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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Barton Gellman, Latria Graham, Teju Cole, Samuel Ashworth, and Shanna Baker.

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1. The Election That Could Break America

Barton Gellman | The Atlantic | September 23, 2020 | 38 minutes (9,621 words)

“If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?”

2. Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream

Latria Graham | Outside | September 21, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,512 words)

“Two years ago, Latria Graham wrote an essay about the challenges of being Black in the outdoors. Countless readers reached out to her, asking for advice on how to stay safe in places where nonwhite people aren’t always welcome. She didn’t write back, because she had no idea what to say. In the aftermath of a revolutionary spring and summer, she responds.”

3. In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio’s Paintings

Teju Cole | The New York Times Magazine | September 23, 2020 | 34 minutes (8700 words)

“The work the artist made near the end of his life changed my understanding of both beauty and suffering.”

4. The Slow, Troubling Death of the Autopsy

Samuel Ashworth | Elemental | September 21, 2020 | 29 minutes (7,275 words)

Doctors make mistakes. The true cause of a person’s death is often complicated and unclear. “Why you should get an autopsy if it’s the last thing you do.”

5. Where Camels Take to the Sea

Shanna Baker | Hakai Magazine | September 22, 2020 | 32 minutes (6,900 words)

“In Gujarat, India, a special breed of camel is not constrained by land—but it cannot escape the many forces of change.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

CALISTOGA, CA — A CalFire firefighter uses a hand tool as he monitors a firing operation while battling the Tubbs Fire on October 12, 2017 near Calistoga, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Abrahm Lustgarten, Greg Jaffe, Omari Weekes and Elias Rodriques, Jeremy Lybarger and Cat Cardenas and Christian Wallace.

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1. Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration

Abrahm Lustgarten | ProPublica | September 15, 2020 | 24 minutes (6,133 words)

“Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit areas, but if the people there move, where will everyone go?”

2. A Pandemic, a Motel Without Power, and a Potentially Terrifying Glimpse of Orlando’s Future

Greg Jaffe | The Washington Post | September 10, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,400 words)

The economic collapse has pushed vulnerable families living in motels near Disney World to the brink.

3. A Close Reading of Randall Kenan, Who Paid Rare Attention to Black Complexity

Omari Weekes, Elias Rodriques | LitHub | September 16, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,444 words)

“Omari Weekes and Elias Rodriques in conversation about the late writer.”

4. Fag Rag: The ’70s Paper Of Gay Political Revolution

Jeremy Lybarger | Columbia Journalism Review | September 11, 2020 | 10 minutes (2,608 words)

Fag Rag wasn’t an idealistic publication; it didn’t suggest that a gay utopia was possible or even desirable. Instead, it pushed for a political revolution that wouldn’t come at the expense of other marginalized groups.”

5. Top Dog: An Oral History of “Wishbone”

Cat Cardenas, Christian Wallace | Texas Monthly | September 16, 2020 | 32 minutes (8,100 words)

“No one had ever done this before. No one had ever put a dog in the middle of the Civil War. How do you actually make that happen?”

Elsie Conick: A Biography in Fragments

Longreads Pick
Published: Sep 8, 2020
Length: 17 minutes (4,415 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Adam Serwer, Alexandra Marvar, Timothy Snyder, Gaby Del Valle, and Sulaiman Addonia.

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1. The New Reconstruction

Adam Serwer | The Atlantic | September 8, 2020 | 30 minutes (7,613 words)

“There has never been an anti-racist majority in American history; there may be one today in the racially and socioeconomically diverse coalition of voters radicalized by the abrupt transition from the hope of the Obama era to the cruelty of the Trump age. All political coalitions are eventually torn apart by their contradictions, but America has never seen a coalition quite like this.”

2. The Unfinished Story of Emmett Till’s Final Journey

Alexandra Marvar | GEN | September 3, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,559 words)

“Till was murdered 65 years ago. Sites of commemoration across the Mississippi Delta still struggle with what’s history and what’s hearsay.”

