Search Results for: Veterans

When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip

Library of Congress / Corbis Historical / Getty, Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Yuval Taylor | An excerpt from Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal | W. W. Norton & Company | March 2019 | 30 minutes (8,692 words)

 

Ornate and imposing, the century-old Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Passenger Terminal in downtown Mobile, Alabama, resembles a cross between a Venetian palace and a Spanish mission. Here, on St. Joseph Street, on July 23, 1927, one of the more fortuitous meetings in American literary history occurred, a chance incident that would seal the friendship of two of its most influential writers. “No sooner had I got off the train” from New Orleans, Langston wrote in The Big Sea, “than I ran into Zora Neale Hurston, walking intently down the main street. I didn’t know she was in the South [actually, he did, having received a letter from her in March, but he had no idea she was in Alabama], and she didn’t know I was either, so we were very glad to see each other.”

Zora was in town to interview Cudjo Lewis, purportedly the only person still living who had been born in Africa and enslaved in the United States. She then planned to drive back to New York, doing folklore research along the way. In late 1926, Franz Boas had recommended her to Carter Woodson, whose Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, together with Elsie Clews Parsons of the American Folklore Society, had decided to bankroll her to the tune of $1,400. With these funds, Zora had been gathering folklore in Florida all spring and summer. As the first Southern black to do this, her project was, even at this early stage, clearly of immense importance. It had, however, been frustrating. “I knew where the material was, all right,” she would later write. “But I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, ‘Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?’ The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores, looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around there. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn’t I try over there?”

Langston, meanwhile, had been touring the South for months, penniless as usual, making some public appearances and doing his own research. He read his poems at commencement for Nashville’s Fisk University in June; he visited refugees from the Mississippi flood in Baton Rouge; he strolled the streets alone in New Orleans, ducking into voodoo shops; he took a United Fruit boat to Havana and back; and his next stop was to be the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was his very first visit to the South.

When Zora invited him to join her expedition in her little old Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie,” Langston happily accepted. (The car looked a lot like a Model T Ford, and could only seat two.) Langston adored the company of entertainers, and Zora was as entertaining as they came. Langston did not know how to drive, but Zora loved driving and didn’t mind a whit. They decided to make a real trip of it, “stopping on the way to pick up folk-songs, conjur [sic], and big old lies,” as Langston wrote. “Blind guitar players, conjur men, and former slaves were her quarry, small town jooks and plantation churches, her haunts. I knew it would be fun traveling with her. It was.” Read more…

‘There’s Virtually No Conversation In Chicago … About the Aftershocks of the Violence.’

Residents, activists, and friends and family members of victims of gun violence march down Michigan Avenue carrying nearly 800 wooden crosses bearing the names of people murdered in the city in 2016 on December 31, 2016 in Chicago. (Scott Olson / Getty)

Hope Reese | Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (3,002 words)

 

In recent years Chicago has had more homicides than any other city in America. From 1990-2010, roughly 14,000 people were killed there — more than the combined number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, giving a horrifying legitimacy to the city’s infamous nickname Chiraq. It’s not clear, exactly, why this is so — the rest of the country is experiencing a period of historically low crime. In fact, Chicago contributed nearly half of the country’s overall uptick in homicides in 2016.

Veteran reporter Alex Kotlowitz, author of the bestseller There Are No Children Here and producer of the award-winning documentary The Interrupters, has been chronicling the effects of violence on the city’s neighborhoods for decades. Kotlowitz, whose recent book, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago, presents the cumulative effects of violence on the city through 14 vignettes. “For reasons I don’t fully understand, we just seem to be in the place where we have this extraordinarily tragic [violence],” he tells me. “Anybody who tells you they found the answer is just lying to you. Because nobody really knows.”

The book documents the complicated relationships between victims and perpetrators, the nature of the killing — how it is often cyclical and retributive — the way that violence scars communities, and his awe at surviors’ resiliency. Read more…

Honey Bees, Worker Bees, and the Economic Violence of Land Grabs

Don Farrall / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Melissa Chadburn | Longreads | April 2019 | 12 minutes (3,024 words)

 

This essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit organization.

