Search Results for: Slate

Where the Spirit Meets the Bone: A Memoir by Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin  | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words)

Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS app.

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Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family

Illustration by Laura McCabe

Debie Thomas | River Teeth | Summer 2013 | 17 minutes (4,194 words)

River TeethFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share an essay from Ashland, Ohio’s narrative nonfiction journal River Teeth. Longreads readers can receive a 20 percent discount off of a River Teeth subscription by going here.
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The Believer Interview: Ice Cube

Linda Saetre | The Believer | 2004 | 26 minutes (6,574 words)

 

The below interview is excerpted from The Believer’s new book, Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews. Thanks to The Believer for sharing this with the Longreads community.

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‘Music Is a Mirror of What We’re Going Through, Not the Cause of What We’re Going Through. It’s a Reaction, It’s Our Only Weapon, It’s Our Only Way to Protect Ourselves, It’s Our Only Way to Fit, It’s Our Only Way to Get There.’

Before rap music, New York might as well have been:

Paris


Africa


Australia


A thousand miles away from a thirteen-year-old Ice Cube

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Once upon a time, the name Ice Cube was analogous to explicit lyrics, guns, women as “bitches,” South Central, and attitude. Bad attitude. Not to mention mind-blowing rap music wrapped in raw emotions. But those were Ice Cube’s teen years, before he married Kimberly Jackson, became father to four kids, and turned into a true Hollywood player. A legend long before he turned thirty, Ice Cube, together with his fellow N.W.A. members, revolutionized not only the rap/ hiphop genre, but all music, by making it OK for musicians to speak their minds and then some.

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When Your Kid Has a Disease No One’s Ever Heard About

The Mights couldn’t wait for the culture of scientific research to change: they had been told that Bertrand could have as little as a few months left to live. The same day that they learned about NGLY1, they began plotting ways to find more patients on their own. Several years earlier, Matt had written a blog post, called “The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.,” that became a worldwide phenomenon; it was eventually translated into dozens of languages, including Serbian, Urdu, and Vietnamese. The popularity of the post, combined with Matt’s rising profile among computer programmers, meant that almost anything he put online was quickly re-posted to Hacker News, the main social news site for computer scientists and entrepreneurs. He decided to use his online presence to create what he referred to as a “Google dragnet” for new patients.

For the next three weeks, Matt worked on an essay that described Bertrand’s medical history in clinical detail. Matt called the result, which was more than five thousand words long, “Hunting Down My Son’s Killer,” and on May 29, 2012, he posted it to his personal Web site. It began: “I found my son’s killer. It took three years. But we did it. I should clarify one point: my son is very much alive. Yet, my wife Cristina and I have been found responsible for his death.”

Half an hour after Matt hit “publish,” Twitter began to light up. By the end of the day, “Hunting Down My Son’s Killer” was the top story on Reddit. The next morning, an editor from Gizmodo, a tech blog owned by Gawker Media, asked Matt for permission to republish the essay. In less than twenty-four hours, the post had gone viral. The more it was shared and linked to, the higher it rose in search engines’ rankings, and the easier it would be for parents of other children to find.

In The New Yorker, Seth Mnookin reports about what one couple, Matt Might and Cristina Casanova, did when they discovered that their son had a rare condition that no doctor had ever heard about. We featured Might’s account of his family’s search to diagnose his son’s disease in 2012.

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Photo of Matt Might by: David Van Horn

The Memories of Dad We All Want to Have

When I was 3, my parents tried to plop me into a ski resort day care so the three of them could explore the mountain, but apparently I refused to sit around rearranging blocks with those other babies. My mom tried unsuccessfully to position me between her legs and launch me onto my own skis, pulling me up again and again as I plunked my butt onto the snow instead of attempting a turn. After an exhausting hour, she escaped with my brother while my dad and I languished on the bunny hill, trying to advance me past the snowplow. Dad would ski backwards in front of me, holding my tiny skis into a V-shape, until, finally, I managed to put my skis side by side and pivot on the snow. When my dad tells this story, he throws his arms in the air and launches into my tiny kid voice: “Daddy! I can ski!”

A few years later, I was accompanying him on black diamond runs with moguls as tall as me. When goggled adults riding high above us on the chairlift pointed at me in awe (or else at my father in disgust), I got a rush that sustained me until the bottom of the hill, where my dad would remove my mittens and breathe warmth into them before fitting them back on my pink hands. I didn’t know to feel lucky to be a little girl with a father who took her along on all of his adventures. I just liked that I could keep up with my dad.

Amanda Hess, in Slate, on adventures with her dad.

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More dads in the Longreads Archive

Photo: Amanda Hess

The Self-Driving Revolution

Let’s be honest: Humans never should have been allowed behind the wheel in the first place. There’s so much that can go wrong, so much room for negligence—it’s incredible to think that we managed human-controlled cars for as long as we did.

Here’s a reading list covering the past, present and future of transportation. Read more…

Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)

 

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community. 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

 

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A Return to the Dark

Longreads Pick

Women in Afghanistan fear what will happen when NATO troops leave:

There were no women among the eight candidates in Afghanistan’s April presidential elections, and just one — Dr. Habiba Sarobi, former governor of Bamiyan — on any of the slates (as second vice president). There were, however, two warlords running for president (and four as running mates) who are known for trampling on women’s rights.

“When you go from darkness to light you have to pass through shade,” says Sarobi. Yet many women say that things are already going backward, into the dark.

Published: May 24, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,804 words)

The History of the Future: a Reading List

Below is a guest reading list from Daniel A. Gross, journalist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He also writes and produces radio about the lives of stuff and the stuff of life.

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Journalism has been called the first draft of history. Here are 5 technology stories that belong in the second draft. Like a lot of technology journalism, they’re each focused on an emerging future, which at times makes them a bit breathless with excitement. But unlike most technology journalism, these stories have only gotten better with age. They’re sprinkled with uncanny predictions and unexpected depth about the devices we’ve come to take for granted. Read more…

The Business of Books: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from The Atlantic, Vulture, The Rumpus, and Slate.

Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 13, 2014