3. What Ails America

Timothy Snyder | New York Review of Books | September 3, 2020 | 8 minutes (4,700 words)

“We would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care.”

4. Waiting to Be Thrown Out

Gaby Del Valle | The Verge | September 8, 2020 | 33 minutes (8,280 words)

Following the story of one Cameroonian, Gaby Del Valle dives deep into how video teleconferencing technology in the U.S.’s immigration courts fuels the deportation machine.

5. The Wound of Multilingualism: On Surrendering the Languages of Home

Sulaiman Addonia | LitHub | September 8, 2020 | 6 minutes (1,627 words)

“Learning a language as an adult or in your teens, especially with a history of repeated migrations between languages and countries, is extraordinarily difficult. It isn’t just about swallowing new words like passion fruit that glides down your throat. It’s like chewing on stones breaking your teeth in order to seed the foundations of that new language on your tongue already heavy with many idioms.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Rukmini Callimachi, Annie Waldman and Joshua Kaplan, Jesmyn Ward, Hillery Stone, and Alice Driver.

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1. Breonna Taylor’s Life Was Changing. Then the Police Came to Her Door.

Rukmini Callimachi | The New York Times | September 3, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,500 words)

Two months before she was killed in her home in Louisville, Breonna Taylor tweeted triumphantly, “2020 deff gonna be my year WATCH!”

2. Sent Home to Die

Annie Waldman, Joshua Kaplan | ProPublica | September 2, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,029 words)

In New Orleans, hospitals sent infected COVID patients into hospice facilities or back home to die — to family members untrained and unprepared to care for them — and in some cases discontinuing treatment against the family’s wishes.

3. On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed By Pandemic

Jesmyn Ward | Vanity Fair | September 1, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,146 words)

“The acclaimed novelist lost her beloved husband—the father of her children—as COVID-19 swept across the country. She writes through their story, and her grief.”

4. Fever in the Woods

Hillery Stone | Guernica Magazine | August 26, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,691 words)

“Tucked far away with my children, this is where I feel safest and most afraid.”

5. Back to the Land

Alice Driver | Oxford American | August 25, 2020 | 8 minutes (1,914 words)

Alice Driver shares the story of her dad’s wish to build his own tomb on his own land. “He wanted his death, like his life, to be a work of art—a tomb he designed and filled with ceramics—and one that would allow him to define death on his own terms.”

A Lover’s Blues: The Unforgettable Voice of Margie Hendrix

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Tarisai Ngangura | Longreads | September 2020 |14 minutes (3,715 words)

 

Hive is a series about women and the music that has influenced them, edited by Danielle A. Jackson. Read more at Longreads and The Believer

 

The voice of Margie Hendrix on “Night Time is The Right Time” comes at you out of nowhere, like an explosive, thunderous crack in the sky after a period of steady rain. Long after the song is over, it’s her words that stay ringing in your ear. You’ll belt out, “Babyyyyyyy!” in the shower, while out for a jog, or when giving your friends a hard time as they share their most trying relationship conundrum. On The Cosby Show, it’s her part that is most memorable when reenacted by adorable, pig-tailed Rudy, played by Keshia Knight Pulliam. In the 2004 biopic Ray, it was future Academy Award winner Regina King who played the role of Hendrix. King spoke of the difficulty in channeling the musician, as few references, visual or text, were available to use as inspiration for the role: “There isn’t a lot of information out there on Margie, so I had to rely on her voice to guide me.” The kind to stop you in your tracks, Hendrix’s voice remained unchanging, and from her earliest solo releases to her final years, it was an infallible offering from an artist who was moved to sing.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles. I’ve thought about her regularly for years, wondering how a woman with that voice could disappear from the public eye so easily, after making such an unforgettable appearance. It’s a thought that’s stayed with me, because it carries the sobering reality that someone can be incredibly talented — phenomenal even — and still find themselves omitted by history. It could happen to anybody, but it seems to happen most often to talented Black women who are bold enough to chase their dreams, then fall apart from the sheer pressure of it all. Women who are public but invisible and who are noticed without really being seen. Women like Margie Hendrix.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles.