“One bad thing about me is that I don’t give a shit about the environment.” That’s what I told my smart, edgy friend when we were walking to get coffee one day. I admitted that I suck at recycling, and that what I care about is workers, “not like, being vegan and shit.”

“Yea fuck those bumper stickers with the panda on them,” she replied.

The truth is I didn’t think those worries were for me, the type of planning and research it takes to be green. That was a concern for people living a different quality of life, people who carried around large glass bottles filled with distilled water, ladies in lululemon pants who consistently applied Burt’s bees lip balm, ate cacao energy balls, and drove hybrid vehicles. No, caring about the planet was off limits for me.
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America’s Post-Frontier Hangover

'American Progress' (1872), by John Gast, depicts settlers moving west, guided and protected by a goddess-like figure and aided by technology (railways, telegraphs), driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. (Fotosearch / Stringer/Getty)

Will Meyer | Longreads | March 2019 | 17 minutes (4,498 words)

In the small New England town where I live, Hadley, Massachusetts, the common lies a few miles from the mishmash of corporate chains that make up the town’s economic center. A quiet residential neighborhood surrounds the common. It is a grassy patch, left vacant most of the year, save for occasional festivals and craft fairs; open space to be utilized as needed, hardly disturbed otherwise. Adjacent to the college towns of Northampton and Amherst, not much happens in Hadley. I go for walks around my neighborhood most days and seldom run into many people. The common feels like an oasis, a fleeting yet contained sliver of vastness.

In 1995, the Hadley Historical Commission installed a plaque on the side of a rock, near the end of the common, between where it meets the main road and a paved rail trail. The plaque commemorates the “17th Century Palisade,” a wall that was “3 fingers thick and 8 feet high” in 1676, 100 years before the American revolution. The “fortification,” the plaque states, “was one mile long by 40 rods wide.” Most saliently, however, “Hadley was then a frontier outpost which felt threatened by Native American attack.” In other words, the settlers built a wall (around the corner from where I live now) both to assert their settlement and ward off perceived threats — namely the brown-skinned Other the United States was founded, at least partially, to pacify and remove. Read more…

Three Decades of Cross-Cultural Utopianism in British Music Writing

Mick Jagger and Brian Jones reading a copy of Mersey Beat magazine in 1965. Mark and Colleen Hayward / Redferns / Getty

Mark Sinker | A Hidden Landscape Once a Week Strange Attractor Press | February 2019 | 32 minutes (6,436 words)

 

It was late 1986, and I was frustrated. I’d given up my day-job to dedicate myself full-time to writing, but I wasn’t getting much work, and what I did get was paying almost nothing. Only one title was giving me the freedom to find my voice — Richard Cook’s still-small monthly The Wire, where he was building a team of new young writers — and it paid worst of all. No surprise I wasn’t getting enough paid work: Mostly I wrote about free improvised music and the more intransigent offshoots of post-punk, but I’d also seen King Sunny Ade play at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1983, and fallen in love with West African pop, its dancing brightness and the strangeness of its vocal lines. Others were writing about it, no one very well. Or so I felt. I was young, and young often means arrogant. Two things had drawn me to the music-writing of that era, the weeklies in particular: its opinionated mischief-making humor, and the sense of young people travelling by touch, learning as they went — finding out about the wider world by throwing themselves out into that world. Master both, and there’s your recipe for professional success, I thought. I had a head full of ideas about what music should and shouldn’t be, and was intensely willing to argue about them.

The LP in front of me was Coming Home, debut release of a group of South African exiles under the collective name Kintone. Its quietly melodic afrojazz — with hints of Weather Report, but far less flashy — went right over my head that aggrieved autumn. I had come to hate jazz writing which damned musicians with bland praise, leaving readers swimming unconvinced in routinized tact. But re-listening now, 30 years on, I have to say I no longer hear what apparently so riled me then, when I scorned instrumental prowess and sneered at a cartoon idea of the meaning of fusion.

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When Black Male Singers Were Sex Symbols

Philadelphia International Records / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Ericka Blount Danois | Longreads | January 2019 | 23 minutes (4,688 words)

 

Driving through blinding rain from Baltimore to Philadelphia recently to see the documentary If You Don’t Know Me By Now, about the life of R&B singer Teddy Pendergrass, I was reminded how one of my first encounters with Teddy was as a life-size cardboard cutout of him my mother kept in our living room. Dressed in an Italian silk suit, he became part of my family as my parents and sister passed him daily on our way out the door to school.

