Author: British Day

Alison Stine | Longreads | October 2019 | 10 minutes (2,469 words) This essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit organization. Disability status? It’s a question I am confronted with almost daily when I fill out job applications. Sometimes I skip the question or I say I am not disabled. Sometimes I answer it truthfully, writing that I am hard of hearing (HOH), born partially deaf. I was laid off eight months ago from my full-time editing job, and in the arduous process of searching and applying for positions, I often face this voluntary disclosure…

Alicia Lutes | Longreads | October 2019 | 18 minutes (4,426 words) I remember turning around, but I don’t remember why. It was sometime in 1996 or 1997; maybe 1995? I was small, sitting on the couch in our living room, probably watching a cartoon on the comically large television my father had insisted upon, when something moved me to turn around. When I did, I saw my mother, her rapidly shrinking frame surrounded by the rays of a setting sun, her wafer-thinness outlined in fiery gold, a woman on fire. I watched her through the back porch as she…

Heather Sellers | True Story | April 2019 | 44 minutes (8,983 words) I was on my way home, flying from New York back to Florida. In the heart of Manhattan, I had given a keynote address to a large group of researchers at Rockefeller University. Internationally known neuroscientists, men and women at the top of their field, had been interested in what I had to say. I still couldn’t believe how well it had gone. When we landed in Tampa, the plane, full of Disney-bound families and snow birds, nosed up to the gate, and I strode down the jet bridge.…

Ayşegül Savas | Longreads | July 2019 | 15 minutes (3,811 words) Two weeks after I read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, I found out that she would be speaking at a literary symposium titled “Against Storytelling” at a venue some minutes from where I live. The Cost of Living is a memoir about the period following Levy’s separation from her husband. She moves into a dreary apartment block with her two daughters, loses her mother, takes every job she is offered, and continues writing, in an entirely new set-up of family, home, and work. The book is about…

Laura Lippman | Longreads | May 2019 | 16 minutes (4,090 words) [1] My daughter was 10 days old the first time I was asked if I were her grandmother. It was the second week of an unseasonably early Baltimore heat wave and I had managed to maneuver her stroller across my neighborhood’s bumpy, narrow sidewalks to my favorite coffee shop. Almost nine years later, I still remember the one spot on our street where the juxtaposition of a tree planter and a set of rowhouse steps made it physically impossible to push a stroller through at any angle. One…

Tobias Carroll | Longreads | March 2019 | 18 minutes (4,830 words) Namwali Serpell’s first novel, The Old Drift, tells the story of several families living in Zambia, encompassing over a century of their interwoven lives. The novel takes its title from a region located near Victoria Falls (otherwise known as Mosi-o-Tunya, which translates to “The Smoke That Thunders”), which is also where the novel begins. Along the way, The Old Drift touches on many moments in history, from the Second World War to Zambia’s foray into space exploration. But Serpell isn’t content to simply tell the story of a…

Allyn Gaestel, Photos by Bénédicte Kurzen / Noor | Nataal | February 2019 | 16 minutes (4,113 words) If you look closely you’ll noticeThat the pattern on this soft broadcloth shirtIs made of working man’s bloodAnd praying folks’ tears.If you look closer you’ll noticeThat this pattern resemblesTenement row houses, project high rises,Cell block tiers,Discontinued stretches of elevated train tracks,Slave ship gullies, acres of tombstones.If you look closer, you’ll noticeThat this fabric has been carefully blendedWith an advanced new age polymerTo make the fabric lightweightWeatherproof, and durable.All this to give some sort of posture and dignityTo a broken body that is…

Vanessa Golenia | Longreads | September 2018 | 19 minutes (4,692 words) “Should we tell each other how much we make?” I asked Peter, trying to sound casual while in bed enjoying post-coital ice cream. In the late summer of 2016, after 15 months of shuttling back and forth between our apartments in Ubers and exposing our roommates to the nightly soundscape of our sex life, we decided it was time to move in together. We were having fun deciding what colors to paint the walls, and which pieces of furniture to combine, but had so far avoided any discussion…

This week we have articles from CJ Chivers, David Ewing Duncan, Steve Silberman, Anna Wiener, and David Marchese. Sign up to get this list delivered to your inbox for free every Friday. * * * CJ Chivers | New York Times Magazine | August 7, 2018 | 45 minutes (11,261 words) “The failure of the Pentagon’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan left a generation of soldiers with little else to do but fight for each other.” David Ewing Duncan | Vanity Fair | August 7, 2018 | 17 minutes (4,352 words) “Barbra Streisand is not alone. In a South Korean…

Carolita Johnson | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,600 words) By the time I was 44 I’d never lived with a boyfriend, a fact that I, a woman living under a patriarchy and not getting any younger, sometimes thought should be bothering me more, but which didn’t. I even had fond memories of a day when I was 41 and freshly dumped, on which I woke up alone in bed, stretched out, and had a remarkable, quite unexpected realization… I loved not having to wonder what mood my boyfriend would wake up in next to me, or worry…