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Longreads Best of 2019: Music Writing

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

Ericka Blount Danois

An award-winning journalist, writer, editor, and professor, Ericka Blount Danois has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vibe, Spin, The Washington Post, Wax Poetics, The Source, and Da Capo’s Best Music Writing 2012. She is the author of Love, Peace, and Soul.

The Empire Strikes Back (Melissa A. Weber, Red Bull Music Academy)

Melissa A. Weber’s roller-coaster ride retrospective on George Clinton, P-Funk, Funkadelic, and various offshoots of everything funky is told with a musician’s attention to detail and a storyteller’s attention to drama. In the end, it’s Clinton’s otherworldly genius and cultural impact that can’t be denied.

How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music (Emily Lordi, The New Yorker)

In Emily Lordi’s insightful New Yorker feature, she illustrates how Hayes’s 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul was an exercise in Hayes commanding his own space — musically, sartorially, and physically. The album was both an act of resistance and healing during a time when Hayes was distraught over the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His insistence on being himself remade the record industry, with songs like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which ran for 18 minutes, and “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” which Lordi refers to as an “exercise in the refusal of fear and containment.”


Ann Powers
NPR music’s critic and correspondent, previously The Los Angeles Times‘ chief pop music critic, Ann Powers is the author of Good Booty and Weird Like Us, co-author of Tori Amos: Piece By Piece, and co-editor, with Evelyn McDonnell, of the anthology Rock She Wrote

I’ve said it before: A golden age of music writing is scattering its fruits across the wild plains of the Internet. Music writing is a bastard form, journalistically unnecessary, literarily unstable, and so perfectly suitable to a virus-prone, hierarchically unstable intellectual epoch like our own. Trying to pick one or two great pieces from 2019, I fell into a vortex, revisiting instant classics, like The New York Times’ history-making investigative report about the Universal Studios fire that destroyed irreplaceable master recordings, and GQ’s powerful oral history of how sober musicians thrive creatively, and The Ringer’s illuminating trend piece about TikTok, and heartfelt stuff like this memoir in Texas Monthly. However, I had to make a choice. I started thinking about language itself. Music is language, and music encounters language; it conveys more than words can offer, but is also often bound up with them. These five pieces offer insight into this complex relationship.

I Believe I Can Lie (Kimberlé Crenshaw, The Baffler)

In the wake of the edifice-toppling documentary Surviving R. Kelly, law professor and intersectional theorist Crenshaw analyzes the lyrics to Kelly’s answer song, “I Admit,” as an example of the “SOB (Save Our Brotha”) rhetorical strategy also employed by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when faced with accusations of sexual harassment.

The Poetic Consequences of K-Pop (Emily Yungmin Yoon, The Paris Review)

This deceptively modest memoir of being seen within the crowd of BTS fans speaks volumes about how pop can literally speak for its audience.

Who’s Billie Eilish? (Meaghan Garvey, The Fader)

On the surface, this appears to be just another profile of an up-and-coming pop star, but this recounting of time spent at home with the teenage oracle of Gen Z goes deeper. Author Meaghan Garvey really listens to her Eilish and her family, and she does the work of letting the singer’s words — in conversation, but also in her journals, which Garvey reads — change her perspective on her art.

A Secret Ingredient in Songs of Summer (Reggie Ugwu, The New York Times)

Over three years of listening, Ugwu identified a three-beat pattern (“boom-ch-boom-chk”) that always got him dancing: rhythm, the basic grammar of pop. This multimedia read follows it from Jamaica to Africa and the U.S., identifying an opportunistic cross-pollination, as he writes, that only benefits our playlists.

Arizona (John Edgar Wideman, The New Yorker)

Trying to find the linguistic key to a 1980s quiet storm classic by R&B lifer Freddie Jackson — “How do you offer a space with your voice that feels real enough for a listener to enter” — the 78-year-old novelist goes to a remarkably raw and poetic place in this piece of short fiction, as he contemplates pleasure, mortality, morality, and the imprisonment of his teenage son for murder the year after the song was released.


