Search Results for: Washington Post

Does A.G. Sulzberger Even Understand What a Public Editor Is?

(Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images)

Last year The New York Times announced it was ending the public editor — a role created to help readers get accountability from the paper of record in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal in 2003 — and replacing it with the Reader Center.

Ever since, readers of the Times have lamented the loss whenever an article or op-ed comes out that draws consternation. The paper’s final public editor, Liz Spayd, was less than beloved, but her predecessor Margaret Sullivan, now a media columnist at The Washington Post, earned the respect not just of readers, but of those inside the Times newsroom.

A friend at the Times recently asked me what I thought of the Reader Center. I replied that I didn’t know it had been set up or even what it did. I’m a home delivery subscriber to the Times, a native New Yorker who grew up writing detailed letters of admiration to Times reporters. Why hadn’t I heard about what the Reader Center had been up to? Read more…

Diary of a Do-Gooder

Illustration by Nusha Ashjaee

Sara Eckel | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,774 words)

In the fall of 2016, I stood on the concrete steps of a mustard-colored ranch house off the New York State Thruway in Ulster County, a broken red umbrella hooked below my shoulder. The mustached man at the door — 50ish, in a t-shirt and khakis — had the stern, dry look of a high-school science teacher.

“Hi, Thomas?”

He nodded.

“Hi, Thomas, my name is Sara, and I’m a neighborhood volunteer for Zephyr Teachout for Congress.”

Thomas didn’t tell me to go away, didn’t slam the door or scold me for interrupting his day. He stoically endured my spiel about why I was spending my Sunday afternoon doing this — because Zephyr has been fighting corruption for her entire career, and I believe she’ll go to Washington and represent the people of New York’s 19th District, rather than corporations and billionaires.

“Okay, thank you,” he said, closing the door.

“Would you like some literature?” I asked, proffering some rain-dotted pamphlets.

“No, you people have sent us plenty.”

You people.

Read more…

A Speech and a Sermon

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (AFP/Getty Images) and Oprah Winfrey (Sthanlee Mirador / Sipa via AP Images)

In November 1967, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The sermon, titled, “But If Not,” starts with a parable from the Book of Daniel.

Three young men — Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego — refuse to bow before a golden image of King Nebuchadnezzar. “Our God whom we serve,” they tell the king, “is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace.” They believe God will save them, in the end, for disobeying the king’s immoral order to worship him instead.

“But if not,” they reason, “be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.” In other words, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are pretty sure that God will reward them in the afterlife for rejecting this false idol. “But if not” — even if their refusal wouldn’t stamp their one-way ticket out of hell — it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t bow before the golden image anyway, because it would be wrong.

Dr. King interprets the story as a biblical portrayal of civil disobedience. The three men honor “a commitment to conscience” before honoring the law of the land because, as Dr. King says, “a moral man can’t obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.” The men aren’t refusing conditionally, or positive that they will be saved in exchange. They’re refusing because they know, deep down, that it wouldn’t be right.

What does this mean? It means, in the final analysis, you do right not to avoid hell. If you’re doing right merely to keep from going to something that traditional theology has called hell, then you aren’t doing right. If you do right merely to go to a condition that theologians have called heaven, you aren’t doing right. If you are doing right to avoid pain and to achieve happiness and pleasure, then you aren’t doing right.

Ultimately you must do right because it’s right to do right. And you got to say “But if not.” You must love ultimately because it’s lovely to love. You must be just because it’s right to be just. You must be honest because it’s right to be honest.

Fifty years after Dr. King delivered this sermon, Oprah Winfrey, the first black woman to receive the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement, delivered another inspired speech that brought viewers to tears and attendees to their feet.

“For too long,” Oprah said, “women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of [brutally powerful] men. But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up.”

“In my career, what I’ve always tried my best to do, whether on television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave. To say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, persevere, and how we overcome. I’ve interviewed and portrayed people who’ve withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights.

