Search Results for: The Nation

Sarah Moss on Brexit, Borders, Bog Bodies, and the ‘Foundation Myths of a Really Damaged Country’

A section of Hadrian's Wall. Associated Press / Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Tobias Carroll  | Longreads | January 2019 | 16 minutes (4,245 words)

Silvie, the young woman at the heart of Sarah Moss’s new novel Ghost Wall, has embarked on a fascinating project: living with her family and several others in a style inspired by Iron Age Britain. It would be a fascinating foray into archaic ways of living, except that the academic conducting this research doesn’t seem entirely reliable in his methods, and Silvie’s father quickly reveals himself to be controlling and physically abusive. Soon enough, the oppressively patriarchal society from which she seeks to extricate herself has taken on another aspect, and the landscape abounds with sinister portents and ominous structures that seem designed to prevent escape and stifle dissent.

In Ghost Wall, Moss blends evocative and stark language with a disquieting narrative. In a different work, these might be hallmarks of a coming-of-age story. In Ghost Wall, the goal is more one of simple survival. Read more…

The Thrill (and the Heavy Emotional Burden) of Blazing a Trail for Black Women Journalists

Dorothy Butler Gilliam at her desk in the fall of 1961 or early in 1962, soon after she arrived at The Washington Post. (©1962, Harry Naltchayan, Washington Post)

Dorothy Butler Gilliam | an excerpt from Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America | Center Street | January 2019 | 17 minutes (4,927 words)

When I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1961, the city, the entire country, and the African continent were all on the threshold of change. The dashing, young John F. Kennedy had just begun his presidency promising “a new frontier.” The Civil Rights Movement was kicking into high gear with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now urging young people like me to pursue professions we’d been excluded from and to excel. It was thrilling to be in the nation’s capital to begin my career as a daily newspaper journalist in the white press.

I brought a pretty placid nature to that career. When I later looked back, I surprised myself. I was so conservative politically! For example, only six years earlier, when I wrote about school integration in the student newspaper while attending Lincoln University from 1955 to 1957 (the Negro college in Missouri that provided higher education for colored students, allowing the state to keep all its other colleges and universities white), I indicated reasons we should go slowly with integration. But reporting for The Tri-State Defender in Memphis as the Civil Rights Movement dawned had begun to change me. The bus boycott victories had begun to liberate my thinking. And added confidence came from my faith, strengthened my spirit, and pushed me to do things that other people in my family didn’t do. Read more…

Eleven Books to Read in 2019

Utamaru Kido / Getty

We asked eleven authors to tell us about an amazing book that we might have missed in 2018.


Kiese Laymon
Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi; author of several books, including most recently the memoir Heavy.

The Reckonings by Lacy Johnson (Scribner)

I read, reread and loved Lacy Johnson’s new book, The Reckonings. I was shocked by how Lacy really complicated my understandings of justice, disaster and just art. In a way that hopefully sounds sincere and not sentimental, Lacy made me think, and actually believe, justice was possible, and art must lead the way. The flip is that the book subtextually forced me to reckon with the roles art and artists have in sanctioning suffering, which forced me to reconsider justice as this clearly demarcated destination. I actually think The Reckonings, Eloquent Rage, and No Ashes in The Fire are in this radical three-pronged conversation with each other in 2018 about where we’ve been, and what we do with where we’ve been. They are masterfully conceived projects and generously constructed. At the root of all three are warnings, rightful celebrations, and lush ass uses of language. Read more…

Memory and the Lost Cause

MEMPHIS - OCTOBER 04: Hernando De Soto bridge in Memphis, Tennessee on October 4, 2016. (Photo By Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,360 words)

 A few days after my father’s funeral, I rented an Airbnb on Memphis’s Second Street, two avenues over from the Mississippi Riverfront. From one window, in the mornings, I could see riverboats slowly slinking by. From the other, a view of the Hernando de Soto Bridge. Named after the conquistador who arrived from Florida in 1541 in search of gold, the bridge was constructed in 1982. It connects Tennessee to Arkansas and is in many ways a dividing line between America’s east and west coasts.

