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The 1619 Project

Longreads Pick

With essays, poems, timelines, and photography, the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project commemorates the 400th anniversary of American slavery, retelling the story of America’s origins by “placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center.”

Published: Aug 14, 2019
Length: 149 minutes (37,272 words)

On a Wild Patch of Mississippi Soil

AP Photo/Beth J. Harpaz
For Oxford American, freelance journalist and wanderer Boyce Upholt explores a large wooded island along the Mississippi River, appropriately named Big Island. It’s home to many legends about an old moonshiner and murderer named Perry Martin, but what draws the author back over and over, are its aura and the thick woods that somehow still preserve its wildness and beauty. This is the land called the Delta. I’ve visited it myself, and it quickly seduced me. Still reeling from the plantation slave economy, it’s one of the poorest parts of the US, and one of the most beautiful. Upholt’s brief travel dispatch shines a necessary light on this overlooked region, and challenges our modern notion of wildness.
On his frequent camping trips to Big Island, Upholt uses Mississippi River water to brew his morning coffee, which works against the long-standing notion of the trashed, tamed, polluted old river. As he says, “the thick woods and wide, sweeping sandbars are, in my opinion, among the most beautiful American landscapes.” Perry Martin is the embodiment of this landscape, as Upholt writes, “a tall tale, an emblem of the days when this place sat at the fringe of civilization, unbound by domesticity. “

The idea of a dismal Mississippi is one more story. While in its narrow beginnings in Minnesota there is often too much bacteria for safe swimming, the mighty river that runs through the Deep South is relatively clean. Indeed, the thick woods and wide, sweeping sandbars are, in my opinion, among the most beautiful American landscapes.

This river is not trashed. But it has been tamed: its path has been shortened and straightened; its southernmost thousand miles are sheathed in an intricate system of locks and levees, and now ninety percent of its old floodplain stands dry. This engineering, accomplished in pieces over three centuries, often came at the behest of the swell-heads who bought up the valley and demanded protections against the river’s floods. The U.S. government, to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars, acquiesced.

The greatest flurry of engineering came in the twentieth century, in the wake of the Great Flood of 1927. It’s probably no coincidence that Perry Martin abandoned Big Island soon after that flood. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began to install the floodways and spillways and dams and reservoirs that precisely managed the river’s flow; eventually, they paved the banks of the bends in concrete. From his perch in the batture, Perry Martin watched his former timber frontier be paved into a flowing machine.

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I’ll Be Loving You Forever

Richard E. Aaron, Jason Kempin / Getty

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4,077 words)

 

“You are not wearing that shirt right now.”

Even in this establishment’s near-black 4 p.m. lighting, the bartender, a guy about my age dressed in the Portland Gen-Xer uniform (“Henry Rollins, but a dad”), has made out the faded names and visages adorning my bosom: Donnie. Danny. Joe. Jordan. Jon.

“Oh,” I tell him. “Not only am I wearing this shirt, but I’m about to go see these very motherfuckers. With Gretchen, my best friend from middle school. Who I haven’t seen in years. She was on my gymnastics team, and she flew in from Wyoming. Just to do this.”

When I’m excited I tend to overshare, but I do not admit that the pint of Kölsch I’m ordering is for Gretchen and me to split. I am 42 years old, and if I drink more than half a beer I will sleep through the “rock concert,” as we used to call them, which I have paid $162 to attend.

I can attempt to explain, using human language, the extent to which Gretchen and I were fans of New Kids on the Block. I can explain that my room was a four-walled decoupage of Tiger Beat pin-ups. I can explain how I had the bed sheets and comforter. The trading cards. The marbles (why?). The comic books. The bubblegum (a bit too on the nose). How I had, God help me, the dolls, which my little brother took great pleasure in arranging in flagrante and placing on my bed. I can explain all of this in words, but it’s the kind of thing best expressed in scream — specifically, the scream of a 13-year-old’s terrifying nascent sexuality, sublimated in real time into something safe in its simultaneous unattainability and ubiquity.