I had already admired Teddy when I would browse my father’s extensive record collection as a kid and stare at the covers. Both the Jackson Five’s Third Album and The Teenagers Featuring Frankie Lymon album covers made me wish I had been born just a little bit sooner so I could meet Frankie Lymon or a young Michael Jackson. I thought Marvin Gaye was handsome, but when I saw Teddy Pendergrass’s album Teddy, I said to myself: One day I will marry a man that looks just like that. I don’t know what made Teddy future marriage material and not just a childhood crush. Maybe it was the handsome face and the masculine beard that looked like it tasted like Hershey’s Kisses. Maybe it was the aloof look and the symphony of gold chains on his chest, surrounded by a silk scarf and shirt. Or that North Philly, rough-and-rugged, raspy, commanding baritone voice. Or the way he talked trash on the album’s interludes. Or the half church, half sexual ecstasy shouts and ad-libs, sometimes full-on sermons and conversations mixed with singing. His weellls, ooohwaaahs, and yessssahs all got you to the point that, when he said with conviction “close the door!” on the cut of the same name, you nearly jumped up to slam it shut. He was the kind of man whose steak you made sure was hot when he came home as you handed him his pipe and slippers. Somehow I knew he was the whole package, a man’s man in a time when this is what it meant to be a man. And I wasn’t wrong.

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Cowards and Accomplices

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Judith Hertog | Longreads | Month 2018 | 13 minutes (3,153 words)

The first thing I did when I learned the alphabet at age 6 was to spend a weekend writing out a stack of flyers that said, in large, uneven block letters: “Ret de weerelt!” a clumsily misspelled Dutch phrase that translates into English as something like “Sav the worlt!” I finally had a chance to express the urgency I felt when I discovered that, outside the idyllic life my parents had created for me in our small apartment in Amsterdam, the world was a dangerous and terrifying place where children starved to death in famines, innocents were killed in wars, factories poured chemicals into the water, and nuclear warheads stood ready to destroy everything in a flash. The world was in trouble and something needed to be done urgently.

So I copied the words “Sav the worlt” 50 times, folded my manifestos into paper airplanes and aimed them from our fourth-floor bathroom window down into the neighbors’ backyards at the center of our block. I assumed the neighbors were not aware of the state of the world, or else they would be busy trying to save it. I imagined my fliers would alert them to the seriousness of the situation and spark a worldwide activist movement under my leadership, even though I had not signed my name to the rallying cry or included a return address. Only when I saw the paper airplanes gliding into the neighbors’ yards, getting caught in tree branches or plunging into mud puddles, did I realize the futility of my act. I didn’t get any responses, and I never told anyone about it.

I recently thought back to this because I don’t know how I’d react now if I found one of my own paper planes in my yard.

I’m sitting here at the gym, waiting for my son’s tumbling class to end, and I just read a Facebook post by a friend in Gaza whose updates have become increasingly desperate amidst yet another Israeli bombing campaign on his city.

“Today I suffered a lot. I almost forgot what it means to be human. I was a THING,” he wrote. I have never met Mosab in person. A friend introduced me to him online because he is a poet who is trying to establish a library in Gaza, to take people’s minds off violence and desperation. I have sent him books and an occasional message to cheer on his project. But today I can’t even respond to his despair. Words seem inadequate. They can’t stop bombs from killing people. I should be back in Israel and doing something. But instead, I live in Vermont, where life is comfortable and my kids don’t have to face war. I’m aware the world is falling to pieces all around me. But for now, I just want to shield my children and keep them away from pain and evil. And I’m afraid I’ve become just as complacent as my old neighbors.

Nobody told me that this is what it means to be a parent: to have your soul placed inside another’s body. One mishap, and it can all be gone. My son is practicing his backflips. My heart stops each time I see his slender 14-year old body balanced in the air. He wants to become a circus clown, and I want him to live a life of razzle dazzle and applause. So I take him to tumbling class, even though I can almost see the world end just before he makes that last-second spin to land on his feet.
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Longreads Best of 2018: Food Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in food writing.

