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Qualities of Earth

Longreads Pick

“That violent heteronormative cultures of sex and reproduction among humans are attributed to ‘nature’ feels astonishing after spending time on the allotment. The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel that makes a mockery of conservative ideas of the natural.”

Source: Granta
Published: May 13, 2020
Length: 16 minutes (4,171 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Franklin Foer, Andy Greenberg, Jerry Saltz Sara Selevitch, and Kyle Buchanan.

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1. Putin Is Well On His Way to Stealing the Next Election

Franklin Foer | The Atlantic | May 11, 2020 | 30 minutes (7,634 words)

Russia wants to eradicate democracy, and they’re doing a fine job of it, by pitting people against one another, sowing discord, misinformation, chaos, and doubt about election integrity. The problem, that plays right into the hands of the Russians, is that the United States is already too divided to do much about it.

2. The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

Andy Greenberg | Wired | May 12, 2020 | 55 minutes (13,941 words)

“At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.”

3. My Appetites

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | May 12, 2020 | 35 minutes (8,500 words)

“On eating and coping mechanisms, childhood and self-control, criticism, love, cancer, and pandemics.”

4. The Un-Heroic Reality of Being an ‘Essential’ Restaurant Worker

Sara Selevitch | Eater | May 12, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,166 words)

“The imperative to thank frontline workers has not extended into material protection and solidarity, from either the government or the general public.”

5. ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: The Oral History of a Modern Action Classic

Kyle Buchanan | The New York Times | May 12, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,370 words)

“I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

What I Want to Know of Kindness

County Kerry, Ireland / Getty Images

Devin Kelly | Longreads | May 2020 | 14 minutes (3,897 words)

This is the second time we’ve been lucky enough to publish Devin Kelly. Read his first Longreads essay “Running Dysmorphic.”

I remember that I was in a 6th floor classroom of the high school where I used to teach when I got the text. I read some words: Nancy…about to happen…they moved her.

I remember leaving the classroom and all those kids, finding my department head, and huffing out a rush of phrases.

My friend’s mom is about to die, I said. She’s like my aunt, I said. No, no, I said. She’s like my second mom.

I remember how bright it was outside as I walk-jogged to Grand Central to catch a northbound train out of the city. I remember the polish on the shoes of blue-suited men, and the tinny clack they made as they slapped along the sidewalk. I remember thinking how odd it was, and how much I felt alone, and how the world felt stilled and tilted on its axis, but that I was the only one who felt it, like I was leaning sideways while each other person I passed stood upright.

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Five Longreads Stories Selected for 2020 Editions of the ‘Best American’ Series

It’s always a thrill when an essay or article we’ve published is selected for publication in one of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s annual, venerated The Best American Series anthologies.

This year Longreads is proud to announce that no fewer than five pieces we published in 2019 will be published in four of the books.

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Self Portrait With iPhone

Getty / Image courtesy of the author / Photo illustration by Longreads

Pam Mandel | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,453 words)

The first thing I notice are the car selfies. So many of the profiles I see include car selfies. I overthink as I try to determine what this tells me.

I consider the following options:

I have a car. See how I have a car?

No one knows I’m doing this. My car is the only place I can get privacy in which to take a dating profile selfie.

I have no friends, no one to take my picture.

On Reddit and Quora, I learn that others have noticed this too. I find multiple threads asking my exact question. “What’s the deal with all the car selfies?”

Consensus is that the light is good inside your car — it’s even and diffused. You might be on your way to or from an important event, one that requires you to clean up, whatever that means for you. You look in the mirror, check your teeth, and think, “Hey, I look good.” Your phone is right there, in the dash-mounted bracket, perfect for a selfie.

Snap.

I consider taking “car selfie” off my list of disqualifying factors for selecting a mate. I mean date. For selecting a date.
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From Russia, With Malice

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Russia, through its Active Measures campaign, is hard at work sowing chaos in America, including misinformation campaigns on social media designed to stoke racial discord, email hacking campaigns aimed at discrediting campaign officials, and “jangling the doorknobs” at state election websites to find vulnerabilities they can use to disrupt elections. Why? So that Americans question the validity of election results and get disillusioned with the whole process. There’s even a hastag: #RIPDemocracy.