“So I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say ‘Me too’ again.”

Time and again, Oprah has proven her commitment to conscience. She used her platform at the Golden Globes to imagine a more just world — one where our collective conscience kicks in more often, protects more women from violence, and leads us more reliably to choices that are right, good, and safe.

Women in the audience rose to their feet. Men in the audience rose to their feet, too. But few of the men spoke up.

Were these the phenomenal men? Where were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego? Were the men whose time is up choosing to listen, just this once? Or was there fear in their silence — an aversion to risk, a conditional bargain, a negotiation of face?

As Martin McDonagh, the writer-director of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri who won for best screenplay, put it to Cara Buckley in the New York Times, “I do feel it’s time for men to shut up and listen.” Oprah made sure to include men in her speech, too — “every man who chooses to listen” — by singling out listeners specifically.

Maybe the men really were listening. Maybe they still are.

But if not:

Time will not run out on men learning how to speak up for what is right, when the microphone makes its way back to them. There are ways to pass the mic even when given an opportunity to take it — as Oprah did, by telling Recy Taylor‘s story.

Recy Taylor is dead now, and so is Dr. King. No one who refused to hear them decades ago was dead at the time, though their spirits may have been. Maybe the men who hurt them are all gone now — those bygone souls that never listened. Maybe their fears and their toxicity and their influence all died with them.

Maybe all of mankind’s cowardly traits are in the past. Maybe their time is up.

But if not:

You may be 38 years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause — and you refuse to do it because you are afraid; you refuse to do it because you want to live longer; you’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you’re afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity; or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, and so you refuse to take the stand.

Well you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90! And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice.

Read the sermon

Further reading, watching, and listening:

The Encyclopedia of the Missing

(James Hosking)

Jeremy Lybarger | Longreads | 4,160 words (17 minutes)

From the outside, it’s just another mobile home in a neighborhood of mobile homes on the northwest side of Fort Wayne, Indiana. There’s the same carport, the same wedge of grass out front, the same dreamy suburban soundtrack of wind chimes and air conditioners. Nothing suggests this particular home belongs to a 32-year-old woman whose encyclopedic knowledge of missing persons has earned her a cult following online. The FBI knows who she is. So do detectives and police departments across the country. Desperate families sometimes seek her out. Chances are that if you mention someone who has disappeared in America, Meaghan Good can tell you the circumstances from memory — the who, what, when, and where. The why is almost always a mystery.

A week after she turned 19, Good started the Charley Project, an ever-expanding online database that features the stories and photographs of people who’ve been missing in the United States for at least a year. She named the site after Charles Brewster Ross, a 4-year-old boy kidnapped in 1874 from the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. His body was never found, and his abduction prompted the first known ransom note in America. Like Charles Brewster Ross, the nearly 10,000 people profiled on Good’s site are cold cases. Many fit the cliché of having vanished without a trace, and if it weren’t for Meaghan Good, most of these cases would have faded into oblivion. Read more…

Dance Me to the End of Love

Photo by Ahmad Odeh

Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | January 2018 | 20 minutes (4,983 words)

We converged on New York City from every corner of the globe: from college dance departments in Ohio and Michigan and Minnesota, and conservatories in Florida and California and North Carolina; from Athens and Stockholm and Tel Aviv, and tiny towns in Brazil and Ecuador and Italy, all of us sweeping into Manhattan, that sliver of an island, from the outer boroughs for morning class. In our bags: cut-off sweatpants and bottles of water, tape to bandage split and bleeding toes, matches to soften the tape, apples and bags of tamari almonds from the Park Slope Food Coop, sports bras and tubes of mascara, gum, cigarettes, wallets full of cash from late nights working in bars and restaurants, paperbacks and copies of New York Magazine, and iPods for long subway rides. The bags weighed 10, 15 pounds.

