The 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.
***
This week’s picks from Emily include stories from The Morning News, VQR, All About Birds, and Open Spaces Magazine.

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

Debra Monroe | 2012 | 20 minutes (5,101 words)
Debra Monroe is the author of six books, including the memoir “My Unsentimental Education” which will appear in October 2015. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The American Scholar, Doubletake, The Morning News and The Southern Review, and she is frequently shortlisted for The Best American Essays. This essay—which is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir—first appeared on John Griswold‘s Inside Higher Ed blog, and our thanks to Monroe for allowing us to reprint it here. Read more…

Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
I’m tired of middle-aged white dudes critiquing my generation as selfish and narcissistic. Often, the selfie is held up triumphantly as the very symbol of our self-degradation. Here, four other, more intelligent perspectives on selfie culture:
The author, a self-identified “selfie enthusiast,” simultaneously critiques and defends the selfie phenomenon. She explains that selfies allow her to capture her solitary travels and control how her life looks, while acknowledging the complaints of narcissism.
Gram looks at selfies in light of capitalism: “In an economy of attention, it is a disaster for men that girls take up physical space and document it, and that this documentation takes up page hits and retweets that could go to ‘more important’ things. And so the Young-Girl must be punished, with a disgust reserved for the purely trivial.”
A cross-country road trip, a modern-day archivist, a Wendell Berry poetic analysis—Pham marvels at the Midwest and stakes her claim to memory in this piece.
This piece touches briefly on several aspects of the discussion surrounding selfie culture, including its roots in self-portraiture, the opportunity to escape the male gaze and the tension between aspiration and authenticity.
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New reading list from Emily Perper featuring picks from The Morning News, Textual Relations, Full Stop, and Pacific Standard.
How musical therapists are helping patients in a care center in southeast London:
For about 10 minutes, Gibbes hits the djembe in a 3/4 beat while Prince accompanies him in making what sounds sort of like a flamenco song. Gibbes stares off into space while pushing the song up to its crescendo, then rolling it back down again. He takes his time and does this more than once. Eventually the sound of Prince’s guitar lowers to a whisper and Gibbes is only rubbing his hands in rhythm over the rope-tuned skin on top of the drum. Then comes a long silence. Prince doesn’t say anything. So after about 30 seconds, Gibbes starts to speak.
Prince can’t understand him so Gibbes tries again. ‘You are not…?’ Prince repeats back to him. But that’s not it. So Gibbes tries again. He does this five, six more times. Eventually, Prince pieces it together and repeats it back to him: ‘Oh! You were lost in the rhythm!’ he says. ‘Well why didn’t you just say that?’ Gibbes just rolls his eyes and laughs.
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, The Classical, National Geographic, Chicago Reader, The Morning News, fiction, plus a guest pick from Kriston Capps.
A writer on his experience spending time in an artist colony—and why they actually work:
The poet in the studio next to me, Kathryn Levy, was at the time revising her work by reading it aloud, recording it, and playing it back to herself. The murmur of it was reassuring somehow. Years later, when I remembered it to her, she laughed and said ‘I don’t work that way anymore.’ I recently asked her about thoughts on colonies, and she said: ‘You have all the solitude you want, with none of the usual distraction of daily life at home, and then when you want to be in a social situation with interesting people, you have that as well. I find that I experiment in colonies more often than I do at home because I have such an expanse of time, and that I not only write more and think about writing more, but think about life more as well.’
Colonies also teach lessons. Typically, there are older, more experienced artists who offer tips on, for example, finding and maintaining silence. I also learned there is almost nothing better for your work than having someone cook and clean for you who is neither a relative nor someone you’re sleeping with. I am something of a cook, for example, and between food prep and shopping, I spend about 14 hours a week on meals. But when I go away to a residency, that becomes writing time. I gain two whole working days from the week.
And so sometimes people would complain about a meal and my only thought was What is wrong with you?
Long after the 1960s, a researcher into the effects of LSD makes the case for a return to studying it:
On a Saturday last October, 45 years after dispensing those last legal doses, James Fadiman stood on stage inside the cavernous hall of Judson Memorial Church, a long-time downtown New York incubator of artistic, progressive, and even revolutionary movements. High above him on a window of stained glass, a golden band wrapped Escher-like enigmas around the Four Evangelists. Fadiman appeared far more earthly: wire frames, trim beard, dropped hairline, khakis, running shoes—like a policy wonk at a convention, right down to lanyard and nametag.
A couple hundred people sat before him in folding chairs and along the side aisles of the hall. He adjusted his head microphone, then scrolled his lecture notes and side-stepped the podium. He felt fortunate to be there for many reasons, he said, including a health scare he’d had a few months back—a rather advanced case of pericarditis. ‘Some of you, I know, have experimented with enough substances so that you’ve “died.” But it’s different when you’re in the ER.’ He chuckled. ‘And you’re not on anything.’
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