So this week has been pretty chaotic. We move out of our office in 2 weeks and I’ve been helping coordinate that and with the other departments on my floor leaving at the same time (our building is being renovated) it’s a mishmash of meetings, packing, chatting with coworkers about how weird it is to have our departments separated for the next year. Anyhoo, because of all this, I haven’t been…
Where did March even go? This has been a bit half-assed because of time constraints, but idk, read this when you’re bored at work? This edition is a wee bit late; I wanted to wait out the weekend because I went to an excellent art show and I wanted to share pictures. Unfortunately, the Starbucks I had right before that made the rest of the night not great, but I did eat a very tasty cake and the…
I’ve had fiction writer’s block for way too long, but reading this helped… I think.
I read this and realized I hadn’t listened to any Tribe Called Quest in way too long so I loaded a playlist while I took a bath and it’s my new form of self care.
Thisis a great piece about why some black women have a fondness for fur and you should read it…
So the way I usually write these goes like this: 1. Open up wordpress on Monday morning 2. Read something enraging 3. Don’t post the link 4. Read something fun or thought-provoking 5. Post the link 6. Repeat throughout the day 7. Save draft at 4pm Repeat steps 1-7 Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. On Fridays I add some commentary, obligatory Good Place gifs, re-read the post a couple times for some…
What a week! I’m SO glad it’s Friday and I can go home in an 75 minutes with at least the dream of being able to chill out. It was a busy week, but I did manage to read a bunch, so lucky you! Enjoy!
On the Web
I’m not linking it because, let’s be real, as if I would, but I did read that Lena Dunham profile when I could’ve been more productive and repeatedly stabbed myself in the eye.
So, another week, another list of things I read. There are a few pieces I was saving to read this week, but then I died twice, which cut into my reading time. Nevertheless, I did manage to read some stuff.
Ali al-Makhzomy was 17 in 2005 when his older brother — handsome, popular — threw him the keys to his Range Rover and said he was walking to a friends’ house. He never came back.
“Two weeks later we received a call from his phone — the guy said, ‘We have Mohammad and we want money.’” Mohammad was a subcontractor for the US military and made a decent salary. But the $250,000 they were asking for was an impossible amount. The kidnappers agreed to accept his vehicle instead of ransom money. But they didn’t release him.
Mohammad was 29 when he disappeared. He was Ali’s hero. They shared a bedroom at the family home in Baghdad. Ali would iron his older brother’s clothes for him. “I would do anything he asked,” he says. “When I walked down the street I was never afraid because I thought, ‘I have my brother watching my back.’”
Ali’s father died of a heart attack two years before the Iraq War. After his brother’s kidnapping, Ali was the only male left in the family.
“It’s not just my family — you can find in all the families in Iraq now there is a crisis. Either someone has gone missing or someone has been killed.”
Asala
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was one of the most isolated countries in the world. Most young Iraqis had never seen a cell phone or satellite television before 2003. Ideas and information were considered dangerous and both phones and satellite dishes were banned. The internet was censored, monitored and available only in public cafes. When the regime fell, the barriers to the outside world did as well.
Those new links out inspired new interests for young people like Asala, who is now 19. But at the same time, years of war gave rise to more conservative, religious cultures. Between the expectations of their parents and of society, a lot of young women here feel unable to pursue their dreams.
Asala doesn’t have close friends in which to confide. But she chats every day online with French and Austrian friends she discovered through a Korean pop fan page. “We all got super close,” she says. It was her online friends who told her she seemed depressed.
“I said, ‘Wait, depressed? Depression — what is that?’ So I looked it up and I have the symptoms. It’s horrible. At this age you are supposed to go out and have fun. But [in Iraq] you deal with things that are so much bigger than you. You worry about how are you going to live if things get worse. You even worry about if you are going to make it to the next day. Death is pretty much surrounding you. It’s really depressing.”
Daoud
Soccer is a favorite pastime and a national passion. It is a part of almost every Iraqi’s childhood. Two years ago, Daoud Asager and his friends played a game of soccer on a July evening. He was 24 at the time. Neighborhood children lined the field as the sun fell below the horizon and the summer heat burned away.
Asager saw the car approach. The soccer field erupted in flames.
“I saw one of my friends on the ground hit by pieces of the car. Then I saw two children who were on fire. They were walking and their bodies were on fire. I will never forget that sight.”
The suicide car bombing — now a regular feature of growing up in Iraq — killed four of his friends that day. It was one of a series of coordinated bombings in Baghdad that killed a total of 27 people.
The war had finally struck too close for Daoud. Traumatized, he decided to get out.
“I wanted a peaceful life. I didn’t want war,” he says.