Our lives were organized around class. We needed jobs that wouldn’t interfere with our real reason for being here. We heard rumors of people who had gotten Real Jobs — as temps, as school teachers, jobs with insurance and benefits and holidays off — who swore they’d keep dancing. There are plenty of classes after work! they’d say. This was technically true, but we knew that they’d get talked into going out for that one post-work drink, or be lulled by the security and predictability of it all, the paycheck and the summer Fridays, the day-in, day-out schedule; a full-time modern dancer’s life too eccentric, too chancy, too ridiculous. We knew that once that happened, it was hard to let go and dive back in. This was the time: you had to do it early; this career couldn’t wait until 28 or 30, couldn’t wait for you to get properly settled in the city, to hook up your safety net. There would always be a stronger, younger dancer on your heels. The time was now, only now.

Read more…

‘The Paper’ is the Most Essential and Overlooked Film About Journalism

There’s a lot to like about The Post, a film that has drawn rave reviews even before its pre-holidays debut. The combination of Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, and Tom Hanks as the paper’s editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee is the rare pairing of GOAT actors operating at their all-time peak.

The film covers the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times, the Washington Post’s attempt to obtain its own copy, and the ensuing battle against the Nixon administration which led to the Supreme Court case about the Daniel Ellsberg-leaked documents. As Manohla Dargis of the New York Times described in her review of the film, “The pleasure of The Post is how it sweeps you up in how it all went down…Like many movies that turn the past into entertainment, The Post gently traces the arc of history, while also bending it for dramatic punch and narrative expediency.”

The Post is the ultimate click-bait film for our current moment: An all-star cast telling the story of righteous journalism while press freedoms are being threatened on a daily basis. There is a time-honored tradition of films that have functioned in a similar way, including NetworkAll the President’s Men, and most recently, Spotlight. Last month The Post published a compendium of the greatest journalism movies ever made, selected by the likes of Katy Tur, Jill Abramson, and Marty Baron (who, of course, chose Spotlight, where he’s played by Liev Schreiber). And on the heels of The Post’s rundown was a feature by Haley Mlotek on the 30th anniversary of Broadcast News, the 1987 drama that “predicted journalism as we know it.”

What’s most interesting isn’t the selection of films that have largely defined what our conceived notions of how journalism functions, including what reporters look like — bodies clad in beige clothing drinking copious amounts of coffee. What I find fascinating is that most of these films deal with large-scale or long-form investigative reporting, the type of work that takes months and involves countless interview montages. What about a film that covers a day in the life of an average newspaper?

I’m talking about The Paper, in my opinion, the best journalism film ever made and one that almost never gets any credit. Starring Michael Keaton as the metro editor of the fictional Sun — a loose portrayal of The New York Post —  the movie details the killing of two out-of-state businessmen in a pre-gentrified Williamsburg and the arrest of two black teenagers for the crime. The problem is the charges are bogus, a mob hit made to look like murders with racial undertones at a time when New York, on the screen and in real life, had reached a tipping point. The Sun and its staff, including Glenn Close as the managing editor, Robert Duvall as the EIC, and Randy Quaid as a quasi-Mike McAlary-Pete Hamill-type columnist, have a day to both confirm and break the exclusive. Asked at one point why the story can’t wait until the next day, as Close tells Keaton during a staff meeting, “We taint them today, we make them look good on Saturday, everybody’s happy.” Keaton exclaims, “Not tomorrow, right fucking now, today!”

Co-written by Stephen Koepp, former executive editor of Time magazine, The Paper beautifully illustrates the lunacy and creativity of working under a deadline. The feeling one gets upon getting the perfect quote — “Don’t take the bat out of my hands, it’s the ninth inning, I got to get the quote, the guy’s not going to be there all night,” says Keaton — or confirming a previously deep background detail on the record. It’s a rush native to only journalists, the endorphins multiplying as you have only minutes to finish the article. Every reporter has experienced at least one editor snapping at them as Duvall does to Keaton, “You want to run the story? You have five hours until 8 o’clock — go get the story. Do your job!” And then it’s over, and you have to do it again the next day. That’s the inherent genius of The Paper. No other film conveys the madness of deadline journalism — or the fun.