Michael A. Gonzales

The Blacklist book columnist for Catapult, cultural critic Michael A. Gonzales has written articles, essays, and reviews for publications including The Paris Review, Pitchfork, Wax Poetics, Mass Appeal, Complex, Longreads, and The Wire U.K

How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music (Emily Lordi, The New Yorker)

While pop-cult fans know the late Stax Records singer-songwriter Isaac Hayes as the soundtrack innovator who delivered the 1972 classic “Theme from Shaft,” and the voice of the comical Chef on South Park, there was much more to him than funk and laughs. In Emily Lordi’s wonderful New Yorker feature “How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music,” she shows us a different side of bald-headed dude who was a friend of Martin Luther King and became very distraught when the civil rights leader was slain in 1968 within blocks of Stax. After mourning for months, Hayes put his anger and grief into making the 1969 psychedelic soul masterwork Hot Buttered Soul. Lordi’s essay presents a stellar portrait of a soul music modernizer.

For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway (Tari Ngangura, Catapult)

One of the coolest things about original essay sites like Catapult and Longreads are the abundance of music related pieces that double as personal essays. In August, writer Tari Ngangura, published her piece For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway, that began as a coming of age in 1999, the same year she bought and embraced Meshell Ndegeocello’s brilliant Bitter album. In the two decades since its release, the disc has served as a soundtrack and solace through various of Ngangura’s relationships. Her writing is poetic, probing and precise, and made this Bitter aficionado quite blissful.


Tom Maxwell
Journalist, Longreads Shelved columnist, and musician

The Ryan Adams Allegations Are the Tip of an Indie-Music Iceberg (Laura Snapes, The Guardian)

Two music stories from earlier this year are standouts to me. First is a piece by The Guardian’s deputy music editor Laura Snapes, published on Valentine’s Day. “The Ryan Adams Allegations Are The Tip Of An Indie-Music Iceberg” is not the most wieldy of titles, but the writing is crisp and incisive. Snapes speaks of a chronic indie rock condition, which reinforces and promotes misogyny even as it feigns enlightenment. “The industry has been slower to reckon with its abusers post-#MeToo than other art forms,” Snapes writes, “partly because it is built on a generally permissive culture of excess and blurred lines between work and leisure — but also because the myth of the unbridled male genius remains at its core.” Go read it. Practically every line is a pull quote.

Before & After ‘The B-52’s’ (Christopher Wiengarten, The New York Times)

On July 15, Christopher Wiengarten gave us an entire weekend’s worth of reading and listening, thanks to “Before & After ‘The B-52s’.” The Times has done this type of thing before, like with 2014s dazzling, multi-media longread “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie.” But this new one is pure Technicolor. I freely admit my own biases here ― not just because I’m helping the Bs write their first official biography — but because I’m a sucker for context, precedent, and insight. Wiengarten shows us, not just what might have been the musical parents for any given B-52s song, but what those songs subsequently inspired. Great music often leads to great music, and these stepping stones always lead to a life better-lived.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

Who was Behind the First State-Sponsored Computer Attack? The Russians, Quelle Surprise

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At Wired, Andy Greenberg visits with Clifford Stoll, 30 years after he wrote the original book on computer hacking, The Cuckoo’s Egg. Stoll discovered what is believed to be the very first state-sponsored computer hacker.

He starts reminiscing, telling a story about his hacker hunting that isn’t in the book.

After Stoll helped German police trace the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s hacker to an address in Hanover, they arrested the intruder—a young man named Markus Hess. The police found that Hess, along with four other hackers, had together decided to sell their stolen secrets to the Soviets.

What he didn’t mention in the book is that he later met Hess in person. When Stoll was called to the German town of Celle near Hanover to serve as an expert witness in the case, as he tells it, he ran into Hess in the courthouse bathroom, coming face to face with the hacker he’d chased online for a year. Hess recognized Stoll, and began asking him in English why he had so doggedly pursued him. “Do you know what you’re doing to me?” Hess asked, according to Stoll’s 30-year-old memories. “You’re going to get me sent to prison!”

Stoll says he simply told Hess, “You don’t understand,” walked out of the bathroom, and testified against him.

