Just over a year ago, the players and coaches of a high school baseball team walked off the field soon after the game began while the parents applauded. They weren’t protesting an umpire or the other team’s behavior, though; instead, they were abandoning their own team’s only two Black players. Over the course of 8,000 words, Howard Bryant tells the story of the Fort Myers High Green Wave’s sickening display—the fracture that led to it, and the chasm that resulted from it. An ire-inducing feat of reporting from one of baseball’s best. While many team issues fell under the common soap opera of ..read more

Sally Jenkins gives us a searing portrait of the life of the bull-riding cowboy J.B. Mauney—a life filled with pain after sustaining multiple horrific injuries flung from bulls. Breaking his neck in his last ride was career-ending, and in this piece, he reflects on a his different future.  Mauney, too, cuts a black outline. From under a black felt cowboy hat, hair blacker than coffee runs to the collar of his black shirt. The impression of severity is relieved by blue eyes the color of his jeans and a smile crease from the habit of grinning around a Marlboro. It’s an arresting ..read more

In this deeply thoughtful essay for The Common Reader, Jeannette Cooperman considers silences both healing and harmful. This layered and nuanced piece will give you a much-needed pause; you may not think of the absence of sound quite the same again. Most days, life’s demands come at me like flung Frisbees, but here, they cannot reach me. Here, I feel at home in a way I do not even feel at home, because here, all I need do is be. This is the silence I craved all along: not an absence of noise but a freedom from my tiny, petty self. As I move through the trees, I am listening, but not hard-focu ..read more

Ramen that’s more than three times as expensive than it is at Target. Water prices that shot up 50 percent in a year. Peanut butter marked up 70 percent. These are just a few of the findings from a nine-month investigation of prison commissaries. This project comes with a searchable database, so that you can get acquainted with the costs incarcerated individuals are forced to bear to access items they need: The Appeal’s investigation reveals that incarcerated people in many states are charged significantly more for essential items than those outside prison even though they typically earn penn ..read more

For Politico, Jessica Bateman shines a light on the secret history of politically motivated adoptions after the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949. Thousands of Greek kids were adopted abroad in the 1950s and ’60s; some children, whose parents were rebel leftist fighters, were orphaned or abandoned, while others were taken from mothers who were coerced or manipulated. Children were adopted mostly by Americans—ideally well-off and conservative families—during a time when Cold War politics softened immigration laws. Today, most of these Greek adoptees don’t know the truth about their past or who ..read more

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. Montserrat Andrée Carty | Longreads | April 23, 2024 | 3,251 words (12 minutes) When I introduce myself to a friend of a friend, I say, “I’m Montse [Mohnt-seh].” At the sight of his bewildered face, I try to help. “Or you can call me Mon-sea.” I’m accustomed to giving people in the United States options, to ensure they are comfortable.  “Wait, why do you have two names?” he asks.  Two names, two identities—this is what I’ve always known. Though behind this name, there are more than two cultu ..read more

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. In this week’s list: • Keeping the internet alive via 800,000 miles of undersea cables • What an auto trade show says about America • Art framing as a lens into what we hold dear • The (kinda) doomed voyage of the Snowdrop • Life as an artist—the maddening, unvarnished version 1. The Cloud Under the Sea Josh Dzieza | The Verge | April 16, 2024 | 8,856 words I wouldn’t call myself a hardware geek, but lately I’ve been fascinated by stories that help me understand and appreciate the infrastructure that ..read more

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers. Andrew Chapman | Longreads | April 18, 2024 | 3,755 words (13 minutes) At first, it was simply a roast chicken recipe. Then it was everything. I watched a man on YouTube cook the chicken, imagining what it would be like to taste it. Even if he had prepared it in front of me, I couldn’t have eaten it. Inflammation from Crohn’s disease had connected the tissues of my small intestine and my bladder together via fistula, and I did not want to pee out a roast chicken. Instead, I was on a form of artif ..read more

Paul Brown tells the tale of the crew of the shipwrecked Snowdrop without melodrama in this highly entertaining piece. Using accounts from the sailors, he brings the journey to life, along with the characters of these stoic Scots. After several weeks of hunting, the Snowdrop’s storage tanks were full. According to Ritchie, although they had not caught a whale, they had six hundred and fifty walrus and six hundred seals, plus many polar bears and Arctic foxes. The plan was to take the Inuit community back to Cape Haven, then return with their catch to Dundee. The Snowdrop came t ..read more

Ever wondered what it’s like to be a visual artist in the 21st century? This episodic essay provides an intimate, hilarious, and very painful look at what’s required to create art without dying or (entirely) losing your mind: Someone tips off Barneys New York about the boho-chic lifestyle I’ve assumed at Grandma’s, and they reach out to interview and photograph me for their fall catalog. I ask a model what they would get paid for a shoot and propose $2,000 to Barney’s. They reject my proposal and offer a $1,000 gift card. I discover a website that will turn the encrypted plastic into $940 cas ..read more