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Pablo Escobar: Renaissance Man

As dusk settles on the Magdalena Valley, the jungly middle stretch of Colombia’s great river basin, the hippopotamuses bawl and snort. The indelicate groans of these multi-ton beasts border on comedic, but mostly their ruckus is a fearsome thing—a primal ritual that has churned these waters ever since Pablo Escobar imported four hippos to his narco-sanctuary, Hacienda Nápoles, in the 1980s.

The hippos came not from Africa but from America, the nation whose appetites and prohibitions would catapult the cocaine king onto the Forbes billionaires list. He went shopping for them at the International Wildlife Park, a bygone drive-through zoo outside Dallas that featured camel rides and a boxing kangaroo. For one male and three females, plus a menagerie of other exotics, Pablo reportedly paid $2 million in cash.

Flown to Colombia on a military-grade Hercules, the hippos found paradise in the swampy heat of Hacienda Nápoles, halfway between Medellín and Bogotá. During the 7,000-acre retreat’s heyday, when the fortune of cocaine was still new and wondrous and too opportune for most Colombians to question, Pablo opened Hacienda Nápoles to the public: “Son, this zoo is the people’s,” he told his eldest, Juan Pablo. “As long as I’m alive, I’ll never charge, because I like that poor people can come and see this spectacle.”

The hippos have not only survived their master but multiplied: to a bloat of twenty-nine, or thirty-six, or maybe sixty. Nobody really knows.

Over 20 years after his death, notorious cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar is undergoing a renaissance. In 2014, Benicio Del Toro starred in the biopic, Escobar: Paradise Lost.  El Padrino’s legend is currently being re-examined in the hit Netflix original series Narcos, and Javier Bardem is filming Escobar, alongside Penelope Cruz for a 2016 release.

At GQ, Jesse Katz examines the commodification of Pablo Escobar and his legacy in Colombia.

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A Sort of Readiness: Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin -- Photo by Laura Anglin (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Admired for her quiet daring, her structures, and her inventions, most of all she is revered for her sentences.

SICHA: A few people may talk about the “craft of writing,” but they sound phony. The way you put it is very realistic: that this is an important thing to do if you care about writing.

LE GUIN: The word craft these days has this sort of funny, twee sound, like some little artisan putting the yeast in his handcrafted bread. Craft is how you do something well—anything. You can do anything with craft or with skill, or without it. Writing an English sentence takes a good deal of craft and skill. Writing a good English sentence takes a lot more of it.

At Interview, Choire Sicha talks with revered author Ursula K. Le Guin about balancing writing and parenthood, the relevance of “craft,” and having confidence in oneself as a writer.

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Jenny Diski Remembers Doris Lessing: Why Can’t People Be Sensible?

Peter Lessing died in his flat, of a heart attack, in the early hours of 13 October 2013, aged 66. His mother, Doris Lessing, died four weeks later, on 17 November 2013, aged 94, in the adjoining house. An interconnecting door had been cut into the shared wall and was always left open. This very nearly tells the story of their lives as mother and son, in the sense that we know our planet is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in.

At London Review of Books, Jenny Diski reflects on Doris Lessing’s hierarchy of writing, life, and motherhood.

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Ravaged Yet Connected: New Orleans, Ten Years After Katrina

Hurricane Katrina as seen on August 26th, 2005. Via Scotto Bear and noaa.org.

Hurricane Katrina, and all of the myriad events surrounding it, both good and bad, is that vast, sweeping layer within the lives of the people of New Orleans. Almost fifteen hundred people died. There was $100 billion in damage. The levees failed. The city flooded. The city, state, and federal governments failed even worse than the levees did. It was estimated in 2006 that four hundred thousand people were displaced from the city; an estimated one hundred thousand of them never returned. Parts of the city recovered. Parts of the city were rebuilt. Parts of the city gleam now brighter than they ever did. There will be parades on the anniversary of the storm because there are things in the city to celebrate, but it is the tradition in this city that the music doesn’t lively up and the parade really doesn’t start until the departed has been laid to rest, until what is lost is counted, and until the memories are stored away. Only then does the music swing the way the music is supposed to sound. Only then do they begin to parade.

At Esquire, Charles P. Pierce reflects on the “boundless loss and endless opportunity” of New Orleans ten years after Hurricane Katrina.

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The Palpable, Yet ‘Incomprehensible Expanse of Time’: A Wilderness of Waiting

I am used to pausing beside train trestles, tilting my head to watch passing planes, perpetually looking forward to: to the evening, to the weekend, to the next year in a new place. But for the first time I find myself unable to fix my gaze on the horizon; I find my relationship to time and place and days transformed. I do not strike out in discovery but rather roam the same terrain over and over: woods of oaks and maples and beeches; grassy sloping pastures punctuated with dogwood; beds of red clay and teal slate in a creek animated by intermittent waterfalls; rocky, fern-covered hills that rise to open Midwestern sky.

Before gestation, I dominated time in the way I dominated my body. Long runs whittled the latter into sculpted hardness, and the discipline of schedules and fixed points – Saturday, summer, graduation – brought the former into focus as a series of arrows pointing always one towards the next. Time as trajectory, body as tool of the mind. And then this baby began growing and my body expanded into a force to which the “me” of my mind was subjugated, bobbing about unsteady and insignificant as a paper boat in surges of blood and hormones. Time yawned open, a vast canyon I fell into, with the erstwhile tidy arrows echoing off the walls.