At this point in the story, Stoll becomes silent and his face twists into a pained expression. Slowly, I realize that he’s angry. Then Stoll tells me what he really wanted to tell Hess: “If you’re so smart, if you’re so brilliant, make something that will make the internet a better place! Find out what’s wrong and make it better! Don’t go screwing with information that belongs to innocent people!” Stoll says.

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Longreads Best of 2019: Investigative Reporting

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

Alice Driver
Long-form journalist and translator based in Mexico City.

Stories About My Brother (Prachi Gupta, Jezebel)

Gupta investigates her brother’s death with tenderness and intimacy, providing us with a rare glimpse into the way toxic masculinity affects men. She recounts childhood memories of her brother Yush and his evolving views on power and masculinity, which have been shaped by his family and his mostly white classmates and peers. As Gupta grows up, she embraces feminism, which her brother defines as a “female supremacy movement,” and from that point on, their relationship deteriorates. Gupta, haunted by her brother’s death, digs deep to push through the pain of mourning and discover the cause. When she interviews Yush’s friends, they reveal that he had deep-seated insecurities about his height which led him to seek out limb-lengthening surgery. Yush believed that being taller would make him richer and more successful. Instead, he died of a pulmonary embolism, one of the side risks of the limb-lengthening surgery. Gupta’s work is personal, revelatory, shocking and provides insight into an area where we need more work: the ways in which conventional ideas of masculinity and power harm men.

The Death and Life of Frankie Madrid (Valeria Fernández, California Sunday)

I am drawn to investigations that harness the power of one story to illuminate the situation of a whole group — in this case, the lives of young, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Fernández writes poetically about the death and life of Frankie Madrid, an undocumented teen who arrived in the U.S. with his mom when he was either 4 or 6 months old. Fernandéz begins the story with Frankie’s death — he committed suicide after being deported to Mexico — and then works her way back in time, investigating the cause of his suicide, his relationship with his mother and the difficulties of daily life while being undocumented. Via Frankie’s story, we begin to understand the pressures that undocumented kids face and to question the increasingly inhumane U.S. immigration policies and practices that played a role in his suicide.
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The Guy who Ordered a Hit On His Stepmother for $5

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Unsurprisingly, you can order a murder online, using forums on the dark web geared toward undertaking any heinous task for money. Jurisdiction is tricky and as Brian Merchant reports at Harper’s Magazine, law enforcement is either too overwhelmed or unequipped to deal with the problem. Strangely, targets usually don’t believe the threat is genuine. Some of these sites are known scams, designed to fleece the hit orderer for whatever amount they’re willing to pay. Others are, sadly, for real.

Monteiro started scrolling through messages he had cached from Yura’s previous sites. The markets may have been scams, but the desire for violence was real. Monteiro had amassed a running list of people who had been singled out for death; people who’d had bounties placed on their heads, and a log of detailed conversations about how and why their would-be killers wanted them beaten, tortured, kidnapped, and murdered. It was like a Wikipedia entry for the outer extremes of human cruelty. Before I left, Monteiro gave me the password so I’d be able to keep tabs on it myself.

I began calling, emailing, and reaching out on social media to massage therapists and managers of Chinese restaurants and right-wing bloggers and I.T. guys and aerospace engineers and sex offenders and web developers. Some I couldn’t track down at all; others never answered their phones or returned my messages. I didn’t blame them. There is no easy way to say, “Hello, I found your name on a kill list on the dark net, and while the site is a scam the order is not; someone you likely know wants you dead badly enough to pay thousands of dollars to an impossibly shady website. Give me a ring back anytime,” though I tried every imaginable permutation. I was blocked on Twitter, hung up on, and, occasionally, kindly received.

In June 2018, news came of a second death from the kill list. Twenty-one-year-old Bryan Njoroge was found dead in Indiana, shot in the head on a baseball field. The police ruled the death a suicide. Weeks earlier, a user with the alias Toonbib had paid around $5,500 to order his murder and provided details of his upcoming travel. Njoroge was a U.S. military serviceman who, before he died, had made a female friend the beneficiary of his life-insurance policy. His father questions whether the death was a suicide, but the local police department has said that it is aware of the dark-web assassination order and stands by its conclusion.

