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‘The Paper’ is the Most Essential and Overlooked Film About Journalism

There’s a lot to like about The Post, a film that has drawn rave reviews even before its pre-holidays debut. The combination of Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, and Tom Hanks as the paper’s editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee is the rare pairing of GOAT actors operating at their all-time peak.

The film covers the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times, the Washington Post’s attempt to obtain its own copy, and the ensuing battle against the Nixon administration which led to the Supreme Court case about the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked documents. As Manohla Dargis of the New York Times described in her review of the film, “The pleasure of The Post is how it sweeps you up in how it all went down…Like many movies that turn the past into entertainment, The Post gently traces the arc of history, while also bending it for dramatic punch and narrative expediency.”

The Post is the ultimate click-bait film for our current moment: An all-star cast telling the story of righteous journalism while press freedoms are being threatened on a daily basis. There is a time-honored tradition of films that have functioned in a similar way, including NetworkAll the President’s Men, and most recently, Spotlight. Last month The Post published a compendium of the greatest journalism movies ever made, selected by the likes of Katy Tur, Jill Abramson, and Marty Baron (who, of course, chose Spotlight, where he’s played by Liev Schreiber). And on the heels of The Post’s rundown was a feature by Haley Mlotek on the 30th anniversary of Broadcast News, the 1987 drama that “predicted journalism as we know it.”

What’s most interesting isn’t the selection of films that have largely defined what our conceived notions of how journalism functions, including what reporters look like — bodies clad in beige clothing drinking copious amounts of coffee. What I find fascinating is that most of these films deal with large-scale or long-form investigative reporting, the type of work that takes months and involves countless interview montages. What about a film that covers a day in the life of an average newspaper?

I’m talking about The Paper, in my opinion, the best journalism film ever made and one that almost never gets any credit. Starring Michael Keaton as the metro editor of the fictional Sun — a loose portrayal of The New York Post —  the movie details the killing of two out-of-state businessmen in a pre-gentrified Williamsburg and the arrest of two black teenagers for the crime. The problem is the charges are bogus, a mob hit made to look like murders with racial undertones at a time when New York, on the screen and in real life, had reached a tipping point. The Sun and its staff, including Glenn Close as the managing editor, Robert Duvall as the EIC, and Randy Quaid as a quasi-Mike McAlary-Pete Hamill-type columnist, have a day to both confirm and break the exclusive. Asked at one point why the story can’t wait until the next day, as Close tells Keaton during a staff meeting, “We taint them today, we make them look good on Saturday, everybody’s happy.” Keaton exclaims, “Not tomorrow, right fucking now, today!”

Co-written by Stephen Koepp, former executive editor of Time magazine, The Paper beautifully illustrates the lunacy and creativity of working under a deadline. The feeling one gets upon getting the perfect quote — “Don’t take the bat out of my hands, it’s the ninth inning, I got to get the quote, the guy’s not going to be there all night,” says Keaton — or confirming a previously deep background detail on the record. It’s a rush native to only journalists, the endorphins multiplying as you have only minutes to finish the article. Every reporter has experienced at least one editor snapping at them as Duvall does to Keaton, “You want to run the story? You have five hours until 8 o’clock — go get the story. Do your job!” And then it’s over, and you have to do it again the next day. That’s the inherent genius of The Paper. No other film conveys the madness of deadline journalism — or the fun.

Midway through the film, Quaid, who shines as the paper’s embattled columnist who believes people are plotting against him, fires a gun through a stack of newspapers to end an argument, which allows Keaton to finish a conversation with his wife (played by the brilliant Marisa Tomei).

At which point, Tomei, whose character works at the Sun and is at the beginning of her maternity leave, gushes, “God, I miss this place!”

The journalism practiced in All the President’s MenThe Post, and Spotlight is never going to cease — it’s the journalism that will always endure. The deep-rooted injustices that are so outrageous, it is as if the abuses themselves are practically begging for someone to shine a light on. Liev Schreiber, as The Boston Globe‘s editor-in-chief, makes this point in Spotlight: “Sometimes it is easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly, a light gets turned on.” But what is being threatened is the journalism of The Paper: the daily local grind.