Zahir Janmohamed
Co-host, The Racist Sandwich Podcast.

There Is No Dalit Cuisine (Sharanya Deepac, Popula)

Sharanya Deepak is one of the most promising, and inspiring food writers, to emerge from India in as long as I can remember. So often, food and travel reporting, both from India and from outside of India, evades questions of caste, gender, and state violence. But Deepak dives right into these topics. In 100 Cups of Tea, for Taste Cooking, she talks about how food traditions are fighting on, even thriving in the midst of India’s brutal violence in the disputed area of Kashmir.  In a lesser writer, this type of story might come off as hokey, but Deepak complicates the narrative, both for Indian and non-Indian readers. My favorite piece of hers, though, is on Dalit cuisine in India for Popula. The word Dalit means “broken” and refers to about 16 percent of the Indian population who are excluded from the Hindu caste system and are often relegated to the most menial jobs in India, such as trash collection. Deepak shows us how food politics—such as the banning of cow slaughter—has been used by upper-caste Brahmins to preserve their hegemony and to deny Dalits agency. She even calls out one of India’s most celebrated food journalists, Vir Sanghvi, who she says, “reveres the upper-class and colonial vision of Indian cuisine.” This piece, and all of her pieces, is journalism at its best: uncomfortable, layered, and fearless


Naz Riahi
Writer, Consultant, Founder of Bitten.

Can We Honor Your Service with a Steak, Malibu Chicken, or the Jumpo Crispy Shrimp? (Erin Clare Brown, Eater)

This piece encompasses so much that is lovely and so much that is brutal. On its surface Brown and her father go to Sizzler’s on Veterans’ Day for the free steak, a promotion to honor those who’ve served. In that, we are placed in midst of all that is heartbreaking about America, with its promise of opportunity juxtaposed against its exploitative reality. Brown and her father, in brief moments that punctuate long silences on the subject, discuss his service in the Vietnam War. In this essay, Brown explores her complicated feelings on the subject, her relationship with her father and, perhaps, the marketing machine he inadvertently fought for.


John T. Edge
Author of The Potlikker Papers, Columnist, Oxford American.

Houston Is the New Capital of Southern Cool (Brett Martin, GQ)

This piece gave me new perspective on a city I dearly love, a place I wrote about for the Oxford American — early in this era of Houston-is-Cool revelations. I was proud of that piece and the insights I offered. But this essay is so dang much better. It’s smart and circuitous and searching, a string of observations that could be used to describe Houston itself.


 

Irina Dumitrescu
Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn, whose work has appeared in Best Food Writing and Best American Essays.

Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner, The New Yorker)

Those of us who like to read food writing are probably all tired of the Great Cliché: misty memories of grandma in the kitchen, stirring a pot of fragrant, utterly authentic stew from the Old Country. At the same time, food remains such a useful symbol of our entangled connections to the families and cultures that made us. The reminiscence of a meal includes barely recoverable flavors and scents, ephemeral gestures of care, and, occasionally, flashes of perfect belonging.

Michelle Zauner stumbles across her memories in H Mart, the Korean American supermarket chain. She mourns her mother among dumpling skins and refrigerators stocked with banchan. Her madeleine is the puffed-rice snack ppeongtwigi, which she used to nibble after school. A grandmother slurping jjamppong noodle soup in the food court reminds Zauner of the old age her own mother never reached. This beautiful, delicately observed essay shows how many stories are still left to be told about food, what rich associations are still to be found in immigrant restaurants and strip malls and suburban kitchens, in places “where you can find your people under one odorous roof.”


Melissa Chadburn
Essayist, Novelist.

The Tyranny and the Comfort of Government Cheese (Bobbi Dempsey, TASTE)

I grew up in poverty. I grew up with my mother’s bounced check, a scarlet letter, taped to a wall behind the check-out at the Food King. I grew up washing out stains in the bathroom sink with hot water and a bar of soap, scrubbing until my knuckles bled, sharpening pencils with a steak knife, sucking on Kool-Aid and Country Time Lemonade off my licked wet fingers dipped into a sandwich bag. I want to tell these stories, these stories need to be told, these stories are my bones, and I’m so delighted that food outlets like TASTE are publishing them.