Midway through the film, Quaid, who shines as the paper’s embattled columnist who believes people are plotting against him, fires a gun through a stack of newspapers to end an argument, which allows Keaton to finish a conversation with his wife (played by the brilliant Marisa Tomei).

At which point, Tomei, whose character works at the Sun and is at the beginning of her maternity leave, gushes, “God, I miss this place!”

The journalism practiced in All the President’s MenThe Post, and Spotlight is never going to cease — it’s the journalism that will always endure. The deep-rooted injustices that are so outrageous, it is as if the abuses themselves are practically begging for someone to shine a light on. Liev Schreiber, as The Boston Globe‘s editor-in-chief, makes this point in Spotlight: “Sometimes it is easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly, a light gets turned on.” But what is being threatened is the journalism of The Paper: the daily local grind.

Following the dissolution of uber-local sites DNAInfo and Gothamist, Danielle Tcholakian wrote about what happens when newspapers stop covering what immediately impacts its citizens:

That was a big part of what we were there to do: show people exactly how every action, big or small, impacted their daily lives in the neighborhoods they lived in and loved.

And that is what makes The Paper so special, and why Tomei’s quote is such a genius line. She underscores the heart of the film: forget the money, the fame, and the accolades, all that matters is getting the story right — for a moment, because as the 1010 Wins tagline blares throughout the film at various points, “Your whole world can change in 24 hours.”

My Daughter Died, But I’m Still Mothering Her

neo8iam via Pexels

Jacqueline Dooley | Longreads | January 2018 | 20 minutes (5,067words)

In July 2016, when we got the results of my 15-year-old daughter’s CT scan, my friend Babs introduced me to a new term: “anticipatory grief.” The scan showed that tumors in Ana’s lungs were noticeably larger than they’d been three months earlier, and masses in her abdomen had multiplied. Having been through this eight years earlier with her then 16-year-old son, Killian, Babs recognized that what we were dealing with wasn’t just a bad scan. It was a turning point in Ana’s disease — the Inflammatory Myofibroblastic Tumor, a rare form of pediatric cancer, she’d been diagnosed with four years earlier.

Medicinenet.com defines anticipatory grief as “the normal mourning that occurs when a patient or family is expecting a death.” As if there was anything normal about preparing to mourn my child’s death.

I didn’t like the term. I wasn’t ready to start grieving.

Babs suggested I reach out to a local hospice organization. I recoiled at the thought. Ana looked and felt good. I was sure her oncologist would find a drug to slow her progression until some miracle of modern medicine revealed a cure. It seemed impossible that Ana would die. I had no frame of reference or spiritual foundation for the enormity of that kind of loss.

Ana’s oncologist switched her to a new medication, but made it clear that this likely would only slow things down. Although it was disappointing, we still had hope. Ana glowed with health, at least outwardly. Maybe this new treatment would work better than the others had. Maybe.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Under-Recognized Stories

Here are the best stories we thought deserved more attention this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

Sari Botton
Essays editor, Longreads

How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay (Porochista Khakpour, Catapult)

Women writers of color aren’t given enough opportunities, and too often when they are, the opportunity is limited. They’re asked, again and again, to write about aspects of their identity, and are rarely afforded chances to write about anything else. Writing in the second person, Porochista Khakpour helps the reader to imagine being an artist hemmed in by such limitations. She takes us through the arc of her career thus far: from deciding early on that she didn’t want to “write what you know,” as a mentor suggested; to becoming the Iranian-American essayist of choice every time certain publications wanted an opinion from that particular demographic; to deciding she was no longer willing to be limited in that way, but feeling conflicted nonetheless. As a fan of Kahkpour’s writing, I certainly hope this isn’t her last essay but instead marks the beginning of a new chapter in which she feels free to write about whatever she chooses.

