In this spellbinding read, Emily Fox Kaplan recounts being emotionally abused as a child by her stepfather, a well-off surgeon. Written in second person, Kaplan masterfully explores the telling of her own story, taking back control of the narrative with clarity and bravery. It’s a tense read about childhood abuse, toxic family dynamics, and the power of a “bad man,” and Kaplan guides the reader through the piece with a bold, assured voice.
You figure out which genres you love and which ones you don’t. You like historical fiction, stories of brave, precocious kids in troubled times. You like science fiction, and series about normal kids with everyday problems — strict teachers, bullies, beloved pets who die. You don’t like the horror series that are popular with your classmates, written in a second person much too visceral for comfort, where the protagonist is never in control. In those stories, the worst things always happen off the page, leaving you to fill in the most terrifying details.
And then there are the stories where, midway through, the premise shifts beneath you, where you realize that everything you thought you knew was false. You learn that these stories have what’s called an unreliable narrator. These are the scariest stories of all.
You prefer fairy tales, with their strange logic and their consistent casts of characters: unloved children and evil stepmothers, all happening some place outside of time. As you get older, you seize upon stories that play with their tropes: the castle as a metaphor for loneliness, the princess who saves herself.
And you’ll realize, too, that a person can tell a story any way she likes; that the same story — a little girl who loves to read — can be told as a horror story or a fairy tale, depending on the choices of the author.
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In this personal essay, Cherise Morris explores her family’s relationship to—and deep respect for—extreme weather, how Black communities have created homes in the most inhospitable places, and the importance of mutual aid and helping each other in times of climate crisis. It’s a beautiful, ultimately uplifting lyrical essay that’s part of Scalawag’s Salt, Soil, & Supper series on climate justice and the American South.
In the overgrowth of Cypress trees older than humankind, a vast expanse of marshy waters became a mirror. In the morass of swing limbs and undisturbed brush, there was a refuge to be found. The people who found it, the ancestors—familial or collective—who willed their freedom across untamed horizons, were called maroons. While there is no official record or documentation of these free people, history estimates thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of formerly enslaved Black folks made homes in the Great Dismal Swamp throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
The news cycle after Hurricane Katrina was constant, a 24-hour-loop of rising flood waters, record high temperatures, “looting,” unsubstantiated claims of rape, murder, and lawlessness in the Superdome, where a city and country had abandoned its citizens. New Orleans, a city forged by Blackness, Black people, and Black culture became the epitome of a mythic recklessness. The recklessness born from the wrath of nature, the recklessness cradled by untamable waters, the recklessness bred by Blackness. Blackness, in this biased retelling, was an invasive plant watered by the floods, a plant left overflowing and uncontrollable.
But what the news coverage never showed was the ways Black people, at the nexus of nature’s calamity and systemic disinvestment, came together to care for one another, to look out for their neighbors who were also stranded, to plead for help together, and then, when they realized help wasn’t coming, to become that help themselves.
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A harrowing account of an evacuation from Yellowknife, Canada, as wildfires rip towards the city. Jessica Davey-Quantick’s trauma is clear, and her message is desperate. A powerful piece.
When it was time to go home, after 35 days on shift, that gut-twisting fear came back. I knew too much and too little: I knew enough to be terrified that this was too early, that the highway through the South Slave up to Yellowknife was still unsafe and threatened by winds like the ones that had sent us all out of the territory in the first place. But I didn’t know what I’d be coming home to.
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Marco Giancotti’s brain can’t imagine a sunset, the sound of a bell, the smell of bread baking, or little else. In this fascinating piece for Nautilus, Giancotti introduces us to aphantasia, a condition that prevents him from picturing any “kind of sensory stimulation” in his mind.
…as soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind. And, although it isn’t the subject of the current experiment, I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head. I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses.
My whole life, I’ve been aware—sometimes painfully so—of my own peculiarities, strengths, and weaknesses: A terrible memory, a good sense of direction, and what I felt was a lack of “visual creativity,” among others. I always thought these were just random, disconnected traits, and didn’t think much about them. Who doesn’t have their quirks?
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Rosecrans Baldwin demonstrates true bravery in this piece on men’s struggles with evolving masculinity. Not only does he report on the therapy offered at the Sylvan Dale Dude Ranch, but he fully partakes in it, offering us a raw, unflinching look at his personal failings. His honesty pays off, providing a real insight into the struggles some American men face in dealing with the male culture instilled in them in their youth.
A question from my interviews also came up a lot in Colorado: What does masculinity, “being a man,” actually mean anymore? Is it trading crypto for testosterone supplements? Swapping spouses on Feeld? More importantly, what might a healthy, confident version of masculinity look like today?