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Flagrant Foul: Benching Teen Moms Before Title IX

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | August 2019 | 27 minutes (6,922 words)

Before the pregnancy, before the ineligibility, and before the lawsuit, Jane Christoffer was one of the best basketball players in the basketball-loving state of Iowa. As a freshman in 1968–69 at Ruthven Consolidated High School, a school of just 106 students located in northwest Iowa, the 5-foot-11 Christoffer averaged 35 points per game, leading Ruthven to the state tournament for the first time in more than a decade. She upped her scoring average the next season to 47 points, and was named third team all-state, which prompted Richard Barber, her coach at Ruthven, to say, “Jane’s as good a player as we’ve had in the 20 years I’ve been here.” Read more…

Toni Morrison, 1931-2019

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison photographed in New York City in 1979. (Photo by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)

To lose Toni Morrison is to lose a great earthly guide. It feels personal, familial, yet I am aware that it is not. She had her own, very full life, with two sons, Harold Ford Morrison and Slade Morrison (who died in 2010), as well as grandchildren and other extended family. Still, I was born into her world. When she died last Monday night after a short illness at 88, Toni Morrison, born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, had published eleven novels, nine volumes of non-fiction, five children’s books (in collaboration with Slade), two plays, a libretto, and more over four-and-a-half decades. After her third novel, Song of Solomon, Morrison left her job at Random House, where, as senior editor, she shepherded work by Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis. She “single-handedly produced a black literary canon,” poet Harmony Holiday wrote as part of a longer reflection. A good amount of this work, including Clifton’s memoir Generations and The Black Book, from 1974, is out of print. The essayist Michael Gonzales told me The Black Book was “a breathtaking tome of black life from the Motherland to the Otherland, sheet music and slave notices, pictures of baptisms and black bodies burning as hordes of white men laughed.” In her foreword to the 35th anniversary edition, Morrison called it a “requirement for our national health.”

My earliest years overlap with the publication of Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz. Morrison won the Pulitzer in 1988 and became a Nobel Laureate in 1993, when I was not yet a teenager. In their tributes, many writers have spoken of a maternal transmission — how they came to Toni Morrison through their mothers, aunts, older sisters. I remember early edition hardcovers with bold plain fonts, laid out in different spots around my first home, protected in slick plastic, tucked under my mother’s arm or in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats for a return trip to the library. Morrison was grown-woman business and I burned to be let in on it. I’ll never know the force of what made my mother — born in 1943 to a woman born in Mississippi in 1906 — truly reach for those books and hold on to them the way she did. I’m lucky to have come of age with Toni Morrison fully formed, her books on the typewritten reading lists teachers pass around at the start of the school year, on Oprah’s show, in the glossies. We do not deify the pursuit of learning — we’d pay teachers and journalists more in money and respect if we did. When a person who reads for pleasure and reads for work, who takes the lessons of what they read to heart, who allows the lessons to wash over them is held up as an American celebrity, it is its own kind of coup. This coup made a different country possible. By being born and coming of age in the last years of the 20th century, I received the gift of the challenge Morrison waged on behalf of literacy, learning, and language, and, to some degree, won. 

 

* * *

I finally read my first Toni Morrison novel, Song of Solomon, at 16. Before then I breezed through every book I read for school or fun with a haughty ease, memorizing names and dates and the facts of plots in order to recite them back for tests. I do not know that anything before made me stretch and reach for my intelligence. The village in which the protagonist, Milkman, comes of age, the circle of women who surround him, the language they speak to each other, all had the texture of home. But Morrison’s experimentation with narrative and her conception of time — the gaps and dynamism that make a reader slow down  — were too much for tenth grade me to breezily absorb. It got better the second time; I could understand enough to talk about it. “That, my dear, is called reading,” Morrison said to Oprah when Winfrey phoned about adapting Beloved for the screen. I hadn’t known before then that if something did not come easy, I could struggle with it until it changed me. That it would be meaningful; I could be made myself by the struggle. Not an egoistic pursuit of struggle, not a flirtation with martyrdom or self-deprecation. But a grown-woman struggle made of will and a desire to extend myself. Reading is re-reading, trying means trying again.

