Longreads

articles read & loved no. 58

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:21:38 -0400

Talking Famous Female Suicide: The Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the Vice Way.

My Visit to a Life Coach

After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet

Fat Queer Tells All: On Fatness and Gender Flatness

Reading List: 21 Outstanding Stories from Women's Magazines and Websites

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:10:40 -0400

Are women’s magazines avoiding “serious journalism”? Guess it all depends on who’s deciding what’s serious.

The New Republic asks that question in a new article, and our biggest problem with this debate (and, to be honest, the term “longform journalism”) is that it can often run everything through a male-skewed filter of what counts as “serious journalism.” We’ve seen serious storytelling in both.

The other problem is that we’re still relying on National Magazine Awards and print-only publishers to reflect the zeitgeist. I’ve mentioned that 65% of all #longreads started out in print, but we also should spotlight the work of online publishers who are pursuing in-depth storytelling.

So, here’s a start: 21 stories from women’s magazines and sites that we’ve featured on Longreads. On Twitter, Rebecca Traister is curating some of her favorite serious work. And we’d love for you to add your favorite women’s magazine stories in the comments.

Allure

• The F Word, Jennifer Weiner

Marie Claire

• The Big Business of Breast Cancer, Lea Goldman

Tiger Beatdown

• The Percentages: A Biography of Class, Sady Doyle

O, The Oprah Magazine

• ‘I Will Never Know Why’, Susan Klebold

• ‘We Thought the Sun Would Always Shine on Our Lives’, Paige Williams

• Promises of an Unwed Father, Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Is Ecstasy a Viable Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?, Jessica Winter

Rookie

• Higher Learning, Staff

XO Jane

• How A Gun-loving West Texas Girl Learned to Fear Assault Weapons, Haley B. Elkins

• It Happened To Me: My Parents Adopted a Murderer, Amity Bitzel

More

• How I Lost $500,000 for Love, Aryn Kyle

Vogue

• Notes on a Scandal: Jenny Sanford Vogue Interview, Rebecca Johnson

• Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw at the Revolution, Kevin Conley

• Susan Rice: She’s Got Game, Jonathan Van Meter

Elle

• I’m For Sale, Genevieve Smith

The Hairpin

• My Brother, My Mother, and a Call Girl, Mara Cohen Marks

• He’s So Unusual, Jane Marie

• A Goodbye to Ambien in Dubai, Amy Schumer

• The Evolution of Ape-Face Johnson, Carolita Johnson

Glamour

• Relationship Violence: The Secret That Kills 4 Women a Day, Liz Brody

Jezebel

• What Can a Civilian Possibly Say to a Wounded Soldier?, Chloe Angyal

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Share your picks in the comments

Reading List: Where the Witty Things Are

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:58:00 -0400

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

1. “This Wedding Season, Say Yes to Strangers: What I Learned From My Craigslist Date” and “A Brief Addendum to Our Craigslist Wedding Story.” (Lindsey Grad and Nick Hassell, The Hairpin, June 2013)

When a bridezilla demanded that Grad find a date to her wedding, she made the best of the situation—she took to Craigslist.

2. “The Amazing Atheist: The Full Interview.” (David Luna, The Annual, May 2013)

Traditional interviewing with a twist: Luna interviews T.J. Kincaid, better known as YouTube’s The Amazing Atheist. (Full disclosure: I am the editor-at-large for The Annual, a monthly humor magazine founded by my childhood friend and comedy connoisseur, Kevin Cole.)

3. “Jokes Taught Me About Sex.” (Andrew Hudgins, The Rumpus, June 2013)

To everyone who didn’t understand the dirty jokes their friends told in middle school: Hudgins understands you. And he may have had it a bit worse.

4. “And … Scene” + “An Oral History of Upright Citizens’ Brigade Theater Partying and ‘Awkward Sexuality.’” (Brian Raftery, New York magazine and Vulture, 2011 and 2013)

Their former venues include a bloody delicatessen basement and a low-fi burlesque club frequented by Hasidic Jews. Upright Citizens Brigade has produced some of the wildest and funniest folks in comedy today. Here, Raftery compiles the experiences of the early days of Amy Poehler, Ed Helms, Bobby Moynihan, Horatio Sanz, Janeane Garofalo and many more.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Photo: Marcin Wichary

Longreads Guest Pick: Todd Olmstead on 'Random Access Denied'

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 16:24:00 -0400

Todd Olmstead is Mashable’s Associate Community Manager and an occasional music writer. He lives in Brooklyn.