During their heady romance, my father drove the length of that bridge from West Memphis, Arkansas to court my mother. She once told me they’d ended their relationship in a teary conversation while driving across. The night of my first date, at 16, I parked and walked along Riverside Drive, just south of the Memphis entrance to the bridge. It was late in August, the dog days of summer, the start of my junior year in high school. The air was sticky and sweet, mosquitoes nipped at my shoulders. I had a feeling of expectation in my heart, an idea of a future that I could construct.

The Mississippi River is a marvel. It is filthy, contaminated, and mostly unsuitable for swimming, drinking, or fishing. It is also, for me, steadying and grounding. It is a site of many beginnings, and something told me it was where I could grieve my father privately after many days of public ceremony. About a year before he died, I’d started missing home and made plans to go back for an extended time, for longer than a visit. In my longing, the reasons I left nearly 20 years before seemed a nebulous mix of striving and progress and running from something, or some things, I was not yet ready to name.

Memphis is a place where, if you’re Black, and you can, you leave. It is a proud majority Black city, and Blacks have power, but it was and is a tenuous kind of power, slow-coming and distributed in a scattershot way among a selected few. We elected our first Black mayor during my lifetime, in 1991, nearly 20 years after Atlanta. And I remember when white students left my school by the dozens and how my mother labored to enroll me in another school, to follow the current of good teachers to a better place.

My mother grew up and raised all of her children in Memphis, but five years ago, she, too, left, to live out her retirement elsewhere. In the years since, I heard a lot about a “reverse migration” where young Blacks, disappointed and frustrated by the urban North, went back to the Southern states of their ancestors for better weather and lower costs of living. Last December, Memphis’s monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general responsible for the brutal Fort Pillow Massacre and an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, came down. This year, a new cadre of progressive leaders like Tami Sawyer, London Lamar, and Lee Harris became elected officials. My dread about home and my longing for it began to work on me anew.


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“Americans do not share a common memory of slavery,” Blain Roberts and Ethan Kytle write in Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy,  a powerful account that uses the history of Charleston, South Carolina, the “cradle of the Confederacy,” or “slavery’s capital,” to trace the origins of the nation’s competing visions of slavery. One view, of slavery as “benevolent and civilizing,” say Roberts and Kytle, supported by “former slaveholders and their descendants” is “a whitewashed memory,” ignoring or minimizing how brutal it was when human beings were chattel, and how central slavery is to our nation’s history. The other vision, maintained in memories and ritual by “former slaves, their progeny, and some white and black allies,” has a gorier truth.

Memphis, founded as it was, on the Mississippi River, situated at the borders of Arkansas and Mississippi, has long been a commercial port. Americans purchased the land from the Chickasaw Nation in 1818, and the city incorporated in 1826; soon after, it became a point to transport and sell Mississippi Delta cotton. It also became an important slave market, and trading in slaves was how Nathan Bedford Forrest made his name.  He was, according to scholar Court Carney, “one of the largest slave traders on the Mississippi River,” and a two-term city alderman before enlisting in the army. Tennessee was the eleventh and last state to secede from the Union. Its mountainous eastern end, far away from cotton country and less dependent upon slavery, retained pro-Union sentiments throughout the war.

According to Kytle and Roberts, the myth of the “Lost Cause,” a term coined in 1866, took root among former Confederates in the decades after their loss. It emphasized the valor of the Confederate army and how’d they’d been outmatched by better resourced Union soldiers, but fought anyway. Standing in moral defeat (and with federal troops still occupying the South initially), former Confederates and sympathizers “scrambled to distance the Confederacy from the peculiar institution.” They claimed that while slavery played a part, it was loftier goals like states’ autonomy that the secessionists had fought for.

