Search Results for: The atlantic

The Obliteration of a Person

Longreads Pick

Marion Coutts recalls the last months of her husband, art critic Tom Lubbock, after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Excerpted from Coutt’s memoir The Iceberg:

Fast forward to February. The future has arrived early. Tom has a severe fit in the small hours of the morning. He had gone away by himself to get some writing done in a house by the sea and was due home today. It is evening, he is back with us, lying down quietly upstairs. He can talk after a fashion, read a little but he can’t write. He is estranged from himself.

Spring. There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part. It is now March. In one week, Tom will have another scan. This is the one to fear. There have not been so many fits, but outside them complexity is multiplying and thousands of lesser confusions also occur. Words slip out, switches are stumbled over and substitutions made.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jun 14, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,806 words)

An Untamed State: The Opening Chapters from Roxane Gay’s New Novel

Longreads Pick

Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is out this week, and we’re excited to present the opening chapters with the Longreads community. Our thanks to Gay and Grove Atlantic for sharing it here.

Author: Roxane Gay
Source: Longreads
Published: May 8, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,742 words)

An Untamed State: The Opening Chapters from Roxane Gay's New Novel

Roxane Gay | An Untamed State | May 2014 | 11 minutes (2,742 words)

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Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is out this week, and we’re excited to present the opening chapters with the Longreads community. Our thanks to Gay and Grove Atlantic for sharing it here.

For more, read our Roxane Gay picks from the Longreads Archive. Read more…

Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story

Ned Stuckey-French | culturefront | 1999 | 21 minutes (5,289 words)

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story,” by Ned Stuckey-French, originally published in 1999 in culturefront, the former magazine for the New York Council for the Humanities. It’s a story that takes a closer look at the dynamics of a friendship, and the roles we play in each other’s lives.

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

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Alexander Woollcott fell in love with Harpo Marx the first time he saw him. It was the evening of May 19, 1924, and the Marx Brothers were making their Broadway debut in the slyly titled musical comedy I’ll Say She Is. Woollcott was there, reluctantly, to review it for the Sun. Another show, a much-hyped drama featuring a French music-­hall star, had been scheduled to open the same night, but when it was postponed at the last minute, the first­line critics decided to take the night off. Except for Woollcott. His career was in the doldrums, and hoping against hope for a scoop, he dragged himself over to see what he assumed were “some damned acrobats.” Read more…

How to Do Oral History the Right Way: Remembering the Baltimore Stallions, Our College Pick

Journalism, like everything else, has its trends. From celebrity guest editors to abundant Upworthian headlines, there’s a lot of replication in our business. So it was with low expectations that I began to read “Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions,” an oral history of a Canadian Football League team by a group of University of Maryland students. Most oral histories are not particularly challenging or innovative – they are, after all, just stitched-together interviews. But this one required some deep reporting to identify, locate, and interview more than 40 sources, including Baltimore Stallions superfans and the team’s former marketing executive. The Capital News Service team went beyond simply interviews and created several interactive graphics to help tell their story in an organic way, not just a tacked-on-for-technology’s sake way. This is the kind of oral history worth repeating.

Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions

Capital News Service | January 24, 2014 | 49 minutes (12,268 words)

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Appetite of Abundance: On the Benefits of Being Eaten

Photo by born1945

J.B. MacKinnon | Orion | July 2013 | 12 minutes (2,875 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick comes from Orion magazine and J.B. MacKinnon, author of The Once and Future World.

Thanks to Orion and MacKinnon for sharing it with the Longreads community. They’re also offering a free trial subscription here.

Read more…

Transport: On Leaving New York for Rehab in Minnesota

Emily Carter Roiphe | Seal Press | 2013 | 10 minutes (2,409 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, a collection of essays edited by Sari Botton. We’d like to thank Seal Press for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

College Longreads Pick of the Week: ‘When NCAA Schools Abandon Their Injured Athletes,’ by Meghan Walsh, UC Berkeley

Longreads Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher and Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick is “When NCAA Schools Abandon Their Injured Athletes,” by Meghan Walsh, who is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Journalism School.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 26, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,670 words)

Our Longreads Member Pick: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis

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This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains:

I first arrived in Libya at the end of February 2011, less than ten days after the uprising began when peaceful protests were attacked by Col. Qaddafi’s forces. I spent a few months there on that trip and witnessed the beginnings of the armed conflict and the NATO intervention and, accidentally, the inside of the Libyan prison system.  In September of 2011 I returned to report on the final phases of the war and the eventual execution of Qaddafi by rebel forces.