My favorite longread this week is ‘Random Access Denied,’ by Sasha-Frere Jones in the New Yorker. It takes you through the mind of the reviewer, writing about a big-deal album, and peels back the curtain a bit. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that initial listening party? And yet, it’s about more than just an album. It’s about the way we listen to music. Frere-Jones, despite being a critical listener, isn’t lamenting leak culture or the rush for journalists to judge albums, though no one would blame him if he did. Rather, he presents an honest case for how we listen: Oftentimes in phases, via iterations of songs and bits of marketing, piecing together our opinions as we go. Rarely do we as listeners arrive at the finished product on album release day anymore, and that’s okay. As we come up on the summer’s next massively anticipated music release — Kanye West’s “Yeezus” — it’s worth this reflection before we rush in.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Our Longreads Member Pick: The Skies Belong to Us (Chapter 5), by Brendan I. Koerner

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:06:10 -0400

This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner’s new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who’s been featured on Longreads in the past, explains:

“On the morning of October 11, 2009, I encountered the 616-word newspaper story that would change my life. It was a New York Times report about a man named Luis Armando Peña Soltren, a former Puerto Rican nationalist who had helped hijack a Pan Am jet to Cuba in 1968. After spending the next 41 years living in Fidel Castro’s socialist ‘paradise,’ he had decided that he could no longer bear to remain apart from the wife and daughter he had left behind. So at the age of 66, Soltren had voluntarily returned to the United States. He had been arrested the moment he stepped off his plane at JFK Airport; he now faced a possible life sentence if convicted of air piracy.

“I was first struck by how much Soltren’s longing for his family had slowly swelled as the years flew by; it had taken him over four decades to muster the courage to risk his freedom for a chance to see his wife and daughter again. (I’ve always been drawn to tales of fugitives and exiles, who must often pay a steep psychological price in order to reinvent themselves.) But the more I thought about Soltren’s predicament, the more I was intrigued by its historical element—namely, the fact that he and two comrades had actually managed to hijack a Boeing 707 to Cuba in the first place. The New York Times piece gave the impression that such crimes were run-of-the-mill during the Vietnam Era. Given the airport security gauntlets we’re forced to endure these days, that seemed an almost unfathomable notion.

“Yet using a little Google-fu, I unearthed a lengthy list of dramatic skyjackings from the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time period I have romanticized ever since watching Mean Streets. There were plenty of fascinating characters who seemed to beg for deeper study, such as the Marine who fled to Rome to escape a court-martial, or the Mexican immigrant who just wanted to give a 34-minute speech about his troubles. But there was one name that tugged at my heart more than any other: Catherine Marie Kerkow.

“Why her? Well, for starters, she was a woman—skyjacking was almost exclusively a male pursuit. She was also high-school classmates with legendary miler Steve Prefontaine. But most important, she didn’t seem to have any obvious reason for getting involved in a spectacular hijacking—she was, by all accounts, just an aimless 20-year-old kid with no political ties, nor any history of criminality.

“So why did Cathy Kerkow turn her back on everything she’d ever known in order to hijack Western Airlines Flight 701? As my infinitely patient wife and kids can attest, my obsession with answering that question has now gobbled up a significant chunk of my life. The Skies Belong to Us is what I have to show for all those countless hours holed up with the keyboard, surrounded by teetering piles of marked-up documents.”

Read an excerpt here

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articles read & loved no. 56

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:13:31 -0400

dietcoker:

Addicted to Netflix: Teen-Soap-Opera-Binge as Psychosis

A Brief History of Swans

Fresno State journalists investigated and reported Freefall Into Madness: The Fresno County’s Jail Barbaric Treatment of the Mentally Ill

Places I’ve Cried in Baltimore City

Father's Day Pick: Chapter 1 of Drew Magary's 'Someone Could Get Hurt,' Now Free for Everyone

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:32:19 -0400

For Father’s Day, we’ve unlocked our recent Longreads Member Pick, chapter one from Drew Magary’s new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for Deadspin and GQ, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together:

I was in the middle of writing a second novel that would hopefully earn me a billion dollars in movie franchise royalties when my third kid was born. There were complications. I find that ‘complications’ is the universal euphemism for anything bad that happens during the birth and early life of an infant. It can mean anything, really: birth defects, mental illness, a lost limb, an ambulance driven into a tree, etc.

If you’ve ever experienced complications with a baby, you know that it immediately makes any other difficulty you’ve ever experienced in life seem harmless by comparison. Your life can be neatly separated into Before Complications and After Complications. They always say that having a kid changes you, but that’s a lie. It’s having a kid on the brink of dying that changes you.

So I had to table the novel for a bit and get this out of my system. I had to write about my third kid, and I had to write about my family as a whole, about this whole unit of people that needed to be strong enough to go through what we were about to go through. And that’s how Someone Could Get Hurt came to be. This is the first chapter.

