Author: British Day

Dan Musgrave | Longreads | May 4, 2023 | 21 minutes (6,022 words) I had been volunteering at the ape house for four months before I was invited to meet Nathan. It was December and I’d just spent my first Christmas with the apes. Everyone but the director and I had left for the day. The night sky spilled over the glass-ceilinged, central atrium we called the greenhouse. Despite the snow outside, the greenhouse air was warm and ample. Moving toward the padlocked cage door, I felt light, as if I was about to float up into that dotted black expanse…

Samuel Ernest| Longreads | May 2, 2023 | 19 minutes (4,261 words) for Josh In the dorm, friends were playing the new record of a local band, Too Bright by Perfume Genius, and I couldn’t tell if I liked it. The songs were tender and fierce, sometimes one or the other, but often both at once, the singer’s voice trembling like someone who has ever only whispered learning to shout. Having followed their career, I can now see how tenderness and ferocity have characterized all of Perfume Genius’ albums in different ways as their sound has grown louder — from…

Susannah Felts | Longreads | April 27, 2023 | 16 minutes (4,248 words) 1. On a November night in 2018,  I went to a show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the kind of show that fans like me enjoy telling other fans they were there for, years after the fact. Three songwriters in their 20s — Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker — performed on one bill. It was the first date of their tour together, and the first time any of them had played that historic venue; it was also the debut of a collab — a girl…

In November 2012, I moved back home to Scotland after spending nearly all my savings backpacking. I stayed at my friend’s flat near the base of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and began looking for writing jobs. With no end to the recession in sight, it turned out that there were none. I began temping and applying for editing-marketing-anything jobs. Went to an interview in a smart office in New Town. Realized the advertised “graduate marketing position” actually involved stopping strangers in an outdoor shopping center in Leith and trying to sell them phone contracts on commission. Cried.  On a morning…

Joseph Lezza | I’m Never Fine: Scenes and Spasms on Loss | March 30, 2023 | 22 minutes (4,014 words) Ask me how I am. Go ahead. Ask. But only if you’re interested. Trust me, I know what it’s like to put forth that question with the expectation of a concise, if not ambiguous, response, which I would plan to use as a segue into the real reason behind any one conversation. Often, that’s just what I’d get. After which, I’d springboard faster than an Olympic diver. It’s gotten to be that our inquiries into the wellness of others result from…

Froggy’s Regrets. Rare Chicago Bulls tickets. A conversation about AI and nature. A profile of the world’s most famous unknown author. And finally, a look back at last Friday and St. Patrick’s Day traditions. 1. Frog Anne Fadiman | Harper’s Magazine | February 10, 2023 | 5,816 words “There are two kinds of pets: those you choose and those you get by chance,” writes Anne Fadiman, reflecting on her family’s diverse collection of pets, including goldfish, hamsters, guinea pigs, a dog named Typo, and Bunky, an African clawed frog the family raised from a tadpole. Praising Bunky, who looks like…

Susanna Forrest | Longreads | March 23, 2023 | 3,474 words (12 minutes) Twelve years ago, I lived alone in Berlin and the crows knew me. My particular murder kept watch in the park nearest my flat, a long green strip marking the course of the demolished Wall. The neighborhood was part of the former East, and at the weekends the park filled with locals and tourists browsing the flea market for GDR cookware, furniture, and ratty old fur coats. I once found an entire stuffed dog there, lying rigidly over a pile of the flotsam and jetsam of 20th-century…

Kira Homsher | Longreads | March 14, 2023 | 3,308 words (12 minutes) My childhood best friend broke, and still holds, the Guinness World Record for fastest text written on a QWERTY mobile phone. Though I never came close to matching her speed, it was only natural that I should absorb her enthusiasm for messaging. She was also one of the most private people I knew, with an uncanny ability to create and compartmentalize disparate personas to charm all sorts of people, and much of her social life took place on strange websites I’d never heard of. Even after she…

Maria Zorn | Longreads | March 7, 2023 | 3,373 words (12 minutes) In middle school, I would hide behind a giant oleander bush when it was time for the bus to leave for track and field meets and then, once it left without me, I’d walk to Panda Express and eat chow mein in blissful peace. This was also my strategy for grieving you. I thought I could, like a rapacious vole, burrow myself into the branches of the quotidian and the bus of mourning would pass me by altogether.  This is not to say that I didn’t ever…

Dan Hernandez | Longreads | February 28, 2023 | 16 minutes (4,503 words) When a criminal defense attorney warns you not to view something — in this case, a suspicious VHS tape — it’s probably wise to listen. Dread filled my gut as I slid the tape into the VCR and pressed play. My car had been stolen in October 2022, and after the police recovered it, a lot of stuff belonging to the thief remained inside, including the VHS tape.  At first, I figured it would contain something sentimental. Home movies of a wedding, Christmas, or graduation. It crossed my…