Tim Brown seemed like a typical Florida retiree: He loved doting on his wife, fishing with friends, and flying his plane. But his life was built on a secret.
On the morning of December 2, 2020, Tim Brown got up early to start a fire. The night before, an unseasonable cold front had descended on Love’s Landing, Florida, where Brown lived with his wife, Duc Hanh Thi Vu. By 8 a.m., the mercury in the thermometer had yet to reach 40 degrees. At the bottom of the cul-de-sac where the couple lived, a thin layer of frost glistened on the long grass runways that extended through the quiet neighborhood: Love’s Landing is a private aviation community, home to pilots, plane engineers, and flying enthusiasts.
As heat from the fireplace warmed the house, Brown headed to the small hangar he’d built right outside. Nearly everyone in Love’s Landing owned a plane, and Brown was no exception. He’d just had the engine of his gleaming Tecnam P2008 replaced, and despite the chill in the air, the morning was shaping up to be calm and clear. Perfect weather to take the plane up.
Since the first operation in Bangkok in 1975, Thailand has become one of the top destinations in the world for gender confirmation surgery. But what drives people to seek trans healthcare in Thailand, and why would so many patients rather fly across the world for the procedure than do it in their home countries?
In her new story for Longreads, “Finding a Path in a Broken System,” Bangkok-based visual journalist Mailee Osten-Tan explores these questions and more.
All photographs in this gallery, and in the story, by Mailee Osten-Tan.
Tim Brown seemed like a typical Florida retiree: He loved doting on his wife, fishing with friends, and flying his plane. But his life was built on a secret.
On the morning of December 2, 2020, Tim Brown got up early to start a fire. The night before, an unseasonable cold front had descended on Love’s Landing, Florida, where Brown lived with his wife, Duc Hanh Thi Vu. By 8 a.m., the mercury in the thermometer had yet to reach 40 degrees. At the bottom of the cul-de-sac where the couple lived, a thin layer of frost glistened on the long grass runways that extended through the quiet neighborhood: Love’s Landing is a private aviation community, home to pilots, plane engineers, and flying enthusiasts.
As heat from the fireplace warmed the house, Brown headed to the small hangar he’d built right outside. Nearly everyone in Love’s Landing owned a plane, and Brown was no exception. He’d just had the engine of his gleaming Tecnam P2008 replaced, and despite the chill in the air, the morning was shaping up to be calm and clear. Perfect weather to take the plane up.
June first marks the beginning of Pride Month! To celebrate, Spencer George curates a list of seven pieces that range from a celebration of the work of gay photographer Jack Robinson to deeply personal essays about lived experiences in the Southern United States.
In popular culture, the stories I saw of Southern queerness often involved leaving. Queerness in these narratives was a secret shame, one that, if revealed, led to loss and disappointment. If there were happy endings to these stories, it was only because the characters left everything behind, escaping to distant metropolises where they could begin anew. There seemed to be no bridge between lives once lived and futures where the possibility of joy existed. Most of all, there seemed to be no way to have that joy without removing oneself from home entirely.
I often think that I would have come out years earlier if I had been able to see myself represented in different ways. If I had witnessed queer characters fall in love and thrive and build lives — joyous, wonderful, full lives — in the places they are from.
This week, our Top 5 sets an important and particularly sobering precedent. In the April 28th, 2017 edition of the Top 5, Jason Fagone’s extraordinary Huffpost Highline piece, “What Bullets Do to Bodies” was selected as number one. In light of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, this piece retains a startling relevance. It’s our number one piece this week. Editor Seyward Darby explains why.
Jason Fagone | HuffPost Highline | April 26th, 2017 | 7,799 words
I’m breaking from tradition here and highlighting a story that’s already been in one of these newsletters, and as a top pick no less. The circumstances demand it. On Tuesday, a gunman armed with two legally purchased AR-style assault rifles slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in a single classroom at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. As authorities worked to identify the victims, they asked parents to provide DNA samples. What’s unspoken in this detail is that the dead children were unrecognizable, or so mangled that it would have been an unimaginable cruelty to ask their parents to look at them. I can’t get this fact out of my mind, and it prompted me to re-read one of the best pieces of explanatory journalism in recent memory. Almost exactly five years ago, Jason Fagone spent time with the head of trauma surgery at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia to understand the damage that bullets do to bodies. What Dr. Amy Goldberg had to say about the Sandy Hook massacre could be said today about the shooting in Uvalde: “As a country, we lost our teachable moment…. The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.” America is a country where the mass murder of children is followed by mourning and forgetting, but never action: Congress hasn’t passed a single piece of gun control legislation since Sandy Hook. Until that changes, Goldberg’s comment will be relevant again in another community, at another school. It’s only a matter of time. —SD
Happy 74th Birthday, Stevie Nicks! To celebrate, Longreads contributor Jill Spivey Caddell has collected six great reads spanning Nicks’ incredible career.