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Chapter 1: Malrotation

Our third child was born seven weeks premature with a condition known as intestinal malrotation. The doctor explained it like this: When you’re in your mom’s uterus, your intestines initially form outside of your body. Then they retreat into your abdomen, twist, and your abdomen seals up around them. If you’re unfortunate enough to be born with this condition (5,000-to-1 odds, though more common in premature infants), that crucial twist never occurs, and you can end up with something called a volvulus, which sounds like a kind of Swedish superhero but is actually a dangerous condition in which the intestines get kinked, like a garden hose, and the path of digestion is cut off, restricting blood flow. You must have your belly split open so that everything can be put back in the proper order, or else you will die. If you’re among the lucky souls born with properly ordered bowels, you should thank those bowels the next time they process a two-pound burrito on your behalf.

They found out that the baby had the condition when he began vomiting thick green fluid after his first feedings. The bile that he secreted to digest his formula was getting clogged in his intestines and was gurgling back up into his stomach, causing him to vomit over and over again. They placed a tube down into his stomach to suck up all the excess fluid and hoped the issue would resolve itself. Nights before the surgery, I stood by his isolette—an enclosed plastic incubator— in the NICU and stared at the output of that tube, praying that it would turn yellow or clear, hoping to God that he’d be spared the knife and that I’d never see that horrible green shit come out of him again. But I did see it again. I would come to the NICU during the day and ask the nurses if he barfed, my fingers crossed tight enough to break. And they often said yes, he had an “emesis.” The first time I heard the word, I asked them if “emesis” meant barf, and when they said that it did, I wished they had just said that he had barfed instead.

The vomiting wouldn’t stop. His insides weren’t going to just naturally fall back into place. He had to be opened. No one makes it through life unscathed, but you usually get a grace period at the start. My son would not be so lucky. At the time, he weighed five pounds—large for a preemie, but still just five itty-bitty pounds. No heavier than a dictionary. I wondered how the surgeons’ blades and instruments would fit inside him. Such a large surgery for such a tiny body, I thought.

The surgeon was talking us through the procedure as we all stood by the door to the OR. He had only a few moments to speak with us before our son had to go under. To wait any longer risked killing him.

“What’s the survival rate for this surgery?” I asked the surgeon.

“If I don’t find any salvageable bowel, the survival rate is zero.” Doctors never explicitly say your loved one will die. They say things like “the survival rate is zero.” It’s up to you to jump to the proper conclusion. “But if the bowel is healthy,” he said, “the survival rate is one hundred percent.” He suspected my son’s bowels were still viable, but he didn’t rule out the possibility that there would be “dusky bowels,” parts of the intestine that had lost blood flow permanently and were now dead and would have to be removed. Forever. I had never heard the term “dusky bowels” before. It sounded like a good name for a fantasy football team.

The doctor needed our consent before going ahead with the surgery. We didn’t hesitate for an instant. In fact, we felt as if we had wasted enough of his time already. It’s amazing how quickly you’ll agree to a procedure like this once you hear talk of survival rates. You take a leap of faith. You trust that a total stranger will know how to properly disembowel your child because you do not. He was a nice-looking doctor. He seemed to know what he was talking about. Fuck it. I signed the forms.

The doctor rushed back into the operating room to prepare, and a very nice NICU nurse named Kathy led my wife and me to our son, to see him one final time before he went to have his guts torn out. They had knocked him out with an anesthetic, so he was sleeping peacefully by the time we got there. He was in an isolette and had wires running from his mouth, chest, stomach, and foot. He looked like an IED. He was surrounded by a phalanx of adults who were all determined to prevent his death because the death of a child is the saddest thing in the world. He wasn’t old enough or awake enough to know that he didn’t want to die. We did all that worrying for him. Kathy opened the top of the isolette so we could kiss him on the head—possibly for the last time, possibly just another kiss in an entire lifetime of them.

His head was coated with a shocking mass of black hair. When a baby is born premature, it still has plenty of the mother’s hormones racing through its system. This can cause it to have enlarged genitals, lactating breasts (!!!), or a healthy head of hair. That hair eventually falls out and is replaced with new hair. But for now, our son still had hair long enough to get a side gig as a bassist. I bent down and let my nose glide along the soft fur, alternating between taking in his scent and kissing him on the head. I wanted to retain as much of the sensation as I could.

Kathy led my wife and me back out to the general surgical waiting room. They had updates on the status of all operations listed on a big monitor at the far end of the room. We could check on our son’s intestines like we were trying to catch a connecting flight to Milwaukee. The second I saw my son’s doctor and room number up on the board, I got a morbid thrill. THERE’S MY BOY UP ON THE TEEVEE! Then reality set back in and I could feel my heart withering. There were dozens of other people sitting in the room, and I felt exposed, naked, without any armor to protect myself. I just wanted to find somewhere for my wife and me to cry ourselves sick. Kathy saw us visibly breaking down in front of everyone and stole us into a private waiting room. I sat down next to my wife and stared off into space because the rest of the world seemed empty to me at the moment. Desolate. We took turns telling each other it was going to be okay because it helps in times of grief when someone you love tells you everything is going to be all right, even when you suspect that it’s a lie.

