Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 6
10 of our favorite stories from across all of WordPress.
Here’s the latest collection of our favorite stories from writers and publishers across all of WordPress. You can find our past collections here — and you can follow Longreads on WordPress.com for more daily reading recommendations.
Keep these stories coming: share links to essays and interviews (over 1,500 words) on Twitter (#longreads) and WordPress.com by tagging your posts longreads.
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1. Criticism and Self-Criticism (S. Li, The Kenyon Review)
Li, an associate professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology in Nanjing, China, recalls being forced by a teacher to criticize her best friend as an adolescent. “Criticism and self-criticism were required practices in every socialist social unit,” Li explains. “In the village school I attended, they took the form of trimester reports constituted by two parts: class criticism of each student and each student’s self-criticism.”
2. A Letter to Mitchell Browne, ‘Why Should Artists at Work Fund Idlers at Art?’ (Dave Lamb, School for Birds)
A Melbourne-based artist’s open letter to a journalist on eliminating arts funding: “The very best art will tell us not just who we are, but who everyone is, and will allow us to accept and understand not just what makes us different but what makes us unalterably the same.”
3. “I Promise to Never Forget Where I Came From” (Sean Sprague, Sportsnet)
“They just look at him as LeBron James, the kid from the neighborhood”: Dan Robson reports from Akron and Cleveland in Ohio, meeting with Lebron James’s fans, surrogate father, former coaches, and the residents who watched him grow up.
4. Elon Musk: How We’re Going to Colonize Mars (Ross Andersen, Aeon)
An in-depth interview with the SpaceX founder on how we could make it to Mars — and why it’s important for us to get there.
5. Why Gangsters Who Broke Every Law Still Went to Services on Yom Kippur (Robert Rockaway, Tablet)
Robert Rockaway on Prohibition-era Jewish mobsters, who — despite their criminal behavior — still saw religious observance as an integral part of their identity.
6. Identity In Pieces: When You Don’t Know Where You Count (Jaya Saxena, The Aerogram)
Jaya Saxena, whose mother is white and father is Indian, writes about her experience with being biracial: “You’re an intruder in either space, with no right to claim one or the other without a heavy caveat.”
7. Before the Law (Jennifer Gonnerman, The New Yorker)
The New Yorker is known for its exceptional reporting. This story, about a crippled legal system that left a 16-year-old imprisoned on Riker’s Island for three years without a trial, is particularly devastating.
8. Sirte and Misrata, Libya’s Last Battle (Clare Morgana Gillis, The American Scholar)
War journalist Clare Morgana Gillis recalls her days reporting in Libya with James Foley.
9. Who Killed Bugsy Siegel? (Amy Wallace, Los Angeles Magazine)
A family’s answer to one of America’s most famous unsolved Mob mysteries.
10. On Our Traveller Perception of a Place & Finding Alternate Stories (Jessica Lee, Road Essays)
Jessica Lee, a travel writer and author for Lonely Planet, recalls her time in the Middle East, primarily Cairo.
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WordPress.com News 
love it , so interesting
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How do Bloggers get featured on Freshly Pressed? Is there any sort of contest for the same or WordPress Admins do it on their own?
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Great question! And I’m certainly not surprised that you’ve gotten no response because I have seen many, many bloggers that should have been Freshly Pressed and I’ve read many, many Freshly Pressed blog posts that frankly just weren’t up to snuff.
However it’s done, I am under the impression that it’s not at all fair and above board. And I do understand that not everyone will like what I like, but to be fair, when someone’s posts are consistently spot on and noteworthy and never a Freshly Pressed award is in sight, then something ‘smells rotten in Denmark’.
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Darshan, Shelby, the Freshly Pressed picks are selected by us, the editors at WordPress.com. We try very hard to search for and share the best work from what is a huge community, but we also need your help to recommend picks! If you find something particularly great, you can always send a link to editor@wordpress.com. Thanks for your help.
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I can’t comment on the system, since I haven’t understood it completely. But yeah Shelby, even I’m confused about this Freshly Pressed features. I hope someone soon sorts this out for me & for my fellow Bloggers.
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Some great posts 🙂 !
I am a bit of a space travel geek and I particularly like the interview with Elon Musk. I think that his company SpaceX are up to some pretty exciting things.
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Some great reading this afternoon. Enjoyed. Looking around wordpress. Getting used to wordpress hopefully
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Why Gangsters Who Broke Every Law Still Went to Services on Yom Kippur, Wow! and I thought I knew about gangsters. Thanx
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Just read some of Patrick Modiano work(novels).
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The Elon Musk article is great but . I wish they had moderated the comments a bit more. There were 251 when I last looked.
Many of them are very odd indeed, don’t relate to the article and are just people getting strange ideas of their chest.
The Science Geek
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To witness the courage and resilience of Malala and her family brought me a joy I will remember for a long time. A wonderful article very deserving of wide readership. Kudos.
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