anissa and Morgan, with its shared obsessions and mutually satisfying imaginary play, was the rather unremarkable effort of two bright, alienated kids to build a world more thrilling than their reality, a private bubble that offered them belonging, excitement, and a sense of their own power. The problem wasn’t that Morgan and Anissa didn’t know they were living in a fantasy world: Ultimately, when pressed by adults, they acknowledged the difference between fantasy and reality. The problem was that they couldn’t — or didn’t — extricate themselves from the fantasy. “He does not exist,” Anissa told police on the day of the stabbing. “He is a work of fiction.” Morgan, the more troubled one, had a more enduring attachment to the fairy tale they had told themselves and that had brought them to the woods. But even she admitted, in her interview, that the attack on Bella was “probably wrong,” she said. “I honestly don’t know why we did this.”

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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Will intellectual combat ever top the televised 1968 debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley? New York Magazine‘s Jim Holt thinks not.

Sari Botton | Longreads | July 2015 | 5 minutes (1,250 words)
This year, on the 45th anniversary of its publication, W.W. Norton & Company has re-(re-)released Desperate Characters, a novel by Paula Fox first published in 1970 and made into a film the following year, with Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars. We’re thrilled to publish an excerpt here on Longreads. Read more…
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