Search Results for: oral history

From One Friendship, Lessons on Life, Death, AIDS, and Childlessness

Left to right: Dan, the author, and Michael. (Photo courtesy of the author)

S. Kirk Walsh | Longreads | January 2018 | 27 minutes (6,711 words)

 

I first met Dan Cronin on an early spring evening in 1993. Michael, my new boyfriend, introduced us. We were standing on the southwest corner of 12th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A stream of cabs, city buses, and cars surged toward the illuminated marble arch of Washington Square. The changing twilight danced through the rustling, pale-green leaves of the trees that shaded the grounds of the nearby church. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you,” Dan said to me. His smile was angelic and mischievous, his eyes, a striking slate blue. He lit a Newport cigarette, a wisp of smoke releasing from the corner of his mouth.

That night, we decided on dinner at a family-run Italian restaurant in the West Village. The three of us talked about books (J. M. Synge, E. L. Doctorow), Catholicism (the religion of our childhoods), Arthur Ashe’s recent death from AIDS, Dan and Michael’s strong allegiances to Upper West Side. It was a memorable night. As I said goodbye to them at the 14th Street subway stop, I felt a kind of certainty and contentment as if I already knew that Dan and Michael were going to be a part of my life for a long time.

Prior to that night, Michael had also told me a lot about Dan: He was a professional tenor, who had performed on Broadway and national tours around the country. He was a voracious reader of American history, passionate about all things Abraham Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. He was religious in his daily purchasing of lottery tickets. (He always played the same numbers; the street address of his childhood home.) He was employed as a waiter at the famed Russian Tea Room. (He was the shop steward of the union, and the powerful position allowed him to work only when he felt up to it.) Having recently visited his ancestral town in County Kerry, Ireland, he told a story of encountering a man who could recite passages of Ulysses in Gaelic.

Over the past year, Dan and Michael had become close friends. They had many lively discussions about sports and politics, but their true bond centered on their experiences with recovery, addiction, pain, and abuse. “He’s a remarkable man with many talents,” Michael said when he first told me about Dan. “It’s sad because he’s HIV positive.” Shortly after his diagnosis seven years earlier, Dan started taking high doses of AZT (zidovudine, the first antiretroviral drug approved by the FDA in 1987) as a part of his treatment protocol.

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Wallace Shawn’s Late Night

Wallace Shawn in 1988. (AP)

Troy Jollimore | Zyzzyva | Winter 2017 | 30 minutes (8,142 words)

More than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn wrote:

A few months ago, the American public, who in political theory and to some extent even in reality are “sovereign” in the United States, were given a group of pictures showing American soldiers tormenting desperate, naked, extremely thin people in chains — degrading them, mocking them, and physically torturing them. And so the question arose, How would the American public react to that? And the answer was that in their capacity as individuals, certain people definitely suffered or were shocked when they saw those pictures. But in their capacity as the sovereign public, they did not react. A cry of lamentation and outrage did not rise up across the land. The president and his highest officials were not compelled to abase themselves publicly, apologize, and resign, nor did they find themselves thrown out of office, nor did the political candidates from the party out of power grow hoarse with denouncing the astounding crimes which were witnessed by practically everyone throughout the entire world. As far as one could tell, over a period of weeks, the atrocities shown in the pictures had been assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept. And so now one has to ask, well, what does that portend?

Thirteen years later, we have a quite good idea of what such a thing portends. Thirteen years later we know much more than Shawn, or anyone, could have known at the time about just how much could be “assimilated into the list of things which the American public was willing to consider normal and which they could accept.” We know so much about this now that it is rather a wonder any of us can sleep at night. And in fact, some people tell me that they aren’t sleeping, that they have not been sleeping well for a while. Not since November. That’s what I keep hearing. Of course, there are those who lost the ability to enjoy an untroubled night’s sleep long before that. Read more…

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.

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Longreads Best of 2017: Local Reporting

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

Sarah Smarsh
Writer covering socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The New Yorker and Harper’s online, The Guardian, Guernica, and many others.