As Franklin Foer reports at The Atlantic, Russia wants to eradicate democracy, and they’re doing a fine job of it. The problem, which plays right into the hands of the Russians, is that the United States is already too divided to do much about it.

The Russians have learned much about American weaknesses, and how to exploit them. Having probed state voting systems far more extensively than is generally understood by the public, they are now surely more capable of mayhem on Election Day—and possibly without leaving a detectable trace of their handiwork. Having hacked into the inboxes of political operatives in the U.S. and abroad, they’ve pioneered new techniques for infiltrating campaigns and disseminating their stolen goods. Even as to disinformation, the best-known and perhaps most overrated of their tactics, they have innovated, finding new ways to manipulate Americans and to poison the nation’s politics. Russia’s interference in 2016 might be remembered as the experimental prelude that foreshadowed the attack of 2020.

Problems of inattention, problems of coordination, and deep concerns about November—these themes came up over and over in my interviews for this story. Indeed, at times everyone seemed to be sounding the same alarm. H. R. McMaster, who briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, sounded it when he proposed a new task force to focus the government’s often shambolic efforts to safeguard the election. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sounded it when he realized how poorly the bureaucracy was sharing the information it was gathering about the Russian threat.

Vladimir Putin dreams of discrediting the American democratic system, and he will never have a more reliable ally than Donald Trump. A democracy can’t defend itself if it can’t honestly describe the attacks against it. But the president hasn’t just undermined his own country’s defenses—he has actively abetted the adversary’s efforts. If Russia wants to tarnish the political process as hopelessly rigged, it has a bombastic amplifier standing behind the seal of the presidency, a man who reflexively depicts his opponents as frauds and any system that produces an outcome he doesn’t like as fixed. If Russia wants to spread disinformation, the president continually softens an audience for it, by instructing the public to disregard authoritative journalism as the prevarications of a traitorous elite and by spouting falsehoods on Twitter.

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This Week in Books: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

Theatrical masks of tragedy and comedy depicted in a Roman mosaic. (Photo By DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini via Getty Images)

[If you’d like to browse all the books mentioned in the newsletter this week, you can do it on our Bookshop page, because I enjoy lists, especially lists about other lists, so I spent a few hours making one. -DS]

Dear Reader,

On Mother’s Day my mom told me that, still, no one in her office is wearing a mask — not when the employees are alone together. She has a public-facing job at a cemetery; through the clientele, as well, calamity stalks her. Grieving families during an epidemic should arouse our empathy, but there is one family that has done its best to test the limits of my pity: a large family of seven, unmasked, who all at once entered the little cemetery office where my mother works, and grew belligerent when asked to leave, and spoke angrily, and spread pestilence and decay upon her, the woman helping them grieve.

Alone together, the cemetery workers don’t wear masks; they do not wear masks unless customers enter; the customers who enter are often unmasked. The masks come on and off like sock and buskin in a Greek play. When it ends, I will know for sure whether it’s been a tragedy or a comedy.

In these inconstant times, I have been thinking of giving up on all these measured scientific and sociological studies of plague times that I ordered a few weeks ago, and which rest on my desk in a talismanic pile to ward off disease, and instead reading only comedies of suffering; well, I guess all comedy derives from suffering, but I mean the very blackest humor written about the very worst of times. It seems to be the only mood that fits as the virus spreads through the White House and the states “open” and my mother masks and unmasks at the cemetery. I could reread Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon, which I’ve mentioned before in the newsletter, although I didn’t mention that it’s funny. (Maybe then it didn’t seem so funny.) I could reread Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, which is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. You could read them, too, if you’re in the mood to laugh at something that isn’t funny.

Or if not comedy, then horror. A phrase from a book occurs to me when I think of my mother and the mourners at her cemetery. Or when I see anyone without a mask. In R.W. Chambers’ seminal work of cosmic horror The King in Yellow, four of the stories are interlocking; they each reference a play called The King in Yellow that, rumor has it, drives readers insane when they get to the second act. Only two brief excerpts from the play appear in the book, which makes sense: in the book, the play is banned all over the world, but spreading nonetheless.

The phrase that recurs to me is from this fragment of the play:

Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed, it’s time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

I’m sure you can guess the part that strikes a nerve. But anyway that’s just me. I’m sure we all have one. Some strange little phrase that keeps coming back, again and again, to our growing horror.

