Barry Yeoman | The New New South, Creatavist | December 2013 | 52 minutes (13,100 words) For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to feature “The Gutbucket King,” a new ebook by journalist Barry Yeoman and The New New South, about the tumultuous life of blues singer Little Freddie King, who survived stabbings, alcoholism and personal tragedy. […]
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Podcast Pick: 'Dec. 31, 1995'
Random Tape is a podcast by David Weinberg, and it’s exactly what its name implies—it’s audio from a random tape. The most recent episode (discovered via @samlistens) is “Dec. 31, 1995,” and it records a troubling argument between what appears to be an older couple, Kenneth and Miriam. We asked Weinberg for some context: “The Kenneth […]
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What It's Like to Grow Up Hapa
“The question of nationality perplexes my little brain. Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters. Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised? I […]
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Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws
How a get-tough law in California led to life sentences for petty thieves and drug offenders—and how support for its repeal came more from Republicans than Democrats: “Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end. As the years passed and word of great […]
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Chris Kluwe Takes a Stand
[GLAAD’s 2013 “Outstanding Newspaper Article” Winner] How Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe became “football’s most aggressive straight ally to the gay rights movement”: “Kluwe says he doesn’t see the issue of gay marriage as political. His philosophy on the subject goes back to the Golden Rule, and he believes an amendment that would constitutionally criminalize […]
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Experience
[Fiction] A woman whose marriage is ending finds a new place to live: “When my marriage fell apart one summer, I had to get out of the little flat in Kentish Town, where I had been first happy and then sad. I arranged to live for a few months in another woman’s house; she agreed […]
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What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?
A classic story of a Red Sox baseball legend, by Richard Ben Cramer, who died January 7: “It was forty-five years ago, when achievements with a bat first brought him to the nation’s notice, that Ted Williams began work on his defense. He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would […]
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Afghan Women Caught Between Modernity, Tradition
A teen girl who’s being forced into marriage attempts suicide: “Just before she leapt from her roof into the streets of Kabul, Farima thought of the wedding that would never happen and the man she would never marry. Her fiance would be pleased to see her die, she later recalled thinking. It would offer relief […]
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The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus
Inside Harvard historian Karen King’s discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that includes the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife’”: “What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not […]
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Member Exclusive: When Your Therapist Drives You Crazy
Our latest exclusive comes from Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone. “When Your Therapist Drives You Crazy,” first published in 2002 for Philadelphia magazine, is about a woman who enters marriage counseling—but ends up consumed by something much bigger. “The vibe at Genesis was equally informal and New Agey, from the burbling waterfall […]
