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Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

Ernest Hemingway’s Private WWII-Era Spy Network

Ernest Hemingway aboard the Pilar, 1935: Wikimedia Commons

During World War II Hemingway organized a private spy network, which he jokingly called the Crook Factory, and gathered information about Nazi sympathizers on the island. But in a secret, 124-page report on Hemingway, the FBI—which feared his personal prestige and political power—expressed resentment at his amateur but alarming intrusion into their territory, and unsuccessfully attempted to control and vilify him.

In October 1942 the local FBI agent told J. Edgar Hoover that the American ambassador had granted Hemingway’s request “to patrol certain areas where German submarine activity has been reported” and had given him scarce gasoline for this purpose. Hemingway thought that his boat, the Pilar, fully manned and heavily armed but disguised for fishing, would attract the attention of a German submarine. The sub would signal the Pilar to come alongside in order to requisition supplies of fresh water and food. As the sub approached, Hemingway’s men would machine-gun the crew on deck while a Spanish jai alai player would throw a small bomb into the conning tower. Fortunately, for both Hemingway and the Germans, he never actually encountered an enemy submarine.

Jeffrey Meyers, writing in Commonweal about Ernest Hemingway’s long involvement with Cuba, where Hemingway lived for twenty years.

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Robert Oppenheimer on Albert Einstein and the Bomb

Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, 1947: Flickr, James Vaughn

Though I knew Einstein for two or three decades, it was only in the last decade of his life that we were close colleagues and something of friends. But I thought that it might be useful, because I am sure that it is not too soon—and for our generation perhaps almost too late—to start to dispel the clouds of myth and to see the great mountain peak that these clouds hide. As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful.

Late in his life, in connection with his despair over weapons and wars, Einstein said that if he had to live it over again he would be a plumber. This was a balance of seriousness and jest that no one should now attempt to disturb. Believe me, he had no idea of what it was to be a plumber; least of all in the United States, where we have a joke that the typical behavior of this specialist is that he never brings his tools to the scene of the crisis. Einstein brought his tools to his crises; Einstein was a physicist, a natural philosopher, the greatest of our time.

***

Einstein is often blamed or praised or credited with these miserable bombs. It is not in my opinion true. The special theory of relativity might not have been beautiful without Einstein; but it would have been a tool for physicists, and by 1932 the experimental evidence for the inter-convertibility of matter and energy which he had predicted was overwhelming. The feasibility of doing anything with this in such a massive way was not clear until seven years later, and then almost by accident. This was not what Einstein really was after. His part was that of creating an intellectual revolution, and discovering more than any scientist of our time how profound were the errors made by men before then. He did write a letter to Roosevelt about atomic energy. I think this was in part his agony at the evil of the Nazis, in part not wanting to harm any one in any way; but I ought to report that that letter had very little effect, and that Einstein himself is really not answerable for all that came later. I believe he so understood it himself.

Robert Oppenheimer speaking about his relationship with Albert Einstein. Oppenheimer’s lecture was delivered at UNESCO House in Paris on December 13, 1965. The text was reprinted in The New York Review of Books the following March.

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How ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ Got Its Name

John Steinbeck—who would have been 113 today—wrote more than thirty books, and The Grapes of Wrath, which you were most likely assigned to read in high school, is widely considered to be his best work. The novel was published in 1939 to great acclaim, both critically and commercially; it “was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national talk radio; but above all, it was read.” It was also the New York Times’ bestselling book of 1939, and won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

As for the title, where did the phrase “The Grapes of Wrath” come from? As David Greetham notes  in his 1998 book Textual Transgressions: Essays Toward the Construction of a Bibliography:

As is well-known, it was Carol Henning, Steinbeck’s wife, who provided the almost-finished novel with its title, drawn, of course, from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As Steinbeck reported in his journal for September 3, 1938, “Carol got the title last night…The book has being at last.” But what was the “being” the novel had achieved…? The story proceeds: because Steinbeck had already destroyed a 70,000-word draft of an earlier version in which California growers were polemically attacked, he was very sensitive to the political meaning of the new version and decided that one way to avoid the charge of radicalism, foreign-inspired propaganda was (almost literally) to wrap the book in the flag by insisting that the words and music of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” be printed in the endpapers. In fact, when the first proof was returned by his editor with only one verse [of the song] as prologue, Steinbeck wrote back “I meant to print all, all, all the verses of the Battle Hymn. They’re all pertinent and they’re all exciting. And the music too.”

Confessions of a Weary Restaurant Critic

After a seven-year-long stint as a restaurant critic at the Charleston City Paper Robert F. Moss is bidding the profession—or at least the beat—adieu. But before pushing away from the table for the last time, Moss has penned an essay about the difficulties of eating dinner for a living. In the excerpt below, he discusses how the writing itself can grow tedious:

Writing formal reviews is difficult. And by “reviews,” I mean it in the plural form. Composing a passable review or two is challenging enough, since it takes practice to get the hang of the form. But what’s even harder is churning out one after another, month in and month out.