The #MeToo Movement in Kansas (Hunter Woodall, Kelsey Ryan, and Bryan Lowry, The Kansas City Star)

While the spotlight falls on sexual-misconduct allegations in the nation’s centers of power — Washington, New York, Hollywood — reporters across the country localized the revolutionary #MeToo moment on their own turf, including often overlooked and unglamorous places like my home state of Kansas. When I opened my morning newspaper to this lengthy feature on alleged sexual misconduct at the Kansas State Capitol, I was struck by the tenacity of the reporting in a digital-media era rife with emotional, partisan opinion pieces. Kansas City Star reporters Hunter Woodall, Kelsey Ryan, and Bryan Lowry spared neither side of the aisle as they hounded male legislators and gave voice to women who were previously silenced.

As a personal essayist who began as an investigative reporter, I hold no writing in higher esteem than that which does the hard work of digging for obscured facts, without which a million think pieces could never exist. This single installment of the ongoing coverage of the statehouse scandal quotes some fifteen interviewed sources: four female former interns (two named and two anonymous), two male Democratic representatives, a male intern-program director, two university spokespersons, a female Republican senate president, a male Republican house speaker, a female former Democratic staffer, the male director of the legislature’s human resources department, a second Republican state senator, and a male Democratic house minority leader.

This last source, a Democratic candidate for governor in the state’s crowded 2018 gubernatorial race, is some liberals’ best hope to defeat far-right candidate Kris Kobach. Even if the reporters’ own politics might be liberal, as journalists do perhaps lean, they didn’t allow the legislator a pass, giving readers not just his statements but also when he “tried to change the topic,” “refused to answer the question” and “demanded to know” whether he’d been accused of harassment. This is local reporting at its finest and bravest — government watchdogs shining a light where secrets might live. This is the work of a free press that sets its society free, no opinion required.


Gustavo Arellano
Former editor-in-chief, OC Weekly, contributor to Curbed LA.

Orange County’s Informant Scandal Yields Evidence of Forensic Science Deception in Murder Trials (R. Scott Moxley, OC Weekly)

My former colleague at OC Weekly, R. Scott Moxley, is the most underrated investigative reporter in the United States. His work at the paper over the past 21 years has resulted in a six-year prison sentence for our former sheriff, the end of congressional and state assemblymen’s careers, and the freeing of at least three people wrongfully convicted of crimes. Last year alone, six murder convictions covered by Moxley were overturned.

And he continues. In December, Moxley published this blockbuster exposé in which forensic scientists switched their conclusions to help prosecutors win shoddy murder cases. It was the latest Moxley blockbuster in the so-called “Orange County Snitch Scandal,” which saw prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies use jailhouse informants to illegally get information and win cases. Moxley’s work proves again the value in local news, and especially in the alt-weekly world. Long may Mox reign!


Katie Honan
Former DNAinfo reporter

Dignity In Danger (Kristin Dalton, Staten Island Advance)

In February, the Staten Island Advance published a multimedia package focused on the borough’s developmentally-disabled adults. “Dignity in Danger” is a well-reported piece of advocacy journalism, featuring the stories of those struggling, as well as the response of the city and state. It was compassionate journalism that held officials accountable for their lack of support.  

What made this piece of local journalism stand out to me was how comprehensive it was. For any local paper struggling to keep audiences and stay on top of what’s happening, it was an impressive project on an often-overlooked subject.

For their coverage, the Advance also dug into their archive of their coverage of the Willowbrook State School, where hundreds of developmentally-disabled children were abused for decades. It says a lot about local journalism to have people on staff to recognize that and have the familiarity with a place’s history.


