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Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

The Big Business of International Kidnapping

Photo via Risks Incorporated

As we drive to an office in nearby Pembroke Pines, Wilson briefs me on the bourgeoning business of international kidnapping. The White House’s recent acknowledgment of the accidental killing of two al-Qaida hostages in Pakistan in January, as well as the dark news from Syria in recent months, both overshadows and underscores the fact that kidnappings are a global scourge. As incidents have increased worldwide, a parallel industry has emerged, one that includes insurance companies, negotiators, lawyers, and security firms like Risks Inc. In a 2010 investigation, London’s Independent newspaper dubbed this the “hostage industry,” and estimated its worth at about $1.6 billion a year.

“You don’t have to be rich. People will kidnap you for next to nothing,” Wilson says. “Venezuela is out of control. Mexico is out of control.” Most of his clients for the Florida course are executives or wealthy individuals who live in high-risk areas, primarily in Latin America. (Wilson also offers the course in Belgrade, Serbia.) Other students have included American businessmen who travel to potentially dangerous locations, security contractors, and an international yacht captain. (Lambros Y. Lambrou, a trial lawyer in Manhattan and a father of two, took Wilson’s kidnap course to help ensure his family’s safety when they travel to countries like Mexico and Serbia, where his wife is from. “We live in a very uncertain world sometimes,” Lambrou says. “Unfortunately, most of the time the only person you have to protect you is yourself.”)

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Cass Sunstein Remembers Thurgood Marshall

You clerked with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. What was he like?

He was very, very quick. He had a sense of the human reality of the cases, which he could size up in an instant partly because because he had been a trial lawyer. He was a repository of experience such as the human race rarely has. In the sense that he had been a lower court judge, a Supreme Court justice, solicitor general of the United States and the most successful supreme court advocate probably in the court’s history—at the point when the court was arguably more significant than at any time in the nation’s history.

So he argued and kind of conceptualized Brown v. Board of Education and he had at the top of his mind, it seemed, stories and anecdotes about the early civil rights days. He knew Martin Luther King, he had been on the phone with Roosevelt. He knew Johnson very, very well. He knew the Kennedys. So he was like a walking history book. But also someone who could read a brief and say, “I know what’s really going on here.” And there were some cases where the briefs wouldn’t capture what he knew was going on. And he would ask us, why don’t you do a little digging. And he was always right.

Legal scholar Cass Sunstein, interviewed by Matt Phillips in Quartz.

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How the Skater Kids From the Movie ‘Kids’ Were Cast

[Harmony] Korine, nineteen at the time, and [Larry] Clark, then over fifty, wrangled the troops from the skate clique, supplementing them with more non-actors from Washington Square Park and the club scene, and across downtown—including Chloë Sevigny, from tony Darien, Connecticut, who had been hanging out with the crew in Washington Square Park for years. They plucked a then fifteen-year-old Rosario Dawson from her stoop in the East Village. Vibe magazine was shooting a commercial on her block, and her father told her to go downstairs to get discovered. Korine heard her laughing loudly at a strange man who looked like Jesus, walked over and told her, “You’re exactly what I wrote.”

Rosario’s father rode her on his bike handlebars to the auditions, downtown on Broadway. When it came down to Rosario and another girl for the part of Ruby, Harold, who she knew from the East Village, was the deciding factor–he told Korine and Clark to go with his neighbor.

Caroline Rothstein writing for Narratively in 2013 about what happened to the cast of the seminal 1995 movie Kids.

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The Unlikely Union of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush

One year earlier, it had been inconceivable that Reagan’s and Bush’s destinies would seamlessly merge and propel them both to the White House.

In the Pennsylvania GOP primary, Bush uttered three words that almost doomed his political rise. At Carnegie Mellon University, he dismissed Reagan’s plan to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget as “voodoo economic policy.”

“That really pissed off Reagan,” says Richard V. Allen, who was the Californian’s foreign policy specialist.

A month later, Bush dropped out of the race. In his diary, he pondered, “What’s it going to be like? Driving a car, being lonely around the house?”

