The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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In this week’s edition:

• Land stolen from the formerly enslaved
• Ex-NFL players fighting for compensation
• A Chicago school custodian’s dark secret
• Nature as a salve for depression
• The curious state between sleep and wakefulness

1. 40 Acres and a Lie

Alexia Fernández Campbell, April Simpson, and Pratheek Rebala | Mother Jones | June 14, 2024 | 3,550 words

We think of reparations for slavery as something that has yet to happen in the US. In truth, reparations did once happen: in 1865, the federal government issued land titles to a number of freed Black people along the coastlines of South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida. The titles were to plots as small as four acres and as large as 40. But then, during Reconstruction, the government turned on its heel and returned much of the land to former slaveowners. (Andrew Johnson: bad president, or the worst?) A team of reporters at Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity, and Reveal delved into records of these stolen land titles, which were only recently digitized, to grasp the true scale of the injustice. “There would’ve been a territory ranging from the Sea Islands to northern Florida that would’ve been essentially a coastal Black belt community,” a Duke historian tells the reporters. “That would’ve had very significant implications for Black economic wellbeing as well as Black political power.” Instead, economic inequality between Black and white people became the norm in the region. This remains the case today: the team found that wealthy communities—places with manicured golf courses, gleaming McMansions, and mostly white residents—exist on land once owned by freedmen, many of whose descendants have no idea their forebears were cheated out of an explicit foothold in the American dream. “40 Acres and a Lie” is a fine example of how to make a historical, document-based investigation feel vivid, tangible, and urgent. —SD

2. The Final Penalty

David Gambacorta | The Philadelphia Inquirer | September 9, 2024 | 6,446 words

It’s no secret that some former NFL players have struggled with memory loss, depression, personality changes, and movement disorders after repeated concussions and sub-concussive hits endured during their playing days. They denied it at first, but the NFL eventually admitted a link between football and degenerative brain disease. Players eventually sued the league, and under the 2014 settlement, the NFL agreed to fund a program that would pay retired players “between $25,000 and $5 million if they had neurocognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).” For The Philadelphia Inquirer, David Gambacorta reports that now—with many of these players in their 60s and 70s, living with the long-term aftereffects of their playing days—they’re facing an uphill battle trying to navigate the NFL program’s morass of requirements and caveats in order to receive their compensation. —KS

3. The Nazi of Oak Park

Michael Soffer | Chicago Magazine | September 3, 2024 | 7,645 words

Reinhold Kulle was an SS member in the elite Death’s Head division and a guard at Gross-Rosen concentration camp. After the war, when Kulle had a final visa interview at the US Consulate in Frankfurt in 1957, he kept those dark details about his past a secret. In this excerpt from Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil, Michael Soffer recounts Kulle’s second life in the US as a chief custodian at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Chicago—and what happened when people discovered a respected member of their community was a Nazi. —CLR

4. My Harmony With the Heron

Jarod K. Anderson | Atmos | September 9, 2024 | 2,950 words

This essay is a gift, and I’m so grateful to read it this week. We’re expected to do, to carry, to perform each day, and the cumulative weight of all these to-dos becomes so heavy over time that we forget about what’s around us: the natural world teeming with life and full of wonder. Jarod K. Anderson’s writing transports me to formative moments of my childhood, when I first experienced the awe of the outdoors—walking in the misty quiet of the redwoods, gravel crunching under my sneakers, listening to the forest and hearing what it said to me. In this piece, he describes how he reconnected with the wildlife of Ohio, the great blue heron in particular, at a low point in his life. His insights are grounding and comforting, his turns of phrase eloquent. Herons are “living poems,” he writes. “They are the sky from below, and, from above, they are the dark water regarding itself.” He tells a story about how these majestic birds can produce and sprinkle luminescent powder onto the surface of water to attract fish at night, but that this sort of magic in the world only manifests if you let it—if you choose to harmonize and meet nature halfway. Struggling with depression, Anderson eventually decides to escape academia and leave his job. One day, while walking intently along the banks of a stream, he sees a great blue heron, and she sees him. “It’s all still here,” he writes. “I had gone away, not nature.” Reading this piece won’t wipe away all of the to-do lists, the debt, the pain. But if you make the space to read this, Anderson’s gorgeous words will shine over the dark parts deep inside you that need some light. —CLR

5. Living In A Lucid Dream

Claire L. Evans | Noēma | July 1, 2024 | 3,921 words

Claire L. Evans experienced a lucid dream for the first time after a long night of sleeplessness. Then she did what writers do: she followed her curiosity and wrote about it. For Noēma, Evans researches history’s lucid dreamers, visits online dream communities, and surveys modern science as a prelude to personal experimentation. She discovers that with a little practice, she could occupy that liminal space between sleep and wakefulness at will. (I won’t spoil the seemingly easy method to entering lucid dreamland. I’ll just say that the door to wakeful altered reality involves a mindfulness activity.) This piece is brain-bending in more ways than one; it explores not only lucid dreaming but the definition of consciousness itself, all along its curious spectrum from deep sleep to daydreams. “Dreaming and waking perception are both illusory; they’re models constructed by our brains that turn sensory stimulus, or its absence, into meaning,” writes Evans. “In waking life, short of a heavy psychedelic experience, that illusion is all-encompassing; there’s no other level of consciousness to ‘wake up’ into. But in lucid dreams, we can examine the construction closely. Does this make a lucid dream more conscious than waking?” Perhaps. While lucid dreaming can feel real and it may be enticing to learn how to enter them, Evans reminds us that dreams—as amazing as they can be—are strictly solo and somewhat lonely. Now, if only there was a way to share the experience with someone else. —KS