There would be other lessons. Sula sees possibility in a matriarchal upbringing and pushes me to recommit to my own women friends. “My sister? I need her,” Morrison told the writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah during their time together. I am thinking of black women like my mother who rushed the bookstores and signings when Toni Morrison began publishing her own work in 1970, before she’d won any of the awards that signaled her significance to white America. I am thinking of the black women she shared the New York Times bestsellers’ list with, like Alice Walker and Terry McMillian, who, together, created a renaissance of black women’s fiction. I am thinking of the poet Sonia Sanchez, one of the early instructors to teach Morrison’s work in the university. I am thinking of the 48 signatories of the January 1988 open letter to the New York Times, published shortly after the publication of Beloved and fresh off the loss of James Baldwin, whose defiance helped write Toni Morrison’s work into posterity. I am thinking of the black women she wrote alongside (“Some of us thrived; some of us died,” she writes in a foreword to Sula), with whom she dreamed:

I was living in Queens while I wrote Sula, commuting to Manhattan to an office job, leaving my children to childminders and the public school in the fall and winter, to my parents in the summer, and was so strapped for money that the condition moved from debilitating stress to hilarity. Every rent payment was an event; every shopping trip a triumph of caution over the restless caution of a staple. The best news was that this was the condition of every other single / separated female parent I knew. The things we traded! Time, food, money, clothes, laughter, memory—and daring. Daring especially, because in the late sixties, with so many dead, detained, or silenced, there could be no turning back simply because there was no “back” back there. Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore. Use what was known and tried and investigate what was not. Write a play, form a theater company, design clothes, write fiction unencumbered by other people’s expectations. Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves. 

Morrison’s passing is an enormous loss. She was a singular writer and editor with a complex body of work, a rigorous, unwieldy mind who wrote and thought us toward a more capacious humanity. She defies any impulse toward summary. She taught us what reading is, and will be teaching it into all the futures we actually have. May we also remember the witnesses who saw her early on. 

For more on Toni Morrison, selected profiles, interviews, and tributes: 

For more of Toni Morrison, a short story and selected essays: 

 

Won’t You Be My Neighbor: An Anti-Hate Pop Culture Syllabus

Sony Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 | 8 minutes (2,156 words)

The closing fight scene of the 1988 martial arts movie Bloodsport has the Muscles from Brussels (Jean-Claude Van Damme) growling prehistorically, flexing his pecs, and kicking like Nureyev as he beats his Asian opponent while blinded by dust. A bottle blond cheers from the stands at this homoerotic display of outdated, pumped-up white masculinity and, surprisingly, it’s not Donald Trump. This corny alpha-male fantasy, one of the president’s favorite movies, is loosely based on the life of U.S. marine Frank Dux, who — fittingly — made it all up. Trump watched Bloodsport on his private jet because of course he did. Apparently, he fast-forwarded to the action scenes because of course he did. It’s since been spliced into a video game because of course, of course, of course.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace,” said the Bloodsport fan-in-chief after two mass shootings earlier this month. “Cultural change is hard, but each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life.” In case you inadvertently bought that, remember the guy reading those words has based his popularity on denigrating virtually every human life that is not his own. Because Trump appears to continue to reside in the ’80s, it makes sense that he never got (read?) the memo that studies have failed over the past three decades to show that popular culture incites violence. But even a stopped clock is on point twice a day and as much as it pains me to say, Trump is inadvertently semicorrect: We do need a change. Certainly, individual games or movies or shows or songs don’t have the power to pull a trigger, but put all of them together and it’s a slightly different story. Popular culture has been defined predominantly by the white patriarchal society that also formed Trump, and all too often shares his xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny. It established an assumption in which, while it may be frowned upon to shoot a movie theater full of people, it is also a man’s God-given right to bear arms, to dominate, to express himself with violence. So, sure, find comfort in the fact that including two accused rapists in a major international film festival will be unlikely to directly cause another man to behave the same way; perhaps less comforting is the realization that this perpetuates a climate in which it wouldn’t be so bad if he did.

