The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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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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.
* * *

In last week’s Reading List, I wrote about Eula Biss and her new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation. It is a meditation on the United States, disease, race and motherhood, using vaccination as a metaphor/catalyst. With that on my mind, this week’s list is about diseases—four essays about Ebola, Parkinson’s and more.
In a combination of memoir and science writing, from her father’s careful logs to the books she reads to her ailing mother, AuBuchon comes to realize “we come from people who listen and people who believe in stories, because stories are the only thing getting them from one moment to the next.”

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.
* * *

— Michael Steinberger in a post for The New Yorker, on Priority 1, the stringing and racquet customization company that is used by tennis pros like Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. The players pay $40,000 a year for the service.
Photo: Edwin Martinez

—William Finnegan writing in the New Yorker about Cassandro, the drag queen star of Mexican wrestling.

–In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles Beard, who has helped confront the online and Twitter abuse that women face. (Beard’s full lecture is here.)
Photo: YouTube

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.
* * *
Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest in 1984, when she was twenty-two. Their son was born the next year. Two years after that, Bob disappeared from their lives, seemingly without a trace. In this piece for The New Yorker, Lauren Collins investigates who Bob Lambert really was: a British police officer part of a massive undercover operation, whose officers— known as “deep swimmers,”—spent years surveilling different radical groups.

Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words)
Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS app.

– Amy Larocca profiles Tavi Gevinson for New York Magazine’s fall fashion issue.
Photo: YouTube/LA Review of Books
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