1. “Cooking with Giovanni Boccaccio” by Valerie Stivers, The Paris Review

Valerie Stivers prepares a fascinating spread from The Decameron and consults The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? to find out exactly what kind of turning point one could expect a global pandemic to be. “‘The Decameron’ loathes sanctimony, tramples sacred cows, and punishes corruption. It takes elites less seriously and celebrates a cast of characters much more diverse than would previously have been allowed. By observing humanity and the world more realistically, it ushers in a new era of scholarship and reason—the Renaissance, no less.”

2. “Sleight of Hand: On Meena Kandasamy’s ‘When I Hit You’ and ‘Exquisite Cadavers’” by Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Los Angeles Review of Books

A review of two novels by Meena Kandasamy. The first, When I Hit You, “reveal[s] abusive homes as the absurdist performance sets they are: where everyday objects drift loose from their original uses …. where the players know their parts are a matter of life or death”; the second, Exquisite Cadavers, as reviewer Stephanie Sy-Quia writes, is a clever critique of how the first book was received. Reminiscent of Suki Kim’s complaint that her excellent Without You There Is No Us was labeled a memoir rather than a work of journalism, rendering it ineligible for certain journalism prizes, among other concrete consequences, Exquisite Cadavers reacts to the delegitimizing way in which When I Hit You was received as a memoir rather than a novel; “its content was valorized over its form… all too frequently, the fate of women and people of color.”

3. “When James Baldwin Wrote About the Atlanta Child Murders” by Casey Cep, The New Yorker

In light of a new HBO documentary about the Atlanta Child Murders, Casey Cep revisits James Baldwin’s writing on the case, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Cep looks at how the piece came to be (it was no small feat for a black editor at Playboy to lure Baldwin back to the American South) and how prescient, as always, Baldwin’s argument was. He did not believe that the police’s suspect, a young gay black man, was guilty; he wasn’t sure there was a serial killer at work at all. Instead “Baldwin…. used his coverage of the child murders to argue that the crimes were representative of the way that the city and the country still failed to protect black lives. In the eyes of David Leeming, Baldwin’s biographer, ‘The Evidence of Things Not Seen’ is ‘to the aftermath of the “civil rights” movement what “The Fire Next Time” had been to its heyday.’”

4. “Making a Mess of the World: On Hao Jingfang’s ‘Vagabonds’” by Virginia L. Conn, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Virginia L. Conn writes that Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds may be the first work of Chinese sci-fi marketed in the West that has incorporated the fact that “Chinese sci-fi” is now being marketed in the West (ever since the runaway success of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem) into its social commentary; the story features “an aggressively communitarian Mars” and an Earth defined by “insularity and possessive intellectual property laws,” and it revolves around the ways in which characters from each world seem to misunderstand the alien world as well as their own. Conn says this bifurcated effect makes Vagabonds a genuinely Sino-Western work of sci-fi, written with both audiences in mind.

5. “Annie Ernaux’s Object Lessons: Braiding Identity Through Time” by Mary Hawthorne, Lit Hub

Mary Hawthorne’s review of Annie Ernaux’s The Years seems a little late out of the gate, since the book was first published in translation several years ago, but I found its reflections on consumerism to be really interesting during this time. Like all of us, I’ve been shocked by the spectacle of some (mostly white seems like?) Americans claiming they have a dire need to consume remarkably trivial things (and to be served, but I think that’s a separate, particularly racialized aspect of this uniquely American madness), a need which feels so urgent to them that they think it must be a human right. Hawthrone writes that, in The Years, a novel about a family’s evolution over the course of the 20th century, consumerism is a mechanism which erases the past and the family members’ connection to one another. “….objects, especially long-held ones, contain memories, grounding us implicitly in reality; once discarded, so, too, are the memories, along with the reality. [Ernaux] writes: ‘The increasingly rapid arrival of new things drove the past away. People did not question their usefulness, they just wanted to possess them and suffered when they didn’t earn enough to buy them outright.’” Strange to think that being surrounded by their own memories for too long is driving my countrymen insane.


