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.
* * *

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.
* * *

It sounds like something out of a bestselling dystopian novel, but it’s horribly real: in the 1970s, tens of thousands of so-called subversives were murdered by a despotic Argentinian government. What happened to their children? They grew up under the roofs of their parents’ killers. Distraught, the women of Argentina organized. Now, two of the most famous siblings in the country are under investigation–could they be children of the desaparecidos? Francis Goldman investigates in the New Yorker.
On April 22, 2010, the country’s four largest daily newspapers published a letter signed by Marcela and Felipe. “Like so many adopted children, we don’t know our biological identities, but like any other person we’ve formed our own identities in the course of our lives,” they wrote. “We’ve never seen any concrete proof that we are children of the disappeared. . . . The political use of our story seems unjust. . . . Thirty-four years ago our mother chose us to be her children. And we, every day, choose her to be our mother.” The letter did little to dispel the general impression of the siblings as captives, whose every utterance was controlled by Grupo Clarín and its lawyers, and it only added to the public’s perception of them as having a sense of aggrieved entitlement. Any adopted children born in Argentina in 1976, especially those with as many irregularities in their adoption records as Marcela and Felipe, could be subject to an investigation. The Noble Herreras’ long history of resistance made it look as if they were desperate to hide the truth.

No one knows why Bruichladdich whisky tastes the way it does, but plenty of people think they do. In Reynier’s view, the distillery’s proximity to a shallow bay makes a difference. (Bruichladdich is Gaelic for “raised beach.”) When the tide goes out, across the road, algae are exposed to the air, which influences the spirit as it matures, giving it a maritime tang.
Officially, the company also credits its distinctive tall, narrow pot stills, the oldest of which has been in use since 1881. But McEwan differs sharply. “The shape of the pot is not significant, in terms of flavor—this is a kind of fairy story,” he says. “It’s the artisanal skills of the whisky-maker.”
—Kelefa Sanneh, writing in The New Yorker about a London wine dealer’s mission to revive the revered Bruichladdich distillery, on the Scottish island of Islay. Sanneh’s piece ran in February 2013.

Joyce Mitchell, alleged accomplice to two murderers on the loose from Clinton-Dannemora correctional facility in New York, is hardly the only prison employee to ever have allegedly aided—and had sex with—detainees. From Jeffrey Toobin’s “This Is My Jail” in the April 14, 2014 issue of The New Yorker:
Many relationships between guards and inmates appear to have been consensual, and initiated by the inmates. “When they started having these really young girls as guards, that’s when it really went downhill,” the former inmate Kevin said. “They get infatuated with the gang members.” In a way, the more serious the charges against an inmate, the more deference he would be accorded by the guards. “Most of the C.O.s, they was young,” Vernon, another former inmate, told me. “If you came in with high-profile charges, they would treat you with more respect. The big-time drug kingpins would be more likely to get what they want. The guards would worry about the repercussions if they didn’t. There were relationships in there. I saw a C.O. used to bring McDonald’s to this dude. That’s cause she was his baby mama.”…
…According to the government, Tavon White had sexual relationships with four guards and fathered five children by them. (One of the guards had “Tavon” tattooed on her wrist; another had the name on her neck.) An inmate and gang member named Jamar Anderson was involved with five guards. Female guards smuggled the contraband into the facility, concealing it “in their underwear, hair, internally and elsewhere,” according to a government filing. The guards were subject to cursory or nonexistent searches when they entered the premises, and they also brought in the cell phones for the inmates to use, even though correctional officers were forbidden to carry phones while working.

Flannery O’Connor is going to be on a stamp! I’m going to actually mail those postcards I bought years ago. In my enthusiasm, I learned there have been almost 800 different folks on the U.S. stamp—authors, like O’Connor, but also blues singers, inventors, athletes and politicians. After much deliberation, I chose to feature five stamped individuals: an inventor, an entertainer, an activist, a journalist and a short story mastermind. Don’t worry, I linked to their stamps.
Buckminster Fuller wrote rambling manifestos and dreamed of cookie-cutter bathrooms and cars that flew. This inventor’s stamp is as strange and wonderful as his failed, fanciful inventions. Read more…