Kate’s Still Here (Libby Copeland, Esquire)

I’ve reached an age where death — of friends, family, colleagues — has become a more regular occurrence. I’ve become slightly obsessed with it, but at the same time, remain afraid to discuss it and plan for it. It was refreshing and moving for me to read this feature by Libby Copeland about a couple who embraced the inevitable so boldly and lovingly. Copeland spends time with Kate and Deloy Oberlin as they consciously prepare for Kate’s death from metastatic breast cancer, and again in the aftermath of her passing. Deloy honors his wife’s wishes that once she’s gone, a gathering will be held where family and friends can visit with her body, chilled with dry ice and frozen water bottles. Afterward, he delivers her body to a site where it is composted as part of a study in green burial. I believe it might be impossible to get to the end of this piece without feeling warmed and shedding some tears.


Aaron Gilbreath
Contributing editor, Longreads

In the Land of Vendettas That Go on Forever (Amanda Petrusich, Virginia Quarterly Review)

Amanda Petrusich she traveled to Northern Albania to write about the culture of vengeance that guides the region’s sense of justice. Her story takes readers along rocky roads to mountain villages, but the real journey takes place inside the minds of the local people, whose ideas about justice require a vigilante, not the law, to kill a person who was involved in a murder. His eye-for-an-eye approach harkens back to early tribal times in the country. Perfectly mixing narration with analysis, the story ultimately asks philosophical questions: Does revenge really make up for a loss? What is justice? In a year when many of us eagerly watch special counsel Robert Mueller investigate a president who flaunts his disregard for the law, justice is on the forefront of our minds, except some of us want it to arrive through legal channels.


Matt Giles
Contributing editor and chief fact-checker, Longreads

Jumpin’ Joe (Robert Silverman, Victory Journal)

Much of sports discourse this year has centered on Colin Kaepernick. Thousands of words and hours of conversation have been unspooled on the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, his stance on athletes’ rights, and why the NFL has seemingly blacklisted the QB who nearly won a Super Bowl four years ago. But to understand the present, it helps to look to the past, and Silverman’s profile of Jumpin’ Joe Caldwell, a star forward with the ABA in the 1970s, is timely and worth highlighting. Caldwell was vice president of the league’s players union, and after a contentious episode with the management of the St. Louis Spirits, who believed Caldwell convinced Marvin Barnes, the team’s best player, to jettison to the NBA, Caldwell couldn’t land another contract in either league. Caldwell’s story is truly one of the first in which athletes sought the control they deserved from their employer, and though Silverman doesn’t overtly connect Caldwell’s situation to Kaepernick’s, the parallels are more than evident.


Ethan Chiel
Contributing editor and fact-checker, Longreads

The Immortal Life of John Tesh’s NBA Anthem “Roundball Rock” (David Roth, Vice)

The first time I heard John Tesh’s voice was in the passenger seat of my dad’s Mazda, driving through upstate New York as part of a road trip to visit colleges. Tesh was hosting his daily radio show and he was telling an interminable story with no point, but I ate that shit up. It was only later that I’d see the famous Red Rocks video David Roth mentions in his wonderful story about Tesh’s NBA on NBC anthem, or learn anything about that part of Tesh’s life. But through the story of that instrumental anthem — which remains a banger — and his conversation with Tesh, Roth manages to tease out the easygoing, very slightly anodyne, successful-yet-anonymous nature of Tesh’s work and life, as well as what makes him so bizarrely charming.


