Q: What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
A: An ecosystem.
In our latest Longreads Questionnaire, tech critic and author Cory Doctorow (@mostlysignssomeportents) shares his thoughts
on multitasking (including thinking while swimming); writing in
hammocks; and blogging for the long haul.
Visit Longreads to read more from Cory Doctorow.
The People Who Know Too Much: A Reading List on Amateur Experts
“To care intensely about one narrow subject is to reject the idea that value must be broad, immediate, or easily monetized. So while fixation can seem bizarre, it is also to resist the thinning of attention that modern life demands.”
In our latest reading list, Dr. Dinesh Kumar Jangra celebrates those who nurture an obsession. Find out more here.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Joseph Trinidad’s new essay collection, Lucky Creatures, published by @sarabandebooks. In “The Cousin Returns,” Trinidad, a Filipino writer based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington, recounts a visit home to the Philippines:
The last time I was in Cabuyao, there weren’t townhouses, private swimming pools, or major shopping malls in the area. It was long stretches of grassland. There wasn’t the fluorescent glow of fast-food chains every three minutes. There weren’t as many potholes. In the name of progress, much of the town, like everywhere in its vicinity, is dragged through time.
A blip, a turn, and suddenly, I’m in a present I no longer recognize. Exhausted, my mind retreats toward sleep.
I can never truly return.
Visit Longreads to read “The Cousin Returns.”
Photo credit: Dennis Eir Lim
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
In this week’s Top 5:
* Quiet, please (The New Yorker)
* An ode to art (The New York Review of Books)
* The value of vultures (The Washington Post)
* The Big Ea(t)sy (Oxford American)
* A marginal conversation (The Yale Review)
Author Lavinia Spalding has edited The Best Women’s Travel Writing series seven times, so
she’s learned a thing or two about strong travel narratives and writing
about place.
“I see how stories suffer when a writer attempts to
fit the play-by-play of an entire experience into a few thousand
words,” she says. “I remind myself that it’s almost always more
effective to focus on just one illuminating slice of an experience and
bring that to life on the page, excavating it for the inner story and
zooming in close, so I can move beyond shallow observations.
Spalding takes us behind the scenes of volume 13, published this week by Travelers’ Tales. She considered more than 1,600 submissions for this edition and
ultimately curated 27 stories—a collection of essays written by
best-selling authors Susan Orlean and Roxane Gay, as well as emerging writers who have never been published.
Visit Longreads to read our conversation with Lavinia Spalding on curation, grief and levity, and the travel stories she hopes to read more of in the future.
Friction: A Reading List on Why Inconvenience Can Be Meaningful
We prize convenience and efficiency, almost to a fault. Sometimes, though, we’re missing out on surprise, serendipity, and anticipation when we avoid friction. Courtney E. Martin brings us five reads that examine the pros and cons of life’s little hurdles.
Without getting too nostalgic about it, these readings will make you revisit the forgotten, sometimes wonderful feelings that go with friction. We don’t have to throw away our cell phones to bring spontaneity back into our lives. We can be intentional and collective. In fact, we must be intentional and collective; it’s the only way to live expansive lives connected by slow and messy delight. And that is an aim far more worthy of our finite time than productivity, no matter what the false gods of Silicon Valley and late-stage capitalism say.
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
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.
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.
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!
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?
Read the excerpt. Check out the full episode.
