The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

It’s been just over a day since the internet exploded with analyses, memes, and hashtags on Melania Trump’s liberal use of phrases from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic National Convention speech. The awkwardness of this particular case of (alleged) plagiarism will soon be drowned out by other stories. But debates around plagiarism never quite disappear: they touch on originality, authenticity, and property, concepts that are deeply linked to our modern sense of humanness.
Here are six meaty reads on plagiarism: from deep dives into infamous recent cases to essays that question the very possibility of writing that isn’t, to some extent, an act of unattributed borrowing.
By now a postmodern classic, Lethem’s piece is a passionate, erudite defense of plagiarism — composed almost entirely of passages he himself lifted from other works.

Mary Pilon | Longreads | July 2016 | 8 minutes (2,061 words)
Last May, and much to the disappointment of many “Little House on the Prairie” fans, Melissa Gilbert announced that she would be ending her bid for a congressional seat in Michigan’s 8th district.
Best known for playing Laura in the 1970s television adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s iconic series of books, Gilbert, a Democrat and former president of the Screen Actors Guild cited health problems as her reason from stepping away from the campaign.
But during her short-lived bid for elected office, many Michigan voters and fans of the “Little House” television show and books may not have realized that politics is far from anything new for the franchise. In fact, they’ve been integral since the books’ Depression-era genesis.
Given the wholesome, all-American image of “Little House,” the political history of the books may surprise some readers. Wilder, who was born in 1867 and published the first “Little House” book in 1932, was an impassioned hater of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. In a letter, she once called Roosevelt a “dictator,” and like her journalist and politically-active daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Wilder also maintained strongly anti-government views. Lane, along with Ayn Rand, is noted as one of the pioneers of the American libertarian movement. Read more…

Black Cardigan is a great newsletter by writer-editor Carrie Frye, who shares dispatches from her reading life. We’re thrilled to share some of them on Longreads. Go here to sign up for her latest updates.
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A few months ago, my friend Maud was in town from New York, and one afternoon I met her and her stepdaughter at a teahouse downtown. The conversation turned to what we were each reading, and I mentioned that I was rereading Harriet the Spy. Within a minute, I noticed, we’d all grown extremely animated: three women in the corner of a dark tearoom, waving their arms around and exclaiming “Harriet the Spy! Harriet the Spy!!”

In the 1980s, a New York magazine writer named Tony Schwartz wrote a critical cover story about Donald Trump’s aggressive business tactics as a real estate developer. Much to his surprise, Trump loved the article—and he recruited Schwartz to ghost write a memoir about his success in business.
The result, The Art of the Deal, became a national bestseller—but now Schwartz is speaking out for the first time, telling The New Yorker he regrets the image and mythology of Trump that he helped create. His experience convinced him that Trump is unfit to serve as president:
This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on “The Art of the Deal,” Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular,” he observed, on October 21, 1986. But, as he noted in the journal a few days later, “the book will be far more successful if Trump is a sympathetic character—even weirdly sympathetic—than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.”
Interestingly, the idea for the book itself came from neither Schwartz nor Trump, but Si Newhouse, the media magnate whose company owns Condé Nast, the parent company of The New Yorker.

The bookstore where I work has a motto: “Get to know your world.” We’re a small shop, but visitors often marvel at the size of our travel section. Spend a few too many minutes near these shelves, and you’re researching flights to Iceland or the best time of year to hike the Appalachian trail (maybe that’s just me). Lately, I’ve noticed an increase in books about Nordic life—like The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell, to this past week’s release, The Nordic Theory of Everything by Anu Partanen. Why are we Americans so drawn to the Scandinavian Peninsula and beyond? Why do some Republicans speak of Sweden with disdain or horror, whereas left-leaning folks go starry-eyed? Does the recent influx of refugees to these countries mark the beginning of institutionalized xenophobia? Read more…