Like nearly every journalist who covered the conflict, and over 90% of the Libyan population, I had spent all my time in Libya on the Mediterranean coast. When I returned in February 2012 for the one-year anniversary of the uprising, I was determined to see more: the vast southern deserts had always fascinated me with their promise of oil-fields, tribal peoples, camels and oases. That month an age-old friction between the Tubu and Zwaya ethnic groups broke out into open battle in Kufra, some hundred miles north of the Chadian border. Despite claiming around 100 lives, it got almost no media attention, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go south. 

We—my Ukrainian colleague Vadim Naninets (whose photographs were in the piece), our driver and I—set out before the break of dawn to make the 620-mile drive south from Benghazi. Fully stocked with bread, cheese, dates, and many cigarettes and bottles of water for the trip, the only real concern we had was bandits on the road. Since fighting in the city had ended, and it was fully ‘liberated,’ under the control of anti-Qaddafi rebels, we didn’t worry about politics in town. That was our first mistake…

On arrival we were immediately taken to the military council headquarters, where the questioning started off fairly innocuously (‘where are you from,’ ‘what are you doing here?’). Within an hour or two we were being questioned separately, our answers transcribed. Local newspapers wrote of our detention, prompting anxious Facebook discussions and phone calls from the temporary consulate in Benghazi. Ten hours later we were released into the custody of the National Army, the Benghazi-based outfit which had come south to quell the battles. 

I quickly understood that in the Sahelian region of Libya—where lighter-skinned Zwaya and darker-skinned Tubu live together—the revolution had a very different meaning from the straight politics of the coast. Pro- and anti-Qaddafi factions were largely based on ethnicity and the history of relations between each ethnic group and the onetime Leader.

The ride home was much swifter and livelier than the ride down: National Army gave us a night-time lift in a C-130. In flagrant violation of any extant aviation law, we rode in the cockpit (I took a turn in the pilot’s seat), each of the ten or so men in the flight crew chain-smoking and explaining what all the dials were for, and pointing to distant red flares burning in the darkness which marked locations of oil fields. 

I was struck yet again by the unimaginable vastness of the deserts, and the sense that we can never fully know what goes on there.

Read an excerpt here

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Students, Professors: We Want Your Best #College #Longreads

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Throughout May and June, a new generation of reporters, writers, editors, and essayists make their way out of school and into the professional world. They come bearing clips, work samples produced for class or during an internship. Hundreds of media outlets at colleges and universities across the country publish student work, and an equal number of professors, instructors, and advisors help students report, write, and edit their best journalism. We’d like to encourage those writers to produce more and better work, and introduce these new voices to a wider audience of readers—and maybe even future employers and mentors.

To help in this effort, we’ve teamed up with Aileen Gallagher, assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, to help search for and share outstanding student work.

Students, writers, publishers, professors: We need your help to find and share the best work of the past year.

If you’ve read (or written) something this school year, just tag it #college #longreads on Twitter or Tumblr, or email it to aileen@longreads.com.

Student publications are the easiest and best place to find college #longreads, like Mary Kenney’s account of an Indian sex worker, published earlier this year by Indiana University’s INSIDE magazine. Or Project Wordsworth, the outstanding new pay-what-you-want experiment from Michael Shapiro and students at Columbia University.

Sometimes a piece that a student writes for class, such as the one Syracuse University grad student Danielle Preiss wrote about high suicide rates among Bhutanese refugees, lands in a professional outlet. And of course, we’ll also tout good work produced by students as part of a fellowship or internship, like Columbia undergrad Jack Dickey’s investigation for Deadspin about Manti Te’o.

The only rules for #college #longreads are: Stories should be over 1,500 words and written by a student enrolled in a college or university at the time of publication.

Share stories worth reading by tagging them #college #longreads.

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Know of a writer or publication we should keep an eye on? Tell us about it in the comments below.