Seyward Darby

New York

Editor in Chief at The Atavist Magazine

Articles

An Experience for Me

1 week ago | longreads.com | Seyward Darby

Who is Nathan Fielder, really? Alexandra Tanner asks the question on many TV watchers’ minds, but if you’re hoping for an illuminating look at entertainment’s consummate man of self-made mystery, this isn’t it.
Playing Secretary

1 week ago | longreads.com | Seyward Darby

To say that things are messy in Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon would be the understatement of the year. As Kerry Howley’s reporting reveals, the place is beset by utter chaos—leaks that constitute a veritable tsunami, backstabbing among wildly unqualified staffers, and a leader more adept at posting photos of his workouts than managing one of the largest bureaucracies in the world:Hegseth was different after Signalgate, according to six people in a position to know.
At Immigration Court

2 weeks ago | longreads.com | Seyward Darby

On its face, the premise of this essay is simple to the point of mundane: readers follow along as a man sits through a routine court hearing. But the piece reads like a thriller, because the man is M, an asylum-seeker from Mauritania, and he appears in immigration court in New York City, stalked by groups of ICE agents:M and I walked through the main atrium, where small clusters of men in plain clothes stood with their phones out. This was also new.
The Dark History of the Far Right’s Natalism

1 month ago | vogue.com | Seyward Darby

I had my first child in December; he will also be my only child. I’m going one-and-done with kids for the same reasons many women in the United States are having fewer babies, and later in life. Faced with economic uncertainty, climate change, and vanishing reproductive rights, it feels like a prudent choice. Most importantly, it’s what I want. The Trump administration is trying to figure out how to change my mind, and doing a terrible job of it.
A Year in Reading: The Wounds That Bind

Dec 10, 2024 | longreads.com | Seyward Darby

Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 13,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today. I’ve had a lot of big feelings this year. This is due in part to the hormonal tides of pregnancy—as I write this, I’m three weeks shy of my due date. But as my beloved, ever-patient Longreads colleagues know, I’m predisposed to big feelings whether I’m growing a tiny human or not.
Inside the Vatican’s Secret Saint-Making Process

Dec 4, 2024 | longreads.com | Seyward Darby

Canonization has long been a way for the Catholic church to shape its image. The Vatican is preparing to anoint its first millennial saint, but how does it decide who is worthy? Linda Kinstler goes inside the apparatus that has been choosing saints for centuries. Fans of the movie Conclave will salivate reading this story:The dicastery’s daily operations are kept out of the public eye.
If My Dying Daughter Could Face Her Mortality, Why Couldn’t the Rest of Us?

Dec 2, 2024 | longreads.com | Seyward Darby

Sarah Wildman has written several beautiful pieces about her teenage daughter Orli’s death from cancer. This might be her best yet. It is an examination of the ways in which cultural discomfort about discussing children’s mortality influences end-of-life care, leading often to confusion and a sense of abandonment: One afternoon, a palliative care doctor stopped by and lightly offered what she called a “back door” to home nursing: hospice.
Racing's Deadliest Day - Longreads

Nov 20, 2024 | longreads.com | Seyward Darby

Despite, or perhaps because of, growing up in the heart of NASCAR country, I am not a fan of car racing. I am, however, a huge fan of Michael Mann, and ever since watching the movie Ferrari last Christmas, I’ve had a morbid fascination with historical crashes at racing events. Enter this piece by Darrell Hartman, which details the 1955 Le Mans disaster, in which 82 people were killed, many of them decapitated.
Death in Nogales

Nov 20, 2024 | longreads.com | Seyward Darby

On January 30, 2023, a forty-eight-year-old Mexican man named Gabriel Cuen Buitimea was shot dead in southern Arizona. The man who shot him was almost certainly George Allan Kelly, a retiree living on 170 acres of ranch land, which Cuen Buitimea was walking across in an effort to make his way into America. But the question at the heart of this story isn’t whether Kelly is guilty—though that is, of course, addressed.
Santa Maria - Longreads

Nov 13, 2024 | longreads.com | Seyward Darby

As a kid, Myriam Gurba was obsessed with Dorothea Lange’s famous photo “Migrant Mother.” A copy of it hung on the wall of her dad’s office. Later in life, as Gurba researched the story behind the photo, she found that its subject, Florence Owens Thompson, wasn’t who so many Americans familiar with the picture assumed she was. This revelation demanded a reckoning:Thompson was not a White Okie like so many of us had been led to believe. Instead, Florence was a Cherokee.