Yet this revision of historical memory was not benign. It coincided with losses of recently acquired rights of citizenship for freed men and women. Reconstruction officially ended in 1877 when federal troops left the South; by the 1880s, state governments began erecting barriers to voting rights and mandating separate accommodations for Blacks and whites in public spaces. Lynchings, usually committed as punishment or warning against some breach of social order, spiked in the 1880s and 1890s. According to data compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center,  the biggest increase in dedications of Confederate monuments and memorials was in the early years of the 1900s. Memphis’s Forrest monument was dedicated at a ceremony attended by nearly 30,000 in 1905. Throughout the years, proponents of the monument included prominent leaders in business and city government, and they celebrated the former general’s “rough-hewn, unschooled martial style,” and held him up as a “pinnacle of southern manhood,” writes Carney. At least, publicly, they mostly minimized or ignored his history of brutality, but sometimes, when Blacks were particularly vocal and assertive, like during the push for desegregation during the 1960s, Forrest enthusiasts resorted to threatening an unruly populace that the general would be somehow resurrected to avenge something lost.

Even in Memphis of the 1980s and 1990s, when I grew up, remnants and relics of the Lost Cause mythos were everywhere. My first job was as an actor in a city theater performance of Tom Sawyer, a musical adaptation of Mark Twain’s first novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I played a friend of Amy Lawrence, essentially a chorus girl, and had two speaking lines. I was thrilled to have the job  — I was 12 and got to be out of school for more than half the day for rehearsals and performances. I earned a weekly stipend and adored learning from the veteran actors in the theatre’s resident company. The cast was a mix of company members and actors from outside, and we were a multicultural crew. A Black actor played Tom Sawyer, and I was the one Black girl in the chorus. Nigger Jim was played by another Black girl; we only called her character Jim. The actress had several speaking lines and performed a solo musical number to the song “Buffalo Gal,” a song I now know is from a minstrel written by early blackface performer John Hodges. Throughout his life, Mark Twain wrote about his love of minstrel performances, calling them “nigger shows.” He said in his autobiography, “If I could have the nigger-show back again, in its pristine purity and perfection, I should have but little further use for opera.”

Watching the actress’s adroit performance every afternoon and night, singing along with the rest of the chorus to songs about the glorious Mississippi and the whistle of steamboats, I don’t remember feeling anything I would call embarrassment. I sometimes got a vague feeling of discomfort, but, truth be told, I thought I was different from the other Black actress. I was, after all, playing a schoolgirl, not a slave on the run. Weren’t we simply celebrating the glory of Mississippi River towns? Our shared land and culture? I was a child and I was deluding myself.

It is only now, looking back, that I realize that none of the theatre’s resident company, the actors with guaranteed jobs and pay for the season, were Black. While researching this piece, I learned that is still the case.

A subterranean racism is intertwined with many Southern artifacts and practices. It is an incomplete nostalgia, a false memory, a longing for an old South stripped of the truth of what living then meant for many people. At Memphis’ Sunset Symphony, a seemingly benign, popular, old-fashioned outdoor picnic was held on the Mississippi River every May. “Ol’ Man River,” from the musical Showboat, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, was performed for 21 years by local bass singer James Hyter as the crowd-stopping finale, with encore after encore. Hyter would change the lyrics many times throughout the years, removing words like “nigger” and “darkey.” Even without the hurtful words the song still describes a Black man’s life of impossible toil.

It is only now, looking back, that I realize that none of the theatre’s resident company, the actors with guaranteed jobs and pay for the season, were Black. While researching this piece, I, learned that is still the case.

