Search Results for: The Stranger

Kind

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) Years later, Ann saw one of the daughters. She ended up seated beside her on a flight from New York to Chicago, the odds who knows how many million to one. As strangers will in transit, they began talking. Ann learned that the woman taught high school English and was just now trying her hand at playwriting, that she had never married but had lived with someone off and on for years. After a while, exchanging names seemed beside the point. Ann wondered why this woman seemed familiar, but now that she was seventy-seven, almost everyone she met reminded her of someone she used to know. Still, still there was something about her: an expression that was both discerning and compassionate, those pale eyes of no discernible color, those graying curls poised to spring from their clip.

Source: Missouri Review
Published: Jan 1, 2007
Length: 26 minutes (6,596 words)

L’amour, CA

Longreads Pick

(Fiction) My sister, Isa, speaks English and Tagalog. But one word, she could say in many languages: koigokoro, beminnen, mahal, amor. “It’s the most important thing,” she used to say, “the only thing. L-O-V-E. Love.” So when we learned that we would be moving to California, to a city called L’amour, she called it home, the place where we were always meant to be. I believed her. This was January of 1974, our final days in the Philippines. Isa was sixteen, I was eight, and we were from San Quinez, a small southern village surrounded by sugar-cane fields and cassava groves, with a single paved road winding through. Every house was like ours, made of bamboo and nipa and built on stilts, and every neighbor was somehow family. No one was a stranger where we lived.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 14, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,740 words)

The Body on Somerton Beach

Longreads Pick

Most murders aren’t that difficult to solve. The husband did it. The wife did it. The boyfriend did it, or the ex-boyfriend did. The crimes fit a pattern, the motives are generally clear. Of course, there are always a handful of cases that don’t fit the template, where the killer is a stranger or the reason for the killing is bizarre. It’s fair to say, however, that nowadays the authorities usually have something to go on. Thanks in part to advances such as DNA technology, the police are seldom baffled anymore. They certainly were baffled, though, in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, in December 1948.

Author: Mike Dash
Source: Smithsonian
Published: Aug 12, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,650 words)

Online Commenting: The Age of Rage

Longreads Pick

Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it’s why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don’t like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it.

Author: Tim Adams
Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 24, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,808 words)

The Searchers

Longreads Pick

Zhou Chengliang is about 27 years old (he doesn’t know for sure), goes by the name Huang Jie, and is an entrepreneur based in the western Chinese city of Lanzhou. He suffers from memories of a lost past: he was one of countless young Chinese children kidnapped and sold to strangers to be raised as their own. Zhou’s story is a human tragedy, but it’s also emblematic of a country in the throes of rapid change, torn between tradition and modernity, challenge and opportunity, morality and corruption.

Source: Time
Published: Nov 22, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,483 words)

All the Young Girls

Longreads Pick

“Being a new girl [in New York] is a lot to process. Your dopamine receptors are haywire from so much of what feels like the right kind of attention and you preen out of paranoia. Sometimes you tap-dance about books, music, movies, food and politics for complete strangers. For hours. You mind-meld with people you hope to never see again because they scare you a little. You get sick from the options and the sleep deprivation and the vodka. Your friends from home tell you you’ve changed and you’re convinced that envy’s poisoned their flabby, docile minds. If you’re lucky, you snap out of it.”

Published: Nov 17, 2010
Length: 5 minutes (1,473 words)

Closing Time

Longreads Pick

The History Of America Is The History Of The Automobile Industry— Which Is Far Older And Stranger Than You Might Imagine.

Author: Rich Cohen
Source: The Believer
Published: Sep 1, 2009
Length: 42 minutes (10,520 words)