Kyle Swenson | Longreads | July 2016 | 14 minutes (3,440 words)
My hometown isn’t very good at stomaching bad news. The word on Tamir landed on an icebox Monday afternoon deep into December. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office must have been watching the calendar—and the Doppler radar. The announcement arrived in the patch of dead static between Christmas and New Year’s when most of the country is unplugged or has hit the mental snooze button. As Prosecutor Timothy McGinty started his press conference, a perfect storm of human error, a tragic accident, winter rain began soaking the city. That night, spot protests were small in number. But the word went out: tomorrow afternoon, downtown, be there. 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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Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders | ProPublica | July 7, 2016 | 29 minutes (7,261 words)
Law enforcement across the U.S. use $2 kits to test for drug possession while out on the field, despite evidence showing that the tests routinely produce false positives. The effect on the lives of the falsely accused and convicted can be devastating.
George Saunders | The New Yorker | July 4, 2016 | 41 minutes (10,419 words)
George Saunders goes on the road to attend Trump rallies to get a sense of why so many people support the controversial candidate, and an understanding of how America has become so divided.
Stav Ziv | Newsweek | July 7, 2016 | 16 minutes (4,074 words)
Before the Holocaust's last architects can die naturally of old age, one Jewish man continues to track them down in order to bring them to justice for their crimes. Now his 40-year crusade has led him to Lithuania, a country which murdered over 90 percent of its Jewish citizens. Needless to say, he isn't popular there.
David Dobbs | Spectrum | July 6, 2016 | 18 minutes (4,648 words)
A look into childhood disintegrative disorder, a rare condition which causes a child to "suffer deep, sharp reversals along multiple lines of development."
Soraya Roberts | Hazlitt | July 5, 2016 | 33 minutes (8,447 words)
Revisiting the women of John Hughes' '80s teen films, whose complex characters were unable to avoid the trap of aspiring to domestic ideals.

In between bites of hot dog and sunscreen applications, you can read about police brutality, what the rest of the world thinks about the United States, one woman’s American wardrobe and so much more. Happy Independence Day, America!
J.D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, Yiyun Li, Julie Otsuka and Annie Proulx are just a fraction of the authors cited by this “deeply unscientific survey of nearly 50 writers, editors, publishers, critics, and translators, representing 30 countries.” I feel patriotic just reading this list!

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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Anna Clark | Elle | June 27, 2016 | 29 minutes (7,297 words)
Clark weaves the story of Ardelia Ali’s 1995 rape—one of 11,431 Detroit cases in which the rape kit had been left untested—into a profile of Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy, who took on the testing of those kits and the prosecution of perpetrators as a personal mission. Worthy, both the first woman and first African American to hold her position, is a rape survivor herself. Her commitment to women brave enough to report what happened to them is rooted, in part, in her own regret for not going to the police after her own experience, leaving her rapist possibly free to attack other women.
Jodi Kantor, Catrin Einhorn | New York Times | June 30, 2016 | 22 minutes (5,511 words)
In Canada, ordinary citizens are clamoring to sponsor Syrian refugees and welcome them into their homes. The Times spent five months interviewing families and refugees about their experiences, which have been largely positive.
See also: "The Shadow Doctors" (Ben Taub, The New Yorker)
Jia Tolentino | Jezebel | June 28, 2016 | 12 minutes (3,203 words)
Tolentino explores the recent "Becky With the Bad Grades v. UT Austin" Supreme Court ruling through the lens of her own experience writing college essays for privileged white high school students.
Evan Hughes | GQ | June 28, 2016 | 29 minutes (7,403 words)
Kurt Sonnenfeld became a suspect in the death of his wife and moved to Argentina to start a new life. When the U.S. government pursued extradition, Sonnenfeld began insisting to Argentinian media that the U.S. wanted him for ulterior motives related to 9/11.
Dan Kois, Isaac Butler | Slate | June 28, 2016 | 68 minutes (17,161 words)
Twenty-five years after its premiere, the behind-the-scenes story of Tony Kushner's landmark play.
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