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In 2014, Longreads published its first Taylor Swift reading list, (recognizing her somewhat provocatively, perhaps, for the time) as a music business genius. But how could we have foreseen what the Taylorverse has since become? The past nine years have witnessed new albums, rerecorded “versions,” tours, spats, hookups (musical, romantic, otherwise), missteps, rebounds, the friendships with exes’ exes, and breaking the National Football League.
As the Eras Tour grosses a projected $2.2 billion in North America alone, and the October 27 rerelease of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) approaches, and her soon-to-be-released Eras Tour film is predicted to rock the film industry, Taylor Swift’s genius is no longer a question. She continues to get impossibly bigger, a supernova refusing to stop expanding, gobbling up ever more fans (and ever more money). Swift’s largesse over the last decade—on our devices, in our stadiums, on our screens, at our football games—has made the star even more of an unknowable cypher than ever: how can any of us relate to the champagne problems of a person whose condiment choices go viral? Yet even as Swift’s omnipresence makes her increasingly difficult to see, her brand is built on making us “feel seen,” in what Amanda Petrusich has identified as the star’s “chatty, ersatz intimacy.” She invites identification, but as her monocultural presence grows, this identification becomes ever more challenging, unless we project our own selves onto her. Swift’s artistic output is now entirely separable from Taylor Studies.
This reading list collects pieces from the last decade that use Taylor Swift as a muse, a conduit, a springboard, or a punching bag in service of the authors’ own journeys. They demonstrate how, as Taylor’s Swiftdom grows, so too do the opportunities to use her as a lens through which we can project any number of issues—gender, race, identity, authenticity—and witness the prismatic results, a “kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats under coats,” an easter egg waiting to be unwrapped. She’s a mirrorball, after all, reflecting every version of ourselves.
Incarcerated for two decades and currently awaiting his first chance at parole, Joe Garcia reflects on how Taylor Swift’s music has accompanied him through the California prison system. As her lyrics provide solace and her voice offers happiness in a hopeless place, Garcia contemplates life beyond prison and what it means to love in broad daylight.
After several months, my belongings, including my CD player, finally caught up with me. I was getting ready to buy “Red” from a catalog of approved CDs when I learned that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or C.D.C.R., had placed me on another transfer list. I didn’t want the album to get stuck at the prison after I had been transferred, so I resorted to a country station that regularly featured Swift. Sometimes, hearing Southern drawls and honky-tonk medleys, I’d laugh out loud at myself. But that was the station that played the widest variety of her music, from “Tim McGraw” to “I Knew You Were Trouble.” There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness. When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.
For novelist Anna Dorn, Taylor Swift is what you might call a Bitch Eating Crackers. In this essay, Dorn comes to terms with her vitriol for an artist who suffers (in her opinion) from a fatal lack of charisma, and how she’s slowly been won over to the merits, if not the charms, of Swift. Much of that transformation comes down to Dorn recognizing how the things she finds annoying about Swift are also aspects of her own personality: the desire to people-please, the feeling that ultimately she’s not that talented. But ultimately, Dorn recognizes that Swift makes people happy, and that’s not nothing.
I understand how looking at Taylor Swift shows me what I dislike and/or fear about myself. I fear we have the same type of unexceptional, bordering-on-unappealing WASP faces and share a history of throwing ourselves at people with little to no interest in us. We both identify as artists but lack something original to say, instead parroting a variety of inspirational source texts and current pop-cultural trends. Neither of us is supremely talented. Growing up, no one ever told me I was a good writer in a way I doubt anyone outside of Taylor’s family told her she had a good singing voice. Her voice is fine; my writing is fine. Our lack of charisma might be killing us.
Once in a class I was teaching, a student highlighted a writer’s choice to use the “passive aggressive voice.” I’ve cherished the slip ever since. Before journalist and fiction writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner penned the definitive celebrity profile on noted Swift ex Tom Hiddleston, she wrote this ode to Taylor Swift’s use of the passive aggressive voice. In her current era, Swift may be rewriting her lyrics to better embody the brand of feminism she now espouses, but Brodesser-Akner’s piece reminds us that Swift’s subtle savageness has always been part of her appeal.
Taylor’s career is, in fact, the perfected realization of every writer’s narrowest dream: To get back at those who had wronged us, sharply and loudly, and then to be able to cry innocent that our intentions were anything other than poetic and pure. Most of us can only achieve this with small asides. Taylor not only publicly dates and publicly breaks up, but she then releases an achingly specific song about the relationship—and that song has an unforgettable hook—all the while swearing she won’t talk about relationships that are over. Yes, date Taylor Swift, and not only will she shit on you on her album, but the song will become a single, then a hit, and then you will hear yourself shat upon by an army of young women at Staples Center. And then she’ll deny that she was ever doing anything other than righteously manifesting her art. It’s diabolical, and for a lifelong passive-aggressive like me, it’s made her my hero.