Simon Bredin
Editor-in-chief, Torontoist

Where the Small Town American Dream Lives On (Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker)

After the presidential election, there was a sudden vogue for profiles of small towns in the grips of despair. So it was a pleasure to read Larissa MacFarquhar’s feature about Orange City, Iowa, and its “pure, hermetic culture.” MacFarquhar’s article is a delight for many reasons, not least its depiction of the endearing eccentricities of the town’s Dutch heritage. The author clearly grasps the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work, driving some townspeople away and luring others back.  But what makes the article profound is the way it describes Orange City’s sense of place, which inspires a loyalty among the residents critical to the town’s continued success.


James Ross Gardner
Editor-in-chief, Seattle Met

A Washington County That Went for Trump Is Shaken as Immigrant Neighbors Start Disappearing (Nina Shapiro, The Seattle Times)

Voting has consequences, as story after story in the wake of last November’s surprising electoral outcome has endeavored to show. Yet to my mind, few if any of the attempts to explain the Trump voter have landed. This one does. That’s because Nina Shapiro doesn’t let her sources off the hook. The people in this story say they didn’t know they were voting so cruelly, but their friends and neighbors — arrested or deported or both — nevertheless paid the price. Shapiro, to her credit, is able to find the humanity amid the folly.


Bethany Barnes
Education reporter for The Oregonian

Overlooked (Cary Aspinwall, The Dallas Morning News)

Praise for journalism has a standard repertoire. The old chestnuts include “shine a light” and “give voice to the voiceless.” Cary Aspinwall’s investigation for The Dallas Morning News truly earned such appraisal. Aspinwall looked where no one else was looking and showed her readers the human face of a problem that wasn’t being considered. Her investigation revealed that more mothers are going to jail in Texas, and that no one pays attention to what happens to their children when they do.

“Overlooked” is deftly told through an intimate portrait of five sisters:

The voices of these children are rarely heard — which is why the five Booker sisters agreed to tell the story of their mother’s arrests and their own abandonment by the criminal justice system. They told it over months, chatting in a bug-infested apartment complex, sharing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at a QuikTrip, trying tacos near the juvenile courthouse, driving almost three hours to visit their mother in prison.

Aspinwall’s extensive survey of mothers in jail gives readers a chance to hear perspectives we almost never hear. Her shoe-leather reporting to find people who could speak to the problem makes the data she found meaningful and personal.


Julia Wick
Former editor-in-chief, LAist

Behind a $13 shirt, a $6-an-hour worker (Natalie Kitroteff and Victoria Kim, The Los Angeles Times)

Natalie Kitroeff and Victoria Kim’s damning exposé nails how fast fashion giants like Forever 21 avoid liability for wage theft violations at the factories where their clothes are made. The piece, which explains how the retailer “avoids paying factory workers’ wage claims through a tangled labyrinth of middlemen,” has national and international implications. It is also very much a local story.

Garment workers making $6 an hour “pinning Forever 21 tags on trendy little shirts” in stifling factories right here in Los Angeles. Although most manufacturing has migrated overseas, L.A. still holds onto a small production niche, which is largely staffed by underpaid, immigrant workers. (Little-known fact: Southern California is the nation’s garment manufacturing capitol). Forever 21 itself is a Los Angeles-based company and an immigrant story: It was founded in Los Angeles in 1984 by a couple who had emigrated from South Korea.

Kitroeff and Kim’s piece masterfully illustrates the layered steps behind the production of every garment, explaining labor law and humanizing the lives and wage claims of workers. Their reporting offered a powerful indictment of a massive retailer — and our own complicity every time we buy that $13 shirt — drawing much-needed attention to worker abuses in our own backyard.


Michelle Legro
Senior editor, Longreads

Lawrence Tabak’s reporting on Foxconn in Wisconsin for Belt Magazine

It began as a shady deal with a big promise: Wisconsin taxpayers would give Foxconn $3 billion to open a plant that would provide 13,000 jobs, ostensibly for locals. Belt Magazine’s Lawrence Tabak has been following the deal for months: He tracked down workers at a Foxconn plant in Indiana and discovered that the quality of these jobs was low for locals, and that management favored Taiwanese nationals in management, and also relied on undocumented workers hidden during ICE raids. In a series of stories, he explained step-by-step how governor Scott Walker was taken in by Foxconn’s deal and sold it to the state legislature:

The proposed plant combined everything that an ambitious Republican governor could want. Not only a lot of jobs, but manufacturing jobs. Never mind that these were not the sort of jobs that would revive the Rust Belt, let alone jobs that would employ a significant number of Wisconsinites.

