The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *

-Meredith Broussard, in the Atlantic, on a data experiment revealing that public schools that use the “wrong” textbooks may be hurting their performance.
More education in the Longreads Archive
Photo: cybrarian77, Flickr

In college, I rearranged my majors and minors, all in the humanities, for years. I loved everything. Finally, I majored in English. It was fate—second-grade me was constantly in trouble for sneaking books under her desk. Majoring in English was both the joy and bane of my life. I struggled with a Faulkner-heavy Southern Lit course, even though Faulkner remains beloved. I groused about Shakespeare. I wrote my senior thesis on Michael Chabon. And I transformed my love for editing into a prestigious position on the college newspaper. My Lit Crit class—a notorious gauntlet at my college—introduced me to Derrida’s jeu and the revelation of feminist theory. I spent my time studying and socializing in the English department suite. I TA’d for the head of the department. When I am nostalgic for college, I am nostalgic for the English suite—for the camaraderie among my fellow students and best friends, my professors and mentors, and the dusty books and teacups and flyers.
A confession: today, I whined to my boyfriend about the great gigs my journalist friends have procured. Daily papers! Grad school! Photography internships! New York City! On my worst days, I feel envy and inferiority. On my best days, I go to the library and check on a huge stack of books, remind myself to be grateful for my temp job and come home to write for Longreads. I remember that I did something right. If I remember that, I will continue to do something right, to do something, write.

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…

What ultimately brought their work together to a halt was not creative disagreements but business ones. During his power grab, John was sweet-talked by a canny, dubious manager named Allen Klein, with whom he promptly signed. George and Ringo followed—pure primate politics there. But Paul would not.
And so legend has it that the Beatles broke irrevocably apart.
Except that they never really did.
It’s tempting to think that a partnership ends like some scene in an opera, where two people come to dramatic conflict, sing emotionally in each other’s faces, and decide to separate, weeping. But more often a split happens like it does in one of those country songs about a person leaving home and never coming back, in which no one—not the one who left, not the one who was left, not the listener—really knows why.
–Joshua Wolf Shenk, in The Atlantic, on the power of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s collaboration, and how it ended.
More Atlantic in the Longreads Archive
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

At the Atlantic, Koa Beck writes about the spouses of famous writers who supported their partner’s writing careers, often devoting their lives to it. Vera Nabokov epitomized this: She not only performed the duties of cleaning and cooking expected of her as a wife in her era, but also worked as her husband’s “round-the-clock editor, assistant, and secretary”:
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In a recent blog post for The Atlantic, David Zweig spoke with wayfinding expert and airport-sign designer Jim Harding about his work on the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson. According to Hartfield, the highest mark of success in Harding’s work is invisibility: if his job is perfectly executed, “you will never think of him or his work.” In Harding’s work, no decision is arbitrary; even the tiniest aesthetic choices are part of a carefully orchestrated ballet, subconscious triggers that point the visitor in the right direction without them even realizing that they are being guided. Even something as seemingly minor as the shape of a street sign takes on great weight:

—Michael Zuckerman, in The Atlantic, on the challenges of an affordable legal system.
More stories from The Atlantic
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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…

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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