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6. “The Weight of Certain News” by André Naffis-Sahely, Poetry

Garous Abdolmalekian’s Lean Against This Late Hour “is a page-turner,” writes André Naffis-Sahely, which is always a promising epithet for a collection of poetry. “‘One-Way Ticket,’ for instance, is prompted by the discovery of a bunch of one-way train tickets inside the speaker’s pocket. At first, the poem focuses on the lyricism inspired by this unexpected find: ‘Oh, all the one-way tickets! / I haven’t found anything / more sorrowful than you / in the pockets of the world.’ But then it concludes with this arresting image: ‘—You pound the windowpanes of this train to no avail. / In vain you hurl your voice to the other side of the window. / We / are the actors in a silent film.’”

7. “‘Unless We Make Some Place’: On Andy Croft’s ‘The Years of Anger: The Life of Randall Swingler’” by Robert Chandler, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Robert Chandler reviews Andy Croft’s The Years of Anger, a biography of Randall Swingler, a British poet who Chandler writes has long been erased from the British canon because of his commitment to communism. Swingler is best remembered for the poetry he wrote as a soldier in WWII. Shortly after the war was over, he wrote:

It is only the bone that is dead. The earth is their flesh
And every year grows green in the sloughing of grief.
All they have lost is fear and the crooked bone.

But in me only the bone is alive, must watch
The slow decay of the will, the inch by inch
Retreat of the nerves, the death by shame.

8. “The Defender of Differences” by Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

A lively review of recent books about or featuring Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology. It begins, “Franz Boas fought his first duel in 1877, when he was nineteen,” and then the reader discovers, delightfully, that the father of cultural anthropology was more or less ritually scarified all over his face. Because apparently the point of duels was to just slice the other person’s face up. Oh, also he was dueling proto-nazis! (Thought I’d try to end on a positive note this week.)

Stay safe,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Phone Call in The Age of Coronavirus

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Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | May 2020 | 6 minutes (1,765 words)

When I imagine the call, it comes on a landline. Not a cell phone. A land line like the one propped on the little table in the hall outside my parents’ bedroom on 22nd Street, on the second floor landing. Beige with a rotary dial. Not installed on the wall but sitting fat and secure on the table where a chair joined it, perfect for those long conversations my older sisters had with their friends, the phone that rang in the middle of the night with the news my father’s only uncle had died. My father stumbled out of bed to answer its loud and insistent rings. My mother and my sisters and I followed the ringing, unheard of at that hour, assembling by our father as he heaved himself into the chair after hearing the news. I was 5 years old and it was the first important phone call of my life. The image of my whole family hovering around the phone was engraved forever as the way one receives the surprising news of death.

Recently, after years of not thinking about the phone call I imagined I might receive some day, I thought about it again. I used to torture myself by pretending it was his voice I heard on the line, saying the name he alone knew, the name he had given me because he thought it suited me better than the one I wore so heavily. And now I wanted to hear him say that name again, one last time. The global spread of the Coronavirus, our shutdown in Washington where I live, the way fear hangs in the air has perhaps triggered its return. Doctors are making their wills, never a good sign, and we’re being told it’s time to talk about death. For some of us may have run out of time to do those last things we thought we might do. In my imagination, the call still comes in on the beige phone of my childhood even though I haven’t owned a landline for 10 years. Those models are museum pieces, shoved away in attics as relics along with bone china tea sets. My husband never did sign on for the transition to cell phones. He missed the physical presence of the landline in our lives, claiming he couldn’t hear the voice on the other end as clearly on a cell phone. About three years ago he finally broke down and got one installed in our condo unit only to discover no one ever called him on it. This new version of the landline didn’t look at all like the phones of old and it didn’t operate like one either. It was much more machine-like with buttons to hit and complicated functions. Though it sat on his desk where he could readily answer, it never rang. The world had moved on. Eventually he got rid of it, the expense of the landline wasn’t justified, he said.