There are only so many ways to describe food. You become hyper-aware of your own clichés. If you’ve gotten tired of reading “lovely,” “tinged,” and “delightful” in my reviews over the past seven years, all I can say is that you should have seen the first drafts.

Then there’s how you structure a review. It’s easy to lapse into such a rote pattern that you almost fall asleep while you’re writing.

Want to pen a textbook B-grade review? Here’s the template. Start with a capsule history of the business (“A new hook-to-table seafood restaurant that opened in May in the strip mall location once home to McGrubby’s Greek Deli.”). Next, march lockstep through the food offering. (Spoiler alert: we’ll start with the appetizers, then move on to entrees, and — surprise! — finish with the desserts.). Toss in a brief description of the interior (exposed brick and brown wood, of course), then wrap it all up with a paragraph that passes final judgement on the place.

If you do it right, the gist of that final paragraph will be that “it’s the kind of place you’ll like if you like that kind of place” and “time will tell whether local diners will embrace it,” which is reviewer code for “it doesn’t totally suck, but I give it three months tops.”

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How a Legendary Rock Critic Found a Home in the Comments Section of an MSN Blog

As for the awe he inspires himself, Christgau’s devotees are smaller in number these days than in his Voice years, but they’re still extraordinarily dedicated, particularly among a small community who came together in the comments section of Expert Witness, the MSN blog he started after leaving the Voice. (He’s since moved on to the Medium site Cuepoint.) “The Witnesses are the greatest experience of my professional life,” Christgau says. “Most of them are very married kind of guys, but I’m so very married that it makes sense.”

He credits the Witnesses with helping him to stay current. Nick Farruggia, at 25 years old, is one of the youngest members of the group; he first heard of Christgau when he was 15 and trying to branch out musically. During the hours and hours he spent researching music on the internet, he began to notice that the same critic’s name kept appearing in nearly every Wikipedia entry. (At first, “I thought he was really pompous and pretentious,” he admits now.)

Eventually though, Christgau became a kind of reference book for all the things Farruggia was curious about in music. He found the Expert Witness blog, and quickly mixed in with its surprisingly robust comment community: The Witnesses meet up in person occasionally, usually at shows by Wussy, an Ohio indie-rock band that has been Christgau’s favorite for the last few years.

“It sounds so weird, to be honest,” Farruggia says. “We have a hard time explaining it to our spouses that there is this group of people who all have respect for this one older guy, and who collectively constitute this amazing group of friends.”

If Expert Witness is essential to the Christgau diehards, it’s an even more necessary outlet for the author himself. “There’s the sense that there is just not enough time for him to get everything out that he needs to get out,” Farruggia says.

—Leah Carroll, profiling rock critic Robert Christgau in Deadspin. Christgau spent three decades reviewing music for the Village Voice.

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How to Tell Your Children and Friends That Your Father Is a Serial Killer

Recently, Roy Wenzl profiled a woman named Kerri Rawson for The Wichita Eagle. Rawson’s life was upended a decade ago, when an FBI agent knocked on her door and informed her that the man she’d always known as a loving father was in fact the BTK serial killer. Wenzl’s piece is a compelling and meticulous portrait of a woman slowly coming to terms with the impossible. Below is an excerpt:

When friends questioned whether it was wise for them to have children, Kerri ignored them. She never worried about her kids inheriting a serial killer gene.

When Emilie, at 5, understood what “grandfather” meant, she asked where her grandfather was.

“In a long time-out,” Kerri replied.

Couldn’t Kerri go see him? Emilie asked.

“It’s a really long time-out,” Kerri replied.

Kerri asked friends: “Don’t tag our children” on Facebook. When friends asked why, she didn’t know how to answer them. She told some of them that “my dad did something terrible.”

“What?”

“Just Google me.”

And they would. And then: “Oh.”

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William S. Burroughs on Why He Stopped Taking Drugs

Photo from Wikimedia Commons From left, Carl Solomon, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs

INTERVIEWER

Why did you stop taking drugs?

BURROUGHS

I was living in Tangier in 1957, and I had spent a month in a tiny room in the Casbah staring at the toe of my foot. The room had filled up with empty Eukodol cartons; I suddenly realized I was not doing anything. I was dying. I was just apt to be finished. So I flew to London and turned myself over to Dr. John Yerbury Dent for treatment. I’d heard of his success with the apomorphine treatment. Apomorphine is simply morphine boiled in hydrochloric acid; it’s nonaddictive. What the apomorphine did was to regulate my metabolism. It’s a metabolic regulator. It cured me physiologically. I’d already taken the cure once at Lexington, and although I was off drugs when I got out, there was a physiological residue. Apomorphine eliminated that. I’ve been trying to get people in this country interested in it, but without much luck. The vast majority—social workers, doctors—have the cop’s mentality toward addiction. A probation officer in California wrote me recently to inquire about the apomorphine treatment. I’ll answer him at length. I always answer letters like that.

