EDITORS' NOTE: Hello friends, Happy Friday and Happy St. Patrick's Day! We know you are probably still working your way through Ashley Parker's wonderful edition, but with Jacob leaving tonight for a 10-day tour of Sicily—yes, Don is jealous—we wanted to send an abbreviated list before taking something of a Spring Break (We'll be back in your inbox Sunday, April 2). To spearhead this special edition, we have a treat for you: The Undefeated's editor-in-chief, Kevin Merida.
Kevin has helmed ESPN's sports, race, and culture site since its launch last May after spending 25 years at The Washington Post. There, he served as a congressional correspondent and covered the 1996 presidential election before becoming a features writer, a columnist, and eventually the paper's national editor. He's also written twobooks. A BU grad, Merida is returning to Boston next weekend as a keynote speaker at the school's "Power of Narrative" Conference, which we are honored to be supporting. (If the event is not for you, don't worry, this week will be the last you hear of it, but we do think it would be the perfect way to spend an SLR-less weekend.)
Alright Kevin, the floor is yours!
Most of the writing I have ever done and loved has been done to music. There is something about getting lost in sound, feeling enchanted by beats and melodies, arrangements and lyrics. I feel about our best musicians the way I feel about our greatest athletes and the way I feel about our most amazing writers: improvisational geniuses. I respect artistic brilliance everywhere, and regard writers as artists. I am writing this while listening to the soundtrack from the movie Sully, with The Tierney Sutton Band. Love Tierney. Tomorrow, inspiration might come from 2Pac’s Greatest Hits. In fact, I think I wrote this piece on Anthony Marcellus James while skipping back and forth from Pac’s “Changes” to “I Ain’t Mad At Cha.”
Thank you, Don and Jacob, for creating The Sunday Long Read, which connects a community of writers (and readers) to great writing. I am honored to curate this edition of SLR, for it is here that I get a weekly jolt of inspiration. Speaking of inspiration, I am thrilled to be joining fellow writers and editors at Boston University’s “The Power of Narrative” conference, which begins March 24 and runs through March 26. On March 25, WBUR’s Lisa Mullins and I will have a conversation about questioning convention and nurturing strong voices.
If you stay in this game long enough, you will develop some strong viewpoints about writers and our craft. Here are a few of mine:
We caricature both the rich and the poor.
We’re too often seduced by scene and access.
The most gifted writers should choose the hardest, most challenging subjects.
If we truly want to be open to new voices, we have to learn to hear differently.
A couple of voices I am really enjoying right now:
—Damon Young, editor-in-chief of Very Smart Brothas.
—Our own Justin Tinsley.
Just pure simple excellence here. Details. Cadence. Characters—the mayor, the reverend, the program specialist in the biology department. But the most compelling thing is the selection of the story itself; it's micro, not macro. We know that white nationalism is having its day. We've seen the snippets on our social feeds. But here's an actual fully-developed tale in a town nobody has ever heard of, and we get to watch it unfold. Stephanie McCrummen is so good at the unfolding. She is super meticulous, a maestro at letting a story tell itself. And this one has it all: fear, suspicion, intrigue, surprise.
Ok, I'm cheating here by declaring the entire NYT Mag's Music Issue a SLR selection. The whole thing is delicious, whether you experience it interactively online or in print. That said, let me shout-out a few of the 26 writers for some specific feats of accomplishment: Wesley Morris for memorable sentences explaining Adele: "That's the future of music: recognizing, in the present, that you're permanently indentured to the past;" Amos Barshad for vulnerability: in walking us through his failed journey to discover who Future really is, he reveals something special about himself as a writer and his genius artist; and Margo Jefferson for complete mastery of a subject in a tight space: Cécile McLorin Salvant will now forever be, to me, "a counter-diva."
I love Molly Ball's energetic political writing. To read her is to feel alive. And she never shrinks from the story. Here she takes on the complicated and fascinating presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway, with telling cameos by pollster Frank Luntz and Kellyanne's mom, Diane Fitzpatrick.
I have never read Rachel Cusk, but I am going to order Transit now. Heidi Julavits reeled me in. Simple sentences matter. "Rachel Cusk is tall. She does not take milk."
A riveting peek into what precisely will happen when the Queen dies. Sam Knight's story is filled with exacting detail of the farewell to Britain's longest-serving monarch. "More overwhelming than any of this, though," he writes, "there will be an almighty psychological reckoning for the kingdom that she leaves behind. The Queen is Britain's last living link with our former greatness - the nation's id, its problematic self-regard - which is still defined by our victory in the second world war."
My colleague Julia Henderson recently shouted this out as one of her favorite podcasts, and now I’m hooked too. It does what any good show does - it creates its own little universe that you just feel good about visiting each week. I also love how spotty the accents are. The most recent episode is also great dishy insight into how SNL comes together.
Jody Avirgan is the host of FiveThirtyEight’s politics podcast and is heading up the new “30 for 30” podcast documentary series from ESPN, coming this June.
When the film "Love Jones" debuted 20 years ago, black romance was a unicorn on the big screen. This piece does what good oral histories should do: plop you into an honest discussion of what you had never considered.
TIM TORKILDSON'S SUNDAYLIMERICK
From The New York Times:
"On premiums alone, prices would rise by more than 20 percent for the oldest group of customers. By 2026, the budget office projected, 'premiums in the nongroup market would be 20 percent to 25 percent lower for a 21-year-old and 8 percent to 10 percent lower for a 40-year-old — but 20 percent to 25 percent higher for a 64-year-old.'"
From Tim: There was an old man from Secaucus
Who said bitterly “So they block us
From medical care
Because of white hair;
Congress is just out to fock us!”
Tim Torkildson is a retired circus clown who fiddles with rhyme. All his verses can be found at Tim's Clown Alley.
Founder, Curator: Don Van Natta Jr. Producer, Curator: Jacob Feldman Senior Recycling Editor: Jack Shafer Senior Limerick Editor: Tim Torkildson Senior Podcast Editor: Jody Avirgan
Header Image: PA
Contributing Editors: Bruce Arthur, Alex Belth, Sara J. Benincasa, Sara Blask, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Chris Cillizza, Rich Cohen, Pam Colloff, Maureen Dowd, Brett Michael Dykes, Lea Goldman, Maggie Haberman, Reyhan Harmanci, Virginia Heffernan, Jena Janovy, Bomani Jones, Peter Kafka, Mina Kimes, Tom Lamont, Glynnis MacNicol, Drew Magary, Jonathan Martin, Betsy Fischer Martin, Ana Menendez, Kevin Merida, Eric Neel, Lizzie O'Leary, Ashley R. Parker, Anne Helen Petersen, Joe Posnanski, S.L. Price, Albert Samaha, Bruce Schoenfeld, Joe Sexton, Jacqui Shine, Rachel Sklar, Dan Shanoff, Ben Smith, Wright Thompson, Pablo Torre, Kevin Van Valkenburg, John A. Walsh, and Seth Wickersham
You can read more about our staff, and contact us (we'd love to hear from you!) on our website: SundayLongRead.com. Help pick next week's selections by tweeting us your favorite stories with #SundayLR.
Hello friends, Happy Friday and Happy St. Patrick's Day! We know you are probably still working your way through Ashley Parker's wonderful 
