Longreads

This week’s Longreads Top 5:

Reign makers, Harper’s Magazine

Board brothers, The New York Times

Filling blanks, The American Scholar 

War games, The New York Review

Field dreams, @fastcompany

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.

The Grate Cheese Robbery 

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.

Getting Unstuck with Ramona Ausubel

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?

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week 

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)

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.

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.

Failure To Lawn

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.

‘This Was Our Life’: A Reading List on Multigenerational Caregiving

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.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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)

The new @atavist story is about an undercover agent who posed as a taxidermist to bust Colorado's worst poachers.

As the Colorado Division of Wildlife saw it, by the mid-1980s the San Luis Valley had become a lawless backcountry where hunters traded poached wildlife for goods and services, to pay off gambling debts, or to obtain cocaine and marijuana.

This week's Longreads Top 5:   

- Bottles ashore, @newyorker - Benches awaiting, Places Journal - Boundlessness disputed, Quanta Magazine - Books aplenty, Cabinet - Batons bought, The Baffler

Finding the Magic in Writing with Lidia Yuknavitch

Today at Longreads, we've got some writing inspiration for you from Lidia Yuknavitch. She’s the author of several best-selling books, including the novels The Small Backs of Children, The Book of Joan, and Thrust, as well as a memoir, Reading the Waves. She recently sat down with Brendan O'Meara for the Creative Nonfiction Podcast to talk about shitty first, second, and third drafts; embracing the struggle to write; and more. Check out this short snippet of their conversation below and be sure to read the excerpt. Don't forget to tune in to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast on your favorite streaming app.

Brendan: I think that, early on, writers can struggle with writing a lot of bad stuff before they can get the good stuff. What’s been your practice for writing a lot of bad stuff and then knowing that, with enough practice, it gets better?

Welcome to the weekend! In this week's edition of our Top 5: —Death traps | The Believer —Derring-do detectives | The New York Review of Books —Drivel inspection | The Drift  —Deforestation? Not in my back yard! | In These Times  —Dissonance appreciation | The New Yorker

The score was 4-0. The night was still a triumph.

Even as the clock wound down, seven players subbed in within the last 14 minutes, each getting a brief chance to play for their country.

Read Jordan P. Hickey’s new Longreads story about the Marshall Islands’ first national soccer team—and what it means to play for a country, a community, and an idea of home.

We asked best-selling author and antiracism scholar Ibram X. Kendi: What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into? 

The Memory Maker

Recently, OpenAI sunsetted their immersive video ap, Sora, but the false memories it helped create will remain. Today, for Longreads, neuroscientist Tim Requarth explores how Sora helped users to believe they had done things they quite clearly had not. 

Of course, there’s one big difference between Loftus’s memory of the house fire and Deutsch’s fanciful scaling of Lincoln’s nose. One was real, the other wasn’t. Not only unreal, but unlikely. “I would make a distinction between something that’s plausible and implausible,” she said. “If suddenly there’s a picture of you in a Russian prison in Siberia and you’ve never been, you’re obviously going to be able to reject it. Maybe you’ll have a weird feeling seeing yourself, but you’re just going to know you’ve never been.”

Fair enough. I started to think that maybe it’s a stretch to say that Deutsch’s “twitch of confusion” is anything to be concerned about. But then I talked to another Sora user and things got weirder.