So far, according to Monteiro, eight people have been arrested for ordering murders through Yura’s websites, on the basis of evidence Monteiro passed to law enforcement. One of them, a young Californian named Beau Brigham, had paid less than $5 toward a hit on his stepmother. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of soliciting murder and sentenced to three years in prison.

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Queens of Infamy: Mariamne I

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | December 2019 | 21 minutes (5,424 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

The year was 54 BC, but not really, because Christ hadn’t been born yet. In Rome, it was 700 ab urbe condita, or 700 years since the founding of the city; at the northern edge of the empire, Julius Caesar was veni, vidi, vici-ing his way into Britain for a second time. In Egypt, it was the 251st year of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and a 15-year-old Cleopatra was scheming. In Judea, which had recently lost its full sovereignty and become a client state of Rome, the year was… who even knows? The Judeans of the time would count it as year 258 in the Era of Contracts, though for Jewish people living after the 12th century, it’s anno mundi 3707. Either way, it was there that a new princess was born into a royal family torn apart by usurpers, civil war, and aggressive foreign meddling. In spite of all the chaos in the Hasmonean household, no one could have imagined that tiny Miriam would one day be that dynasty’s last hope.

Like so many women from ancient history, we have very few concrete facts about Miriam, who would gain wider infamy under the Hellenized version of her name, Mariamne. What little information we do have was recorded by men. Even her birth year is pure speculation, based on the typical ages for engagement and marriage in her culture during the 1st century BCE. What we do know for certain is that things were not going well for the Hasmoneans when Mariamne entered the scene.

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Longreads Best of 2019: Crime Reporting

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

Pamela Colloff
ProPublica senior reporter and New York Times Magazine staff writer.

Show of Force (Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker)

Every Rachel Aviv story is a marvel, and “Show of Force” — which looks at the intersection of domestic violence and law enforcement — is no exception. In language that is both spare and foreboding, Aviv builds detail upon detail as she sketches the contours of a troubled new marriage in Spalding County, Georgia. She notes that Jessica and Matthew Boynton, the protagonists of her story, left their wedding reception “after less than an hour” and that “Matthew wore a titanium wedding ring with a blue stripe, to signify that he was in law enforcement.” As these small but revelatory details accumulate, so, too, does a growing sense of dread. Aviv illuminates the real human cost behind the chilling statistics that suggest law enforcement officers are more likely to abuse their spouses, making it clear that Jessica, despite being in grave harm, has nowhere to turn. By the time I reached the story’s denouement, my heart was in my throat.


Susan Chira
Editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project. Chira worked for The New York Times for nearly 40 years as a reporter and editor, and shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of sexual harassment.

The King of Dreams (Christie Thompson, The Marshall Project)

This grippingly-written and deeply-reported story exposed the scams of a Texas con artist who made millions promising prisoners’ families their most cherished dream: bringing their children home. Thompson, a staff reporter for The Marshall Project, describes how this conman falsely promised them he could obtain reduced sentences and led them on to exhaust their life savings, in many cases. It’s a window into the desperation and vulnerability of the millions of Americans who love someone who is incarcerated.

Taken: How police departments make millions by seizing property (Anna Lee, Nathaniel Cary, and Mike Ellis, The Greenville News)

One of the great truisms about criminal justice is that it’s local. At a time when local journalism is increasingly endangered — along with the prospect of accountability for local wrongs — here’s an example of a compellingly reported and written investigation by the intrepid staff of this Greenville, S.C., newspaper. They examined statewide civil asset forfeitures over three years and found that not only did the state seize more than $17 million in property, but also that black men were disproportionately the targets.


Aura Bogado
Investigative immigration reporter at Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting

Bound by Statute (Ko Bragg and Melissa Lewis, Reveal)

When reporter Ko Bragg spotted a story about a 13-year-old who was being tried as an adult in Mississippi, she wondered if there were others like him. Her investigation, meticulously examined with data reporter Melissa Lewis, uncovered that nearly 5,000 children were charged as adults in the state in the last 25 years. They found that racial discrepancies abound: three in every four of the children are black; sentences for black minors tried as adults average twice as long as sentences for white minors charged as adults; and even when white kids are handed longer sentences, they’re released much sooner than black kids.