She didn’t look like the performers most record producers wanted Black women to be. She was too dark, had a gap between her two front teeth and was a Southern girl with none of that Northern polish and glam. The music industry of today is incredibly corrosive and toxic, but it was even more so for Black musicians in the middle of the twentieth century, who dealt with nothing but no-good managers, unfair contracts, and stolen music credits. Anti-black racism and its social realities make it astounding that artists emerged who weathered through even when it seemed like everyone at some point or another crumbled, with many never making it back.  The argument could be made that had Hendrix managed to stay far from the drugs that would ravage her body, and kicked those bad habits, she would have lasted longer and achieved success rivaling that of her still living peers from that “golden” era. Yet the number of Black women uncounted and unnamed in music history makes it clear that this wasn’t only a question of sobriety. It was also about opportunity, and a perverse lack of care for the artists whose mental and physical health were secondary so long as money continued to be made. Hendrix’s death and eventual erasure from the mainstream were not simply tragic turns in a complicated life, but the outcome of a series of events that befell a woman unloved by those she committed herself to, and unprotected by those whose coffers she filled. 

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Death as a Work of Art

A creek in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas in the Fall. (Getty Images)

Alice Driver grew up in Arkansas in a house her father built in pieces over decades. She was raised by her father, a potter, and her mother, a weaver, as part of a community of back-to-the-landers who wanted a life of self-sufficiency apart from mainstream American commercialism. At Oxford American, she shares the story of her dad’s wish to build his own tomb on his own land. “He wanted his death, like his life, to be a work of art—a tomb he designed and filled with ceramics—and one that would allow him to define death on his own terms.”

…my sense of life and death was informed by nature. As a result, I felt only curious, at home with natural life cycles and possessed by the idea that I needed to find my place among the land and its creatures, to test my mettle…Under piles of hay, I found nests of baby copperheads, their bodies well-fed, hourglass stripes glistening. I swam across the Little Mulberry River when it was brown, swollen, angry from flooding, fighting against the strength of the current. I was raised in equal parts by my parents and by the land.

For them, buying the land was my dad’s way of committing to a different way of life than the one he had witnessed growing up. His father had a corporate job and hated it; he smoked and drank and was rarely around to be a father to his five boys. He died of a heart attack when my dad was fourteen, and at the funeral home, my dad remembers burning up with anger because, he said, “They were torturing my mother and trying to get her to spend more money on a casket because my father deserved it.” Much of his life, as I’ve witnessed it over the past thirty-eight years, has been a reaction to his dad’s life and death.

As dusk set in, he looked out over the field toward the Little Mulberry River. “This is one of the few places on the planet where I feel connected,” he said. “I didn’t want to join the system. I wanted to create my own reality, and I’m going to create my own reality on the way out too.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Ta-Nehisi Coates, Katie Engelhart, Katy Vine, Zach Baron, and Colin Dickey.

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1. The Life Breonna Taylor Lived, in the Words of Her Mother

Ta-Nehisi Coates | Vanity Fair | August 24, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,720 words)

“She started walking early—like at nine months, so she was just a little person early. I always say she had an old soul. She liked listening to the blues with my mother. She would sing me the blues. It was hilarious. She used to sing ‘Last Two Dollars.’ That was her song.”

2. What Happened In Room 10?

Katie Engelhart | The California Sunday Magazine | August 23, 2020 | 64 minutes (16,178 words)

“The Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, was the first COVID hot spot in the U.S. Forty-six people associated with the nursing home died, exposing how ill-prepared we were for the pandemic — and how we take care of our elderly.”