Earlier this year, race scholar Ibram X. Kendi published two antiracist syllabi, one of which included a sprawling list of books “to help America transcend its racist heritage.” He cited titles like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Langston Hughes’s The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, works “that force us to confront our self-serving beliefs and make us aware that ‘I’m not racist’ is a slogan of denial.” (This month sees the publication of Kendi’s third book, How to Be an Antiracist.) His argument is that it is not enough to just claim you are not racist, you have to actively oppose racism. That gave me the idea of a syllabus for pop culture that is anti-hate: that doesn’t merely claim it doesn’t hate, but actively opposes it. These are the works — the movies, television, music — that don’t just offer representations beyond white male dominance but actively foster community and inclusivity, that normalize forms of gender and sexuality that don’t conform to tradition, that make space for anger while providing alternatives to its violent expression against the other. Individual shows or albums can’t kill or save us, but a critical mass either way shapes our cultural foundation.   

* * *

In the wake of last year’s Toronto van attack, I wrote in Hazlitt about how Mister Rogers imbued children’s programming with empathy — initially in the ’60s in Canada — by making feelings “mentionable and manageable.” The underlying mission of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was to encourage a sense of attachment and the idea that not only were the kids who watched cared for, but that they should care for others too. His was a guide to self-actualization within the context of community. As Karen Vander Ven, a psychology professor who went to school with Rogers, explained to me at the time, “When you don’t feel strongly attached then you try to find another way to be significant which is often to take the upper hand.” While there isn’t a strict profile for shooters, this is part of the primordial stew out of which they tend to form their pinhole worldview, which leads to some of them lashing out violently, often against women and people of color.

These men are the fullest expression of a cultural (and political) landscape we created, an extreme form of the everyday violence — from catcalls in the street to racial disparity in executive suites — that owes its normalization to this toxic marinade. The attackers at Dayton and Isla Vista and Toronto were misogynists, while the shooters at Poway, El Paso, Christchurch, Pittsburgh, and Charleston were racists, too. The reigning narrative of our time is the godlike hero, usually white, usually male, the embodiment of antiquated machismo, trouncing his enemies alone according to a combat-and-conquer plot, his personality and his emotions only significant insofar as they feed his weapon-fueled revenge. This is a story of male dominance, of white supremacy, of raging violence, told again and again and again. And this is the story of mass shootings. The hero wins the recognition he has always craved by emulating his chosen gods, men like him who use real guns to kill the real people they take for the fictional enemies inside their heads. Men who come from a place where the number one film of the year (so far) is Avengers: Endgame, which touts toothless representation while failing spectacularly to go beyond standard-issue good and evil. 

The stories we need, the ones that promote inclusivity, have begun to arrive — they’re just less pervasive. Though it made significantly less at the box office, last year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the rare anti-hate superhero movie. The electrifying animation revolves around a 13-year-old superhero, Miles Morales, with a black father and a Hispanic mother, who is unsure of how to get a hold of who he is. This is a story that supplants a fictional moralistic binary with a more realistic take on the elasticity of identity. It shows how family and friends — in this case, a bunch of misplaced Spider-Men from parallel universes — form who we are, but also how the strength we pull from them allows us to create our own narratives, making us more valuable to our community and vice versa. “I’m Spider-Man,” Miles says, “and I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot.” Outside the world of genre, the storyline is reminiscent of GLOW, the Netflix series based on a group of real women wrestlers from the ’80s. This motley crew of various races, classes, and sexualities — and in one case, species — establish a loving community nonetheless. The violent torching of a drag show that happens toward the end of the latest season — “Die Fags Die,” reads the graffiti left behind — is a counterpoint to the safe space that the women provide for one another to self-actualize and that the drag community itself offers to Sheila the She-Wolf, who ultimately becomes closer to the group after throwing her disguise into the fire: “It was getting in my way.”

