This week, we’re sharing stories from Mosi Secret, David Farrier, Ferris Jabr, Blake Butler, and Eoghan Walsh.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
1. Visible Men: Black Fathers Talk About Losing Sons to Police Brutality
Mosi Secret | GQ | December 10, 2020 | 28 minutes (7,072 words)
“We asked the fathers and father figures of Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake to reflect on the violence that forever altered their families’ lives—and what it means to raise a Black man in America.”
2. Hand in Glove
David Farrier | Orion Magazine | September 10, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,967 words)
“And, formed as they are from durable polymers and loaded with toxic plasticizers and other chemicals, plastic gloves can last for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Yet in discarding them (or any plastic object, come to that), we act as if none of this touches us.”
3. The Social Life of Forests
Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | December 2, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,916 words)
“Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?”
4. Molly
Blake Butler | The Volta | December 1, 2020 | 29 minutes (7,486 words)
“Love someone back,” she wrote in a poem that I read the first day I realized I already loved her and always would. “You just begin.” So I began.
5. If Proust Ate Pringles — On Memory, Loss, and the Persistence of Heineken
Eoghan Walsh | Good Beer Hunting | December 8, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,800 words)
“That was the definitive goodbye, but when a loved one dies of a terminal illness they don’t die just once. They are, instead, dying over and over again, as grim milestones accumulate with you powerless to arrest the dawning inevitability of the final, conclusive death.”
Get the Longreads Weekly Email