But on a July night when Reagan was nominated, fate intervened. At 11:35 p.m., a plan to pick Gerald Ford as his running mate collapsed during a meeting between Reagan and the former president.

After Ford left the nominee’s 69th-floor suite at the Detroit Plaza Hotel, Reagan explained to his inner circle, “All this time, my gut instinct has been that this is not the right thing.”

The room was silent until Reagan asked, “Well, what do we do now?”

“We call Bush,” said Allen, who had already put out feelers to see if the Texan could embrace the platform — voodoo economic policy and all. He could.

Alan Peppard writing for The Dallas Morning News about the events surrounding the 1981 attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan.

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The Proustian Powers of Ice Cream

Ice cream is Proustian. One bite can send you time-traveling decades back, to a hot summer day, when you walked barefoot on shell-dappled Gulf sands, vanilla ice cream dripping over the sides of a cone and onto your fingers. Maybe it was a reward for the first time you lost a tooth, a sweet, cold dish of mint chocolate chip as balm for the pain. A bite of blackberry gelato might conjure up a stroll down a sunny Roman street with a long-lost love. More recently, ice cream has become associated with being a good person and doing good works, even though the product really isn’t all that good for you. Honesty matters. Trust matters. We feed it to our children, after all. This is why Ben & Jerry’s, on its website, stresses its commitment to “progressive values across our business,” “climate justice,” and mandatory GMO labeling. This is why Häagen-Dazs wants you to know that the company has devoted more than $1 million to honeybee survival (“We want to keep those little heroes buzzing”). This is why Breyers pledges to use “sustainably farmed vanilla and fruit” and milk and cream from cows “not treated with artificial growth hormones.” Keeping up with modern times, Breyers also features lactose-free, no-sugar-added, fat-free, half-the-fat, carb-smart, and gluten-free ice cream.

Mimi Swartz writing in Texas Monthly about Blue Bell, a much-loved Texas company that has recently been plagued by a series of recalls and deaths linked to listeria-tainted ice cream.

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When Conservation Threatens Indigenous Peoples

But the Maasai of Loliondo are not alone in disputing these supposed benefits. Worldwide, 8 million square miles—a landmass almost as large as the entire African continent—have been classified as protected areas by governments and conservation groups. In turn, the locals have mostly been pushed off their lands. Though no one formally counts people displaced for the sake of environmental preservation, data from the UN and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on park footprints and population density estimate that the total number of removed people could be near 20 million.

These are our world’s conservation refugees—from the Dominican Republic to Kenya, Bolivia to Brazil. They are the Batwa of Uganda, who were forced out of their native forests when they were falsely accused of killing silverback gorillas. Many are now squatters without access to water or sanitation, living on the edge of parks that protect the great apes. They are the Hmong of northern Thailand, who were plunged into food shortage when the government, under pressure from the UN’s Global Environment Facility, created a national park system. This presaged the arrival of men with guns, giving them no option but to give up their way of life.

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky writing for Vice about the dark side of ecotourism and how it has affected Tanzania’s Masai people.

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How a ’12 Angry Men’ Parody Emerged from Amy Schumer’s Writing Room

Photo by Comedy Central


Each episode of Inside Amy Schumer usually contains a number of sketches, but last week the entire show was composed of a single extremely ambitious sketch. Bryan Moylan recently profiled Jessi Klein, the show’s head writer and co-executive producer of the show in New York Magazine. In the excerpt below, Moylan provides context for how the much-talked-about episode came together:

Tuesday night’s “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” sketch has a particularly incisive feminist tenor, though there are practically no women in the episode. Taking a break from their usual blend of stand-up bits, sketches, and interviews, the 22-minute-long parody features a jury deliberating whether or not Schumer is hot enough to be on television.

“Amy had pitched it early on in the season,” Klein says. “And then I got a text from Amy to me and Dan [Powell]: ‘What if we did that sketch as a whole episode, and we got amazing character actors to be in it?’ As soon as we saw that, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that could be really crazy.’ So Amy wrote a first draft and laid out the bones of it. And we all watched the movie again. I had seen it more than once, but not in a long time, and I watched it again and took a crack at it with the movie fresh in my head, to shape it with as much of the movie beats.”