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Late last month, the investigative journalist and author Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted a long thread about the failed slave revolt allegedly planned by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822. “This man was free and prosperous,” she wrote, “but never separated himself from the enslaved, recruited 9000 ENSLAVED PEOPLE — 9000! — to his plot to liberate enslaved in SC, overtake the armory, commandeer a boat and then sail to Haiti…” She said she learned “next to nothing” about Vesey, despite being  an African-American studies major in college, and that omitting or minimizing the truth of Black resistance is a form of “social control.” Indeed, the details of Vesey’s plot, its scale and depth, explained in a comprehensive biography by David Robertson, are remarkable.

In high school, what I learned about North American slave rebellions and resistance was cursory. I knew they happened; I learned them as facts — a laundry list of who, what, when, and how: Stono’s in South Carolina before the American Revolution; Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia; John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.

I didn’t learn that they were more than isolated incidents — that those individual instances of resistance acted in concert with other global eruptions. They were also proof of how utterly unsustainable slavery was. Rebellions, small and large, were “frequent and were ferociously put down,” throughout the Americas, according to a website dedicated to information about Bristol, England’s role as a trading port in the transatlantic slave trade. This resistance is a missing link in the gap between the two strands of collective memory about slavery. It disrupts the Lost Cause narrative of slavery as benign, and its history has been deliberately suppressed. Robertson writes, “In order that his life and actions not be publicly commemorated, any black person, man or woman, seen wearing mourning in the streets of Charleston within a week of his [Vesey’s] execution was to be arrested and whipped.”

…the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

From,”The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison; Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir

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Identity is nothing if not a collection of memories, strung together over time, lunging forward to inform and create a future. Who and what we mourn, too, is bound up in what we love and value. According to Kytle and Roberts, newly freed people held countless public commemorations and a “yearlong wake,” to celebrate the end of slavery, including, in one instance, a procession with a “hearse carrying a coffin labeled ‘Slavery.'” The first Memorial Day, held May 1, 1865 was an occasion when Black volunteer associations in Charleston reburied the remains of Union soldiers in properly marked graves.

Walking in the new Memphis, twenty years after the last time I lived there, I was often lost. There was little pedestrian traffic, but many police cars in the tourist spots I visited. An old Black man, ostensibly homeless, asked for my carton of takeout food. In an old place I loved years ago, sitting at a piano bar alone, having a cocktail, I was the only Black person who was not obviously an employee. In the new places, a fancy coffee shop and a fancier restaurant, it was the same. Chicago’s South Side monument to Ida B. Wells-Barnett may be erected before the end of 2019. There is a marker for her in Memphis, on Beale and Hernando Streets, near the offices of the Free Speech, the newspaper for which she wrote columns, investigated lynchings, and urged Blacks to leave the city if they were not treated more humanely. Wells-Barnett took up that work after grieving the March 1892 lynching of her friend Thomas Moss, a postman and an owner of the People’s Grocery, as well as two of his employees. That May, the Evening Scimitar printed an editorial about Wells-Barnett threatening “to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison streets.” At Main and Madison, a few blocks from the bridge, the river, and where I’d gone to rest after burying my father, there is no marker.

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Danielle A. Jackson is a writer and associate editor at Longreads.

 

Will Amazon Finally Kill New York?

On December 12, activists built this sad box tower at an anti-Amazon press conference held on the steps of City Hall. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images. Illustration by Katie Kosma.

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | Month 2018 | 10 minutes (2,519 words)

In May of 2017, Mayor de Blasio unveiled Jimmy Breslin Way, a street sign dedicating the stretch of 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue to the late reporter. It was a strange press conference — half eulogy, half lecture — a chance for the mayor to laud Breslin and scold members of today’s media by whom he often feels unfairly maligned. “Think about what Jimmy Breslin did. Think about how he saw the world,” said de Blasio. He left without taking questions. What was he talking about? Did he imagine he and Jimmy Breslin would get along? In 1969 Breslin wrote a cover story about Mayor Lindsay for New York Magazine, “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” was the title. Lindsay was an inch shorter than de Blasio.