Dear Baby Witch (Sara Finnerty, r.kv.r.y.)

I read this wrapped in grief. We’d just unexpectedly had to put a magical dog down. And I was going through a phase of hating myself taking diet pills and checking my weight frequently. The idea of eating seemed too close to letting love in, and letting love in seemed like it was reserved for someone who was not me, and Sara Finnerty wrote this beautiful essay and came to my door bearing a platter of homemade Chicken Parmesan and very specific heating instructions, and reading about a young girl kneading gnocchi in the basement with her grandmother was just the reminder I needed to continue to reach for whatever neat thing might be around the corner.


Sara B. Franklin
Writer and professor of food studies at NYU based in Kingston, NY. 

A Cajun Seasoned Boil for a Big Party (Samin Nosrat, The New York Times Magazine)

I love Samin Nosrat’s approach to writing, cooking, and life. Nosrat knows a lot —she is, after all, a bestselling cookbook author and a Netflix personality. But in her column for the Times, she approaches her subjects with great openness and genuine curiosity; you can tell she’s still hungry to learn. In an industry whose celebrities often distinguish themselves by asserting their status with obnoxious, meaningless language like “toothsome,” “mouthfeel,” and “unctuous,” Nosrat aims for approachability and humility. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in her column about Mississippi River boat pilot-cum-home cook extraordinaire, Jared Austin. In just 1,000 short words, she captures Austin in his full humanity — as idiosyncratic, unique, and hospitable as his hometown of New Orleans. (I mean, “And yes, ‘bead’ is a verb.” Come on!) In this moment when we’re questioning all the characteristics traditionally associated with power and authority, Nosrat reminds us that humility is an asset, and for that, I’m thankful.


Aaron Gilbreath
Longreads Editor, Essayist.

Hazardous Cravings (Alex McElroy, Tin House)

In a genre that includes celebrity chef profiles, best of lists, and Yelp reviews, personal essays like Alex McElroy’s prove how deep food stories can go. Growing up overweight, McElroy had a very American predicament: surrounded by food, he ate too much, and people made fun of him for it, and yet, as his weight made him a target of ridicule, his eventual dieting threatened them, and people both encouraged him to lose weight and pressured him to share in their gluttony. While working at a Dairy Queen, he became eating disordered and bulimic. In this powerful, intelligent, devilishly funny essay, McElroy calls dieting “a paradox of masculinity and emasculation.” By exploring his relationship with food and his own flesh, he shows how people mistake his large personal space for public space, and how he struggled to value what others, including himself, had mistreated for so long. It’s an incredible, memorable portrait of a journey in the land of too much food, constrictive gender norms, and body shaming, and it’s unusual to hear it told by a man. It’s also about identity: how our past selves cast an inescapable shadow over our future selves, despite who we become.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

Longreads Best of 2018: Crime Reporting

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in crime reporting.

Pamela Colloff
ProPublica senior reporter and New York Times Magazine writer-at-large.

The Disappeared (Hannah Dreier, ProPublica with Newsday)

When eleven high school students went missing in a single county on Long Island in just two years, law enforcement shrugged. Most of the teenagers who disappeared were recent transplants from Central America, and many of them were last seen heading into the woods, lured by the promise of weed. The Suffolk County police department responded with stomach-churning indifference, telling frantic parents that their children had simply run away.

Hannah Dreier chronicles an upside-down world in which one boy’s mother – an envelope factory employee who speaks no English – is left to piece together what happened to her son. Based on more than 100 interviews and voluminous public records, Hannah Dreier’s storytelling is as vivid as it is effortless. She builds upon an accumulation of damning details — like the fact that one Spanish-speaking mother, whose son was murdered, had to pay a taxi driver to interpret for her at the police station. (“He kept the clock running and charged her $70,” Dreier writes.) “The Disappeared,” which was turned into an episode of This American Life, is a devastating work of both relentless reporting and empathy.


Michael A. Gonzales
Contributor to Catapult, The Paris Review, and Longreads.