Following the dissolution of uber-local sites DNAInfo and Gothamist, Danielle Tcholakian wrote about what happens when newspapers stop covering what immediately impacts its citizens:

That was a big part of what we were there to do: show people exactly how every action, big or small, impacted their daily lives in the neighborhoods they lived in and loved.

And that is what makes The Paper so special, and why Tomei’s quote is such a genius line. She underscores the heart of the film: forget the money, the fame, and the accolades, all that matters is getting the story right — for a moment, because as the 1010 Wins tagline blares throughout the film at various points, “Your whole world can change in 24 hours.”

What to Do With a Man Who Has a Story, and a Gun

Mint Images - Paul Edmondson / Getty

Lisa Romeo | Longreads | January 2018 | 11 minutes (2,767 words)

My boyfriend said it with such confidence, such nonchalance. “Don’t worry. You’re safe in here, and I’ll be back in an hour.”

He shut the bedroom door behind him as he left, and I heard his key in the padlock on the other side — the one he’d installed to keep out his drunk or stoned apartment-mates who kept “borrowing” his cigars, raiding his mini-fridge, and hitting on me.

I was a freshman at an expensive upstate New York college, majoring in journalism, and I’d fallen hard for this guy the first week of September. Though I was young for college — I wouldn’t turn 18 until later that fall — people had always said about me, “She’s so mature, so level-headed,” compliments I shirked away from, instead longing to be a little less sensible, a little more wild. In high school, I had mostly dated self-assured, brainy guys, predictable guys, often Italian and Catholic guys, guys who, if they were girls, would have been me.

I was done with all that, I thought. I wanted something different, someone different.

This guy was short, wiry, pale, certainly older — returning to college at 24 — and also German, Protestant, and had definitely not finished at the top of his high school class. Different, but not a bad guy, not a mean guy, not a guy I couldn’t bring home.

And he wasn’t a guy. He was a man.

A man with a past. A story.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Local Reporting

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

Sarah Smarsh
Writer covering socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The New Yorker and Harper’s online, The Guardian, Guernica, and many others.

The #MeToo Movement in Kansas (Hunter Woodall, Kelsey Ryan, and Bryan Lowry, The Kansas City Star)

While the spotlight falls on sexual-misconduct allegations in the nation’s centers of power — Washington, New York, Hollywood — reporters across the country localized the revolutionary #MeToo moment on their own turf, including often overlooked and unglamorous places like my home state of Kansas. When I opened my morning newspaper to this lengthy feature on alleged sexual misconduct at the Kansas State Capitol, I was struck by the tenacity of the reporting in a digital-media era rife with emotional, partisan opinion pieces. Kansas City Star reporters Hunter Woodall, Kelsey Ryan, and Bryan Lowry spared neither side of the aisle as they hounded male legislators and gave voice to women who were previously silenced.

As a personal essayist who began as an investigative reporter, I hold no writing in higher esteem than that which does the hard work of digging for obscured facts, without which a million think pieces could never exist. This single installment of the ongoing coverage of the statehouse scandal quotes some fifteen interviewed sources: four female former interns (two named and two anonymous), two male Democratic representatives, a male intern-program director, two university spokespersons, a female Republican senate president, a male Republican house speaker, a female former Democratic staffer, the male director of the legislature’s human resources department, a second Republican state senator, and a male Democratic house minority leader.

This last source, a Democratic candidate for governor in the state’s crowded 2018 gubernatorial race, is some liberals’ best hope to defeat far-right candidate Kris Kobach. Even if the reporters’ own politics might be liberal, as journalists do perhaps lean, they didn’t allow the legislator a pass, giving readers not just his statements but also when he “tried to change the topic,” “refused to answer the question” and “demanded to know” whether he’d been accused of harassment. This is local reporting at its finest and bravest — government watchdogs shining a light where secrets might live. This is the work of a free press that sets its society free, no opinion required.


Gustavo Arellano
Former editor-in-chief, OC Weekly, contributor to Curbed LA.

Orange County’s Informant Scandal Yields Evidence of Forensic Science Deception in Murder Trials (R. Scott Moxley, OC Weekly)

My former colleague at OC Weekly, R. Scott Moxley, is the most underrated investigative reporter in the United States. His work at the paper over the past 21 years has resulted in a six-year prison sentence for our former sheriff, the end of congressional and state assemblymen’s careers, and the freeing of at least three people wrongfully convicted of crimes. Last year alone, six murder convictions covered by Moxley were overturned.