3. The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen

Katy Vine | Texas Monthly | August 19, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,633 words)

“Over a decade, Theodore Robert Wright III destroyed cars, yachts, and planes. That was only the half of it.”

4. The Conscience of Silicon Valley

Zach Baron | GQ | August 24, 2020 | 20 minutes (5100 words)

“Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fears—and his bighearted solutions—are more urgent than ever.”

5. How the Spirit Mediums of New York Are Dealing with Mass Death

Colin Dickey | The End of the World Review | August 24, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,025 words)

“A few months into the pandemic, I started contacting spiritual mediums….As we go forward attempting to rebuild our country and our communities in the wake of this destruction, that will not just involve burying the dead—it will involve finding the means and the rituals to make sense of this loss.”

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Seema Jilani, Katy Kelleher, Carina del Valle Schorske, Martin Padgett, and Ben Lindbergh.

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1. Broken Glass, Blood, and Anguish: Beirut After the Blast

Seema Jilani | New York Review of Books | August 18, 2020 | 11 minutes (2,757 words)

Pediatrician Seema Jilani recounts the immediate aftermath of the Beirut explosion: “As I emerged from the car, the air was still whirring with debris. Everything was eerily silent. But it wasn’t. I just couldn’t hear anything. My ears were ringing. The street scene in front of me, almost two blocks from my apartment and walking distance from the epicenter of the blast, was a silent horror film.”

2. Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk

Katy Kelleher | The Paris Review | August 19, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,115 words)

Katy Kelleher meditates on mauve, purple, and periwinkle in history, art, and in the beauty of quarantine sunsets.

3. It’s Not Too Late

Carina del Valle Schorske | The Believer | August 14, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,185 words)

“I don’t want my part to get skipped over, but I still don’t know how to write directly about what went down between me and M. All I can do is worry a detail like an R&B singer worries a line…For years I’ve cherished a clip of Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin singing on Soul Train.”

4. Underneath The Sweet Gum Tree

Martin Padgett | Oxford American | August 10, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,766 words)

“Today, I venture proudly and safely into the straight world outside the confines of bars and clubs once designated specifically as ‘gay’ spaces. I can be free. This wouldn’t have been the case a generation ago.”

5. One Twitter Account’s Quest to Proofread The New York Times

Ben Lindbergh | The Ringer | August 18, 2020 | 21 minutes (5,283 words)

“In 2017, the Times dissolved its copy desk, possibly permitting more typos to slip through. Meet the anonymous lawyer who’s correcting the paper of record one untactful tweet at a time.”

How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries

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Photo credit: Jure Gasparic / EyeEm (Getty Images) and Vladimir Sukhachev (iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Irina Dumitrescu | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,406 words (21 minutes)

When I was a teenager I read James Thurber’s Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I fell in love with this story of a meek, middle-aged Connecticut man whose daydreams afford him temporary escape from a dreary shopping trip with his overbearing wife. Maybe it was because I was an incorrigible daydreamer too. Or maybe I read in his fantasies of being a fearless Navy commander, a world-famous surgeon, or a brandy-swilling bomber pilot a sense of my own opportunities in life, at that point still wide open if you left my gender out of it. Unlike Walter Mitty, I could still learn anything, be anyone.

With time I found a calling, studied for a doctorate in medieval literature, published a book only a handful of people would read, and gained a longed-for professorship. But new desires arose. I discovered I want to write books for more than five readers, and that doing so is remarkably hard. I started to feel afraid of being trapped in one role for the rest of my life. That sense of endless possibility I once had was slipping away.

One day, when MasterClass sends its millionth paid ad into my Facebook feed, I decide this is the answer to the Walter Mitty lurking inside me. MasterClass seems to offer everything: from writing seminars with over a dozen famous authors to celebrity-driven inspiration to take my hobbies further. Clearly, all I was missing were the right teachers, filmed professionally and beamed into my living room. I may not become a surgeon or a pilot, but what if the renaissance woman I’d hoped to be is just a $200 subscription away?
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