This week's long reads

Support the Guardian Support us   Fund independent journalism Love language: faith in universal communication In this week’s newsletter: the peculiar joy of life in Esperanto. Plus, the Long Read magazine summer issue Composite: Alamy Nudists, peaceniks and freeloading travellers: the people keeping the Esperanto dream alive | Katie Thornton Esperanto has the reputation of an idealistic movement that failed. So writer Katie Thornton was surprised to find its annual congress vibrant and full of young people. And although there was a certain earnest tenacity in Esperanto speakers’ refusal to give up the ideal of peace through a common language, mostly there was joy. Photograph: David McCoy/The Guardian Summer reading sorted: the Long Read magazine A few weeks ago we published our summer edition of the Long Read magazine. We had great fun doing a launch event with three of our writers at magCulture in Clerkenwell, London, and we’re delighted to say the magazine is flying off shelves. We’ve had readers send us photos of it in shop windows from London to Amsterdam to Lisbon. Photograph: Handout One of the pleasures of putting together the Long Read magazine is working with our brilliant designers, and one of our biggest questions is always how we want our cover to look. For the latest issue, the brief was simple: evoke the pleasure of summer reading. “With these magazines, there’s always a front-and-back reveal,” explains Chris Clarke, the Guardian’s editorial creative director. “For this summer issue, we lean into the joy of undistracted reading: on the front, a woman sits in a boat, reading, as the tide comes in. On the back, she is still there, still reading, except the tide has gone out and the boat is beached on the sand.” The magazine gives the design team a larger canvas and more time to work on each story. Unlike on the web, says Chris, “with the magazine it becomes much more about flow, pace and rhythm; how all of these stories sit together, and how one piece leads into the next. The hope is to stop the reader with large, punctuated moments, but never at the expense of the read. Everything surrounding the magazine has been built for the pleasure of reading.” What readers have said about these stories: A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world by Tom Lamont: “As Moby-Dick is to whales, so this excursus is to vending machines: immense, immersive, inspired. Prepare to be gripped.” Britain’s strangest pub chain by Mark Blacklock: “Brilliant journalism from Mark Blacklock on Tadcaster’s bizarre beer magnate.” The true(ish) story of the Honduran Maradona by Kieran Morris: “If you want an example of a truly great sports prank caller, I give you the tale of The Honduran Maradona, as confessed – and finally, confronted – by the prankster himself.” Order your copy from the Guardian bookshop today This week’s audio long reads ‘It is comforting to be haunted’: how attitudes to abortion have changed through the ages ‘A dizzying maze’: how the UK immigration system is geared to reject ‘It makes your heart sing’: can a pioneering project show that rewilding really works? Listen to the Audio Long Read on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or in the Guardian app From the archive Photograph: Yuriko Nakao/Reuters The school beneath the wave: the unimaginable tragedy of Japan’s tsunami | August 2017 Rescue teams are trying to find survivors of an earthquake in Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. In 2011, a tsunami engulfed Japan’s north-east coast. More than 18,000 people were killed. Six years later, in one community, Richard Lloyd Parry met survivors who were still tormented by a catastrophic split-second decision. Photograph: Getty Images How our home delivery habit reshaped the world | November 2019 The great trick of online retail has been to get us to shop more and think less about how our purchases reach our homes. Samanth Subramanian looks at the logistics, and the environmental impact, of the package on your doorstep. What else we’ve been reading I’ve been simultaneously reading and listening to Daniel Hahn’s fascinating book about translations of Shakespeare, If This Be Magic. He has spoken to dozens of translators around the world, working in every language from Portuguese to Japanese to Bengali. For those not lucky enough to speak all these languages, the audiobook, featuring readings from actors in all these languages, is the way to go. David Wolf, editor This piece from Equator was widely shared and demands attention. Abdaljawad Omar’s essay Gaza and the problem of moral stupidity is a hard-hitting examination of our failure to act in spite of the evidence before us: “The facts of Palestine are spoken, and increasingly by Palestinians themselves, but they are met by a refusal to listen, by ears that prefer the drone of implausible denial to the unbearable weight of fact.” Clare Longrigg, deputy editor   Our journalism is free to say what it wants… but worth paying for. 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