And he continues. In December, Moxley published this blockbuster exposé in which forensic scientists switched their conclusions to help prosecutors win shoddy murder cases. It was the latest Moxley blockbuster in the so-called “Orange County Snitch Scandal,” which saw prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies use jailhouse informants to illegally get information and win cases. Moxley’s work proves again the value in local news, and especially in the alt-weekly world. Long may Mox reign!


Katie Honan
Former DNAinfo reporter

Dignity In Danger (Kristin Dalton, Staten Island Advance)

In February, the Staten Island Advance published a multimedia package focused on the borough’s developmentally-disabled adults. “Dignity in Danger” is a well-reported piece of advocacy journalism, featuring the stories of those struggling, as well as the response of the city and state. It was compassionate journalism that held officials accountable for their lack of support.  

What made this piece of local journalism stand out to me was how comprehensive it was. For any local paper struggling to keep audiences and stay on top of what’s happening, it was an impressive project on an often-overlooked subject.

For their coverage, the Advance also dug into their archive of their coverage of the Willowbrook State School, where hundreds of developmentally-disabled children were abused for decades. It says a lot about local journalism to have people on staff to recognize that and have the familiarity with a place’s history.


Simon Bredin
Editor-in-chief, Torontoist

Where the Small Town American Dream Lives On (Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker)

After the presidential election, there was a sudden vogue for profiles of small towns in the grips of despair. So it was a pleasure to read Larissa MacFarquhar’s feature about Orange City, Iowa, and its “pure, hermetic culture.” MacFarquhar’s article is a delight for many reasons, not least its depiction of the endearing eccentricities of the town’s Dutch heritage. The author clearly grasps the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work, driving some townspeople away and luring others back.  But what makes the article profound is the way it describes Orange City’s sense of place, which inspires a loyalty among the residents critical to the town’s continued success.


James Ross Gardner
Editor-in-chief, Seattle Met

A Washington County That Went for Trump Is Shaken as Immigrant Neighbors Start Disappearing (Nina Shapiro, The Seattle Times)

Voting has consequences, as story after story in the wake of last November’s surprising electoral outcome has endeavored to show. Yet to my mind, few if any of the attempts to explain the Trump voter have landed. This one does. That’s because Nina Shapiro doesn’t let her sources off the hook. The people in this story say they didn’t know they were voting so cruelly, but their friends and neighbors — arrested or deported or both — nevertheless paid the price. Shapiro, to her credit, is able to find the humanity amid the folly.


Bethany Barnes
Education reporter for The Oregonian

Overlooked (Cary Aspinwall, The Dallas Morning News)

Praise for journalism has a standard repertoire. The old chestnuts include “shine a light” and “give voice to the voiceless.” Cary Aspinwall’s investigation for The Dallas Morning News truly earned such appraisal. Aspinwall looked where no one else was looking and showed her readers the human face of a problem that wasn’t being considered. Her investigation revealed that more mothers are going to jail in Texas, and that no one pays attention to what happens to their children when they do.

“Overlooked” is deftly told through an intimate portrait of five sisters:

The voices of these children are rarely heard — which is why the five Booker sisters agreed to tell the story of their mother’s arrests and their own abandonment by the criminal justice system. They told it over months, chatting in a bug-infested apartment complex, sharing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at a QuikTrip, trying tacos near the juvenile courthouse, driving almost three hours to visit their mother in prison.

Aspinwall’s extensive survey of mothers in jail gives readers a chance to hear perspectives we almost never hear. Her shoe-leather reporting to find people who could speak to the problem makes the data she found meaningful and personal.


Julia Wick
Former editor-in-chief, LAist

Behind a $13 shirt, a $6-an-hour worker (Natalie Kitroteff and Victoria Kim, The Los Angeles Times)

Natalie Kitroeff and Victoria Kim’s damning exposé nails how fast fashion giants like Forever 21 avoid liability for wage theft violations at the factories where their clothes are made. The piece, which explains how the retailer “avoids paying factory workers’ wage claims through a tangled labyrinth of middlemen,” has national and international implications. It is also very much a local story.