Ben Huberman
Senior editor, Longreads

The Age of Rudeness (Rachel Cusk, The New York Times Magazine)

Last February feels like centuries ago. There were still so many terrible things for us to endure in a year that had just started. Yet 10 months and 10,000 news cycles later, Rachel Cusk’s essay remains fresh and unsettling, like a prophecy in which the worst parts may or may not have already come true. Cusk looks at airport agents and shop assistants, Sophocles and Jesus, and yes, Trump makes an appearance too. Through this tangle of anecdotes, she channels something many of us have been feeling yet have failed to articulate: The sense that all previous protocols of basic social decency are broken, and that we’re still not sure how to handle the shards.


Catherine Cusick
Audience development editor, Longreads

The Selfie Monkey Goes to the Ninth Circuit (Sarah Jeong, Motherboard)

Humor never really felt like an option in such a serious year, but Jeong’s simian legal saga reminded me that humor shouldn’t be so disposable. Her story isn’t really about the monkey; it’s about who can rightfully be considered the “next friend” of an Internet-famous crested macaque. It’s about whether or not we can fight the good fight and giggle our way through it and still make a case for justice when it really matters. Bonkers things happened in 2017 — absurd, hilarious things — and not all of them were life-threatening or world-ending or rights-violating. (Unless monkeys have standing to sue under the Copyright Act. Then yeah, some violations went down.)

Humor is like taste-testing non-lethal poison: you never forget it. It’s what made Naruto stand out as the one monkey I clearly didn’t appreciate enough at the time. Most of what flew under the radar this year was probably funny, and I think missing out on that laughter cost us. But writing that has a punchline isn’t an indulgence, it’s a vitamin. We always need more of it than we think we do.


Emily Perper
Contributing editor, Longreads

Contemplating Death at the Edge of the Continent (Laura Turner, Catapult)

This year, I wrote rarely. Every time I put pen to paper or started to type, I began and ended in the same place, full of dread. Writing, which used to be a way to work through my fear, seemed only to reinforce it. And so I looked for writers who could say what I could not. Laura Turner was one of those writers. Her column at Catapult, “A Cure for Fear,” made me feel less alone. Every entry was poignant and true, in an eerie get-out-of-my-brain sort of way.

But my favorite essay of hers predates that column, and it’s called “Contemplating Death at the Edge of the Continent.” Maybe you, too, spiral into a panic when you think about the inevitability of dying. Many nights, I lie awake and hyperventilate while my partner sleeps peacefully next to me. Catapult published Turner’s essay on January 11, the week before Trump’s inauguration, and dying felt closer than ever this year. Would my death come via nuclear war with North Korea? Cancer I wouldn’t be able to treat when my healthcare disappeared? Assault at the hands of someone who hates trans people?

To come to terms with her own anxiety about The End, Turner sought out solitude at the New Camaldoli Hermitage on the Pacific coast. In addition to our shared chronic anxiety, Turner’s writing is infused with a Christian spirituality I recognize and appreciate deeply. I am a person of lapsed faith, but in these uncertain days, Christianity feels comforting in its familiarity. There are no neat answers. We have to sit with that — Turner in her quiet cell on the coast, me at my desk in my cold apartment. So I implore you to read Turner’s work — not just this essay, but her entire oeuvre about anxiety, because it is beautiful, authentic, and necessary.


Danielle Jackson
Contributing editor, Longreads

Eve Ewing: Other Means to Liberation (Kiese Laymon, Guernica)

This conversation between Laymon and poet and sociologist Eve Ewing on the publication of her well-received collection of poems Electric Arches, is spirited and wide-ranging. They talk through the policies that shaped the conditions of Chicago’s public schools, the migratory patterns of black Americans in the 20th century, and the case of Assata Shakur. What has stayed with me is how the sense of comfort and warmth between Ewing and Laymon makes space for them, and by extension, their audience, to imagine new ways of thinking, talking, and doing creative work.