Tabak’s reporting was journalism in action, even making its way to the Wisconsin State Senate, “which used Belt’s reporting in railing against Foxconn’s heavy reliance on H-1B visa holders for skilled positions at its stateside facilities.”

Tabak also did one of the best man-on-the-ground reports that had nothing in common with the kind of parachute reporting on Trump voters that was so reviled this year. Staking out an apple orchard next door to the proposed plant in Racine County, he asked the workers there what they thought of Foxconn and it’s promise of jobs. The workers of Apple Holler saw only environmental pollution on the horizon, and the betrayal of what this area of Wisconsin does best, and has always done best: agriculture.


Ethan Chiel
Contributing editor and fact checker, Longreads

How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire (Andrew Granato, Stanford Politics)

Campus politics is local politics par excellence, and while Peter Thiel may be mediocre at his secondary pursuits, like investing and vampirism, he is by all accounts an excellent right-wing campus political operative. Thiel has spent nearly three decades trying to trigger libs at his alma mater, Stanford, not least by continuing to support the Stanford Review, a conservative publication he founded as an undergraduate in the late ‘80s. Andrew Granato really got the goods in his smart, even-handed account of how Thiel has cultivated the Review as both a source for hires and business associates and a way to try and keep his own, largely contrarianism-based sense of politics alive at a liberal university. It also serves as a reminder that Silicon Valley is very much a place and not just a metonymic device.

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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Longreads Best of 2017: Science, Technology, and Business Writing

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

Deborah Blum
Director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

The Touch of Madness (David Dobbs, Pacific Standard)

A beautifully rendered exploration of the slow, relentless creep of schizophrenia into the life of a brilliant graduate student, her slow recognition of the fact, and the failure of her academic community to recognize the issue or to support her. Dobbs’ piece functions both as an inquiry into our faltering understanding of mental illness and our cultural failure to respond to it with integrity. It’s the kind of compassionate and morally-centered journalism we should all aspire to.


Elmo Keep
Australian writer and journalist living in Mexico, runner-up for the 2017 Bragg Prize for Science Writing

How Eclipse Chasers Are Putting a Small Kentucky Town on the Map (Lucas Reilly, Mental Floss)

Anyone willing to write about syzygy in the shadow of Annie Dillard’s classic 1982 essay “Total Eclipse” has balls for miles. Reilly’s decision to focus on the logistics faced by tiny towns preparing to be inundated by thousands of eclipse watchers was inspired. It brilliantly conveyed the shared enthusiasms that celestial events animate in us. Between these two essays, I’m convinced a total eclipse would be a psychic event so overwhelming I might not survive it. I’ve got 2037 in Antarctica on my bucket list — if it’s still there in twenty years.    Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Essays

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

Nicole Chung
Editor in chief of Catapult magazine, author of the forthcoming memoir All You Can Ever Know.

Going It Alone (Rahawa Haile, Outside Magazine)

One of my favorite personal essays published this year was Rahawa Haile’s stunning “Going It Alone,” for Outside.  She uses a personal story, her own journey on Appalachian Trail, to try and answer a larger question: Just who is the outdoors for? To answer this, Haile doesn’t just rely on her own experiences on the trail, she also does a ton of research, bringing in past interviews and stories, and interweaving anecdotes from other through-hikers she meets along the way. I really appreciated how, with all these other voices in play, we get a clearer vision of Rahawa and her journey, too. At the conclusion of this piece, which is so gorgeously written and urgent and honest and full of life, Rahawa closes with the perfect ode to those she met on her way: “It is no understatement to say that the friends I made, and the experiences I had with strangers who, at times, literally gave me the shirt off their back, saved my life. I owe a great debt to the through-hiking community that welcomed me with open arms, that showed me what I could be and helped me when I faltered. There is no impossible, they taught me: only good ideas of extraordinary magnitude.” Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: 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.