William S. Burroughs, interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker in The Paris Review, “The Art of Fiction No. 36” (Fall 1965).

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How to Become a Cable-News ‘Expert’ Overnight

In a recent piece for New York, Jeff Wise reflected on how he became obsessed with the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 over a yearlong period—falling in with a virtual group of borderline-obsessive amateur aviation sleuths, formulating his own theory, and ultimately paying out of pocket to hire translators and researchers. But before he went down the conspiracy rabbit hole, he was just a pilot and science writer who’d written a big piece for Popular Mechanics about the mysterious crash of Air France 447 way back in 2009. A few days after MH370 disappeared, an editor at Slate emailed Wise asking him to write a short piece about it. It ran on March 12th, and the next morning he was invited to go on CNN. Soon, he was on-air up to six times a day:

There was no intro course on how to be a cable-news expert. The Town Car would show up to take me to the studio, I’d sign in with reception, a guest-greeter would take me to makeup, I’d hang out in the greenroom, the sound guy would rig me with a mike and an earpiece, a producer would lead me onto the set, I’d plug in and sit in the seat, a producer would tell me what camera to look at during the introduction, we’d come back from break, the anchor would read the introduction to the story and then ask me a question or maybe two, I’d answer, then we’d go to break, I would unplug, wipe off my makeup, and take the car 43 blocks back uptown. Then a couple of hours later, I’d do it again. I was spending 18 hours a day doing six minutes of talking.

As time went by, CNN winnowed its expert pool down to a dozen or so regulars who earned the on-air title “CNN aviation analysts”: airline pilots, ex-government honchos, aviation lawyers, and me. We were paid by the week, with the length of our contracts dependent on how long the story seemed likely to play out. The first couple were seven-day, the next few were 14-day, and the last one was a month. We’d appear solo, or in pairs, or in larger groups for panel discussions—whatever it took to vary the rhythm of perpetual chatter.

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On the Difference Between ‘Technical’ and ‘Tactical’ Spies

Photo of Carlo Franzinetti (Left) and Bruno Pontecorvo (Right): Wikimedia Commons

In a recent piece for the New York Review of BooksFreeman Dyson reviewed Half-Life, a biography of Bruno Pontecorvo, a brilliant nuclear physicist and possible spy. Pontecorvo spent six years working on nuclear reactors in Canada, where he may or may not have passed information on to Soviet contacts. However, according to Dyson—who is himself a world-renowned mathematical physicist— even if Pontecorvo had been a spy, the overall effect of his information wouldn’t have been hugely important. Perhaps some of it might have been useful to Soviet bomb designers, but it wouldn’t have been a game changer. Furthermore, the Soviets already had two technical spies (Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall) relaying information from Los Alamos.

This is where Dyson brings up an interesting distinction: that between technical and tactical spies. As a layperson, I’d always presumed a spy is a spy; however, in Dyson’s view, technical and tactical spies belong in entirely different categories. He sees the latter as being responsible for putting actual lives in danger, whereas the former merely steal useful scientific knowledge:

Technical spies were unimportant because the Soviet Union had plenty of first-rate scientists working in the relevant areas of nuclear physics… If a country has this kind of home-grown technical talent, it does not need technical spies to make progress. If a country does not have this kind of talent, technical spies will not be an effective substitute. In either case, the contribution of technical spies will be marginal. Science is a collective enterprise, and needs a community of active participants to succeed in any large venture.

The public vastly overrates the importance of technical spies such as Klaus Fuchs, because the same word “spy” is used for technical spies and for tactical spies. The archetype of the tactical spy is Judas Iscariot, the secret enemy betraying his master and directly causing his master’s death. For two thousand years, the story of Judas has been linked with the image of a spy in the cultures of Europe. Another tactical spy, not quite as notorious as Judas, was Kim Philby, a British intelligence officer who held high positions in the British diplomatic service. He gave his Soviet contacts lists of names of undercover agents operating in various countries, so that Soviet authorities could quickly eliminate them. He was directly responsible for many disappearances. Tactical spies are rightly condemned by public opinion and by the traditional rules of war. They have immediate effects on the life and death of fellow citizens. They are fair game for any soldier to kill, with or without a legal trial. But technical spies are different. Technical spies are more concerned with things than with people.

***

Why then does the American public still consider all spies to be demons? Why does the public make no distinction between technical spies like Julius Rosenberg stealing useful knowledge and tactical spies like Kim Philby destroying human lives? Perhaps it is because the American public is misled by the American secrecy system. The secrecy system is a bureaucratic monster that classifies vast quantities of information as secret, making it impossible for the ordinary citizen to see the difference between important and unimportant secrets.

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