This thoughtful piece by Vrinda Jagota, written the year after Donald Trump was elected U.S. president and the year before Taylor Swift first endorsed Democratic candidates in her adopted home of Tennessee, explores how Swift has benefitted from and weaponized whiteness. While the pop star has come a long way since her post-Trump tentative steps toward political outness, Jagota’s readings of Swift’s public feuds with Black artists and blue-eyed-loving lyrics remain instructive, particularly when her paramours are racist assclowns.
Each of these missteps has left me dubious not only of Swift’s brand of white feminism, but of the relatable vulnerability for which she is known. It’s alienating, not relatable, that even when faced with what appears to be an absurd accusation of neo-Nazi ties, Swift has shown an unwillingness to condemn the racists who adore her. It reminds me of how different our lived experiences are. Like all people of color, I don’t have Swift’s privilege of remaining quiet and thus neutral about white supremacy, particularly at this tense moment in time. Swift’s seeming indifference to the struggles of people of color has also led me to revisit her music—to wrestle with how it affected my teenaged understanding of femininity, and how her music may continue to influence young fans of color.
Bops and brilliant albums aside, Taylor Swift has galvanized 21st-century fan culture, and that has been one of the most remarkable features of her hyperbolically remarkable career. But what happens if you don’t see yourself represented within that culture? This piece, which picks up where Jagota’s essay leaves off, outlines a history of white conservatism within Swift’s fan community. Mahale notes how Swift’s insistence on emotional intimacy in her songs and her interactions with fans heightens fans’ own parasocial feelings toward the singer—and their willingness to “defend” her at any cost.
Zoya Raza-Sheikh, a 24-year-old British Pakistani fan of Swift, finds that the extreme online behavior she’s witnessed as a Swiftie has alienated her from the fandom, particularly as someone who identifies as pansexual. For her part, Swift has been a vocal supporter of LGBTQ causes since her political “coming out.” “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she told Vogue in 2019. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of.” Unfortunately, this message hasn’t reached some of her most fervent fans.
In this brief and arresting piece, Jay Jolles charts his affection for Taylor Swift in relation to broad questions about gender, queerness, and feeling. For Jolles, it’s Swift’s unerring commitment to raw emotion that results in guilt when it comes into contact with white masculinity. As a trans man, Jolles teases apart the ironies and complications of being a male Swiftie.
I have learned — having always been a Swiftie, but still very much in the process of apprehending masculinity — that many men worry about whether or liking Taylor Swift transcends a guilty pleasure and is instead indicative of some greater underlying thing — not a guilty pleasure but just a guilt. A quick perusal of the r/TaylorSwift community boasts many threads on the subject: am I [gay? weird? creepy?] for being a 34 year old straight white male who loves Taylor Swift? Will my girlfriend think it’s odd that I like Taylor Swift? Is it okay for me (38/M) to take my daughter to a Taylor Swift concert?
What this line of thinking evinces for me is not only that my fellow male Swifties are worried about what a potential like (or even love) of Taylor Swift’s music might mean, but that there is an element of guilt deeply imbricated within our understandings of taste and how they relate to a perceived type of manhood. The irony here is that I would argue that Swift herself is often crossing, if not blurring, the gender binary in her writing; not only when she is changing the pronouns in her songs. I think that this is in large part why her work is as legible to me as a twenty-eight year old man as it was to me as a fifteen year old girl.
Jill Spivey Caddell is a writer and teacher of U.S. literature, arts, and culture. She lives in the mountains of Virginia.
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In this personal essay, Henry Wismayer reflects on losing his father to lymphona when he was just 4 years old. The death of a parent at this age is devastating—Wismayer notes that one in five adults who had lost a parent as a young child are expected to face some form of psychiatric disorder, while anxiety and hypochondria are common. For Wismayer, the lack of concrete memories of his father has also meant he’s remembered him largely as a deified, larger-than-life figure. Listening to his father’s story through the recollections of his mother, he writes beautifully about his dad, his legacy, and the lifelong effects of childhood bereavement.
Twelve US presidents — Washington, Jefferson and Clinton among them — lost fathers early in life. From the start of the 19th century to the outbreak of the second world war, 67 per cent of British prime ministers lost a father before their 16th birthday. “That’s roughly twice the rate of parental loss during the same period for members of the British upper class,” writes Gladwell.
Perhaps these public figures, behind whatever resilience was forged in their early misfortune, wrestled with the same paradox. Bereaved children carry with them a mark of exception. But to live in the shadow of a lost parent is to also live with a pervasive feeling of absence and abandonment. In the decades after my father died, I often sensed a thin line between purpose and futility. It would never be possible to emulate the taintless ghost I held in my mind, and so the line between self-belief and self-loathing often felt thinner still.
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