WhenRolling Stone published an updated list of the 500 greatest songs of all time last year, a tune that had not been included at all in the 2004 iteration of the list suddenly appeared in the top 10: “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. Of course, anyone with a fleeting acquaintance with the overwrought and raucous history of Fleetwood Mac knows that “Dreams” is a Stevie Nicks song, part of a Rumours diptych with Lindsey Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way” rehashing Stevie and Lindsey’s tortured breakup. Anointing Nicks’ “Dreams” as a classic anthem 45 years after its initial release, beloved by Gen Z TikTokers and nostalgic Boomers alike, speaks to the irrepressible essence of Stevie herself.
From Prince to Harry Styles, Tom Petty to Haim, Stevie Nicks links generations of musicians and fans, genres and trends. This reading list probes the source of her ongoing popularity through her refusal to be anything but herself, showing how Stevie’s instincts for survival and her silvery songwriting prowess allowed her to rise above her band’s many implosions and cement her own supernatural cultural presence. As we celebrate Stephanie Lynn Nicks’ 74th birthday on May 26, these essays explain why the ageless sound of her voice continues to haunt us.
Kick off your weekend with five great reads on Eurovision, West Coast road trips, the magic of alleys, the existence of demons, and an 89-year-old working cowboy named Boots.
The pandemic has made it difficult and sometimes scary for family and friends to gather around the same table to enjoy not just a delicious meal together, but the nourishment of one another’s company. In this beautiful essay, Benjamin Dubow reflects on the process of baking challah each week for his Friday evening Shabbat meal using a sourdough starter lovingly called “Orlando,” a living, breathing being that evolves as Dubow experiments with his recipe. Come for the bread, stay for the story, and revel in the fellowship and community.
Orlando and I have been working on this challah recipe since we moved to Ames two summers ago. I started with other recipes, including my sister’s and Joan Nathan’s, and tasted what they were about. Then, we tinkered.
To make the bread more tender, I’ve added more oil, a bit more sugar, a couple more eggs — and good ones at that. I try to use the best eggs I can find, eggs befitting a holy bread. The ones I get from Ron & Kristine up in Hubbard from chickens raised on Central Iowan pasture beam with sunlight transmuted into liquid gold. The yolks are nearly orange (the product of their foraged, insect-heavy diet) and color the dough so bright a yellow it looks as though I’ve added turmeric. Now, when I make challah with other eggs — even the nice ones I sometimes get from the co-op when my poultry people are out — the dough looks sad and wan by comparison. Unilluminated.
Then, of course, there is the added component of Orlando, whose presence in this Sabbath bread brings home for me the concept of shalom, though I can’t tell you exactly why that is the case. (Shalom means peace, shalom means welfare.) Only that the feeling I get when we bake together, and especially when we bake challah together, is the same sort of feeling I get when I’m home with my family for Shabbos. (Shalom means wholeness, means harmony.) This, too, I cannot quite describe. Just that I feel a particular warmth in my heart and stomach, cheeks and toes. (Shalom is also used as a salutation — on the Sabbath, for instance, we say: Shabbat shalom.)
I think we’re pretty darn close to where it wants to be. In distinction to our usual sourdough loaf, our challah has a soft crust (though it still could be even softer) and a finer, closer crumb, the lattice of strands more braided pillow than agglutinated web.
What is cabin fever and why does isolation — being cooped up in one place too long — make us feel so bad? At Longreads, Kara Devlin shares six stories about loneliness and isolation to help connect us by reading.
Of course, isolation is not just found through a physical landscape. The most harrowing form of loneliness can occur in a crowded room. Edward Hopper famously explored the loneliness of living in the big city through paintings like “Nighthawks.” This ubiquitous depiction of urban isolation, a diner with no entrance and no exit, serves as a memorable illustration of loneliness. When you are inside of this feeling — the metaphorical diner if you will — there is no perceived beginning or end, and no consideration from those around you, as nothing exists beyond this world-swallowing experience.
I am drawn to the idea that reading can connect the isolated — that one story on loneliness can link together hundreds of confined minds to think, Maybe I’m not alone. The stories on this list do not just seek to analyze and dissect the effects of isolation; they serve as a powerful tool of connection.
In this excerpt from The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, host Brendan O’Meara talks to Katia Savchuk and Atavist editor-in-chief Seyward Darby about their work on “A Crime Beyond Belief.”
A kidnapping deemed a hoax, the newbie detective who cracked the case, and the Harvard-trained lawyer whose mental unraveling set the whole story in motion.