All I could think about was my son dying. I tried my best to avoid it but I couldn’t. I wondered what would happen if his intestines were deemed unsalvageable. Do they euthanize your child? Do they just leave him until he starves to death because he can’t fully digest anything? They can’t do that. The world couldn’t possibly be that cruel, could it? I envisioned being escorted into the morgue and holding a swaddled, nine-day-old corpse in my hands, and how that would make me feel. He wasn’t dead yet, but I had a clear idea of how badly it would hurt. My heart was firmly clenched to absorb the blow. I thought about whether we’d have a funeral for him. I didn’t think we would because that would just be too awful to put our friends and family through. You can’t herd people into a room and force them to stare at a tiny coffin for an hour.

I wondered if he could donate his organs as a premature infant. I wondered if we would bury him or cremate him, and where we might scatter his ashes. Maybe the Atlantic Ocean. He might like that. Maybe we would get a dog if he passed away, a little dog named Otis or Kirby that would bark and yip and shit all over the place and help us forget about this. That might help. Maybe nothing would help.

Maybe our marriage wouldn’t survive if he died. We’d been married nine years, together for twelve. I remember the night we met, in some shitty Manhattan bar that no longer exists. I staggered out of the john and there she was, drunk and smiling, as if she had been planted there by some magnificent benefactor. It took five minutes for me to get her full name right because it was an obscure Armenian name and I was too shitfaced to pronounce obscure Armenian names. God, I loved her. Only an act of extraordinary circumstances could possibly end us: a war, a natural disaster, an unspeakable crime, etc. And as we waited, I thought that perhaps these were those extraordinary circumstances. Maybe we would look at each other after this and see nothing more than a reminder of what was lost. Maybe we would drift apart and I would become a filthy hobo, working odd jobs and dabbling in surfing and heroin.

I couldn’t stop crying. My wife stood in front of me and I wrapped my arms around her waist and buried my head in her stomach. I told her all my fears in hopes that it would make us both feel better. I wanted to find a way through the grief, to emerge on the other side in a state of grace, knowing I was strong enough to live on regardless of what happened. But I still wasn’t certain.

And then my wife farted—a remarkably well-timed fart that made me switch from tears to laughter right away. God bless that fart. I needed that fart. I asked her to do it again and she declined.

She went out for water, and a different nurse, who turned out to be a real shithead (every hospital has its share of dud nurses), told us that we were being kicked out of the private room. No more VIP treatment for us. When my wife came back in, we both took turns calling the shithead nurse a shithead behind her back, and then we headed out to the main waiting room. The receptionist said there was a phone call for us from the OR with an update. The doctor had promised us a mid-surgery update to let us know if the bowel was viable or not—if our son was going to live or die. This was that phone call. The receptionist held out the receiver for me.

I have a chronic case of Walter Mitty syndrome. I’m the type of person that spends an unreasonable amount of time during each day imagining himself plunged into extreme circumstances. Any time I walk outside with my children, I look up to the sky to see if a giant alien ship has stationed itself above my house. Any time I go to Target, I take note of which items I could use as weapons should a zombie apocalypse strike and then the entire store becomes a stronghold for the last of the uninfected. Any time I get on an airplane, I think about crashing in the ocean and being lost at sea for years, teaching myself to fish using only the stitching of my wallet. I am constantly foiling imaginary bank robbers and sexual predators. I waste hours every day envisioning a life far more dramatic, far more macho, than the sedate circumstances in which I usually exist.

That’s part of the reason why I wanted to start a family. When you start a family, you’re signing up for drama. You’re signing up for worry. You’re signing up for life-and-death. You’re signing up for a life that means something more, even if it isn’t as fun a life as when you were single and drinking shots of Fire Water in the Giants Stadium parking lot. Kids make your life significant. They give your life a spine. On some twisted level, I was signing up for a moment such as this: to be there waiting and weeping as I clutched my fists and begged for my son to be all right. But now that it was here, now that it was so sickeningly real, I knew I wanted no part of such cinematic moments. I just wanted life to become normal again. Uneventful. Boring. I wanted to go back to the intensely aggravating march of daily existence. I wanted my son to live so that he could grow up to annoy the shit out of me. People tell you that you should never take life for granted but that’s wrong, because taking life for granted is an encouraging sign that your life is going well. I wanted that.

I took the receiver from the receptionist and braced myself.

From Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books, 2013). Purchase the full ebook here.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'Light from Darkness,' by Mary Kenney, Indiana University

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:15:00 -0400

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher is helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

Recent Indiana University journalism student Mary Kenney used her study-abroad experience in India to test her abilities as a foreign correspondent. In “Light From Darkness,” Kenney profiles a sex worker named Akshaya. Akshaya was a rural girl who sought a new life in a big city. But like so many other impoverished women around the world, Akshaya’s life turned violent. Kenney relies on Akshaya’s own voice to provide the story’s tone and cadence, but without the soft-focus indulgence that can turn such narratives into overwrought Lifetime movies. Her willingness to spend time with a subject, and earn her trust, is evident in this piece.

Kenney is spending her first post-graduate summer on the sports desk at The New York Times, where she is a James Reston Reporting Fellow.

“Light from Darkness”

Mary Kenney | Inside Magazine | March 2013 | 2,932 words

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

Reading List: Love in the Time of Context

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 15:44:37 -0400

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

One reason I admire longform journalism is its ability to tell stories. Some of these stories gain national attention. Some are perfected in an MFA workshop. Some are written on the backs of receipts, after waking in the middle of the night, while in traffic.

Most longform stories are written with love: toward craft and toward subject. These four are no exception. They focus on falling in love with chance encounters and with self-acceptance. They are about a love of career and a love of potential. They are about the struggle-love of family. That is the loyalty of longform: to a love of context.

1. “Owning the Middle.” (Kate Fagan, espnW and ESPN The Magazine, May 2013)

Women’s basketball superstar Brittney Griner makes strides on the court and in LGBTQ athletic culture. Be sure to check the video interview and gorgeous portraits by Cass Bird.

2. “Growing Up With Sailor Moon.” (Soleil Ho, Interrupt Magazine, May 2013)

In the midst of her parents’ emotional divorce, a young Ho discovers and relies upon the subversive gender-empowering message of Sailor Moon.

3. “A Ruckus of Romance.” (Rachel Howard, Narrative.ly, February 2013)

They fall in love on the dance floor: Emily Hall Smith plays matchmaker to the artsy, queer women of New York City.

4. “Butch in the Airport.” (Kate, Autostraddle, May 2013)

The seemingly innocuous airport can be place of great anxiety for those whom identify as genderqueer. Here, Kate reflects on such practical and emotional difficulties.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Photo: Rosa Middleton

Longreads Guest Pick: Margaret Ely on 'Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi'

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 15:32:07 -0400

Margaret Ely is a web producer and reporter for The Washington Post.

Maybe I was hungry and saw the word “sushi” in the headline, but I was hooked the moment I started reading Adam Johnson’s bizarre, outlandish story about a Japanese chef who served North Korea’s supreme, “dear leader” Kim Jong-il. While it’s known that the dear leader had lavish habits and ruled with a firm grip on his country and confidants, Johnson also does a fantastic job of keeping the focus on the chef, who uses the alias Kenji Fujimoto. Fujimoto himself is a complicated character, a man who was willing to leave his family in Japan for an extravagant but dangerous life as one of Jong-il’s cronies. There are parties, death threats, beautiful women, Mercedes-Benzes, and more. It’s a great read.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Reading List: 3 Stories from Young Journalists Honored at the Livingston Awards

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:35:00 -0400

The Livingston Awards are handed out every year to celebrate outstanding work from journalists under 35. Here are this year’s winning stories, honored this week in New York:

“Slavery’s Last Stronghold” (John D. Sutter & Edythe McNamee, CNN.com)

International Reporting winner: A trip to Mauritania, where an estimated 10% to 20% of the population lives in slavery.

“The Things They Leave Behind” (Rachel Manteuffel, Washingtonian)

National Reporting winner: A closer look at the letters, mementos and other artifacts left behind at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“In God’s Name” (Alexandra Zayas and Kathleen Flynn, Tampa Bay Times)

Local Reporting winner: An investigation into the abuse of children at unlicensed religious group homes in Florida.

Our Longreads Member Pick: Among Murderers (Chapter 7), by Sabine Heinlein

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:05:54 -0400

This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Among Murderers, a new nonfiction book by Sabine Heinlein, published by University of California Press, examining the lives of criminals as they prepare to re-enter society. Heinlein, who was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her Iowa Review essay “A Portrait of the Writer as a Rabbit,” explains the origins of this chapter, which focuses on “Job Readiness”:

“A few years ago I set out to learn how New York’s reentry organizations help former prisoners navigate freedom. I talked to clients and staff and observed programs at nonprofit agencies with Pollyanna-ish names like STRIVE (Support and Training Results in Valuable Employees), CEO (Center for Employment Opportunities) and the Fortune Society. The Fortune Society is New York’s most prominent and comprehensive reentry agency. It offers substance abuse treatment to ex-offenders, as well as computer, cooking, fatherhood and ‘job readiness’ classes. Fortune, as it is commonly known, also runs a halfway house in West Harlem nicknamed the Castle. I clearly remember the first time I visited the Castle, its schist rock facade sparkling in the sun. With its miniature lookout towers, its arched windows and the bright crenellations that top some of its walls, the Castle resembled a Gothic bastion. One could easily imagine a muddy moat separating those who had committed serious transgressions—those who had been stigmatized and locked away for most of their lives—from the rest of the world.

