The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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A profile of Gordon Korman, the wunderkind of 1980s Canadian kid-lit.
A fantastic profile of O.J. Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, from during the 1995 trial.
A profile of Es Devlin, a highly in-demand stage designer who has worked with rock stars, playwrights, and fashion designers.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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The James Beard Foundation announced the finalists for its 2016 food media awards last week, so it’s a great time to make a cup of tea and cozy up to some excellent food writing. You might have already read some of the nominees featured here throughout 2015 — “The Brief, Extraordinary Life of Cody Spafford,” “Straight-Up Passing,” “Corn Wars,” “The Second Most Famous Thing to Happen to Hiroshima,” “The Chef Who Saved My Life,” and “On Chicken Tenders,” which features some of the most passionate writing about fried snack foods to hit the internet’s tubes — but here are six more you might have missed:
Worth it for the title alone, Emily’s piece wends from 350-year-old pro-pig promotional literature to the interstate tensions at the 1985 Ham & Yam Festival — with a pit stop to visit The Oldest Peanut in the World — in service of a single question: is the ham capital of the U.S. in Virginia, or North Carolina? (And a runner-up question: Why does it matter?)

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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We are deep in the era of the celebrity chef, but many successful restaurant groups have not one mastermind but two—the star chef, and a co-creator just as important to the business’ success but with a far lower profile.
A quarter century has passed since the infamous beating of Rodney King. In the months before King’s death, he was profiled by Kurt Streeter, who portrays a man still very much haunted by the past.

Chris Jennings | Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism | Random House | January 2016 | 29 minutes (7,852 words)
Below is an excerpt from Paradise Now, Chris Jennings’ look at the history of the golden age of American utopianism, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.
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A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. . . .
—OSCAR WILDE
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Mistaking day for night, they took wing.
At noon, darkness spread across the sky. It was the nineteenth of May 1780, a Friday. On the rolling pastureland of western New England, sheep and cows lay down one by one in the damp grass. As the darkness became total, finches and warblers quieted and returned to their roosts. Above the white pines and budding oaks, bats stirred. Mistaking day for night, they took wing.
The fratricidal war for American independence was grinding into its fifth year. A week earlier, the Continental army had surrendered the smoldering port of Charleston to the British navy after more than a month of heavy shelling. In New England, with so many young men off fighting, gardens went unplanted and the wheat grew thin.
For many colonists the war with Great Britain aroused a stolid nationalist piety, a consoling faith in “the sacred cause of liberty”—the belief that providence would guide the rebels to victory and that the fighting itself constituted an appeal to heaven. But in the hilly borderland between New York and Massachusetts, the anxiety and austerity of the long conflict inspired frenzied revival meetings. This was the New Light Stir, an aftershock of the Great Awakening of radical Protestantism that had coursed through New England in the 1740s. From makeshift pulpits, the New Light evangelists shouted an urgent millenarian message: These are the Latter Days; the Kingdom is at hand.
Standing at the crack of American independence, these backwoods Yankees believed that they were living the final hours of history. It is written: He will come back and the righteous will be delivered from sin for a thousand years of earthly peace and happiness. The New Lights believed that the time had come and that their small revivals, held in fields and cowsheds, would trigger the return of Christ and the millennium of heaven on earth. Looking up from their plows and their milking stools, these hill-country farmers scanned the horizon for signs of His approach. Read more…

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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