This week’s Longreads Top 5:
Visit Longreads to read why our editors recommend these stories.
The new @atavist issue, by investigative journalist Barry Meier, is stranger than fiction.
The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives. Passports were easy to counterfeit, hotels and airlines took cash, and there weren’t cell phones or personal computers that authorities could track.
Read an excerpt on Longreads.
One chancer, who was stopped at the Russian border near Kaliningrad, was found to be carrying 1000 lbs of imported cheese. He valiantly claimed personal use, but the authorities didn’t buy it. Another, traveling from Finland, had stuffed 67 wheels of cheese into the side compartments of his Volkswagen.
Why are criminals stealing cheese? How much cheese are they melting away? Read Olivia Potts’ new fabulous and fun piece on cheese heists to find out!
Writing well is hard! Today at Longreads, we’ve got an excerpt of episode 528 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, in which host Brendan O'Meara talks with author Ramona Ausubel about getting unstuck in your writing projects, developing your voice, and embracing friction.
Students constantly ask, so what do you do about writer’s block? You keep writing, you find a specific and small entry point and you continue on. There is no moment when that stops happening to you. For the most part, most of us have to say, okay, I’m in this dark place, it’s all foggy, I can’t see anything. What do I have? I have a sense of who this character is. I have a sense of the space of the world, and there’s like, 100 flashlights hanging on the wall. Why? I don’t know. Let’s see what we can do with all of those things. It’s just that next little step, and the next little step opens it up a little bit further, and you might get to another stuck place that’s different than the one before. But again, you’re going to look at what you have and keep moving forward. There’s 101 ways of creating that one small step forward, so that it doesn’t feel like a giant impossible task. But it’s a continuous act of discovery, which is not only not a problem, but a good thing. It’s the fun part. So not knowing also means that you get to discover so much more. You just have to keep asking again: Where am I? What am I interested in? What would be the next most fun thing, and what do I have in front of me that I can work with?
Read the excerpt. Check out the full episode.
In this week’s Longreads Top 5:
—After the flood (Texas Monthly)
—Twisted roles (The San Francisco Chronicle)
—Drawn to the emptiness (The Offing)
—When the rice fails (The New Yorker )
—Many, many miles (Texas Highways)
Find out why our editors want you to read these stories here.
The latest in @atavist’s Revived series—which breathes new life into stories lost to dead links and shuttered publications—is “A Hollywood Ending” by Maccabee Montandon.
I wrote this story, which was originally published by Gawker in 2013, as a sort of exorcism to contend with personal demons. I’ve never been great at therapy, so I looked at reporting and writing “A Hollywood Ending” as my version of it. I wanted to get everything out, as it were. There were other considerations, too: I was motivated to make sense of a senseless act of violence for the people who had counseled me after my brother’s death. And I wanted the story to speak to people I’d never met. We hear about the shootings that grab headlines, but what about those that don’t? I wanted to bring to life just one of the thousands of anonymous people killed by guns in this country every year.
Read our excerpt, “Nothing Together,” on Longreads.
In OPIOIDS & ORGANS, a new graphic memoir published @drawnandquarterly, Arizona O’Neill writes about her father’s death and the organ industry’s own codependence on the opioid crisis.
Read our excerpt—“Aren’t the Organs a Silver Lining?”—on Longreads.
Can you hear the sound of millions of lawn mowers firing up in the northern hemisphere as spring gets into full swing and the grass starts to grow? We spend an inordinate amount of time tending our lawns, squandering precious water and spreading chemicals to achieve turfgrass perfection. Maggie Slepian learned that it doesn’t have to be that way.
That night, with no one to talk to about the moral and environmental failings of turfgrass, I typed I hate my lawn into my phone and was funneled straight to r/NoLawns on Reddit. Turns out, a lot of people also hate their lawns.
In the cobwebs of my mind, I must have known native landscaping and regenerative yard meadows existed, but I’d been so overwhelmed by my solo landscaping failures that I didn’t consider alternatives. I scrolled photos of pebble-lined xeriscaping, natural water features, glistening berry bushes, and before-and-afters of ragged grass transformed into a riot of flowers sagging with pollen-covered bee butts. Photos were accompanied by trails of comments and replies praising the grass removal and offering advice and commentary on the range of plants and explosion of life.
Oh, I thought, gazing into the hypnotic glow of my phone. I can just kill my lawn. On purpose.
Be sure to check out the full piece.
Are you a part of the sandwich generation, someone who cares for children in addition to aging relatives, friends, or neighbors? Courtney E. Martin makes her Longreads debut with an incisive new reading list. She brings us five stories that highlight the overwhelming and rewarding work of giving care to other human beings.
Sixty-three million Americans are family caregivers, but many of us don’t identify this way. Perhaps it’s because the role creeps up on us. Perhaps it’s because we feel we’re not worthy of the label; caregivers should be saints, or at the very least, people with well-organized spreadsheets. Perhaps it’s because caring for someone, officially, requires them to acknowledge that they need care—a tricky prospect for the strongest and most stubborn among us.
In this week’s Top 5:
* Happy birthday, Sir David (The Ringer)
* The search for her son (The Boston Globe Magazine)
* A keyboard fantasy (The New York Review of Books)
* A membership to midlife (Taste Cooking)
* The kids will slay (The New Yorker)
Learn why our editors are recommending these stories.
longreads
It feels almost disingenuous to say my car was stolen. It was not broken into. No one hotwired it. I was not carjacked at gunpoint. Nor was it stolen through the recent TikTok trend to boost Kias by sticking a USB drive down the throat of the ignition. Nothing so clever or destructive occurred.
I left Las Vegas, where I live, for a work trip to Phoenix. That morning, my father flew into Las Vegas for a weekend trip with his wife and her grandson. They borrowed my car. While out to dinner that evening, my father left it unlocked with the key inside in the parking lot of the Orleans Hotel and Casino, a budget resort west of the Strip.
I was out drinking with colleagues that night and missed a few calls. When I checked my phone, I saw my father had texted with weird punctuation and fragment sentences: “Call me It’s very important. It’s about important.”
It sounded important. I had also missed a call from the police. I got on the phone with my father first and, with a tone of pure shame, he said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, son. Your car is gone.”
When Dan Hernandez recovered his stolen car, he found a mysterious VHS labeled “Bad Tape” left inside of it. His friends and family told him not to watch it, but Dan couldn’t resist. Read our latest.