“To shed light on the struggles of the 700,000 men and women who are released from U.S. prisons each year, I followed three residents of the Castle for several years. Angel Ramos, the protagonist of my book, Among Murderers: Life After Prison, spent 29 years in prison for strangling a young girl in an abandoned building in East Harlem and for trying to kill a co-worker. At the Castle, the 47-year-old befriended two older men, Bruce and Adam, who had also spent several decades locked up for murder. Over the course of more than two years Angel, Bruce, Adam and I spent a lot of time with each other. I accompanied Adam when he bought his first winter coat in 31 years and visited different ethnic restaurants and cafés with Bruce. I helped celebrate Angel’s ‘first’ birthday and was there when, on Halloween, the halfway house residents turned the Castle into a haunted house. Together, the men and I explored the neighborhoods of their youth. We talked about murder, remorse, shame, love, loss and prison. (Sooner or later our conversations inevitably returned to prison, where the men had spent most of their adult lives.)

“One of the most revealing experiences the men shared with me was their seemingly endless track through New York’s job readiness programs, a requirement to qualify for housing subsidies, welfare and the agencies’ employment referrals. This is what I saw.”

Read an excerpt here.

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Reading List: 6 Great Sci-Fi Stories About Robots

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:32:47 -0400

Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She recently shared six stories for the science-fiction newbie, and a reading list for Fantasy Newbies.

These stories offer a little breadth, a little curiosity, and a little levity to the idea of artificial life. Share your favorite robot stories in the comments below.

1. There Will Come Soft Rains, Ray Bradbury (1950)

A mechanical house continues working on its automated schedule even after the world has ended. There are two interpretations of this story, and they’re both moving and terrifying. Does this house feel sad that it is no longer useful? Or is the setting itself what inspires tears?

2. Satisfaction Guaranteed, Isaac Asimov (1951)

This piece is a fan favorite (especially among the ladies). It explores the dynamics of robot/human romance—for once, everything is about the betterment of the woman; she is not objectified. Due to Asimov’s mathematician bent, the robot is a logical being from beginning to end. This is a triumph of a story.

3. Article of Faith, Mike Resnik (2009)

A robot wishes to become a member of a Christian church. This could have easily gone in a preachy direction, but while it is dialogue-heavy and asks the standard “big” questions, Christianity isn’t vilified—only bigots are. It’s rare to read a science fiction story that views religion with anything other than scorn, and for that reason I respect this story most.

4. 800 ms, David Taub (2012)

Incredible worldbuilding, fascinating “What if” questions, and a protagonist I wanted to understand within one hundred words. If that doesn’t sell you, consider instead the approach to synthetic life vs. organic life beyond the basic “which is better” question.

5. The Pinocchio Complex, Sarina Dorie (2013)

I’m a sucker for updated fairy tales, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of this particular iteration. Geppetto the puppet-maker is now a roboticist, and he is called to serve a most peculiar client. I won’t spoil any of the twists for you.

6. Any Face You Like, Gregg Jansen (2013)

A lighter story about the future of the door-to-door salesman. The narration is clever, and the perspective on gender doesn’t come across as condemning or preachy.

If you were hoping for a little horror on this list, look no further than the champion of the genre: Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” featuring a terrifying mechanized antagonist whom I wouldn’t call a robot. Be warned: this story still keeps me up at night.

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What are your must-read robot stories? Tell us in the comments.

(Image via longgame.org)

College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'Code Red: Struggling for Wellness in Computer Science,' from Kyla Cheung at Columbia University

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:24:00 -0400

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher will be helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

While most good journalists are generalists, sometimes a background in the subject you’re covering helps add some perspective to your story. Kyla Cheung studied computer science and creative writing at Columbia, a combination that positions her to tell a particular story well. In “Code Red,” published in The Eye, Cheung looks at the dark side of computer science studies. There is no field hotter than computer science now, and public successes of people like Mark Zuckerberg and David Karp raise expectations for everyone. In this week’s #college #longreads pick, Cheung explores Columbia’s computer science program with a deep understanding of her peers, and a fascination with their unique culture.

Code Red: Struggling for Wellness in Computer Science

Reported and written by Kyla Cheung.