That sort of collective boost is reminiscent of the Tik Tok community that danced their Wranglers off to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” The viral country rap star was rejected by Billboard’s 75-year-old country chart — because it did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music” — only to have his twangy hip-hop tune become the longest running No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single after a bunch of suburban kids turned it into a meme. What must it be like for a fan of country radio to hear a gay black man, side by side with Billy Ray Cyrus, doing it better? Earlier this year fans also assembled online after Netflix canceled One Day at a Time, one of the rare series to explore the complexity of being Latinx, which, considering the administration’s continued dehumanization of Hispanic immigrants, was a definite choice. “There’s so many people that the story resonates with,” cocreator and showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett told Vanity Fair last year, “about just being the ‘other.’” (CBS’s Pop channel eventually picked it up for 2020.) A growing number of black filmmakers has also been laying bare America’s history of white supremacy, from Jordan Peele’s social thrillers about the many ways the black community has been marginalized to Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America on the many ways they fought back. Meanwhile, Donald Glover’s “This Is America” single and his series Atlanta, play on the absurdity of your own home rejecting you. The FX series subverts tropes around black fatherhood, which, despite the main character’s shortcomings, constantly has him striving to provide for his daughter. 

A more fully formed expression of anti-hate masculinity is Shoplifters, one of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s many films about the various configurations a family can take. The husband in a poor household of six provides all the support he can — through shoplifting, but still — without claiming dominance, without being cold or sexist or violent. He chooses instead to be emotionally available, reinforcing the harmony the adults scrounge together, and setting an example for the kids despite also teaching them how to steal. As Kore-eda told the BFI, “Crime is something that we, as a society, own collectively; I think it’s something we need to reclaim and accept as our responsibility, rather than the individual’s.”

* * *

“Don’t send in a man to do a woman’s job” is the kind of cheesy line I would expect to hear in a remake of Bloodsport (which is apparently happening). But it does make sense that if you want pop culture to be anti-hate, that if hate has notoriously been embodied by white men, you go to the women. And it’s true, the women have been kicking ass in a way that Van Damme could only dream of. From Phoebe Waller-Bridge dismantling the power of the self in Fleabag to Janelle Monáe fucking up sex with Dirty Computer so much so that sexism can’t even get a handle on it anymore to Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, cocreators of Pen15, using surrealism to expose the most realistic depiction of racism a coming-of-age show has ever seen to Charlotte Madelon’s The Rose Garden, a zen antidote to first-person shooter video games that softly encourages you to wind down instead of loading up. And then there’s Rebecca Sugar, who rolls all of this anti-hate into one for the children like a latter day Mister Rogers. Steven Universe, the first animated series created by a woman, has been coined the “most empathetic cartoon” ever made. Miss Sugar’s Cartoon Network series dismantles the idea of the lone powerful white male hero before it has the chance to take root, replacing it with an open universe that lets everybody in, including actual aliens. “We need to let children know that they belong in this world,” she told Entertainment Weekly last year. “You can’t wait to tell them that until after they grow up or the damage will be done.”

The Anti-Hate Pop Culture List

Movies
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018)
Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)
If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)
O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, 2016)
Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018)
Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
(Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018)
Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski, 2018)
Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Television
Atlanta (FX)
The Chi (Showtime)
Derry Girls (Netflix)
Fleabag (Amazon)
GLOW (Netflix)
The Good Place (NBC)
One Day at a Time (Pop/CBS)
Pen15 (Hulu)
Pose (FX)
Queer Eye (Netflix)
Russian Doll (Netflix)
Steven Universe (Cartoon Network)