In 2010, Heike Geissler took a temporary position at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Geissler was a freelance writer and a translator but, more pressingly, she was the mother of two children and money was not coming in. Seasonal Associate, which was translated by Katy Derbyshire and released by Semiotext(e) this month, is the product of that job. (Read an excerpt on Longreads.) It’s an oppressive, unsettling book, mainly because the work is too familiar. The book is written almost entirely in the second person, a style that might’ve come off as an irritating affectation with a lesser writer or a different subject. Here, it’s terrifying — you feel yourself slipping along with Geissler, thoughts of your own unpaid bills and the cold at the back of your throat weaving their way through the narrative. It’s not just that this unnamed protagonist could be you, it’s the certainty that someday she will be you. “You’ll soon know something about life that you didn’t know before, and it won’t just have to do with work,” Geissler writes. “But also with the fact that you’re getting older, that two children cry after you every morning, that you don’t want to go to work, and that something about this job and many other kinds of jobs is essentially rotten.” Read more…

Reckoning With Georgia’s Increasing Suppression of Asian American Voters

Getty / Associated Press / Flickr CC / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Anjali Enjeti | Longreads | December 2018 | 18 minutes (4620 words)

 

Early on November 6, Election Day, Kavi Vu noticed that some voters appeared distressed as they exited Lucky Shoals Park Recreation Center, one of five polling places in Gwinnett County, Georgia. A volunteer with the nonprofit, nonpartisan civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta (“Advancing Justice”), Vu had been standing outside to answer questions about voting and offer her services as a Vietnamese translator.

When she began asking the mostly African American, Asian American and Latinx voters about their voting experiences, she learned that after 2.5 hour wait times, many of them had voted via provisional ballots.

Why? As it turned out, Lucky Shoals was not their correct voting location. “A lot of people had lived in Gwinnett County their entire lives and voted at the same location and all of the sudden they were switched up to new location,” Vu said.

So when poll workers offered voters the option of voting at Lucky Shoals with provisional ballots, rather than driving elsewhere to wait in another line, the voters took them up on it. They left with I’m a Georgia Voter stickers, and printed instructions for how to cure their ballots. But poll workers didn’t verbally explain to the voters that they’d need to appear at the county registrar’s office within three days to cure their ballots, nor did the poll workers make it clear that the votes would not count at all if the voters failed to do so. What’s more, as the day wore on, poll workers ran out of the provisional ballot instructions altogether.

Vu was alarmed. In an attempt to reduce the number of voters using provisional ballots, she began offering to help voters locate their correct polling place using the Secretary of State website. That’s when poll workers repeatedly began confronting her about her presence outside of the polling place. “They told me to stop speaking with voters in line, even after I explained what I was doing.”

By mid-afternoon, Vu counted some 100 voters who had wrongly reported to Lucky Shoals. When she finally left eight hours after arriving, she was “heartbroken,” over the dreadful conditions at the polling place and the number of votes by minority voters that would likely never be counted.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2018: Profiles

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

Sarah Smarsh
Journalist Sarah Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The Guardian, The New York Times, The Texas Observer, and many other publications.
Smarsh’s first book, Heartland, was long-listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction.

William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump (Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker)

The intersection of class, race, and religion — what could be more fraught in these times? Cobb’s rare combination of quiet wisdom and a steady journalistic hand is the perfect guide. He profiles Protestant minister William Barber, the progressive activist and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, with thorough reporting and sensitivity, letting facts speak for themselves but humanizing the subject as no fact alone can do. I’ve been part of the Poor People’s Campaign at the ground level and was heartened to learn here that more than one respected source calls Barber “the real thing.” But, whether or not Barber is your political comrade, you will learn that he believes himself to be your spiritual brother — a refreshing fusion of political and moral force on the sometimes god-averse left.


Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Feature writer for The New York Times.