Danielle Tcholakian
Staff writer, Longreads

How a Pearland Mom Changed Her Life to Save Her Transgender Child (Roxanna Asgarian, Houstonia Magazine)

It may seem strange to deem a story tweeted by the ACLU of Texas “under-recognized,” but Roxanna Asgarian’s feature on a devoutly religious, long-conservative Texas woman’s decision to give up her entire life — losing friends, family and community — and reconfigure her own identity to save her young transgender daughter’s life didn’t seem to generate the attention and discussion it deserved. Maybe it was because it came out in Houstonia’s December issue, maybe because the mother and daughter featured in it had also been written about by national outlets. But Asgarian did the crucial thing that local outlets do, after the national media parachutes in and back out again: She stayed on the story. Her account of Kimberly Shappley’s awakening and devotion to her daughter Kai spans years and is excruciating in its heartbreaking detail. I still wince and shudder thinking about the time Kimberly discovered Kai’s legs were cold while tucking her into bed, only to find her daughter — still called Joseph then — had taken too-small underpants from a toy doll and worn them herself, cutting off her own circulation. While national outlets heralded Kimberly’s heroism, Asgarian showed that their story, and their struggle, is far from over.

Before first grade started, Kai asked her mom a question. “She said, ‘Mommy, when I grow up and have really long hair, will I look weird that I have a penis?’” Shappley recalled. It started a long conversation between them about what makes someone beautiful, and about how everyone’s body is different. Kai seemed satisfied, but later, she followed up: Why, then, don’t princesses have penises?

“I said, ‘How do you know that? How do you know that Ariel wasn’t born with a penis? Because she didn’t like the body she was born in either, and so she changed her body to look like what she felt she was born to be.’”

Now, Shappley said, her and Kai’s “secret giggle-giggle” is that Ariel is transgender, and that other princesses might be, too, because “not everybody tells.”

“It’s constantly having to be an inventive parent, and being quick on your feet,” Shappley said. “But isn’t all parenting that way?”


Krista Stevens
Senior editor, Longreads

The Detective of Northern Oddities, (Christopher Solomon, Outside)

As someone who earns her living seated indoors, laptop in hand, I’m endlessly curious about people whose jobs are very different from mine. At Outside, Christopher Solomon profiles Kathy Burek, a veterinary pathologist who examines unusual deaths in the Alaskan animal kingdom. Elbow deep in bodily fluids, Burek works on everything from sea otters to polar bears, and her necropsies are revealing stunning evidence of climate change in the North that will soon find its way South. The fascinating science in Solomon’s beautiful prose made this a satisfying read.

When they captured her off Cohen Island in the summer of 2007, she weighed 58 pounds and was the size of a collie. The growth rings in a tooth they pulled revealed her age—eight years, a mature female sea otter.

They anesthetized her and placed tags on her flippers. They assigned her a number: LCI013, or 13 for short. They installed a transmitter in her belly and gave her a VHF radio frequency: 165.155 megahertz. Then they released her. The otter was now, in ­effect, her own small-wattage Alaskan ­radio station. If you had the right kind of ­antenna and a receiver, you could launch a skiff into Kachemak Bay, lift the antenna, and hunt the air for the music of her existence: an ­occasional ping in high C that was both solitary and reassuring amid the static of the wide world.


Michelle Legro
Senior editor, Longreads

The Painful Truth About Teeth (Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, The Washington Post)

Filling the Gap (John Stanton, Buzzfeed)

It’s almost hard to believe that the life and death battle over health care dominated the first half of this year, as stories about Medicare, Medicaid, pre-existing conditions, and outrageously expensive medications helped defeat the bill in Congress.

Among these dire stories there was a medical desperation still in the shadows: that of inadequate or nonexistent dental care. The Washington Post’s visit to an enormous mobile clinic on the Eastern Shore showed the lengths people were willing to go to in order to fix just one thing. And in a Mexican border town, John Stanton’s riveting reporting revealed a parallel economy thriving on the shoddy American healthcare system, one where patients — many of them Trump voters — cross the border for cheap dental procedures, if they can afford to make the trip. These stories were a stark reminder that medical care is about far more than life or death, it’s about living with dignity.


