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We’re back with a new collection of our favorite stories from across all of WordPress.

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1. Books for the Broken-Hearted

Hannah Richell

Hannah Richell’s husband Matt was killed in a surfing accident in July. In a recent post, Richell writes about finding comfort in reading words written by people who have also experienced the shock of losing a loved one — people like Joan Didion, C.S. Lewis, and Cheryl Strayed.

2. The Shame of Poor Teeth in a Rich World

Sarah Smarsh, Aeon

An essay about growing up poor in America, and the role of teeth as a class signifier.

3. Giving Up the Ghost

Lynn Cunningham, The Walrus

Lynn Cunningham smoked cigarettes for fifty years before making a decision to quit and get help by visiting the Mayo Clinic’s Nicotine Dependence Center in Minnesota.

4. The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed

Adrian Chen, Wired

Adrian Chen travels to the Philippines, where he meets the employees who work for content moderation companies that scrub objectionable content from social media sites.

5. ‘Before I Write a Word, I Need to Know Clearly What I Want to Say’

Ed Odeven Reporting

An interview with Baltimore-based author and sportswriter John Eisenberg.

6. Talking Shit about Hemingway and Thoreau with ‘The Toast’ Founder and ‘Texts From Jane Eyre’ Author Mallory Ortberg

Elisabeth Donnelly, Flavorwire

The beautiful thing about Texts From Jane Eyre, based on Ortberg’s original column for The Hairpin, is that it offers exactly what it says on the cover: the Western canon is parodied and spoofed through the silly modern invention of texting. Ortberg’s comedy is shot through with love and deep literary knowledge, highlighting the silly and outrageous subtext bubbling under classics from Lord Byron to Nancy Drew. It’s hilarious, wickedly smart work that also serves as a fantastic reading list.

7. Pot Kids

Kate Pickert, Time Magazine

Inside the quasi-legal science-free world of medical marijuana for kids.

8. On Modesty

Anna Vodicka, Shenandoah

An essay about modesty that recalls the author’s girlhood in a conservative community and challenges the mixed messages of women as both “Eve” and “Jezebel.”

9. One of Us

Jennifer J. Roberts, Boston Magazine

Memories of being a Southie kid and black in a mostly white neighborhood in Boston.

10. An American Dream Deferred

Eli Saslow, Washington Post

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eli Saslow profiles Javier Flores, an undocumented immigrant who was hoping that an executive action by President Obama would prevent him from being deported to Mexico and forced to leave his wife and U.S.-born children behind in Ohio. Flores is now in La Mixtequita, Mexico, with few options to reunite with his family.

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As always, you can find our past collections here. You can follow Longreads on WordPress.com for more daily reading recommendations, or subscribe to our free weekly email.

Publishers, writers: You can share links to your favorite essays and interviews (over 1,500 words) on Twitter (#longreads) and on WordPress.com by tagging your posts longreads.

Filed under: Community, Reading, WordPress, WordPress.com

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My friends, the time has come.  Tomorrow I will join April Lindner, Jane Satterfield, Ned Balbo, and Ann Michael for "Springsteen and Storytelling," our panel discussion.  We're one of many Bruce conversations that will be going on this weekend at Monmouth University as part of the Glory Days Symposium.  And I'm so grateful to be given a chance to break away from my world for a moment, and to delve into this one.

Bruce and my bruised heart today have nothing to do with each other, but I feel the need to say this just now, while I have your attention (and I suspect that The Boss himself would agree with me on this one).  For any one who might be checking in on this blog, for whatever reason you may be checking, please trust me on this:  Not everything journalists write—however well meaning those journalists may be—is true.  And sometimes, even if we try very hard to get the record corrected, even if we cry, stomp, and offer to drain our bank accounts in the endeavor, we fail.  We cannot achieve the only right result, which is the truth.

For now, I am sharing this—the opening words of "Raw to the Bone:  Transported Toward Truth and Memory by Springsteen's River Songs," the paper I'll deliver tomorrow.

Might as well start with “Shenandoah,” the old pioneer song that Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band transformed into sweet bitters in the living room of Springsteen’s fabled New Jersey farmhouse.   “Shenandoah,” the tenth song on the We Shall Overcome/Seeger Sessions album, is music being made, as Springsteen himself has said.  Music created in the moment, held between teeth, conducted with the frayed bracelet strings of an uplifted hand.  It’s music hummed, hymned, and high in the shoulder blades, deep in the blue pulse of a straining vein.  Patti’s lighting candles in the darkening farmhouse, as the band tunes in.  The antique clock ticks.  The thickly framed mirror doubles the volumes of sound and space.  And now the Sessions band is elaborating, confabulating, and the Shenandoah roves. 

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to see you,

Away you rolling river.

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to see you,

Away, I'm bound away,

'cross the wide Missouri.

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Donald Stoker is Professor of Strategy and Policy for the U.S. Naval War College’s program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His most recent book is The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War, and in the original post below, he dismantles a common myth about the Battle of Bull Run–the first major land battle of the Civil War–which was fought 149 years ago, today.

On July 21, 1861, the Union troops under Irvin McDowell were defeated by the combined forces of Confederate generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston on the banks of Virginia’s Bull Run Creek. Too often it is reported that this clash was the result of press pressure on Abraham Lincoln to act against the Rebels. This was not the case.

Lincoln did push for action, but he pushed because he wanted a quick end to the war. Moreover, something often ignored is that the Union plans were bigger than just marching an army into Virginia and hoping something good happened. McDowell’s advance was only one prong of the Union operation. Major General Robert Patterson commanded another Union force in the Shenandoah Valley, one that was supposed to pin Johnston’s forces in the Shenandoah. Union troops under Benjamin Butler at Fortress Monroe, at the end of the Virginia Peninsula that George McClellan would soon make famous, were to hold Confederate forces in that area. McDowell, using multiple prongs of attack, aimed at Manassas Junction with the intent of defeating 20,000 Confederates with 30,000 Union troopers.

For the North, none of this went according to plan. The Union forces in the Shenandoah needed a vigorous and aggressive commander. This, Patterson, was not. A veteran of the War of 1812 branded “Granny” by his troops, failed to do his job. As happened so many times in the Civil War the South stole a march on the Union. This allowed them to deliver Johnston’s troops to Bull Run in time to stop McDowell.

The events after the battle greatly impacted the course of the war. Union defeat meant McDowell’s replacement with McClellan, and the subsequent paralysis that then gripped the Eastern Theater until the spring of 1862. Confederate President Jefferson Davis failed to give his generals proper credit for their victory. Both Beauregard and Johnston were very prickly in regard to personal honor and reputation. This perceived slight helped poison the relations between the Confederate president and these two generals for the rest of the war, adding to the South’s difficulties prosecuting the struggle.

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MacBain tartan
8 x 10 or so on watercolor paper, done with watercolors

I'm a plaid junkie. Love it, need it, can't get enough. I buy little fat quarters at the fabric store, just to have them to look at.

The hardest thing I ever sewed was a pleated plaid skirt, back in high school, for part of a costume for my part in Brigadoon**. I will just say that matching plaid, in pleats...well, once you've done that successfully you feel like you can do pretty much anything.

(**This is not my high school production, but aren't they all pretty much the same? I think these guys have better sets. And the hand held camera action is just charming. I feel a little queasy.)


Here's a card I did a couple years back using a print of a painting I did of the Red Scott tartan. There's also wool and other paper and some yarn bits and some hand painted watercolor on there. Maybe I'll do something similar with this new one.

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