EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy. With the news cycle dominated by the coronavirus situation, we know it can be hard to take your mind off what’s happening.

So we want to bring you an interesting read every weekday evening to help transport you somewhere else.

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

The Sahara

Back in 1991, William Langewiesche wrote a three-part piece about the hottest and driest place in the world, the Sahara Desert. Here’s the first part.

(The Atlantic, approx 23 mins reading time)

I remembered one ride on a truck, in a passenger box thick with heat, bodies, and dust. We laughed when the first bump threw us from the benches; the second bump smashed us agains the ceiling, and suddenly it was no longer funny. For two days we held on, waiting for the pounding to end. That was the worst. Elsewhere in the Sahara I had felt other miles — by foot, communal taxi, cargo truck, moped, even river steamer. I had come to the Sahara as others might travel to the Himalayas, to see the world in its extreme. There is no other place as hot and dry and empty. There are few places as hostile to life. Yet it is lived in.

Read all of the Evening Longreads here>