Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon | OR Books | February 2014 | 11 minutes (2,575 words)
Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)
Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)
This week we are proud to feature a chapter from Gay Propaganda, a collection of original stories, interviews and testimonials from LGBT Russians both living there and in exile. The book was edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon, and will be published by OR Books in February. We’d like to thank them for sharing this chapter with Longreads Members.
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“I had a career in Russia, a nice apartment, friends, family.
I sacrificed all that to be with Ana.”
I was born and grew up in Saratov, Russia. It’s a provincial town, built on a mix of old-fashioned Orthodox Christian values (which condemned homosexuality as a sin) and Soviet beliefs (when most people thought that homosexuality didn’t exist in the Soviet Society at all).
Both of my parents worked, and I was on my own a lot. I was a good kid, though. I did my homework, stayed home, and didn’t get into trouble. I was also shy and sometimes had a hard time socializing. My father was a history professor at the university, and my mom worked for a non-profit organization. Read more…

–Marin Cogan in ESPN Magazine (2014) on how the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII changed live television and American audiences.

Douglas Williams is currently a doctoral student in political science at the University of Alabama, where his research centers around public policy and politics as it relates to disadvantaged communities and the labor movement. You can find him on Twitter at @DougWilliams85, at a collaborative blog on Southern progressivism called The South Lawn, as well as at The Century Foundation, where he blogs about the labor movement.
Robert Draper | GQ | June 2010 | 22 minutes (5,382 words)
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This article, y’all. Whew.
I happened upon this article a couple of years ago while doing some unrelated research, and it is something that has stuck with me ever since. It is hard for a story like this to not have some effect on you, for the author provides the grim details of the murders and their investigation with such vividity as to allow readers to place themselves smack dab in the middle of the story. It was also an article that reinforced a lot of concepts that have lived with me since birth: the gut-wrenching despair of persistent poverty; the lack of importance placed on Black women’s bodies; and the fecklessness of law enforcement when it comes to investigating crimes in communities of color, particularly when there is such a large separation between those communities and the political establishment that represents them. It is all here for you to dissect, with few stones, if any, unturned.
This is one of the easiest recommendations that I have ever been able to make.
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Photo: Harris Walker
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In Science News, Susan Milius examines the world of microbes and looks at how animals are really “composite beings.” Read more science stories on Longreads.
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Photo: NIAID
Sam Stecklow (@samstecky) is a TV and journalism student based in San Francisco.

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
I spent this morning exploring The Museum of Unnatural History in Washington D.C. Fueled by the likes of Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman and Paul Simon, the museum is the storefront for 826DC, which holds workshops and tutors local kids in creative writing and reading. A venue combining my fascination with cryptozoology, contemporary literature, and teaching kids to write? Sounds positively mythical.
But I’ve been fascinated by cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, since middle school; I devoured Paul Zindel’s Loch and Reef of Death. In college, I read that essayist and poet Wendell Berry’s daughter, Mary, said, “I hope there is an animal somewhere that nobody has ever seen. And I hope nobody ever sees it.” A week ago, Dan Harmon, creator of “Community” proposed to his fiancé at Loch Ness. And today I admired stencils of chupacabras and jars of unicorn burps. Cryptozoology reveals all the best and worst parts of human nature, and it makes for great storytelling.
Step into the cabinet of curiosities: The International Cryptozoology Museum is in Portland, Maine. It’s stuffed with artifacts ranging from a taxidermy Bigfoot to children’s drawings to blurry photos. It’s staffed by sweater vest-clad Loren Coleman, a foremost authority on cryptozoology and a wonderful tour guide.
Sullivan interviews several of the men most invested in finding Sasquatch; these profiles read like entries from a delightful almanac. Though their methods range from field work to anthropological study, these men share a rivalry with each other and anger toward the scientific community’s contempt for them.
Cryptozoology isn’t only Bigfoot and Nessie. These scientists are also interested in animals thought to be extinct. Here, Eric Karlan delves into Dr. Geoffrey Orbell’s triumphant search for the Takahe—a bright, flightless, stocky bird native to New Zealand, supposedly gone forever–which took over 40 years of scrupulous research in the face of naysayers.
With weird, wonderful humor, skeptic Tom Bissell explores Loch Ness with two writer friends and his childhood love of Nessiteras rhombopteryx.
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Photo: JD Hancock
On Nov. 22, 1987, a Chicago television station was hacked, broadcasting a strange suited figure wearing a rubbery mask and sunglasses to viewers for a brief moment. The story behind the hack and the hunt to figure out who was behind it:
In some corners of the Internet, the story of how Max Headroom infiltrated two Chicago TV stations, just a few weeks after the show was canceled, has reached almost mythic proportions. When the tale is retold every now and then, it’s often received with incredulity by newbies, or with a shock of recognition by Chicagoans who remember watching it as kids, and being terrified, confused, and dazzled.
“I thought it was the coolest thing since WarGames,” said Rick Klein, a Chicagoan who serves as founder and curator of the Museum of Classic Chicago Television, and its website, fuzzymemories.tv. Klein, who was thirteen when it happened, didn’t catch the intrusion live, but he knew that his friend’s father recorded Dr. Who every Sunday night on VHS.
Animal rights activists uncover the dark underbelly of factory farming:
Carlson’s secretly recorded footage, compiled over more than a month, triggered a cruelty indictment and cost the dairy a major buyer. The takedown, in 2008, was Carlson’s first assignment. Hired out of college by Kroll Advisory Solutions to gather business data, he left to find work at a nonprofit firm devoted to social justice. Neither the Polaris Project nor the Environmental Investigation Agency called back, but Mercy for Animals did. After several weeks of training, he hired on at Willet, a giant dairy in Locke, New York, that churned out 40,000 gallons of milk a day. So damning was his footage of standard factory-farming practice – chopping the tails off calves without anesthesia; gouging the horns off their heads with hot branding irons, also without anesthesia; punching cows, kicking calves, beating desperately sick downers – that Nightline ran it on national TV, confronting Willet’s CEO on camera. “Our animals are critically important to our well-being, so we work hard to treat them well,” droned Lyndon Odell of the 5,000 cows standing in lagoons of their own shit. Shown tape of the tortured calves, and pressed on whether a cow feels pain, he rolled his shoulders and mumbled, “I guess I can’t speak for the cow.” It bears saying here that nothing would have come from the tape if left to the whims of Jon Budelmann, the Cayuga County DA. “We approached him with our evidence and he told us to fuck off – he wasn’t going to take on Big Dairy,” says Carlson. “It was only after we went to the media with the tape that he got off his ass and brought charges.” (Budelmann later cleared Willet of any wrongdoing, telling the Syracuse Post-Standard that while Willet’s practices might seem harsh to consumers, they’re “not currently illegal in New York state.”)
“Of course, since Descartes and the 17th Century there have been other French philosophers and many of them have turned their attention to the processes of human thought but the Cartesian legacy is still very important in the French intellectual tradition. In a Cartesian society, everything is ordered according to clear, precise, mathematical, scientific principles, and everything is in hierarchy.”
-Book critic Robert Adams discusses the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery on TVO’s “Big Ideas.” See more recent podcast picks.
(h/t @contextual_life)
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