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The Porn Critic

[Fiction] The life of a supposed hedonist: 

Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preëmpting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique.

“The Porn Critic.” — Jonathan Lethem, The New Yorker

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What the writer learned from the premature birth of his third child:

When the baby cried, I knew it wasn’t gonna die. They had just pulled my son out of my wife and whisked him over to one of those fancy hotel pans that you put newborns in, and there was a brief moment when he said nothing, which you don’t want. You want the baby to cry. You want confirmation that the child can take air in its lungs and then blow it back out. You want the baby to cry the first time. After that, you want it to be quiet so you can get some goddamn sleep, but the first cry matters. The first cry means it’s gonna live. So it cried, and then I did. I cried and cried until it felt like my face was gonna split open. I yelled out, ‘He’s crying!’ to my wife, and after that everything was all right.

“Pain Is A Gift, And Other Notes From A Terrified Father During A Seven-Week-Premature Birth.” — Drew Magary, Deadspin

See also: “The Loneliness of the American College Transfer Student.” Feb. 17, 2011

La Moretta

[National Magazine Awards finalist] [Fiction] A honeymoon set in Eastern Europe in the 1970s:

Since the beginning of their honeymoon, whenever something went wrong she had been eager to remind him. Is this enough of an adventure for you? Aren’t adventures fun? But here they were, in Bucharest, sitting on the edge of a fountain and looking at an elegant, dormered building that could have been in Paris except for the soldiers standing guard in ill-fitting green uniforms.

“La Moretta.” — Maggie Shipstead, VQR

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As the Lyndon Johnson biographer prepares to release his fourth volume examining the former president, a look at how Caro came to spend “36 years and 3388 pages” on LBJ:

Johnson, who all along predicted an early end for himself, died at 64. Caro is already 76, in excellent health after a scary bout with pancreatitis in 2004. He says that the reason ‘The Passage of Power‘ took so long is that he was at the same time researching the rest of the story, and that he can wrap it all up, with reasonable dispatch, in just one more volume. That’s what he said the last time, after finishing ‘Master of the Senate.’ (He also thought he could finish ‘The Power Broker’ in nine months or so. It took him seven years, during which he and his wife, Ina, went broke.) Robert Gottlieb, who signed up Caro to do ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ when he was editor in chief of Knopf, has continued to edit all of Caro’s books, even after officially leaving the company (he also excerpted Volume 2 at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there). Not long ago he said he told Caro: ‘Let’s look at this situation actuarially. I’m now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are that if you take however many more years you’re going to take, I’m not going to be here.’ Gottlieb added, ‘The truth is, Bob doesn’t really need me, but he thinks he does.’

“Robert Caro’s Big Dig.” — Charles McGrath, New York Times

See also: “Hatching Monsters: Lessons in Fame from P.T. Barnum’s Autobiography.” — Charles Baxter, Lapham’s Quarterly

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The American Prospect, Outside Magazine, New York Magazine, The Awl, McSweeney’s, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Krysti Lesch.

A tour of one of the most dangerous stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border—where drug smuggling and human trafficking mean Arizona ranch owners finding bodies in their backyards:

In late 2010, after the ninth corpse or body part had been discovered on his ranch in a span of 12 months, David Lowell sat down and drafted a document that he later took to calling, with a grain of dark pride, ‘my map of atrocities.’ Lowell lives in southern Arizona, 11 miles north of Mexico, in a hinterland canyon in the middle of the busiest drug- and human-smuggling corridor in the United States. Lowell’s map, ‘Sites of Recent Border Violence Within the Atascosa Ranch,’ renders the ranch boundary as a thick black line. Inside the line glow 17 red dots, each stamped with a number. Among the descriptions in the corresponding key: ‘Rape tree with women’s underwear’ (2); ‘Fresh human head without body’ (3); ‘Skull’ (3A); ‘Body found 500 yards west of Lowell home’ (6); ‘Body found 100 yards south of Lowell home’ (7); and ‘Patrolman Terry killed by Mexican bandits’ (12).

