HELLO and welcome to the 104th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about The Jonas Brothers! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.

The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.

Florida Georgia Line: America is Awesome, Partying is Fun (November 2013), by Kyle Kramer for Noisey – “Here’s the thing, too: They’re the perfect country stars for this particular moment. They don’t wear cowboy hats, but rather leather jewelry, wallet chains, and cutoff tees. At the Best Buy Theater show, Hubbard was dressed in a black and gold American flag shirt that looked like something A$AP Rocky might wear, but just as easily could have been from Target. Their guitarist looks like a Warped Tour vet, with a foot-high green mohawk and painfully skinny jeans. Florida Georgia Line still seem like they could probably fix your truck if it broke down, but their image is definitely at home in the suburban world where, if we’re being honest, country mostly lives.”

The Other Side of the Story (December 2013), by Jenny Kutner for The Texas Monthly – This was super-intense. “When I was fourteen, I had a relationship with my eighth grade history teacher. People called me a victim. They called him a villain. But it’s more complicated than that.”

Mysterious Death at the South Pole (December 2009), by Will Cockrell for Men’s Journal – Interesting for many reasons, including its glimpse into the unique culture developed amongst the humans who spend long winters at the South Pole completely cut off from society. “Fifty people. The most remote base on the planet. No way in or out for eight months. Then one of them dies under curious circumstances. A new look into one of Antarctica’s most enduring enigmas.”

The Big Sleep (December 2013), by Ian Parker for The New Yorker – I took ambien almost every night for about two years, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to anybody ever, but boy did I write some interesting blog entries and make some interesting decisions! Anyhow so I found this whole super-long article about sleep meds compelling, but there was a lot of dense sciency stuff in there that might appeal to a sciencey person more than it did to me!

Never Forget (July 2009), by Michael Paterniti for GQ – If you’ve never read about the Khmer Rouge before (I did post another article about The Killing Fields in an earlier TIRTL), just be warned that we’re talking the worst kind of violence and brutality and horror you could ever imagine inflicted on human beings by other human beings. This article is penetrating and cuts right to the heart. I still don’t know why my 8th grade teacher assigned us To Destroy You is No Loss, but needless to say it’s unfathomable at any age.

A Serial Killer in Common (May 2011), by Robert Kolker for New York Magazine – Five prostitutes disappear. Bodies turn up on a beach. Now the families of the victims have formed a kind of sisterhood. They ask: Who murdered my daughter? Who was my sister—really?

Morgan: A Lyric (December 2013), by Boyer Rickel for Guernica – “Some mornings it was just the three of us: Morgan in a deep, nearly paralyzing sedation; the ICU nurse, in almost constant motion, enclosed in profound concentration, attending the countless IV lines and dispensing machines (their warning bells and buzzes), the flash of graphs and numbers on monitors, the recording of data on computer screens and in a paper log; and me, wrapped in a complex synthesis of emotions, as if love, fear, hope, determination, desire, had been atomized into a single gas, which was the air I breathed. I thought of us as a triptych by Francis Bacon, each figure within sight of the other, but alone, without privacy, framed in isolation, distorted not physically by the artist’s vision, but by our separate states of extremity.”

A Good Men’s Rights Movement is Hard to Find (October 2013), by Jaclyn Friedman for The American Prospect – MEN’S RIGHT’S HUMANS ARE THE WORST AND THEY ARE THE WORST TO WOMEN AND THEY MAKE THREATS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE ALL THE TIME

Joe Jonas: My Life As A Jonas Brother (December 2013), by Joe Jonas as told to Jennifer Vineyard for New York Magazine – I didn’t really know anything about the Jonas Brothers, just that they were some kind of punchline in general I think. This was pretty interesting, how their career evolved and the Disney machine functioned, and it also includes the gem about him smoking pot for the first time with Demi Lovato and Miley Cyrus.