A Preacher, a Scam, and a Massacre in Brooklyn (Sarah Weinman, CrimeReads)

Fans of vintage New York crime stories will love Sarah Weinman’s brilliant Brooklyn-based tale, a sordid story that only gets worse the more you read. Weinman takes the reader into the mind and home of a con man named DeVernon LeGrand, a pretend preacher who kept a stable of women who dressed as nuns and begged on the streets. Of course, in true pimp fashion, LeGrand took most of their money. After moving his flock to 222 Brooklyn Avenue in 1966, things get worse for the crooked organization as it eventually becomes involved in kidnapping and murder. Although in the early 2000s I lived four blocks away from the scene of LeGrand’s various crimes for thirteen years, I had never heard of him or his house of pain and death until reading Weinman’s wonderfully written piece.


Jeff Maysh
Contributor to The Atlantic, Smithsonian MagazineLos Angeles Magazine, and The Daily Beast. Author of The Spy with No Name.

Jerry and Marge Go Large (Jason Fagone, Huffpost Highline)

I write about unusual heists from middle-America, so I was game for this Michigan lotto scam story from FOIA-bandit Jason Fagone. In crime writing it’s the characters who make for a good yarn, and I was all-in on this Mom and Pop who used brain-power to beat the system, and the odds.

The Man Who Captures Criminals for the DEA by Playing Them (Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, The New Yorker)

Why actor Spyros Enotiades told his story to Yudhijit Bhattacharjee I don’t know (there must surely be a bounty on his head), but the storytelling was extraordinary. Undercover capers don’t get better than this.


Jayati Vora
Managing editor at The Investigative Fund.

The Trauma of Everyday Gun Violence in New Orleans (Jimmie Briggs and Andre Lambertson, VICE)

This photojournalistic investigation into how gun violence affects black communities explores how living with that violence can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) just like experience with war can. But unlike with returning veterans, gun violence-plagued communities don’t get the funding or mental health resources to help them cope.


Alissa Quart
Executive Editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Author of five books including SqueezedBranded, and the poetry book, Monetized. She writes The Guardian’s Outclassed column.

Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out (Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times Magazine)

This is fantastic longform that embodies what I think social justice reportage should be today. It combines an under-heard, first-person voice with a gripping true story about one of the most crucial issues in America today, incarceration. Betts, who is a lawyer and a poet, also gives his tale an unexpected literary feel, with a comprehensive gloss on the sociology behind juvenile crime, prisons, jailhouse lawyers, and the limited social possibilities for ex-felons.

Omnipresence (Ann Neumann, Virginia Quarterly Review)

This multimedia criminal justice story is about how too-bright, all-night lighting in housing projects, and faulty design overall, contributes to a troubling level of surveillance in poorer communities under the guise of fighting crime. It makes something as basic as sleeping uncomfortable for thousands upon thousands of law-abiding citizens. I really like this story’s taxonomic, poetic style, as well as how architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella gives the story a more formalist visual valence than your typical housing piece.


Tori Telfer
Author of Lady Killers and host of the Criminal Broads podcast.

Blood Cries Out (Sean Patrick Cooper, The Atavist)

In the book Popular Crime by Bill James, the author writes that the phrase “something terrible has happened” is “the best title ever for a crime book…those words turn the ‘crime story’ inside out by exposing the human beings standing on what otherwise appears to be a vast and grisly stage.”

We’re hardly ten percent of the way into the story in “Blood Cries Out” before someone uses those words to tell her husband that the unthinkable has occurred: there’s been a murder right across the road. And the vast and grisly stage? Small-town Chillicothe, Missouri, where two men have amicably farmed the same land for years, until one of them wakes up in the middle of the night with a bullet in his face and his wife dead beside him. The wounded man initially suspects his daughter’s abusive boyfriend, but then changes his story and accuses his farming partner, and then his farming partner’s son, which results in the sort of twisty and utterly corrupt legal process worthy of Making a Murderer part three.

The piece is full of letters and depositions and secret meetings and a lot of paperwork, but on occasion, it vibrates with poignantly biblical/Americana-esque undertones, from the title (plucked from Genesis) to lines like, “[the victim’s] murder was an attack on a Christian matriarch, a cherished local archetype. Similarly, [the innocent man’s] conviction represented the denial of an eldest son’s right to live and work on his father’s land.”


