longreads

[longreads]

99 Problems: The Ice Cream Truck’s Surprising History

“But death still followed the chimes of the ice cream truck.”

Join Olivia Potts for a journey through the captivating—and shocking—250-year history of the ice cream truck. A real treat! Jump on board here. 

[longreads]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week's Top 5:

* The legend of the levee boss (The American Scholar) * Identity in the age of AI (Harper's Magazine) * The rules of Rave Club (The Fence Magazine) * Studying philosophy in prison (Aeon) * French fry why (Toronto Life)

Learn why our editors are recommending these stories.

[longreads]

Our Top 5: 

• Mapping the scars (Slate) • A parent, twice met (The New Yorker) • Paradise in peril (The Dial) • Hallucinating war (The Point) • Wriggly business (The Local)

Visit Longreads to read why our editors recommend these stories.

[longreads]

Science Cheats: A Reading List on Unscrupulous Scientists

"I admire and, as we all do, depend on the work of scientists. But they’re imperfect, and they exist in a world that tends to reward the quantity and newsworthiness of their publications. When promotions or prestige are dependent on how many papers you churn out, inevitably some researchers will try to game the system."

Today, Christine Ro brings us six stories highlighting the shady side of science scholarship. Check out the full list.

[longreads]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week's Top 5:

* The politics of pools (Earth Island Journal) * Not so nice mining ice (The Walrus) * Ultrarunning scamp or champ? (5280 Magazine) * Tom fauxlery (The Verge) * Smells like snail spirit (Texas Monthly)

Learn why our editors are recommending these stories.

[longreads]

When the San Antonio Express-News published his obituary, they made a typo: “beloved brother” became “beloved bother.” The family retrieved their copies from the ends of dusty driveways, flipped to DEATHS, and smiled.

In this week's new essay, Hannah Engler searches for answers about her great-uncle, a forgotten fashion designer named Ronald Kolodzie. She writes about queer NYC in the 1970-80s; family history and memory; and art, understanding, tolerance, and acceptance. 

Read “Beloved Bother” on Longreads.

[longreads]

Our sister publication’s new issue is a fantastic story by Matthew Wolfe about America’s first Black private eye. Thanks to the Atavist, as always, for allowing us to share an excerpt with Longreads readers.

Though Bruseaux has since been neglected by history, he was once a household name in the Black community. But as he prepared to take on the Granady case, the biggest of his career, his public persona revealed only part of his story. He had become wealthy and famous by unearthing other people’s secrets, but the man known as Sheridan Bruseaux was keeping a few of his own.

Read “The Mostly True Story of America’s First Black Private Investigator” on Longreads.

[longreads]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week 

In this week's Top 5: 

 -Mining mortality 

-Coach AI 

-Saving Sacagawea 

-Fighting time 

-Honoring hoarding 

Find out why our editors loved these stories here. 

[longreads]

Dimes, Dunks, and Devotion: A Basketball Reading List

“Just like that, the ball becomes two game-winning points. And with it, my broken heart is born again.”

Rachel Dlugatch's thrilling new reading list on the love of basketball explores community, identity, and hope. Read it here. 

[longreads]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week's Top 5:

• Symbiosis steeped in irony (Washington Post) • The hidden lives of rocks (Atmos) • Journalism’s facts machine (The Yale Review) • What’s up, sun? (Noēma) • Puzzling through problems (The American Scholar)

Learn why our editors are recommending these stories.

[longreads]

"Thank You for Finding Me"

"At some point I forgot exactly what it was that John had said, but I never forgot how he had made me feel—that what I wanted was important, and was important simply because I wanted it."

As a teenager, she met a man whose words changed her life. Twenty years later, she went looking for him. Read Lisa Bubert's essay here.

[longreads]

Disneyland of the Dead

“Sometimes bodies were disinterred before they had begun to decompose fully, the flesh chopped up and thrown into bone pits, while the parts of the coffins that could be preserved were reused.”

Why is it so hard to keep the dead buried? Read our fascinating new essay from Ralph Jones here.

[longreads]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week's Top 5:

* A first-person flood account (Texas Monthly) * Californians icing ICE (Rolling Stone) * Sexually diverse vegetables (Noēma) * Pokémon: Go! (Virginia Quarterly Review) * Polo clonies (Wired)

Learn why our editors are recommending these stories.

[longreads]

Bread and Honey

In her thoughtful new essay, Diana Saverin reflects on the necessary ingredients of a marriage, and how it's important to ensure that over time, we remember to braid the bitter with the sweet.

I once read an article describing that the way a couple tells their story predicts their future, from how satisfied they are in their relationship to whether they stay together in the years to come. In the study, couples who told their meet-cute as if a stroke of fate and luck had led them to each other, who were enthusiastic and loving in their recollections of the past, were much more likely to remain married.

The idea stuck with me, that the stories we tell create—or at least reflect—the lives we live.

Read the essay. 

[longreads]

Our top 5 #longreads:

- Beyond the human clock (Harper’s) - Trampled tranquility (New York) - Exotic Middle America (Slate) - The end is the beginning (Emergence Magazine) - Hope on four legs (The New Yorker)

Visit Longreads to read why our editors recommend these stories.

[longreads]

In this week's new Longreads essay, Erika Howsare writes about her search for secular ritual. She did not grow up religious, but in her 20s, she suddenly craved some kind of ritual practice:

My identity was too wrapped up in skepticism of Christianity to join that fold, and I really had no idea what else might be possible for someone wanting to practice ritual, much less within a group setting.

In this piece, Howsare reflects on the seasons, examines her connection to the land, and explores artmaking—through the work of performance artist Meesha Goldberg—as a form of secular ritual.

Ritual is an urge and an act; it’s an aesthetic gesture. As an adult I established the habit of turning my attention to those subtle seasonal details and recording them. I was loving and honoring the land, but this practice still left something undone. A certain clarity, maybe formality. Something like a frame around a painting, or the white on which the red square floats.

Read Erika Howsare’s essay, “How to Observe,” on Longreads.

[longreads]

The two old adversaries take chairs facing each other across six feet of wood laminate. I perch on a bench halfway between them and fan out the objects I’ve been permitted: notepad, pen, digital recorder.

Larry Thompson's most famous murder inspired two books and a movie. Was he also responsible for a crime that's haunted Louisiana for nearly 50 years? In the latest Atavist story, “Conversations with a Hit Man,” David Howard joins a retired FBI agent, Myron Fuller, on a journey to confront the past. 

Read an excerpt from part one on Longreads.