Search Results for: Time

The Love of a Thousand Muskoxen: Grieving a Love Lost to Time and Sickness

Stephanie Land | Longreads | October 2016 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

 

At two in the morning in mid-July, I sat cross-legged, my hands full of lichen, waiting for the caribou to come.

It was my second to last summer in Fairbanks, Alaska, and the light outside was what most people associate with dawn. I wore shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. I sat as still as possible. When the small herd started towards me, I looked back at Whitney for reassurance. He stood about twenty feet behind me in the fenced enclosure, hips cocked to one side, his frame lanky and thin despite his baggy pants and sweatshirt. When he smirked at me, something shifted in my chest.

He was just a teenager—19 and about to begin his second year in a private college on the east coast. I was five years older. I felt so much wiser. We were two weeks into the four that we would spend together. The finiteness of those days gave us freedom to be inseparable without losing ourselves in each other. After all, it was impractical—I knew that in two weeks, I would drop him off at the airport, that I would wake up the next morning with an aching chest and an empty bed. But for the short time before he left, I could love him unabashedly and feel no shame.

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An Oral History of ‘We Built This City,’ the Worst Song of All Time

Longreads Pick

Warning: This link autoplays the song. It will be stuck in your head all day.

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 1, 2016
Length: 12 minutes (3,000 words)

In Search of Lost Me Time

Longreads Pick

Even though he fantasized about a night out of town without his family, the childless time drinking with friends and watching movies isn’t as satisfying as Larsen imagined. Sometimes it’s comforting to know that the fantasy of solitude can’t live up to the reality of your family life.

Published: May 31, 2016
Length: 6 minutes (1,518 words)

Can Clinton’s Campaign Take Control of the Narrative in Time?

Image by Gage Skidmore

The idea that, at this point, there is some version of Hillary Clinton that we haven’t seen before feels implausible. Often, it feels like we know too much about her. She has been around for so long — her story, encompassing political intrigue and personal drama, has been recounted so many times — that she can seem a fictional character. To her critics, she is Lady Macbeth, to her adherents, Joan of Arc. As a young Hillary hater, I often compared her to Darth Vader — more machine than woman, her humanity ever more shrouded by Dark Side gadgetry. These days, I think of her as General Leia: No longer a rebel princess, she has made a wry peace with her rakish mate and her controversial hair and is hard at work, mounting a campaign against the fascistic First Order.

– Rebecca Traister followed Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail for this profile in New York magazine. With access afforded to few journalists, she saw both sides of the narrative made flesh: the stiff, loud, pedantic arena performer and the engaged, relaxed (yes, relaxed!), nose-to-the-grindstone public servant.

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This Is to Mother You: On Caring for a Toxic Parent in Her Greatest Time of Need

Longreads Pick

When her challenging, cancer-ridden mother suffers a psychotic break, Jane Demuth searches for the wherewithal to help the person who once demanded the most of her.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 30, 2016
Length: 10 minutes (2,632 words)

This Is to Mother You: On Caring for a Toxic Parent in Her Greatest Time of Need

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Jane Demuth | Longreads | May 2016 | 11 minutes (2,632 words)

I don’t panic on the afternoon in August 2012 that my sister calls and tells me that our mother has gone insane and her boyfriend has rushed her to the ER. For the full four-week duration of her hospital stay, I don’t feel much of anything for her. Instead, driving to the hospital that first afternoon, I tell myself to keep my ears open in case she slips and says something important and true.

Three months before, she was diagnosed; two months before, she began treatment. Breast cancer, ductal carcinoma in situ, stage two, one sentinel lymph node affected, ER/PR/HER2 negative, BRCA gene double negative. I advised her on what to tell her doctor about her family history so Medicare would pay for the genetic test. She’s prescribed a lumpectomy followed by six months of chemo followed by radiation.

She tells me these things. She shares these details with me, the same way she did twelve years ago when she had an abnormal Pap result, compelling me to consider a part of her body I’m even more reluctant to think about than her breasts. She sends me her path lab reports, as though I were the parent and she was sending me her report cards to hang on the refrigerator. I don’t know how to ask her to stop. I understand all of these details. I analyze cancer data for a living in collaboration with some of the foremost epidemiologists in the world. I’ve been at my job for 13 years. I’ve long since finished my work on endometrial and ovarian cancer, and I’m now branching out from the cervical cancer projects that were my sole focus for almost a decade; breast cancer has become my new specialty. My mother has had a knack for developing personal connections with the cancers that I study.

And for reasons that have never been clear to me, my company has always assigned me to the lady cancers. The irony in this has been coming in waves which are about to break on my shores—my birth certificate describes me as male, and up to this point I have grudgingly embodied that identity as well as I could. Less than a year after my mother’s hospitalization, though, in June of 2013, I’ll have begun my physical transition to female, something I’ve secretly wanted to do since early childhood, long before I could articulate it. Read more…

The Inevitable, Intergalactic Awkwardness of Time Capsules

Longreads Pick

“It’s easy to make fun of time capsules, but, as Jarvis details, it’s much harder to fill them with the kind of material that will actually stand the test of time. Often, the things we tuck away for posterity are embarrassing or boring. Sometimes, they’re much worse—racist, bigoted, wrongheaded. Most take that old adage about the winners writing history to its logical conclusion. And they are always, by their very nature, exceedingly presumptuous.”

Source: Atlas Obscura
Published: May 25, 2016
Length: 17 minutes (4,295 words)

The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut

Longreads Pick

Lhakpa Sherpa ​​has climbed Everest more than any other woman, but few people know her name. Part of the reason has been the media’s legacy of diminishing the accomplishments of Sherpa climbers, but also: “since 2004, she has been too frightened to speak to reporters.” That’s the year she says she was assaulted by her ex-husband, Everest summiter George Dijmarescu.

Source: Outside
Published: May 20, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,587 words)

How Lifetime Became One Of The Best Places In Hollywood For Women

Longreads Pick

A feminist history of the Lifetime channel, and their transition from “guilty pleasure” to a critically acclaimed home for groundbreaking television.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Apr 17, 2016
Length: 21 minutes (5,279 words)

The Woman Who Was Trans Before Her Time

Longreads Pick

Dianna Boileau was one of the first Canadians to have gender-confirming surgery, in 1970.

Source: Toronto Star
Published: Mar 27, 2016
Length: 15 minutes (3,872 words)