Mike Dang
Editor in chief, Longreads

Series on Children and Gun Violence (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post)

Whenever someone asked me for a story recommendation this year, I asked them if they were reading Cox’s Washington Post series on how children are being affected by gun violence in the U.S. They would either say “no” or would tell me, “Oh, I’ve seen that but haven’t gotten around to it yet.” Well, now is the time to read this stellar series that might have been overshadowed by so many other stellar reporting done this year.

Start here, and then go here, here, here, here and here. If you’ve only got time for one, in this piece Cox does a particularly good job of showing the trauma suffered by six teenagers following the Las Vegas shooting massacre. If I were on a committee handing out journalism awards, John Woodrow Cox would be on my list of honorees.

Longreads Best of 2017: 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.

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

Dirty John (Christopher Goffard, The Los Angeles Times)

I love a good villain, and my baddie of the year was John Meehan, a hazel-eyed Casanova who hid his murky past behind fake surgeon’s scrubs and a kaleidoscope of lies. This wannabe mobster lured a moneyed Orange County divorcée into a toxic relationship, creating an elevated psychodrama that recalled Gone Girl. Delivered as a six-part narrative on the web, Dirty John was also accompanied by a six-part podcast. Both were irresistible. Goffard’s spare prose kept this thriller racing towards its bloody end — the kind of murderous climax we were promised at the start of S-Town but never received — one that made an unlikely hero of a seemingly meek fan of The Walking Dead. Bravo to Goffard for divining this epic yarn from local news to national attention, and for his terrifying portrait of Meehan told through the eyes of his victims. This is the genius of the domestic horror genre: The monster is no longer under the bed but between the sheets.


Rachel Monroe
Contributor to The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New Republic. Author a book on women, crime, and obsession will be published by Scribner in 2019.

The Tragic Story of a Texas Teen and the Marines Who Killed Him for No Reason (Sasha von Oldershausen, Splinter)

 This May marked 20 years since a Marine sniper shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, Jr., a soft-spoken teenager who was tending his goats in the rural border outpost of Redford, Texas. Von Oldershausen not only does an admirable job of attempting to reconstruct what happened that day in 1997, she also explores the ramifications of the fatal shooting on the community and uses it as a springboard to discuss how militarization inflects daily life along the border. “The moment you employ the rhetoric of war, it becomes a battle zone,” one of von Oldershausen’s sources tells her. “And this is what they did in Redford. They made war on the United States by killing Esequiel.”

Sarah Marshall
Contributor to Buzzfeed, The New Republic, and the Life of the Law podcast.

‘I Am a Girl Now,’ Sage Smith Wrote. Then She Went Missing (Emma Eisenberg, Splinter)

Eisenberg describes in heartbreaking detail how both the police department and the broader community of Charlottesville failed to adequately investigate the disappearance of a trans girl of color. Her reporting illuminates systemic injustice by taking the reader into the hearts and minds of the family and friends Sage Smith left behind. The article is both deeply reported and deeply felt and gives the reader the space to reckon with the questions they cannot answer. Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing about Eisenberg’s work here is her ability to show Sage Smith to the reader not as a victim, but as a person. “Every clubgoer leaned closer when Sage spoke,” Eisenberg writes, “as if they were campers pulled to a fire.”

Reyhan Harmanci
Editor, Topic

Carl Ichan’s Failed Raid on Washington (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker)

While it may not have been the juiciest crime story this year, Patrick Radden Keefe’s precise and damning piece on Carl Icahn’s stint in the Trump Administration chilled me more than I could have imagined. This is how the world works: We’re being taken for fools while the Masters of the Universe move from private to public positions. I can only hope to read about more financial crimes in 2018 that get appropriately punished.


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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Trond H. Trosdahl / AFP / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sarah Smith, Mattathias Schwartz, John Woodrow Cox, Justin Heckert, and Jonah Weiner.

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