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Good first-person writing online is an endangered species. A personal essay needs at least thousand words to really get into the nuances of whatever probably-humiliating story you’re choosing to share, but the Internet, being full of distractions, doesn’t reward length. And a personal essay needs honesty to be interesting, but the Internet is meaner to personal essayists than a school bus full of seventh-graders to a kid with bird shit on his shoulder — the more honest you are, the more abuse you’ll take.

So today's roundup celebrates the good, the honest, and the long.

In this Men’s Vogue excerpt from former Luna frontman Dean Wareham's memoir, he tells the story of how he wound up leaving his wife of seven years for his band’s high-cheekboned bassist. His recounting is the opposite of cavalier, and reading it, you wind up sympathetic to everyone involved. (NB: I’m pretty sure I was at the Philadelphia show where Dean and Britta first made out, but I’d eaten an entire bag of Valentine’s Day candy hearts and spent most of the night outside trying not to puke. Rock and roll!)

There's an exceptionally weird story on Fresh Yarn – always a font of weird stories – by a theater kid whose crush on her fellow Gypsy cast member ended when he stabbed a friend of her parents. OK, yes, total spoiler, but aren’t you curious about the road from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” to murder in the first degree?

The Morning News has a lovely, simple, raw tale about the overpowering urge to protect one’s children, and what happens when that urge leads one man – an author of kids’ books, no less – to kick a stranger’s dog.

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