April 18, 2013 | 22 minutes (5,470 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

Today, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the police can collect a...

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 16:56:20 -0400

Today, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the police can collect a DNA swab from people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime. The justices were unusually divided—conservative Justice Antonin Scalia joined liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan on the dissenting opinion.

For some deeper context, read Harry Jaffe’s story, “Truth and Consequences,” in the Washingtonian, which was featured on Longreads last month.

Reading List: Double Consciousness and Religion

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 15:22:00 -0400

Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

1. “Two Decades After Crown Heights, What’s It Like to Be Black and Orthodox Jewish?” (Wayne Lawrence & Molly Langmuir, New York magazine, December 2012)

A gorgeous blend of photography and personal testimony give this piece on black Orthodox Jews its power.

2. “I Am Trans, and I am Beautiful: Haley.” (R.L. Stollar, Homeschoolers Anonymous, May 2013)

The conservative Christian evangelical homeschooling community can be a world of harsh legalism. Here, Haley relates her story of nonconformity for Homeschoolers Anonymous, a blog that shares stories of struggle and abuse within this subculture.

3. “Muslim Women Converts Tell of Hijab Dilemmas, Family Rows and Negative Portrayal of Faith.” (Jessica Elgot, Huffington Post Religion, May 2013)

Elgort’s piece shares some of the The New Muslims Project study, in which subjects of all races and ages shared the beauty and pain of conversion to Islam.

4. “PK.” (Mary Mann, The Rumpus, January 2013)

Mann on her coming of age as the daughter of an Episcopal priest.

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Photo: zeevveez

Longreads Guest Pick: Julie Kliegman on 'Owning The Middle'

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:45:57 -0400

Julie Kliegman is a senior studying journalism and Spanish at Northwestern University. Come July, she’s headed to St. Petersburg to work for PolitiFact. She loves to travel, and has lived abroad for short stints in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico.

“This week I enjoyed reading ‘Owning the Middle,’ an ESPN story about WNBA star Brittney Griner. If their sleek online feature design (see: ‘Out in the Great Alone’) isn’t enough to woo you, Kate Fagan paints a compelling picture of life as a black, lesbian athlete. Griner developed a thick skin during childhood and her time at Baylor that now helps her deflect the bullies Fagan refers to as her ‘troll chorus.’ Reading this will make you want to be as badass as Griner—the proud owner of many tattoos and two snakes.”

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What are you reading (and loving)? Tell us.

Reading List: Six Stories for the Fantasy Newbie

Thu, 30 May 2013 13:22:50 -0400

Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She recently shared six stories for the science-fiction newbie, so next up, she’s tackling fantasy.

George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series, as Parks and Recreation’s Ben Wyatt would gladly tell you, is a crossover hit. However, there are still skeptics who view fantasy as children’s fables and tales exclusively for young adults—or you might just find GRRM’s enormous tomes a little intimidating.

Luckily, fantasy short stories offer us the depth of narrative we require and the fantastic elements we crave. Here is a collection of my favorite new and old gems, available online for free. Share your must-read fantasy stories in the comments below.

1. Prudence and the Dragon, Zen Cho (2012)

A story about love and friendship that won’t leave a cloying taste in your mouth. The matter-of-fact approach to the supernatural reminds me of Terry Pratchett, a superstar of the genre. From here, I’d go right to his Discworld series.

2. The Circular Ruins, Jorge Luis Borges (1940)

Borges is a must-read for anyone interested in magical realism. This story is one of his that is most closely aligned to the fantasy genre, as it involves a wizard and his dark gods. If you liked this, both Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez will have many more stories for you.

3. How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Neil Gaiman (2007)

Current rock star of the genre, Gaiman is a novelist and poet on top of being a mean short story writer. Magical realism mixed with boys being boys.

4. The Specialist’s Hat, Kelly Link (1998)

This story starts creepy and gets creepier—it concerns ghosts, horror, and (shudder) children. The focus on card games hints at the occult; the story progresses in a slow, haunting churn. Once you start, you won’t be able to stop until you finish, and if you aren’t then satisfied, go on to another one of hers: Some Zombie Contingency Plans.

5. Tiger Stripes, Nghi Vo (2012)

A calm, intensely visual story about a woman and her relationship with a tiger. This story reminds me of Avatar: The Last Airbender, not only because of its Chinese influence, but also its vivid worldbuilding. This pick in particular stands up to frequent re-reading.

6. The Kiss, Lauren LeBano (2010)

LeBano is a relatively new kid on the block, but this story is old and heady. It’s difficult to summarize—it involves a woman’s slow decline and both her natural and supernatural relationships. I felt sympathy for every single character, and came out of it drained, but satisfied.