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Cell phones, so thin and light and little, don’t seem fitting for momentous calls, for life and death communications, for last words, or even if the calls aren’t literally life and death, they’re emotionally weighty, too weighty to receive or conduct on an iPhone or flip phone. For calls of that sort, a landline is required, or so my psyche thinks. I never picture receiving the call walking idly about my neighborhood and hitting accept on my cell phone. Or perusing lettuce at the grocery store. Or even on a picturesque trail looking out at the ferry gliding on its way to Seattle. It would be awful to get such a call as I’m imagining in public, standing in line to board that ferry or waiting for an order of coffee. Imagine being at the drugstore, a place as soulless as Walgreens, and getting the call. Because we carry our cell phones everywhere, we now can receive calls anywhere and at any time. This is a tragedy. Cell phones have destroyed the sense of the occasion of a call, the magnitude of picking up and hearing a familiar voice on the other end who has something significant to say. Truth be told, I don’t receive many calls anymore from anyone. Mostly reminders that my prescription is ready or my dental appointment has to be rescheduled. The exceptions are rare and they don’t compare favorably with important calls I’ve received in my life on a landline, like the call telling me my father had died. Now that is a call I will remember until I die.

Because we carry our cell phones everywhere, we now can receive calls anywhere and at any time. This is a tragedy.

The call came in the middle of the night just like that call about my father’s uncle when I was 5. It was early March, cold and wintery, the river that ran by our house was churning with chunks of ice, and the heat had been turned off. I know this because my husband and I had buried ourselves under a down comforter and two large dogs. Richard got up to answer the call — he was surprisingly quick about it having been woken from sleep. I immediately knew the news was bad and it was for me. No one calls in the middle of the night unless they have to. Oddly our phone was beige just like my childhood phone and sat on the dresser in our bedroom. Did I deliberately pick that model, the instrument carrying the news of death, or was it an accident of fate?

I had to get up out of bed to speak into the phone. Not easy and convenient like a cell phone that I could reach while staying under the covers. In the dark I could barely make out Richard’s shape. I heard his voice — It’s your sister Carol. That’s all he had to say and I knew. He didn’t have to say It’s about your father. I threw off the blankets, dislodged myself from the pile of dogs, and found him to take the phone. Nearly naked and shivering I heard her voice. There was no chair to fall into. I stood to hear her say Marcia, Daddy’s gone. It should require some effort to take such a call. You should have to get from one place to another and it shouldn’t be easy. You should have to run down the stairs to answer the call or stumble across the room in the dark hitting your hips on the edge of the dresser. It should leave a mark, a bruise that will take weeks to fade and remain sensitive to the touch.

There are many momentous phone calls I imagine I might receive, frightening calls I dread receiving, terrible test results, something happening to those I love, calls I don’t want to get on my cell phone or pick up as voicemail. These are inevitable and they await me. I doubt that I will escape them. But the call I imagine, the call I’ve thought about receiving is from the man who first stirred me, a troubled man I knew a long time ago before there were cell phones, a time when talking on the phone for us was rare and memorable because I was keeping our relationship secret from my parents. I feared that once our relationship became known, it wouldn’t withstand their disapproval. I was 17. Some might say 17 is too young to have a significant relationship but I would say they are wrong. With him I felt vulnerable and real. At 17 I let everything happen to me. I let him happen to me. And that wasn’t the case as I grew older. For a short space it didn’t matter how we spent our time as long as we were together. But the days between the sweet and the bitter were brief, between the hours of early fall and the dark end of the season. All that was pure affection between us was driven underground in the cold that came. We were doomed from the start, though I didn’t know it — that was something it took time for me to see. We didn’t last, or I should say our relationship didn’t overcome the obstacles put before it. But we did last in my heartbrainbody. He vanished into his life and I vanished into my life without a word passing between us ever again. I know nothing about what became of him. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.

At 17 I let everything happen to me. I let him happen to me.

I used to periodically let myself descend into a kind of sad daze, a timeless daze, imagining that someday he would call me. Something would make him call me. Perhaps he’d have something specific to say to me. That he sometimes was overcome with remembering me, someone would remind him of me. I don’t know what he would say although sometimes I imagined him asking if it was too late. And of course it was. It had been too late for a very long time, but I still wanted him to ask. I wanted to hear him say those words. I wanted to be curled into a chair with the telephone cord wrapped around my fingers and hear his voice one more time. I used to rehearse what I wanted to say to him if I ever got the chance. I suppose I wanted to put something right before it was too late. Though I know it’s impossible for one last phone call to put anything right, to untangle what has tangled, to repair what has broken, to forgive. Mainly there’s just an ache of the unfinished. I know it is likely there will be no call. But because I am still alive, I imagine the call.