From there, the writers’ room had a go at it. “This is how we work on everything,” Klein explains. “Someone does a draft, then there’s another draft, and then everyone is in it. It took a village, in terms of the casting of it and the producing of it.”

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The High-Stress Life of a First Responder

You don’t know what it’s like to be an emergency services provider until you’ve stood in the piss-soaked bedroom of a house and watched a team of medics try to revive an old, lonely guy though 15 minutes of automated CPR. It’s a small part of the job, but unavoidable. When the call goes off for a critical emergency, medics have no choice but to make haste.

“We exist around death, dying, injury, and illness,” remarked Jay Cloud, a paramedic with 33 years of experience outside of Houston. “When we see these horrible situations, we can’t turn off our biological insistence that this is a critical situation. We have to learn to rein in our reactions and refocus that to getting [the situation] resolved. And it is terrible to have to deal with these things. Usually it involves children or senior citizens.”

Indeed, the life of a first responder is one of the most stressful in the nation, one where the non-life-threatening situations can be seen as nuisances, and the high-pressure ones cause nightmares.

Chase Hoffberger writing in The Austin Chronicle about Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services. Austin’s EMS system is one of the best in the nation, but several recent suicides have highlighted structural problems.

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Inside the Kris Jenner Playbook

Kris and her children didn’t do much press for Season 10, unheard-of for this family or anyone promoting a TV show, really. Call it an educated guess to say that perhaps they didn’t want to be asked about Bruce’s transition. But not because they were shielding Bruce, whom they love. It was not because he needed his privacy during this sensitive time, which was the reason so often cited in articles about the rumors that preceded the ABC special. Bruce picked up some lessons from Kris over the years: He has signed on to do a “docuseries” with the same production company that produces their show (though Kris is not involved in it). Bruce has no privacy; none of them do. That’s the deal they made with one another. When they’re silent on Bruce, they aren’t protecting him from the judgments of a cruel world; they are protecting Bruce’s exclusive. “I learned a lot from her,” Bruce said about his marriage to Kris, during the ABC interview. And so he did: He didn’t reveal how he looks dressed in women’s clothing in the interview or what his new name is. You’ll have to tune in to his show to see that. In the Kris Jenner playbook, you don’t give anything away.

And that right there is the hustle. What matters is not the revelation of secrets; who can keep secrets in this modern tabloid culture anyway? It’s the reaction to recently surfaced information — a father’s transition, a sex tape, a new husband’s crack addition, a boyfriend’s drinking problem — that are most valuable in this world. Kris Jenner doesn’t care that you know everything. What secrets can you “discover” from a woman who airs her daughters’ discussion of the size of their labia? Kris only cares that you heard them when and where she decided you should.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner writing about Kris Jenner in the New York Times Magazine.

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Finding a ‘Prepper’ to Go on the Record Is No Easy Task

Preppers are, not surprisingly, a paranoid bunch. Locating people willing to speak with me about their habits was more challenging than finding vegans at a gun range. After emailing a dozen members of Northern Illinois Preppers, a Meetup online community whose membership has grown from about 110 to more than 150 in the past six months, I received two responses. One was from someone who told me to take a hike (“I have no interest in being involved in your article. I also do NOT give you permission to quote me,” he wrote, which was perplexing, considering that no interview had been conducted). The other was delivered via a peer-to-peer encrypted email service:

“Due to OPSEC (operational security) and PERSEC (personal security) you’ll never see my stored materials. Though I personally take no offense at your question due to the nature of this interview the question itself is exceptionally rude in prepping circles. By way of analogy it’s the equivalent of my coming over to your home for the first time and, in front of your wife or girlfriend, telling you I think she’s hot and I’d like to see her without clothes. It’s simply not done. Any prepper who would be willing to show you their stocks, anonymously or otherwise, has violated so many rules they may as well just put their stocks on the curb for all to see and take.”

Rod O’Connor writing in Chicago Magazine about suburban survivalists.

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