For more fantasy short stories, head over to this post. Interested in a young adult fantasy novel? You can’t go wrong with Diana Wynne Jones.

What are your must-read fantasy stories? Tell us in the comments.

(Illustration via Ricardo Garbini, Wikimedia Commons)

Our Longreads Member Pick: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis

Wed, 29 May 2013 09:38:00 -0400

This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains:

I first arrived in Libya at the end of February 2011, less than ten days after the uprising began when peaceful protests were attacked by Col. Qaddafi’s forces. I spent a few months there on that trip and witnessed the beginnings of the armed conflict and the NATO intervention and, accidentally, the inside of the Libyan prison system. In September of 2011 I returned to report on the final phases of the war and the eventual execution of Qaddafi by rebel forces.

Like nearly every journalist who covered the conflict, and over 90% of the Libyan population, I had spent all my time in Libya on the Mediterranean coast. When I returned in February 2012 for the one-year anniversary of the uprising, I was determined to see more: the vast southern deserts had always fascinated me with their promise of oil-fields, tribal peoples, camels and oases. That month an age-old friction between the Tubu and Zwaya ethnic groups broke out into open battle in Kufra, some hundred miles north of the Chadian border. Despite claiming around 100 lives, it got almost no media attention, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go south.

We—my Ukrainian colleague Vadim Naninets (whose photographs were in the piece), our driver and I—set out before the break of dawn to make the 620-mile drive south from Benghazi. Fully stocked with bread, cheese, dates, and many cigarettes and bottles of water for the trip, the only real concern we had was bandits on the road. Since fighting in the city had ended, and it was fully ‘liberated,’ under the control of anti-Qaddafi rebels, we didn’t worry about politics in town. That was our first mistake…

On arrival we were immediately taken to the military council headquarters, where the questioning started off fairly innocuously (‘where are you from,’ ‘what are you doing here?’). Within an hour or two we were being questioned separately, our answers transcribed. Local newspapers wrote of our detention, prompting anxious Facebook discussions and phone calls from the temporary consulate in Benghazi. Ten hours later we were released into the custody of the National Army, the Benghazi-based outfit which had come south to quell the battles.

I quickly understood that in the Sahelian region of Libya—where lighter-skinned Zwaya and darker-skinned Tubu live together—the revolution had a very different meaning from the straight politics of the coast. Pro- and anti-Qaddafi factions were largely based on ethnicity and the history of relations between each ethnic group and the onetime Leader.

The ride home was much swifter and livelier than the ride down: National Army gave us a night-time lift in a C-130. In flagrant violation of any extant aviation law, we rode in the cockpit (I took a turn in the pilot’s seat), each of the ten or so men in the flight crew chain-smoking and explaining what all the dials were for, and pointing to distant red flares burning in the darkness which marked locations of oil fields.

I was struck yet again by the unimaginable vastness of the deserts, and the sense that we can never fully know what goes on there.

Read an excerpt here

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

College Longreads Pick of the Week: 'Freefall Into Madness,' from Students at Fresno State

Tue, 28 May 2013 13:44:43 -0400

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher will be helping Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s her inaugural pick:

There’s a lot of great writing on the Internet, but not as much great reporting. And that’s what we mean when we talk about “the death of newspapers.” It’s less about the end of a product and more about the dearth of watchdogs. Investigative reporting is expensive. It takes time, people and money. When it’s done well, it’s often upsetting, and not something that advertisers rally around.

But exposing injustice, malfeasance, waste, fraud, courage, humanity, and truth are the most important things journalists can do with their talents, skills and platforms. With that in mind, we selected an investigative piece as the inaugural #college #longreads selection.

Students at Fresno State, under the guidance of former Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Arax, produced “Freefall Into Madness: The Fresno County Jail’s Barbaric Treatment of the Mentally Ill.” Through their reporting, the team learned that Fresno County Jail denies medication to mentally ill inmates. “Because they are not mentally competent to stand trial, they bounce back and forth in a perverse revolving door between the county jail and state mental hospitals, costing taxpayers even more money,” the article notes in a chilling early paragraph.

Students interviewed inmates, judges, lawyers, and elected officials—on the record, a rarity in itself—for a piece published in the independent monthly paper, The Community Alliance. In a note that accompanied the story, editor Mike Rhodes wrote: “This is our best argument that even in the world of the Internet, Facebook and smartphones, quality journalism will survive. I believe readers need and will continue to demand in-depth information about the world around them.”

We agree.

Freefall into Madness: The Fresno County Jail’s Barbaric Treatment of the Mentally Ill

Reported and written by Fresno State journalists Sam LoProto, Damian Marquez, Angel Moreno, Jacob Rayburn, Brianna Vaccari, Liana Whitehead and their professor Mark Arax.

May 2013 | 43 minutes (10,556 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.