Garment workers making $6 an hour “pinning Forever 21 tags on trendy little shirts” in stifling factories right here in Los Angeles. Although most manufacturing has migrated overseas, L.A. still holds onto a small production niche, which is largely staffed by underpaid, immigrant workers. (Little-known fact: Southern California is the nation’s garment manufacturing capitol). Forever 21 itself is a Los Angeles-based company and an immigrant story: It was founded in Los Angeles in 1984 by a couple who had emigrated from South Korea.

Kitroeff and Kim’s piece masterfully illustrates the layered steps behind the production of every garment, explaining labor law and humanizing the lives and wage claims of workers. Their reporting offered a powerful indictment of a massive retailer — and our own complicity every time we buy that $13 shirt — drawing much-needed attention to worker abuses in our own backyard.


Michelle Legro
Senior editor, Longreads

Lawrence Tabak’s reporting on Foxconn in Wisconsin for Belt Magazine

It began as a shady deal with a big promise: Wisconsin taxpayers would give Foxconn $3 billion to open a plant that would provide 13,000 jobs, ostensibly for locals. Belt Magazine’s Lawrence Tabak has been following the deal for months: He tracked down workers at a Foxconn plant in Indiana and discovered that the quality of these jobs was low for locals, and that management favored Taiwanese nationals in management, and also relied on undocumented workers hidden during ICE raids. In a series of stories, he explained step-by-step how governor Scott Walker was taken in by Foxconn’s deal and sold it to the state legislature:

The proposed plant combined everything that an ambitious Republican governor could want. Not only a lot of jobs, but manufacturing jobs. Never mind that these were not the sort of jobs that would revive the Rust Belt, let alone jobs that would employ a significant number of Wisconsinites.

Tabak’s reporting was journalism in action, even making its way to the Wisconsin State Senate, “which used Belt’s reporting in railing against Foxconn’s heavy reliance on H-1B visa holders for skilled positions at its stateside facilities.”

Tabak also did one of the best man-on-the-ground reports that had nothing in common with the kind of parachute reporting on Trump voters that was so reviled this year. Staking out an apple orchard next door to the proposed plant in Racine County, he asked the workers there what they thought of Foxconn and it’s promise of jobs. The workers of Apple Holler saw only environmental pollution on the horizon, and the betrayal of what this area of Wisconsin does best, and has always done best: agriculture.


Ethan Chiel
Contributing editor and fact checker, Longreads

How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire (Andrew Granato, Stanford Politics)

Campus politics is local politics par excellence, and while Peter Thiel may be mediocre at his secondary pursuits, like investing and vampirism, he is by all accounts an excellent right-wing campus political operative. Thiel has spent nearly three decades trying to trigger libs at his alma mater, Stanford, not least by continuing to support the Stanford Review, a conservative publication he founded as an undergraduate in the late ‘80s. Andrew Granato really got the goods in his smart, even-handed account of how Thiel has cultivated the Review as both a source for hires and business associates and a way to try and keep his own, largely contrarianism-based sense of politics alive at a liberal university. It also serves as a reminder that Silicon Valley is very much a place and not just a metonymic device.

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.

How Angry Racists Plotted to Kill Somali Refugees in Kansas

AP Photo/Orlin Wagner

So many Trump supporters fear that our country is allegedly being overrun with Muslims who are recruiting terrorists intent on killing Americans, and that the U.S. government doesn’t care, yet some of these white working class men who fear Islamic radicalization have become radicalized themselves.

In Garden City, Kansas, a group of self-described crusaders got fed up with the way their town and country was seemingly being infiltrated with Muslims, who they disparagingly called “cockroaches.” These men decided they needed to draw the proverbial line somewhere, so they formed a group and a plan: to blow up a place of worship and kill the peaceful Somali refugees who’d taken up residence in this small rural town and worked at the local meat-processing facilities. For New York magazine, Jessica Pressler spent time in Kansas piecing together these criminals’ stories, their rage, their plan of attack, and arrest.