Bragg’s elegant writing follows the devastating story of a child named Isaiah who spent nine months in pretrial detention — sometimes in solitary confinement, other times with adults — before being dragged into court shackled at the waist and ankles. Photographer Imani Khayyam captures intimate moments between a son and mother who illustrate the toll that the state’s laws have taken on their family. But perhaps most compelling is the way the work seemlessly reaches into history to find the origins of this inequity in chattle slavery. The writing explains how the practice of robbing black children of their childhood was upheld through Reconstruction, then made a feature of white mob violence, and finally codified into law — the same law that prosecutors and judges say bind them to perpetuate the inequity today.


Josie Duffy Rice
President of The Appeal, a news publication that publishes original journalism about the criminal justice system. Co-host of the podcast Justice in America.

False Witness (Pamela Colloff, ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine)

Pam Colloff’s story on jailhouse informants is one of the best stories I’ve read this year. It’s a topic that sounds like it could get technical — Pam’s reporting drew on thousands of pages of public records, covering half a century of criminal cases in Texas and Florida — but in true Pam fashion, this piece is completely and totally fascinating. It’s also enraging. The main character is a real piece of work, manipulative and charming and unrepentant. The ways in which he’s charmed women, cops, and juries, destroying peoples lives in the process, must be read to be believed. Incredible reporting, remarkable storytelling. I remain in awe.

Sign up to get email updates from Pamela Colloff about her investigation into jailhouse informants and how she reported the story.


Sarah Weinman
Author of The Real Lolita and editor of crime anthologies, including the forthcoming Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsessions

The Minnesota Murderess (Christine Seifert, The Atavist)

Seifert’s historical yarn starts out as a true crime tale but looks more broadly at the ways in which media has always incited panic about women exercising any form of independence in their lives.

He Cyberstalked Teen Girls For Years — Then They Fought Back (Stephanie Clifford, WIRED)

Stephanie Clifford’s story of repeated and sustained harassment of high school girls in a small New Hampshire town is infuriating and enraging and impossible to stop reading.

Catherine Cusick
Longreads Head of Audience and host of The Longreads Podcast

How judicial conflicts of interest are denying poor Texans their right to an effective lawyer / How the Unchecked Power of Judges Is Hurting Poor Texans (Neena Satija, Texas Tribune and Texas Monthly)

In 1963, the United States Supreme Court ruled that states are required, under the Sixth Amendment, to provide an attorney to defendants in criminal cases who are unable to afford their own counsel. How states should pay for this defense, crucially, is left up to the states. For Texas Monthly and the Texas Tribune, Neena Satija exposes the undeniable structural flaws that prohibit funding indigent defense properly in Texas. Satija has done readers an incredible service by recreating the bewilderment of encountering these judicial paywalls from both sides of the bench, bringing much needed humanity to straightening out so many convoluted conflicts of interest.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

Longreads Best of 2019: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2019. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…

Where are the Gay Ladies of Cambodia?

Illustration by Christina Chung

Lindsey Danis | Longreads | December 2019 | 16 minutes (4,081 words)

Since the new road is open, the bus ride to Siem Reap will only take eight hours. We spend an hour at the border, then an hour on the highway, then the driver kicks us all off the bus at a stucco house on what passes for a suburban street. From here, minivans leave for Phnom Penh, Kratie, and Siem Reap.

We slide against the stucco wall of the makeshift bus station, defeated. First we were overcharged for visas at the border. Then our bus was oversold, and the driver packed the aisle with plastic stools to accommodate 20 more people. Now, two hours into our journey, the bus is gone and we’re waiting on a minivan to take us the rest of the way. I wonder whether the new road exists, or if everything in Cambodia is a lie.

At last a van pulls up, but it’s bound for Kratie. A handful of passengers depart and the rest of us grumble. The crowd thins out as minivans come and go, until a dozen of us stand around waiting to go to Siem Reap. We’ve been waiting for over an hour when a rusted minivan with a cracked windshield appears. The driver shoves our bags under the seats then, out of space, tosses luggage to the roof where a second guy ties everything down.

My wife and I hurl ourselves into the van, claiming good spots. Sliding down the bench seat, she scrapes her thigh on a rusty spring that pokes through the vinyl upholstery. Our first-aid supplies are strapped to the roof. And my window doesn’t open. Off we go!