But pregnancy is characterized by a total physical and psychological immersion in the present and the body. There is no room for nostalgia, regret, the lingering glance back, because the web of gestation is spun so tight that the past becomes inaccessible, so remote as to belong to another person’s life. The future is equally impossible to conjure: how can one imagine the brand new human built from scratch, the meteoric impact of her arrival? The boundaries of the world shrink to the parenthesis of the belly. There is no hiding the slow stubborn implacability of time and our rootedness in it beneath the decorations of tasks and substances, of retrospect and projection.

At Vela, Sarah Menkedick reflects on presence and the “incomprehensible expanse of time” in this incisive meditation on pregnancy and motherhood.

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Guns ‘R (Still) Us

Out-of-state residents can purchase firearms in Arizona read the sign behind the counter at Sprague’s Sports in Yuma. ASK US HOW. I asked a clerk named Ron for details. He was short, packed solid as a ham, with a crew cut and a genial demeanor. He pointed to the cavalcade of hunting rifles lined up on the long wall behind him. “Any of these you can get today—or these over here,” he said, leading me to a corner of the store where two young men in ball caps and a woman with a sparkly purse were admiring a selection of AK-47’s.

I didn’t really want to buy an assault rifle, or even a handgun, but I was curious to know what buying one felt like, how the purchase worked, what-all was involved. Nobody in my circle back east had guns, nobody wanted them, and if anybody talked about them, it was in cartoon terms: Guns are bad things owned by bad people who want to do bad things. About the only time the people where I come from thought about guns was when something terrible happened. A lunatic sprays into a crowd and we have the same conversation we always have: those damn guns and those damn people who insist on having them.

In this 2012 GQ piece, Jeanne Marie Laskas spends a few shifts behind the counter at Sprague’s Sports in Yuma, Arizona, to learn about guns and gun culture in the most gun-friendly state in America.

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Quitting the Internet, Cold Turkey

The base of Solitude Mountain, Utah. Photo by Krista

The advice offered to me by people when I explain I am going to live by myself in the woods for a week varies from the sensible (“Develop a routine”) to the frankly awful (“Take some weed!”).

But it is Michael Harris, the Canadian author who published a book in 2014 called The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, who I pay most attention to.

Like me, Harris decided to try and face his fears. He gave up the internet and his phone for an entire month, though not, it must be said, human contact altogether. Nevertheless, “crushing loneliness,” is how he describes the initial effects of his experiment.

“You have to remember, people who design our online experiences have devoted enormous resources toward making them as addictive as possible,” Harris says. “Walking away from it makes you feel like shit, because suddenly all your magic powers are gone.”

He is talking about the way email alerts and social media notifications are rewiring us by triggering endorphins in our brains.

“You have to burrow through that discomfort before you start to see the rewards on the other side. When you’re living online, there is a certain apparatus of approval. What you do, what you think and what you believe is governed by certain corporate interests and the interests of your friends—something becomes worthy if it gets 12 retweets, say.

“When you cut yourself off from the internet,” he says, “you’re forced to construct a personal approval system—something that is not beholden to the opinions of others.

In Esquire, Sam Parker quits the Internet cold turkey, experiencing classic withdrawal symptoms including anxiety and panic after traveling to a remote Scottish bothy in a bid to find true solitude.

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Limits, or How to Avoid the Precipice Between Courage and Humility

Photo by Gary Bremner

I need to tell you about the Cirque of the Unclimbables. Ever since I went there, I’ve tried to describe it to friends and family, tried to explain its power and its perfection. It is, I tell people, the best natural campsite I have ever visited. It’s also among the most beautiful eyefuls of landscape I’ve ever seen — its rock walls more overpowering than Zion’s, in Utah, its evening light more perfect than Hawaii’s, its peaks more menacing than Denali, and its stillness more complete than the deep rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s a place that forces me to reach for comparisons from fiction: It’s “Lord of the Rings,” I tell people. It’s Mordor crossed with the Shire.

Their friend had died while climbing, they said, and now here they were: climbing. They weren’t here because of his death, and they weren’t here despite it. They would continue to live their lives in the face of risk, just as he had lived his. But it was clear that the avalanche that had taken Cole’s life added another emotional layer to their journey, another bit of weight on their shoulders as they climbed.

In SBNation, writer Eva Holland explores what it means to comprehend and embrace your limits — to know yet avoid the precipice between courage and humility — on a climbing expedition to the Yukon Territories’ famed Cirque of the Unclimbables.

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Diane Arbus, Uncropped: A Reading List

Diane Arbus' Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City (1962)

Diane Arbus was renowned for photographing people on the margins, such as the mentally challenged, dwarves, giants, sideshow performers, crossdressers, and transsexuals. Was she merely a privileged voyeur of the vulnerable or an unsung champion of sexual and societal minorities? Here are five stories that will help you cut through the controversy. Read more…

On Cancer: ‘Love wasn’t something I felt anymore. It was just something I did’

Photo by Tara Hunt.

Nicole was thirty-four, and the doctor had been direct: “It’s everywhere,” he said. “Like somebody dipped a paintbrush in cancer and flicked it around her abdomen.” I staggered down a hallway and then collapsed. I remember the tile, close to my face, and then watching it retreat as my best friend picked me up from the floor. His name is Dane Faucheux, and I remember noting, even in the midst of a mental fugue: Dane’s a lot stronger than I realized.

Matthew Teague’s wife Nicole was only 34 years old and dying of cancer. From Esquire, this is the story of how a friendship, deep, true, and strong, became prophylactic against the dizzying litany of indignities involved in a slow, painful death.

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