Now Stein was paying attention. Back in his trailer, he developed a new addiction: content produced by right-wing media outlets, whose outrage matched his own. Stein was a fan of Fox News, and when this corporate entity failed to provide the high of extreme indignation, there were news sites like Breitbart, Infowars, and Reddit, plus Veterans Today, JewsNews, et. al, which Stein, whose mind was already addled by the information he’d mainlined elsewhere, took to be purveyors of the “real” truth. Among the things he came to believe: that the U.N. had built secret tunnels underneath all of the country’s Walmarts that linked to underground military bases. That there were Chinese troops lined up at the Mexican border readying to launch a communist invasion. That Cuba was going to invade Florida. “Been telling people for years it was all a hoax,” he wrote above a headline he posted on Facebook: “Sandy Hook Redux: Obama Officials Confirm That It Was A Drill and No Children Died.”

The nucleus of Stein’s rage was, of course, Barack Obama. “We are literally being run by a terrorist organization at the highest level, being the Oval Office,” Stein told people in the militia he joined during the president’s second term. “He is their leader. Their organization is called the Muslim Brotherhood, and of course it filters down through every other department and branch of the federal government.”

The Southwest Kansas Three Percent was a part of the Three Percenter movement, founded after Obama’s election by Chris Hill, a Georgia-based former Marine who goes by the name General Bloodagent. The group is named for what he claims is the actual percentage of Colonists said to have taken up arms against the British in the Revolutionary War (this figure is disputed by historians). Of its members’ many and varied fears, in early 2016, it was “radical Islam,” as Donald Trump was calling it, that perhaps loomed the largest. Down in Georgia, Hill’s Three Percenters had led an armed protest of a planned mosque, and a Kansas branch threatened to do the same thing when the Islamic Society of Wichita invited the sheikh Monzer Taleb to speak. They hadn’t had to — the event was canceled after then–U. S. representative Mike Pompeo warned the Society’s leaders that if they went ahead with the event, “they will be responsible for the damage.” Still, many of the militia’s members didn’t feel like their government was doing enough to protect them from the rising tide of fundamentalism. “Hell, it’s even getting down into the local governments now,” Stein pointed out. “It’s at the point where it’s got to be stopped or there is going to be no stopping it.”

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Longreads Best of 2017: Science, Technology, and Business Writing

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

Deborah Blum
Director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

The Touch of Madness (David Dobbs, Pacific Standard)

A beautifully rendered exploration of the slow, relentless creep of schizophrenia into the life of a brilliant graduate student, her slow recognition of the fact, and the failure of her academic community to recognize the issue or to support her. Dobbs’ piece functions both as an inquiry into our faltering understanding of mental illness and our cultural failure to respond to it with integrity. It’s the kind of compassionate and morally-centered journalism we should all aspire to.


Elmo Keep
Australian writer and journalist living in Mexico, runner-up for the 2017 Bragg Prize for Science Writing

How Eclipse Chasers Are Putting a Small Kentucky Town on the Map (Lucas Reilly, Mental Floss)

Anyone willing to write about syzygy in the shadow of Annie Dillard’s classic 1982 essay “Total Eclipse” has balls for miles. Reilly’s decision to focus on the logistics faced by tiny towns preparing to be inundated by thousands of eclipse watchers was inspired. It brilliantly conveyed the shared enthusiasms that celestial events animate in us. Between these two essays, I’m convinced a total eclipse would be a psychic event so overwhelming I might not survive it. I’ve got 2037 in Antarctica on my bucket list — if it’s still there in twenty years.    Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Woman working at Ford plant
Photo by Bill Pugliano / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Susan Chira and Catrin Einhorn, John Branch, Amanda Mull, Mimi O’Donnell and Adam Green, and Mansi Choksi.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

When Will the Auto Industry Succumb to the #MeToo Revolution?

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Over the past few months, the #MeToo revolution has brought down men in Hollywood, in media, and in the food world who have harassed or violated women. Other even more male-dominated industries have been slower to respond to this watershed moment, including the auto industry — where violating women has long been tolerated and part of the culture.

The New York Times Magazine has a multi-media expose of the ongoing sexual harassment and misconduct toward women at the Ford Motor Company. Despite numerous lawsuits filed and settled in the 1990s, a threatening culture has persisted and led to a new round of litigations. Reporters Susan Chira and Catrin Einhorn investigate whether that culture can survive the #MeToo revolution. What will it take to bring down male auto workers, managers and union leaders? Read more…

Is Estonia Leading the Way to the Future Digital World?

Lucas Vallecillos / VWPics via AP Images

Although you might not be able to find Estonia on a map, physical locations are less important in this country’s vision of the future. For The New Yorker, Nathan Heller visits this small Baltic nation to see how they’re transforming themselves into a borderless digital society.