There’s no traffic on the new road. There’s nothing to see other than blazing fields as farmers burn the remnants of rice stalks, a practice that controls pests and nourishes the soil. Such dry-season agricultural fires occur elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but this is the first we’ve seen. The dirt is loose and red, except for where the land is on fire, where it’s a shocking black. The flames are so close I can feel the heat through the minivan window. My thighs glue themselves to the ripped vinyl seat, while my sweaty arm sticks to my wife’s skin.

Ten hours later, we reach the Siem Reap bus station. Guys on motorbikes circle the parking lot, calling out the price of a ride into town. Tired and pissed, we are not in the mood to bargain. We will walk to town, however long it takes. “Okay,” one guy says, once he sees we’re serious. “I will take you.”
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The Longreads 2019 Holiday Gift Book Guide

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Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2019 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.

 

Books of friendships & feuds.

Yuval Taylor’s Zora & Langston is a lavishly detailed account of the friendship, literary collaboration, and epic falling out of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes; Dylan Jones’ Wichita Lineman tells the parallel life stories of Jim Webb and Glen Campbell in the years after they came together to create the enigmatic eponymous song; and Andrew Curran’s Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely chronicles Diderot’s intellectual sparring with Rousseau, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great.

Books of conspiracies, coincidences, & cover-ups.

Tim O’Neill’s Chaos lays out the evidence he collected during his 20-year investigation of the Manson family murders; Anna Merlan’s Republic of Lies takes a tour of some of the major conspiracy theories haunting the American psyche today; Evan Ratliff’s Mastermind pieces together a vast criminal network that is astonishingly controlled by just one man; Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival examines the extent to which the aftereffects of Chernobyl were covered up by world governments; Brian J. Boeck’s Stalin’s Scribe  hypothesizes that one of Russia’s most beloved classic novels was plagiarized; and Erik Davis’ High Weirdness is a study of the symbolic “synchronicities” that seem to have recurred during three famous psychedelic experiences of the 1970s.

Books about family.

The bonds of family bend and break across vast distances in Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel Patsy; Mira Jacobs’ graphic memoir Good Talk meditates on mothering in a mixed-race family in America; Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers and T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls are memoirs that celebrate family while also reckoning with legacies of neglect and abuse; and Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House is a 100-year history of her family’s New Orleans home, which was lost during Hurricane Katrina.

Books of investigations & revelations.

Nicole Weisensee Egan’s Chasing Cosby details how the case against Bill Cosby unfolded and why the story took so long to gain traction in the media; Arthur Holland Michel’s Eyes in the Sky reveals that drone surveillance has become widespread in American cities without much public awareness; Ronnie Citron-Fink’s True Roots investigates the real cost of hair dye to humans and the environment; Reniqua Allen’s It Was All a Dream chronicles black millennials’ experiences of income and racial inequality in the 21st century, and explores how this black generation is persevering in transformative new ways; Emily Bazelon’s Charged explores how the power of prosecutors has grown out of control in many American cities; and Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women provides an almost painfully intimate window into the romantic lives of three women who have recently been deeply, obsessively in love with a man.

Frightening books for your fearless friends.

Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is a nailbiting novella of iron-age reenactors and parental abuse; Japanese Ghost Stories is a reissue of Lafcadio Hearn’s foundational collection of ghastly tales; and Mona Awad’s Bunny is a delightfully terrifying novel of sex, magic, and MFAs.

Histories that challenge our understanding of the past.

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments reconstructs the free and experimental lives that black young women and girls were living in the second and third generations born after slavery; Amanda Kolson Hurley’s Radical Suburbs revises what the role of the suburb has been in American history, showing that they were sometimes havens for radicals; Robert MacFarlane’s Underland investigates the human underground world, revealing us to be a surprisingly subterranean species; Daniel Immerwahr’s How To Hide an Empire rewrites the history of the United States from the perspective of its imperial territories; Amir Alexander’s Proof! argues that the discovery of Euclidean geometry profoundly influenced social and political thought; and David Teuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee tells the history of Native America since the Wounded Knee Massacre, reclaiming Native history after the point of its so-called demise.

