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16 hours ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
One year ago, a website publicly outed Blaire Fleming, a starting member of the San Jose State University volleyball team, as a trans woman. That incident, writes Jason Zengerle for The New York Times Magazine, elevated Fleming from “a mostly unknown college volleyball player to an unwilling combatant in the culture war” concerning identity and competitive sports.
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1 day ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
I found myself swiftly transported to the other side of Henri Cole’s essay for The Paris Review, delivered there by a succession of scenes delivered with crisp authority, like a friend handing you a series of photographs. Cole, best known for his poetry, moves episodically through his relationships with a small, close group of writing teachers and friends—primarily James Merrill, a Pulitzer Prize winner who died thirty years ago—as the AIDS crisis looms and then descends upon them.
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3 days ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
During the past century, “creativity” evolved from a mess of privately held notions to a cultural panacea. Beginning in the 1950s, some psychologists interviewed and tested prominent intellectuals, including the architect I.M. Pei and the writer Truman Capote, to better understand the creative individual.
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1 week ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
“Changing your mind in private is one thing,” Timothy White writes for the New York Times, in this fascinating, heartening inversion of a coming-out story. “Changing your mind publicly is very different.” As a teenager, White told his parents he was gay; the revelation shook his father Bill, an Evangelical pastor, and divided his congregation.
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2 weeks ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
Weeks before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Ryan D’Agostino revisited an exchange he’d had with Kennedy years earlier.
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2 weeks ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
The pace of a photograph’s development lags the instant of its capture. Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mike Scalise acquired decades of photographs from his grandmother who, late in life, turned to instant film as a memory tool.
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2 weeks ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
We’ve previously featured pieces from “Who is government?,” a Washington Post series in which writers search for “the essential public servant”—including Dave Eggers on the members of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Michael Lewis on a U.S. Bureau of Mines employee whose life’s work prevents cave-ins.
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3 weeks ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
For Wired, Claire L. Evans considers the C. elegans nematode, a microscopic worm made of fewer than a thousand cells. “It can reproduce, it can eat, it can forage, it can escape,” a neuroscientist tells Evans. “It’s born and it develops, and it ages and it dies—all in a millimeter.” The knowability of the worm makes it appealing for researchers, including the team at OpenWorm, a project dedicated to creating a virtual replica of the nematode.
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4 weeks ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
Some stories bear repeating–at length. A year ago, Jordan Blumetti reported on plans for a residential development in Clay County, Florida, to be built on the grounds of a factory that produced building material and powered its kilns by burning hazardous waste. At 1,700 words, Blumetti’s story for The Guardian evoked a hyperlocal history of environmental degradation.
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1 month ago | 
longreads.com | Brendan FitzGerald |Brendan Fitzgerald
For The New York Review of Books, Ben Mauk considers The Invisible Yoke, a four-book series of photographs from Matt Eich that presents “evidence of a nation’s derangement.” Eich, whose photojournalism credits include The Guardian and The New York Times, devoted nearly 20 years to the project, patiently developing a book that, Mauk writes, “seems to contain a critique of the whole country.” Writing about photography can seem, at its most gratifying, like an act of divination; here, Mauk...
