Long Reads That Caught Our Eye This Week

Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser]( We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. Filled to the Bream Bill Heavey | Garden & Gun When two broods gather for an old-fashioned panfish rodeo, the only thing better than the fillets is the fellowship --------------------------------------------------------------- Gibb, eight, is having trouble keeping his voice down. This does not help put fish in the boat. He’s even more amped having just watched his dad lead an unusually inquisitive four-foot gator in figure eights, chasing and snapping at his bobber. Six of us are crammed into a sixteen-foot skiff with a pail full of crickets and too many rods, trying to fill the cooler for the “Brim Rodeo,” the annual family fish fry that the Wilbourn and the Mahony clans have been holding together every spring for nearly twenty years at their hunting camps in southwest Arkansas’s Little River Bottoms. Some of the clubs here—with names like Po Boy and Grassy Lake, Yellow Creek and Cypress Bayou—date from the 1890s and are among the oldest in the state. [Read More]( Embarrassing bodies: what did the Victorians have to hide? Kathryn Hughes | The Guardian Why did Charles Darwin grow a beard? What was wrong with George Eliot’s hand? Kathryn Hughes examines the physical secrets kept by our 19th-century forebears --------------------------------------------------------------- It turns out that the story about Victorians wrapping little trousers around their indecent piano legs is apocryphal or, at the very least, a weak joke. Yet the idea endures that our great-grandparents muffled their bodies in heavy fabric and silence. It’s an idea we picked up from the early 20th century and then, because it was flattering to imagine ourselves as so different from our poor buttoned-up, self-loathing ancestors, we refused to let it go. [Read More]( Saving Babies' Lives by Carrying Them Like Kangaroos Lena Corner | The Atlantic Skin-to-skin contact sustains premature babies where incubators are limited. It may even be the best form of neonatal care, period. --------------------------------------------------------------- Carmela Torres was 18 when she became pregnant for the first time. It was 1987 and she and her now-husband, Pablo Hernandez, were two idealistic young Colombians born in the coastal region of Montería who moved to the capital, Bogotá, in search of freedom and a better life. When Torres told her father she was expecting, so angered was he by the thought of his daughter having a child out of wedlock that they didn’t speak to each other for years. [Read More]( Confessions of a Catholic convert to capitalism Arthur C. Brooks | America Magazine The greatest conversion story of all time began at daybreak on Dec. 9, 1531, on a hill outside Mexico City. The ruthless Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples was proving an uncompelling advertisement for the Catholic faith. It had produced a meager stream of voluntary converts up to that point. That morning, according to tradition, an indigenous, Mexican peasant named Juan Diego reported an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her message was simple. “Dear little son, I love you,” she told him. “I want you to know who I am. I am the Virgin Mary, Mother of the one true God, of Him who gives life.” [Read More]( The ‘Esquire Man’ Is Dead. Long Live the ‘Esquire Man.’ Alex Williams | The New York Times To that pocket-square-wearing, sidecar-sipping human known as the “Esquire man,” this was life as it was intended to be: a roomful of wags in natty suits throwing back cocktails and trading banter in one of Manhattan’s hottest restaurants, as willowy models and square-jawed movie stars circled the room. At Esquire magazine’s “Mavericks of Style” dinner, held at Le Coucou on a rainy night this past November, spirits were so high, and consumed so freely, that it might as well have been 1966 — doubly so, since Gay Talese, Esquire’s living monument to the New Journalism of the 1960s, was holding court, dry gin martini in hand, a few yards away from Jay Fielden, Esquire’s new editor in chief. [Read More]( Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. Our mailing address is: The Federalist 8647 Richmond Highway Suite 618 Alexandria, VA 22309 [Add us to your address book]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences]( The Federalist · 8647 Richmond Highway · Suite 618 · Alexandria, VA 22309 · USA