Compulsively readable fiction.

Bryan Washington’s Lot, by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, is a collection of interlocking short stories named after cities and streets in Houston; Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha is a too-real satire of the world after Trump’s coming apocalypse; Mary HK Choi’s Permanent Record explores how modern lives and romances are mediated by technology; Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina is a collection of interlocking short stories set in Denver, and in each one a woman has suffered violence at the hands of a man; Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise is a straightforward story of teenage romance that becomes more complicated with every twist of the narrative; and Téa Obreht’s Inland is a sprawling Western based on the true story of the U.S. Camel Corps.

Essays & Criticism.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction, an anthology edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, showcases the craftsmanship of contemporary Native storytelling; Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hell World is a vital and despairing collection of essays on modern American life; T Fleischmann’s Time Is a Thing the Body Moves Through uses the artworks of Felix Gonzáles-Torres to reflect on how the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art; Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing is a manifesto that calls for a radical winding down the attention economy; Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain is a love letter to A Tribe Called Quest; and Jess Row’s White Flights is a literary dissection of whiteness in literature.

Minds & bodies.

Bassey Ikpi’s I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying reconstructs her experience of living with Bipolar II; Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary is a philosophical meditation on menopause; Anne Boyer’s The Undying is a lyrical manifesto against the cancer industrial complex; Keah Brown’s The Pretty One is a lighthearted collection of personal essays that challenge the idea the idea that disability precludes self-love, romance, and happiness; Cameron Dezen Hammon’s memoir This Is My Body reflects on the painful contradictions of harboring deep Evangelical faith in a female body; and Andrea J. Buchanan’s The Beginning of Everything is a memoir of her marriage and mind falling apart.

Extraordinary memoirs.

Ahmet Altan’s I Will Never See the World Again was clandestinely written in the Turkish prison where he is being held as a political dissident; Marc Hamer’s How To Catch a Mole chronicles his rediscovery of the lost art of molecatching; Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is the inventively told tale of how she survived domestic abuse at the hands of her partner; Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True is the story of her experiences in El Salvador as during the civil war, which she famously recorded at the time in verse; Delphine Minou’s I’m Writing You From Tehran is her account of falling in love with the city from which her family had fled; and Matt and Ted Lee’s Hot Box is a whirlwind look at the fast-paced world of high-end catering in New York City.

Book about just one thing.

Semicolons, wind, and beef.

Happy Holidays!

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Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis

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Kelli María Korducki | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,786 words)

 

Not long ago, I noticed a woman reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at my Manhattan yoga studio as we both waited for our Ashtanga class to begin. The sight took me aback. Despite the 2018 book’s many weeks as a nonfiction bestseller, I’d somehow never considered that the scope of Peterson’s audience might extend beyond sulky white men who like to outsource their thinking. That it might include women with the disposable income and leisure time to spend their Saturday afternoons doing sun salutations, whose lives probably look a lot like mine.

Peterson, a once-unassuming psychology professor at my Canadian alma mater (I’d never heard of him during the years we were both there), has emerged in the last few years as a puzzling figurehead among men’s rights aficionados and self-help enthusiasts alike. Wielding a trademark pastiche of literary references and cherry-picked sociological data points, his writing and, to a greater extent, public lectures broadcast via YouTube deliver what is, for many in this age of ‘toxic masculinity’ and #MeToo, a reassuring story: that men are natural rulers, white privilege is a farce, and if millennial men would just make their beds and assume their kingdoms, we’d all be better off.

Peterson speaks to a constellation of loosely connected concerns that have, in the last several years, dominated popular discourse on where boys and men fit into a society in which gender norms play less and less of a role in determining how people fit together. Conversations about rape culture and damaging gender constructs take place alongside global reports of female students outperforming their male classmates. We hear of a workforce that, at least in theory, rewards the “soft skills” women are purportedly socialized to possess. Meanwhile names like “Dylann Roof” and “Elliot Rodger” have become shorthand for an epidemic of male isolation and rage. A New York Times story that followed shortly after the deadly February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, included the observation that “about the only thing” nearly all U.S. mass shooters have in common “is that they are men.” Read more…