The mystery of Tucker Carlson (Lyz Lenz, Columbia Journalism Review)

This was a really good year for profiles, despite their death (reported annually). So good that it was very hard to narrow it down, and so I was very grateful that I couldn’t pick any from the New York Times, where I work, which really helped narrow it down. (Though you’ve just got to read this one.)

And how do you choose from the others: Dan Riley on Timothée Chalamet (though exactly which profile/article/photo/table of contents, even, under Jim Nelson wasn’t great?). Allison P. Davis’ Lena Dunham lede-ender of fallopian tubes like outstretched arms? Amanda Fortini opening Michelle Williams’ historically very locked vault. Emily Nussbaum on Ryan Murphy. Paige Williams on Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Wright Thompson on Geno Auriemma. Jessica Pressler on Anna Delvey. (Jessica Pressler on anything.) What a year.

But I finally picked one, and when I did, I realized it was a no-brainer. Lyz Lenz, who has terrifying amounts of talent, pulled off the neatest trick: A profile of screamy Tucker Carlson that walks the line of being way too self-referential, and yet somehow makes that work. It’s perhaps because it’s so funny. It’s perhaps because instead of looking for some fatuous lede scene it goes straight to the most prominent aspect of Carlson (why is he always screaming?). It’s perhaps because she knows that there is no end to the delight of knowing his full name: Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson. Or maybe it’s this section ender: “His publicist calls after our interview to make sure I know that Carlson is not a racist.” Whatever it is, I was very grateful for it.


James Ross Gardner
Editor-in-chief, Seattle Met.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s Battering Ram (Paige Williams, The New Yorker)

I lost count of how many times Paige Williams was obliged to deploy terms like “inaccurately,” “falsely,” “erroneous,” and “lie” in this extraordinary portrait of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. What’s remarkable about Trump’s press secretary though is that, at least here, those words are rarely used to describe statements by Sanders herself — but rather of those whose lies she must justify. It’s also what makes Sanders a cipher of our time. How does someone who vehemently claims to possess high moral character rationalize defending the indefensible? Put another way: How does one become that person? Williams’s search for an answer takes her to her subject’s native Arkansas, where in the ’90s the daughter of then governor Mike Huckabee “was given Chelsea Clinton’s former bedroom” in the governor’s mansion, and Little Rock “residents and journalists mocked the Huckabees as rubes.” Later, during a visit with a lifelong friend, we catch a rare glimpse of the press secretary uncoiled and away from the podium, “wearing tropical-print shorts and flip-flops, with a blue blouse and her pearls.” Details like these are certainly humanizing. But Williams isn’t here to vindicate Sanders’s transgressions. In 9,293 words she deftly dismantles the notion that the president’s “battering ram” might walk away from any of this with clean hands. “A press secretary who had an abiding respect for First Amendment freedoms likely would have resigned once it became clear that Trump intended to steamroll his way through the Constitution,” Williams offers early in the piece. “But Sanders stayed.”


Seyward Darby
Editor in Chief, The Atavist.

The mystery of Tucker Carlson (Lyz Lenz, Columbia Journalism Review)

Lyz Lenz’s profile of Tucker Carlson in the Columbia Journalism Review begins and ends with the subject shouting at the writer, but insisting that he’s not. It’s the perfect encapsulation of Carlson’s raison d’être in the Trump era: convincing people to believe lies despite proof of the truth sitting right friggin’ there in the form of scientific studies, sociological data, photographic evidence, and the like. And when gaslighting fails? To Lenz, hardy soul that she is, Carlson again demonstrates his favorite ripostes. He deflects probing questions with glib mockery, by rejecting a query’s value so that he doesn’t have to address it, or — my personal favorite — with pseudo-intellectual incoherence masquerading as the sort of wily argument that wins high-school debaters gleaming trophies. (This is a digression where I beg someone reading this list to pen the definitive essay on how debate is the root of political evil. I will tweet it every day, forever.) Lenz, wholly in control of her craft, injects the profile with her own anxiety and anger about Carlson’s bullshit and with sly reminders that, for too long, respectable media overlooked his bullshit because Carlson was quite good at mimicking Hunter S. Thompson. People keep wondering, wide-eyed, what happened to Tucker Carlson. They don’t want to admit that the answer is, and was always, right friggin’ there.