Health records, banking information, student and car and voting registration, police reports, court cases ─ they’re all linked across digital platforms. To reduce breaches, the information is held locally, but a government-owned platform ultimately links data, even to other countries who use the platform. The goal isn’t to simply improve efficiency, it’s to save money and encourage business that will generate money. Having a porous digital society that uses a remote model attracts investors and entrepreneurs to Estonia, both physically and as e-residents. Heller’s story starts with Taavi Kotka, the chief information officer who helped roll out the e-Estonia project. As they spoke, a robot mowed Kotka’s lawn. “Everything here is robots,” Kotka told Heller. “Robots here, robots there.” But digitization has less to do with automation than it does with embracing the transient nature of labor in the European marketplace.

“I am President to a digital society,” she declared in her address. The leaders of Europe were arrayed in folding chairs, with Angela Merkel, in front, slumped wearily in a red leather jacket. “Simple people suffer in the hands of heavy bureaucracies,” Kaljulaid told them. “We must go for inclusiveness, not high end. And we must go for reliability, not complex.”

Kaljulaid urged the leaders to consider a transient population. Theresa May had told her people, after Brexit, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” With May in the audience, Kaljulaid staked out the opposite view. “Our citizens will be global soon,” she said. “We have to fly like bees from flower to flower to gather those taxes from citizens working in the morning in France, in the evening in the U.K., living half a year in Estonia and then going to Australia.” Citizens had to remain connected, she said, as the French President, Emmanuel Macron, began nodding vigorously and whispering to an associate. When Kaljulaid finished, Merkel came up to the podium.

“You’re so much further than we are,” she said. Later, the E.U. member states announced an agreement to work toward digital government and, as the Estonian Prime Minister put it in a statement, “rethink our entire labor market.”

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An Elegy for Bette Howland, a Writer Who Was Nearly Forgotten

Jacob Howland

This past Sunday, The New York Times reported that Bette Howland, a writer most contemporary readers have never heard of, died at the age of 80, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Howland was the recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ prize. She had a prolific decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, first publishing her memoir, W-3, in 1974, which documented her stay in a mental hospital following a nervous breakdown; it was followed in 1978 by Blue in Chicago, a collection of largely autobiographical stories; and then by Things to Come and Go, a collection of three long stories, published in 1983. When Johanna Kaplan reviewed it in the Times, she called Howland, “a writer of unusual talent, power, and intelligence.”

Howland received the MacArthur in 1984 and never published another book, only sporadically contributing to literary magazines and journals, often responding to editors with resistance to the idea of publishing her work.

Despite having a champion, friend, and sometimes lover in the writer Saul Bellow, who encouraged her spiritedly after meeting her at a writing conference on Staten Island in 1961, Howland was often overcome by a lack of confidence, particularly after winning the MacArthur.

In 2015, Brigid Hughes, editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Spaceplucked Howland’s first book, W-3, off the $1 cart at Housing Works Bookstore in New York City and became intrigued upon reading its very first sentences. Hughes had never heard of Howland, but she took the book home and read it in a night. She had earlier in the year begun to think about an issue of the magazine focused on women writers — perhaps, she had thought, there might be something to include of Howland’s.

Hughes, with the help of Laura Preston, an editor at the magazine, began to sleuth for more information about Howland in order to contact her and see if she had more work. The internet offered few breadcrumbs. There was a Wikipedia page with a photo that was not Howland, and there were a few press clippings, but Hughes said at the time, “She had just vanished.”

Hughes and I talked about Howland during the production of her issue focused on underappreciated women writers at a time when I was renting a desk in the magazine’s office. I also became intrigued with Howland and started to read W-3 myself, as well as excerpts from a large stash of letters between Bellow and Howland that Hughes was publishing after their discovery by Howland’s son. Hughes had tracked down Jacob Howland to enquire after his mother’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, Bette Howland had a tragic car accident only the year before. She was suffering from dementia and not healthy enough to correspond with Hughes, but Jacob stepped in and began to work with A Public Space.