I know it is likely there will be no call. But because I am still alive, I imagine the call.

It comes in on the beige phone that sits on a table like the one in my childhood but it isn’t inside. That’s the thing about creating your own dream — you can take a landline sitting on a table and move it to where it could never be. I want the phone and table to be sitting in the middle of a deserted beach. I hear the ring though it comes from far away. I run through the country fields of my youth and along the back roads he and I used to take on his motorcycle. I hear the pit-pat of my boots slapping the ground like panted breath. I run and run until eventually I can see the green sea spread before me and then the table with the phone. I run down steps onto the hard packed sand of the beach. I hear the ring ring ring ! I am close now.

* * *

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press. Her email is aldrich@msu.edu

Editor: Krista Stevens

What Do We Do Without Live Music?

Chris Pizzello / AP Photo

People find their joy in many ways: a nice weekend dinner, family time at the park. The pandemic has brought those lost joys into sharper relief. For Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield writes about the way the pandemic has removed live music from the center of so many listeners’ lives, and how he’s dealing with its absence.

Music is more than sound. We measure our years, even our weeks, by the shows we see. Music is also relational. We experience it with other people, including strangers joined in sweaty community at cramped music venues. This communal experience is part of what Covid-19 has taken away. To compensate for live music’s absence, Sheffield remembers past concerts. He enjoys livestreams and Neil Young’s weekly Fireside Sessions, and he listens to a lot of live albums.

Ministry called one of their live albums In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up — I always love the bitchy tone of that. Showing up is what the live show is all about: We go to be part of that crowd. I started by going to all-ages hardcore matinees on weekend afternoons — that’s where I began learning to handle the chaotic presence of strangers, before I was mature enough to learn any other way. All the people I used to hate at shows, I miss them now. Yes, even you, the douchebag who can’t turn off your goddamn phone because you need to video every moment. Here I am now, scrounging for YouTube scraps and cursing you for not getting better footage. (Seriously, nobody got any video of Stephen Malkmus doing the Cars’ “Good Times Roll” on the 2001 Jicks tour? You people, honestly.)

I keep listening to live albums these days, just because it’s therapeutic to hear a crowd making noise. I’m getting to know the Grateful Dead’s spring ’77 tour all too well. Like the Dead, Taylor Swift had summer stadium shows I was already looking forward to. I revisit shaky fan-cam video of Taylor and relive the night I first saw the Red tour, in 2013. When Taylor busted out the drum solo in “Holy Ground,” the little kid behind me yelled, “She’s rocking out, Mom! She’s rocking ooouuut!” I will think about that moment once a week for the rest of my life.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Shawn Yuan, Marty Munson, Anna Merlan, Lauren Collins, and Drew Magary.

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1. Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup

Shawn Yuan | Wired | May 1, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,696 words)

“The dawn of a pandemic — as seen through the news and social media posts that vanished from China’s internet.”

2. What It Feels Like to Compete at the Biggest Ice Swimming Race in North America

Marty Munson | Men’s Health | April 30, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,255 words)

“The first five minutes — especially when it’s below 60 — can be so painful and you think, I don’t want to do this. But when you’re swimming in training, within ten minutes, your body goes numb and there’s this adrenaline and a thrill. I don’t understand it, but it’s incredible.”

3. I Tried Hypnosis to Deal with My Pandemic Anxiety, and Got Something Much Weirder

Anna Merlan | Vice Magazine | May 5, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,565 words)

“When I stepped through the door, I told him, I found myself in a room entirely lined with aquariums, in which large, spotted, neon-colored fish were floating. It felt peaceful, I told Brown. ‘There’s some purpose here. I’m not worried about the fish, they’re being taken care of.'”

4. Missed Calls

Lauren Collins | The New Yorker | May 4, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,423 words)

Lauren Collins’ father died in March of leukemia as the pandemic began to unfold, forcing her to learn to grieve in a time of enforced isolation. This essay is a remembrance of her father and an exploration of grieving from a distance.

5. I’m On a Pancake-only Breakfast Diet and I Wish I Started This Sooner

Drew Magary | SF Gate | May 4, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,979 words)

“MY NAME IS DREW AND I LOVE PANCAKES.”