Krista Stevens
Senior editor, Longreads.

Jerry and Marge Go Large (Jason Fagone, Huffington Post Highline)

To Gerald “Jerry” Selbee, an “intellectually restless” dyslexic cereal box designer from Battle Creek Michigan, everything in the world was a puzzle to be solved. At age 64, Selbee’s mathematical mind discovered a loophole in the Michigan Lottery’s “Winfall” game. He figured he’d test his lottery strategy as something fun to do to in retirement. Jason Fagone wrote 11,000 words about how Jerry and Marge Selbee won $27 million gaming the Michigan Lottery over nine years and this piece has it all in a winning combination. As you root for the working man who finds a way to win against a big government entity, you too savor the thrill of solving a tough puzzle to make your lottery dream come true. This is longform at its finest.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

Hellhound on the Money Trail

AP Photo/Justin M. Norton

Robert Gordon | Memphis Rent Party | Bloomsbury | March 2018 | 32 minutes (6,304 words)

 

This story first appeared in LA Weekly in 1991.

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The sun did not shine, but it was hot as hell the day a memorial stone was unveiled for bluesman Robert Johnson near a country crossroads outside Greenwood, Mississippi. About seventy-five people filled the tiny Mt. Zion church, a row of broadcast video cameras behind the back pew and a bank of lights illuminating a hoarse preacher as he praised a man who reputedly sold his soul to the devil.

There was no finality in setting the stone. The attention came fifty years too late, and even if his memory is more alive today than ever before, Johnson’s rightful heirs still have nothing but the name. This service was not about the body of the bluesman, which lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in the vicinity; it was about the guitar-shaped wreath provided by Johnson’s current record label, and about the video bite that would be beamed into homes around the country that April 1991 evening.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A memorial to honor the dozens of people who died in the 2016 'Ghost Ship' warehouse fire. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Elizabeth Weil, Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel, Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger, Sean Patrick Cooper, and Priya Krishna.

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Longreads Best of 2018: 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.

Lindsay Gellman
Senior Researcher for investigative journalist Ronan Farrow

Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis (Linda Villarosa, The New York Times)

Villarosa’s unflinching examination of giving birth while black in America has stayed with me. We lose black newborns and black mothers at astonishing rates; in the U.S., black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants, Villarosa writes, and black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts. Why? The piece lays out evidence for a theory that black women bear the trauma of systemic racism in their very physiology — that years of exposure to the stress of discrimination wreaks havoc on a body, and might contribute to pregnancy complications. Just as lethal, Villarosa’s reporting demonstrates, is the frequency and callousness with which medical staff routinely — and disproportionately — dismiss the complaints of black pregnant women and ignore warning signs.

The ISIS Files (Rukmini Callimachi, The New York Times)

Callimachi is a reporter’s reporter; she’s all about the documents. During five trips to Mosul spanning more than a year, she scoured abandoned buildings that had recently housed the workspaces, training grounds, courts, and living quarters of ISIS militants, stuffing tattered papers and folders the group had left behind into trash bags. Callimachi and her team ultimately carted off more than 15,000 pages of documents. Through the lens of these records, Callimachi describes a regimented governing body focused on collecting taxes, issuing birth and marriage certificates, and meting out punishments. ISIS, she writes, “even ran its own D.M.V.” There are practical applications for such insights, the piece suggests. Our prior misconceptions about extremist groups like ISIS, Callimachi writes, have led to tactical failures in U.S.-led efforts to defeat them, such as a focus on destroying petroleum reserves when the group relied more heavily on agriculture for revenue. All this from a haul of jettisoned papers.
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