“150 Miles of Hell.” — Jeff Tietz, Men’s Journal

See also: “Near/Far.” — Nate Blakeslee, Texas Monthly, August 2010

How did the 1970s and Los Angeles end up creating such idiosyncratic singer-songwriters as Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson and Van Dyke Parks?

The first thing you should know about Harry Nilsson is that he won a Grammy for covering a schmaltzy Badfinger ballad called ‘Without You’ in 1971. The second thing you should know is that I once read an interview with Nilsson where he claimed to have recorded ‘Without You’ after having taken what he described as ‘a little mescaline.’ The third thing is that ‘Without You’ is on an album called Nilsson Schmilsson, a title basically designed to make fun of Nilsson’s name, and that the cover of Nilsson Schmilsson is a picture of Harry Nilsson, unshaven, wearing a bathrobe.

“L.A. Weirdos.” — Mike Powell, Pitchfork

Previously: “Jack White Is the Coolest, Weirdest, Savviest Rock Star of Our Time.”

The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government:

What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the British government, which was attempting to drag the Roosevelt administration into WWII by any means necessary. De Wohl, who was employed by SOE (Special Operations Executive, the wartime sabotage unit), had been dispatched with instructions to present himself as a renowned astrologer with no connections to Britain, and to undermine America’s belief in the invincibility of Hitler. As the spy novelist William Boyd put it in a 2008 radio interview: ‘At the time, there was a perception of American people, in the minds of the British Security Services, that they were more gullible than us Brits.’

“The Inconvenient Astrologer Of MI5.” — Emma Garman, The Awl

See also: “CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split.” — Ian Shapira, Washington Post

First in a series on John Bolenbaugh, an oil cleanup worker who said he was fired for refusing to cover up oil from a spill that put millions of gallons of tar sands crude into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Complicating matters is his personality and his own criminal record:

Armed with a digital camera and a machine-gun delivery of baiting, rhetorical questions, usually directed at cleanup workers (‘What do you think of Enbridge covering up oil? Who do you think should pay for killing our fish and poisoning our river?’), Bolenbaugh’s caustic style has made him a divisive figure among locals — a selfless hero to some, a self-aggrandizing crusader to others. Enbridge claims that Bolenbaugh has had no effect on its cleanup efforts, but his picture (square-jawed with wild blue eyes and wearing an orange vest) hung for months inside the security box at the entrance to the Enbridge staging site under the heading: ‘All Personnel Be Alert.’

Even after countless conversations, I sometimes find it hard to tell whether Bolenbaugh is a legitimate whistleblower who refuses to look the other way or, as his critics deride him, a wack-job whose motor-mouth finally got him fired.

“The Whistleblower (Part 1).” — Ted Genoways, OnEarth

See also: “Drilled, Baby, Drilled.” — Alan Prendergast, Westword, Jan. 20, 2012

An essay from Bissell’s book Magic Hours: A film crew and actor Jeff Daniels arrive in the author’s Michigan hometown to shoot a movie:

As the sun sets behind the thick pine stand that perimeters the football field, the lack of extras begins to become a problem. To appreciate how crucial extras are to tonight’s filming, one must know several things about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. First, citizens of the Upper Peninsula are known as ‘Yoopers,’ an inelegant transliteration of ‘U. P.,’ as this underpopulated and fearsomely bleak stretch of land is known. The U. P. is separated from the rest of Michigan culturally and geographically, connected only by the Mackinac Bridge, an architectural marvel built as recently as 1957. The U. P. might be the most rural part of the country, as well as its least familiar. Some maps neglect to include the border separating the U. P. from Wisconsin, an accidental annexation that, if made official, would please the vast majority of Yoopers, who feel a stronger cultural identification with Wisconsin anyway. Finally—and in light of tonight’s scene, not to mention the whole film, this is a key point—for Yoopers, deer hunting has near religious significance. The first day of deer season is actually a school holiday—Deer Day, it is called—and the entire place is a hotbed of gun crazies and gun-craziness.

“Escanaba’s Magic Hour: Movies, Robot Deer, and the American Small Town.” — Tom Bissell, McSweeneys

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