Sarah Weinman
Author of The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World.

The End of Evil (Sarah Marshall, The Believer)

I published a book and wrote a lot of my own pieces in 2018 — including one for this site — so, oddly, I didn’t keep as good track of longform reporting produced by others (podcasts, however, that’s a different story, but this is Longreads, not Longlistens). But I keep returning to Sarah Marshall’s “The End of Evil” because it makes fresh a story long consigned to easy tropes. Marshall, who also co-hosts the stellar podcast You’re Wrong About… and is one of my favorite true crime writers, gives voice to the myriad of women and girls Bundy murdered, shows him as something far less than an evil mastermind, and demonstrates why, with particular clarity, “the longer you spend inside this story, the less sense you can find.”


Catherine Cusick
Audience editor, Longreads

Checkpoint Nation (Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer)

When Americans think of “the border” as a narrow and specific line, we neglect the legal reality that the term actually applies to a border zone, a much larger halo covering up to 100 air miles from any U.S. land or coastal boundary. The zone touches parts of 38 states, covering 10 in their entirety — and within that wide rim, anyone can be subjected to a warrantless search at any time. In this signature longform reality check, Melissa del Bosque digs into the history of how Congress vested U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with alarming, far-reaching powers to search and detain even long-term residents who’ve never committed a crime at surprise, “suspicionless” checkpoints.

Japan’s Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women (Shiho Fukada, Bloomberg Businessweek)

In a series of sweet, anonymous snapshots, Shiho Fukada talks to and photographs a growing cohort of Japanese seniors: “otherwise law-abiding elderly women” who have found a solution to the loneliness of aging in the reliable comforts of prison. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior, Fukada reports, and 90 percent of them are arrested for shoplifting. From the simple things they steal (rice, cold medicine, a frying pan) to the circumstances they’re trying to escape (bedridden or violent spouses, invisibility, loss, and financial strain), the details of this story make structural inadequacies to meet the unmet social and healthcare needs of an aging population all too clear.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

Leaving Barrio 18

A Barrio 18 leader after his arrest in San Salvador, El Salvador, in 2015. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)

At The Intercept, Danielle Mackey writes about what it’s like for young El Salvadoreans to try and leave gangs like MS-13 or Barrio 18. Of the four young people she followed, one is in hiding, one is being forced to buy her child’s safety with criminal favors, and one has been murdered.

Kids like Benjamin try to leave their gangs by hiding in plain sight. They bury their pasts and attempt to start over. They do it in myriad ways and so well that often they’re even unaware of each other. Alone, they shed skin like any wild creature and take on a new identity.

But their needs are akin to those of child soldiers or war veterans — and the devastating cruelty wrought by gangs leaves little public will to provide that kind of support. As a result, the process is like burrowing through a boulder with a screwdriver. Exhausting. Seemingly impossible. You sweat it out alone.

Benjamin, who joined Barrio 18 at age 12, is the fourth. He managed to negotiate a retirement from the gang, but it’s not an easy or peaceful one.

The first thing Benjamin did on his first morning of freedom was smoke pot. “Habit,” he told me. Also terror. Still in bed, he burned through five blunts, paralyzed by a refrain: “What will come of me?”

Every day of the past decade of his life had been determined by the gang. The gang’s interests were his duties, its members were his peers. The gang’s risks were his and its forms of protection were too. But not anymore. He didn’t even have a place to live; he had woken up in the gang house, and today he must leave. Then, a scarier thought: There was a trade-off implicit in his decision. Yesterday he had an identity, but today he had freedom.

He bounced between hostels until just before Christmas, when he found an affordable apartment in an old brick structure near the National University of El Salvador, four stories tall and packed with people. He was relieved to have a room. He needed to lock himself in it for protection from former enemies and police — “people who want me dead” — but also from himself. He had spent most days high on marijuana or acid or cocaine before leaving the gang, and his zealous new evangelical identity prohibited drugs, so he was antsy to wean himself off them. He needed to whittle himself down to his acceptable parts, his holy parts.

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