Music
Against Me!, Shape Shift With Me (2016)
Björk, Cornucopia (2019)
Childish Gambino, “This Is America” (2018)
Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer (2018)
Kendrick Lamar, Damn (2017)
Lana Del Rey, “Looking for America” (2019)
Lido Pimienta, La Papessa (2016)
Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road” (2018)
Lizzo, Cuz I Love You (2019)
Michael Marshall, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” (2019)
A Tribe Called Red, We Are the Halluci Nation (2016)

Games
Celeste
(Linux, Mac OS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One)
Don’t Starve Together (Linux, Mac, PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox )
My Child Lebensborn (Android, iOS)
Please Knock on My Door (Windows)
The Rose Garden (Google Play)
Stardew Valley (Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox)
Super Mario Party (Switch)

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Toni Morrison. (David Levenson/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Rachel Sugar, Kate Knibbs, Mark Arax, and Anna Wiener.

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Nashville contra Jaws, 1975

Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Illustration by Homestead

J. Hoberman | An excerpt adapted from Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan | The New Press | July 2019 | 30 minutes (8,492 words)

June 1975, six weeks after Time magazine headlined the Fall of Saigon as “The Anatomy of a Debacle” and wondered “How Should Americans Feel?,” brought two antithetical yet analogous movies: Robert Altman’s Nashville and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Each in its way brilliantly modified the cycle of “disaster” films that had appeared during Richard Nixon’s second term and were now, at the nadir of the nation’s self­-esteem, paralleled by the spectacular collapse of South Vietnam and the unprecedented Watergate drama.

In fact, in their time, Jaws and Nashville were regarded as Watergate films and, indeed, both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act in the summer of 1974. On May 2, three days after Richard Nixon had gone on TV to announce that he was turning over transcripts of forty-­two White House tapes subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, the Jaws shoot opened on Martha’s Vineyard with a mainly male, no-­star cast. The star was the shark or, rather, the three mechanical sharks — one for each profile and another for stunt work — that, run by pneumatic engines and launched by a sixty-­five­-foot catapult, were created by Robert Mattey, the former Disney special effects expert who had designed the submarine and giant squid for the 1956 hit Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Brought to Martha’s Vineyard in pieces and cloaked in secrecy, Mattey’s sharks took longer than expected to become fully operational, and Jaws was further delayed by poor weather conditions. Accounts of the production routinely refer to the movie itself as a catastrophe only barely avoided: “All over the picture shows signs of going down, like the Titanic.”

In late June, a month when Jaws was still unable to shoot any water scenes, and while Nixon visited the Middle East and Soviet Union in a hapless attempt to, as the president wrote in his diary, “put the whole Watergate business into perspective,” Altman’s cast and crew arrived in the city of Nashville. They were all put up at the same motel, with everyone expected to stick around for the entire ten­-week shoot.

There is a sense in which Nashville represented a last bit of Sixties utopianism — the idea that a bunch of talented people might just hang out together in a colorful environment and, almost spontaneously, generate a movie. Even by Altman’s previous standards, Nashville seemed a free­form composition. It surely helped that neophyte producer Jerry Weintraub’s previous experience lay in managing tours, for Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley among others, and packaging TV specials. Read more…

In the Country of Women

Catapult

Susan Straight | In the Country of Women | Catapult | August 2019 | 38 minutes (7,573 words)

 

To my daughters:

They never tell us about the odysseys of women. They never say about a woman: “Her passage was worthy of Homer . . . her voyage a mythic quest for new lands.” Women don’t get the Heroine’s Journey.

Men are accorded the road and the sea and the asphalt. The monsters and battles and the murders. Men get The Iliad and The Odyssey. They get Joseph Campbell. They get The Thousand Faces of the Hero. They get “the epic novel,” “the great American story,” and Ken Burns documentaries.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Attorney Alan Dershowitz speaks during an interview on May 18, 2010 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Connie Bruck, the San Francisco Chronicle Staff, Justin Heckert, Kent Babb, and Rob Harvilla.

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