Matthew McNaught | Syria Comment | June 2013 | 18 minutes (4,615 words) Matthew McNaught taught English in Syria between 2007 and 2009. He now works in mental health and sometimes writes essays and stories. This piece first appeared in Syria Comment, and our thanks to McNaught for allowing us to republish it here. 1. Here is a […]
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Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2013: 22 Outstanding Book Chapters We Featured This Year
This year we featured not only the best stories from the web, but also great chapters from new and classic books. Here’s a complete guide to every book chapter we featured this year, both for free and for Longreads Members:
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Reading List: Interviews with Awesome Women Authors
The best interviews with authors make you want to read—not just their work, but read in general, and read all the time, and read with a new fervor. * * * 1. “The Art of Not Belonging: Dwyer Murphy Interviews Edwidge Danticat.” (Guernica, September 2013) Danticat gives a beautiful interview, discussing her book Claire of […]
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The Thin Red Line
Inside the debate over what the U.S. should do about Syria: “He walked back to his desk and sat down. ‘The Syria I have just drawn for you—I call it the Sinkhole,’ he said. ‘I think there is an appreciation, even at the highest levels, of how this is getting steadily worse. This is the […]
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A Drug War Informer in No Man’s Land
Luis Octavio López Vega, who worked for both the Mexican military and as an informant to the DEA, is now in hiding: “The reserved, unpretentious husband and father of three has been a fugitive ever since, on the run from his native country and abandoned by his adopted home. For more than a decade, he […]
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Honor Betrayed
A two-part series on sexual abuse and homelessness among female veterans in the U.S.: “In response to the growing outcry over sexual violence, the Pentagon last year ordered that charging decisions in sexual assault cases be determined by more senior commanders than in the past, but the directive stopped short of taking the decision out […]
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The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer
A Navy intelligence analyst reports a rape and finds herself ostracized. She’s not the only one, and the U.S. military still has not taken serious steps to address a culture that condones sex abuse: “The scandal of rape in the U.S. Armed Forces, across all of its uniformed services, has become inescapable. Last year saw […]
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How to Start a Battalion (in Five Easy Lessons)
“If there is one thing we appreciate it is a faction that splinters into smaller factions.” A report from inside Syria: “We in the Middle East have always had a strong appetite for factionalism. Some attribute it to individualism, others blame the nature of our political development or our tribalism. Some even blame the weather. […]
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The NRA vs. America
How the NRA changed its focus from gun owners to gun makers: “Of the top 15 gun manufacturers, 11 now manufacture assault weapons, many of them variants of the AR-15 – derived from a military rifle designed to kill enemy soldiers at close-to-medium range with little marksmanship. The industry loves these ‘modern sporting rifles’ because […]
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The Force
A history of America’s military spending: “If any arms manufacturer today holds what Eisenhower called ‘unwarranted influence,’ it is Lockheed Martin. The firm’s contracts with the Pentagon amount to some thirty billion dollars annually, as William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, reports in his […]