As a freelance writer, I thought Howland’s story and Hughes’s rediscovery would make for a good piece for LitHub. So I began to read and assemble everything I could about Hughes’s discovery, which included the letters. I reached out to her son by email to ask more about her, as well as his interaction with Hughes. “Brigid,” he wrote me at the time, “is the reason we found the letters, My wife and I started looking through Bette’s papers for unpublished material, and that’s when we ran across the letters.”

At some point, as I was reading a draft of that issue of A Public Space and working on my own piece about Howland, I went online and ordered first editions of all of her books. They were all under $10 and easy to acquire. I had recently been introduced to the rare book trade, through rare and antiquarian book dealer Heather O’Donnell, owner of Honey and Wax Books, and had caught the collecting bug. Then realizing I would never be able to afford to become a serious collector of any kind, despite being an excellent hoarder of books, I began to dream that I might start a business of my own focused on women writers.

The idea came about after I visited numerous rare book fairs, which I had begun to realize were run primarily by male dealers, male collectors, and predominantly filled with books by men (this is very broadly speaking), and as a result many women writers’ books were priced far lower than those of their male contemporaries

Howland became the inspiration for a new business I’ve just launched, The Second Shelf, and hers were the first books I acquired to sell, if I can bring myself to part with them. Since I bought them, and since Howland began receiving some attention again, thanks to Hughes, her first editions have increased in value and are difficult to come by at all — a copy of Blue in Chicago costs around $80-100 online.

Earlier this year, Hughes announced a new literary imprint, A Public Space Books, and will begin publication with Howland’s experimental novella, A Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which was originally published in TriQuarterly in the 1990s.

The news of Howland’s death this past week came with a strange and surreal, nearly uncanny timing. I had only days earlier published a piece here on Longreads reporting on Hughes’s own erasure from literary history — as the first and only female editor of The Paris Review, and the editor to succeed the renowned George Plimpton. The piece was sparked by a series of frustrated tweets I posted upon learning of Lorin Stein’s resignation from The Paris Review, the result of a sexual harassment scandal in which he admitted to taking advantage of women writers and staff in his workplace.  

It was a poignant and emotional bit of news, and adding insult to injury, all the articles about it kept repeating the misreported legacy of the magazine’s editorship. I found myself urgently needing to correct the historical record of Hughes’s erased role at the Paris Review, the sexist treatment she received by the board in ousting her, and the similarly sexist treatment by the news media in its decade-long misreporting.

Although Howland chose to step out of the limelight, I see her disappearance from literary history as evidence of sexism in publishing and literary criticism. Great male writers, whatever their output or mental state, have legacies that far outlast those of women writers because men read books by men and are less interested in books by women. There is a maxim in publishing I have heard dozens of times from publishers and editors: Women buy and read more books. Women buy and read books by both women and men. Men buy and read fewer books. Men read books by men, not women. This is, again, not wholly the truth, but it’s not inaccurate either. Then, you’ve got patriarchal institutions and the academy still supporting a canon that was built by white men. Literary women suffer from this in their own lifetime, as Howland’s disappearance demonstrates, and they suffer even worse in their afterlives.

Hughes has been restored to her place in literary history with a series of corrections in The New York Times and with a correction on the masthead of The Paris Review. Because of Hughes, Howland is back in print in the pages of A Public Space and will soon have new work on the shelves, along with her out-of-print work.

It’s hard to not be discouraged as a woman writer these days. In addition to facing sexual harassment in the workplace, we have the boys’ club to contend with, we have unequal pay, we are asked far more frequently to write only for “exposure.” We are often given gendered book covers, often whether we want them or not. On top of it all, our literary history is written by men who mostly are interested in what men write.

But all is not lost, women are pulling up women, and some of us, like Howland, might be lucky enough to find champions who do not discriminate based on sex. Here is a quote from just one of Saul Bellow’s many letters to Howland, encouraging her back to the writing desk after her nervous breakdown:

I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.

Who knows if we would have Howland’s books at all without Bellow’s constant encouragement? If one reads the small bit known about her personal biography, it seems incredible that she was able to accomplish what she did. She had very little support in her pursuits. Bellow’s mentorship appears to have made a huge difference in her life. How many other women writers are gone to us, or, like Howland, are on the precipice of being lost?

There is a secret history of literature, one full of forgotten women. Let’s honor the work of Howland and Hughes, and women like them. Let’s find them, pull them out from the cracks, and begin to balance the bookshelves.