Mayukh Sen
Staff writer, Vice

Can Local Food Help Appalachia Build a Post-Coal Future? (Sarah Jones, The Nation)

Jones has been one of my favorite writers to emerge from the shitstorm that is the Trump presidency, so I was quite happy to see The Nation’s Food Issue publish her look at Appalachian food: the baggage it’s so unjustly carried, where it’s headed, and who’s doing the work to steer it in that direction. She interrogates the language of “trash” that has followed the region’s people and what they eat, and she does so beautifully. Her voice is clear, engaging, and tempered with compassion. The vast majority of food writing is fearfully not much further than center-of-left, which makes Jones’ piece extremely refreshing. It’s a marvelous piece and a reminder that some of the most exciting, relevant food writing will live outside food publications unless they step up their game.

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Living Differently: How the Feminist Utopia Is Something You Have to Be Doing Now

Cover of program for the National American Women's Suffrage Association procession. (Getty Images)

Lynne Segal | Verso | November 2017 | 32 minutes (8,100 words)

The following is an excerpt from Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, by Lynne Segal (Verso, November 2017). This essay is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

The utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.

It is sometimes said that the twentieth century began with utopian dreaming and ended with nostalgia, as those alternative futures once envisioned seemed by then almost entirely discredited. However, it was never quite so straightforward. The challenge to envisage how to live differently, in ways that seem better than the present, never entirely disappears.

The most prominent American utopian studies scholar, Lyman Tower Sargent, notes that dystopian scenarios increasingly dominated the speculative literary form as the twentieth century progressed. In the UK, the equally eminent utopian studies scholar Ruth Levitas concurs, pointing out, for instance, that as sociology became institutionalized in the academy, it became ‘consistently hostile’ to any utopian content.

What stands out in speculative fantasies of the future arising towards the end of the twentieth century are their darkly dystopic leanings, whether in books, cinema, comics or elsewhere. The best known would include the mass surveillance depicted in the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s satirical novel We (1921).

Set in the future, it describes a scientifically managed totalitarian state, known as One State, governed by logic and reason, where people live in glass buildings, march in step, and are known by their numbers. England’s Aldous Huxley called his dystopic science fiction Brave New World (1932), where again all individuality has been conditioned out in the pursuit of happiness. Bleaker still was George Orwell’s terrifyingly totalitarian 1984 (1945): ‘If you want a picture of the future,’ Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

These imaginings serve primarily as warnings against futures that are often read, as with Zamyatin and Orwell, as condemnations of Soviet society. The happiness expressed in Huxley’s ‘utopic’ universe depicts a deformed or sinister version of the route where all utopias end up, as totalitarian regimes, in which free will is crushed. As the Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman later noted: ‘From a means of winning people over to the ideal of socialism, the utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.’

Post-1945, public intellectuals for the most part broadcast the view that democracy and utopic thinking were opposed, the latter declared both impossible and dangerous. The influential émigré and British philosopher of science Karl Popper argued in his classic essay ‘Utopia and Violence’ (1947) that while ‘Utopia’ may look desirable, all too desirable, it was in practice a ‘dangerous and pernicious’ idea, one that is ‘self‐defeating’ and ‘leads to violence’. There is no way of deciding rationally between competing utopian ideals, he suggested, since we cannot (contra Marxism) scientifically predict the future, which means our statements are not open to falsification and hence fail his test for any sort of reliability.

Indeed, accusations of ‘totalitarian’ thinking were the chief weapon of the Cold War, used by Western propaganda to see off any talk of communism. In the USA it was employed to undermine any left or labour movement affiliations, as through the fear and financial ruin inflicted upon hundreds of Americans hauled before Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s – over half of them Jewish Americans. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2017. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…