This morning, as I filed folders at my day job, I turned to the podcast Criminal for comfort. Today’s episode was Gil From London, the story of a strange man posing as a British sixty-something who almost seduced an American widow named Karen. There are lots of well-told stories about con men, Craigslist hoaxes and financial scams—here are a few of my favorites.
Mix cutthroat New York real estate, a too-good-to-be-true apartment, an unstable photographer to the stars and dozens of international tenants. Read more…
The weekly writing assignments—thousand-word limit, a safeguard for Bill’s sanity—required us to try our hands at a wide range of forms: humor, interviewing, travel, science, sports, criticism, editorials. This regimen inevitably yielded the occasional face-first failure, soon to be transmuted by pedagogical alchemy into an edifying failure. At the end of class, Bill would return our papers from the previous week, each illuminated with his editing suggestions and provocative marginalia. I still wince at his dead-on appraisal of my travel piece: “You’ll notice that I stopped marking this halfway through. What you’ve written is interesting only to you.”
–In The New Yorker, Mark Singer remembers his former teacher, On Writing Well author William Zinsser, who died in 2015.

Alysia Abbott | Fairyland, a Memoir of My Father | June 2014 | W. W. Norton & Company | 17 minutes (4,188 words)
After his wife died in a car accident in 1973, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moved with his two-year-old daughter Alysia to San Francisco, a city bustling with gay men in search of liberation. Fairyland, a Memoir of My Father is that daughter’s story—a paean to the poet father who raised her as a single, openly gay man, and a vivid memoir of a singular and at times otherworldly girlhood. As noted in The New Yorker, the memoir, which vividly recalls San Francisco in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, “doubles as a portrait of a city and a community at a crucial point in history.” Our thanks to Abbott for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here.
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I called him Eddie Body. At four years old, language was my playground. “Eddie Body’s not anybody! Eddie Body’s not anybody!” I’d repeat, relishing the near symmetry of the sounds. Eddie Body was Dad’s new boyfriend, his first serious relationship after our move to San Francisco in 1974. There’d been different men—good-looking men, funny-looking men, almost always tall and skinny and young—that I found in Dad’s bed in the mornings. But it was different with Ed. He was the only one with whom I became close. He is the only one I can remember. We spent six months living with Eddie Body. I loved him.
A twenty-two-year-old kid from upstate New York, Eddie Body had moved to San Francisco to get away from his pregnant wife, Mary Ann. He’d made a pass at my dad one afternoon over a game of chess in the Panhandle Park. Soon after, Ed moved into our apartment, a four-bedroom Victorian located a few blocks from Haight Street.
Haight-Ashbury’s “Summer of Love” had ended in 1968 with the arrival of heroin and petty crime. For years the neighborhood was dominated by bars, liquor stores, and boarded-up storefronts. But rent was cheap and soon my father, along with scores of other like-minded searchers, moved in, setting up haphazard households in the dilapidated Victorian flats that lined Oak and Page streets. Many of these new residents, if not hippies themselves, shared an ethos of experimentation and free expression. Many also happened to be gay. Read more…

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)
I first encountered the work of the memoirist, critic, and journalist Vivian Gornick in graduate school when we were assigned The Situation and the Story, her handbook on personal writing. Gornick explains that the writer must create out of her real self a separate narrative persona. The narrator has wisdom and distance the writer may not, and can craft a meaningful story out of the raw details of life. This slim book cracked open my understanding of what it means to write.
In Fierce Attachments, her 1987 memoir, Gornick wields her narrative persona to construct an incisive, nuanced portrait of her conflicted bond with her mother. She describes the Bronx tenements where she grew up, the early death of her father, the complex relationship with their neighbor Nettie and, at the center of it all, a struggle with her codependent maternal bond. Her new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a collage of interactions in the New York City streets and with her longtime friend Leonard, is a meditation on friendship, her status as an “Odd Woman”—a second-wave feminist—and her place in urban life.
We met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Gornick was staying for spring break before she returned to the University of Iowa where she teaches at the nonfiction program. It was sleeting out, and Gornick asked me if her mascara was running, then ordered a mezzo plate and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She began by telling me how much she hates teaching.
I don’t do it often at all anymore. In this case, they offered me too much money, and I felt I couldn’t say no. But I was wrong: I should have said no.
I can’t live for four months in a place like Iowa City anymore. I’m really too old for that. I’m not even sure I do need the money, but you always feel you need the money. I always taught just to make a living, and I made myself a good teacher of writing; I certainly made myself a good editor. But this time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach. Read more…
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