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Ad Age has chosen Longreads among its Media Vanguard Award winners!
Ad Age has chosen Longreads among its Media Vanguard Award winners!
Featured Longreader: Journalist Bret McCabe. See his story picks from The Daily Mail, Tom Scocca, GQ, and more on his longreads page.
Bezos: If you go back to 1999, it’s hard to remember how effervescent the bubble was. People who really didn’t have any passion for technology or the Internet were giving up their careers as doctors and mining Internet gold. And when the bubble popped, a meaningful fraction of our people left. They realized they didn’t really want to be doing this. Some of them got laid off, some of them left of their own accord. Those were not happy days. This super-valuable person you really liked leaves. So your skin gets thicker. Not just me, but all of the executives who stayed.
“Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think.” — Steven Levy, Wired
See also: “The Omnivore.” Sept. 28, 2011
(Not single-page)
For some, reclaiming her old seat has become the sine qua non of her recovery, part of its definition. In the book she offers a simple, heartfelt declaration: “I will get stronger. I will return.” But there are other options if it takes longer than expected. One of the daydreams floating through the corridors of Washington these days is that Kelly will step in. “He’s really accomplished. And there’s the popularity that both of them enjoy. Plus his biography would make him compelling,” said an influential Democrat. Kelly was already speaking for her, endorsing candidates on her behalf, which led to media reports like “Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords support …” It was a version of Bill Clinton’s buy-one-get-one-free boast about Hillary.
It’s a beautiful, clear night outside on deck 4. Ahead of us are the lights of another cruise ship. A few days later – when we reach Puerto Vallarta – I spot it again. It’s called the Carnival Spirit. Forty-three people have vanished from Carnival cruises since 2000. Theirs is the worst record of all cruise companies. There have been 171 disappearances in total, across all cruise lines, since 2000. Rebecca is Disney’s first. A few days ago, Rebecca’s father emailed me: “Would like to inform you the number of people missing this year has just gone up to 17. A guy has gone missing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Carnival Conquest.” By the time I get off this ship, the figure will have gone up to 19.
When someone vanishes from a cruise ship, one of the first things that happens to their family members is they receive a call from an Arizona man named Kendall Carver. “When you become a victim, you think you’re the only person in the world,” Carver told me on the phone. “Well, the Coriams found out they aren’t alone. Almost every two weeks someone goes overboard.”
[Fiction]
Since she’d arrived in America and got divorced, Ilona Siegal had been set up three times. The first man was not an ordinary man but a Ph.D. from Moscow, the friend who’d arranged the date said. When Ilona opened her door, she’d found the Ph.D. standing on her front steps in a pair of paper-sheer yellow jogging shorts. He was thin, in the famished way of grazing animals and endurance athletes, with folds of skin around his kneecaps and wiry rabbit muscles braiding into his inner thighs. Under his arm he held what, in a moment of brief confusion, Ilona took for a wine bottle. But when he stepped inside she saw that it was only a litre of water he’d brought along for himself. Their plan had been to take a walk around a nearby park and then go out to lunch. But the Ph.D. had already been to the park. It wasn’t anything special, he said. He’d just gone jogging there. He didn’t like to miss his jogs, and since he’d driven an hour and a half out of his way to meet her he’d got in a run first. Ilona poured him a glass of grapefruit juice and listened to him talk about his work at Bell Labs. He reclined in his chair, his knees apart, unaware that one of his testicles was inching out of the inner lining of his shorts. Ilona stared at his face, trying not to look down.
“Companion.” — Sana Krasikov, The New Yorker, Pen/O. Henry Prize 2007
The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused but rooted in his earlier suspicions that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more insidious and ran deep. He felt terrible for how the lifetime of competition between himself and Jonathan had fed his son’s ambition. He felt guilty about having pulled strings to get Jonathan into the 173rd. That was where the sense of betrayal was rooted. He had done his homework before approaching Preysler. In 2007 all of the official reports from Afghanistan had been rosy. The fighting was all but over, the assessments read; the work was all humanitarian projects and nation building. Brostrom now saw that as propaganda, and he had fallen for it.
“Echoes from a Distant Battlefield.” — Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair
As I read, something quite unexpected occurred, an “aha” moment in the quiet of my kitchen, with the dog asleep on the floor and coffee cooling in a cup. I leaned against the cooktop. I realized I was writing the wrong story.
Forty-one years ago, while an exchange student living at a convent school in Belgium, I was sexually assaulted by a teacher, a married woman with an 8-month-old son. This is not a newly recovered memory. This is a story I have told repeatedly, though not publicly, for years. I needed to tell it to convince myself it was true.
I choose to tell it here, not because I wish to detract in any way from the severity of the alleged abuse that took place at Penn State but because it illustrates the power of the mind, as psychologist Richard Gartner, author of the definitive book on the subject, Betrayed As Boys, told me, “to put experience in a kind of box so that it doesn’t disturb the rest of you.” Because, while I am a reluctant citizen of the confessional states of America, my experience, which pales in comparison to the trauma described by the grand jury, illustrates the banal ubiquity of sexual abuse and its insidious aftermath.
“Grown-ups Must Act Like Grown-ups.” — Jane Leavy, Grantland
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, 5280 Magazine, New York Magazine, The Awl, plus a guest pick from technologist and writer Matt Langer.
Featured Longreader: Financial news reporter Shanny Basar. See her story picks from BBC News, The Guardian, Rolling Stone and more on her #longreads page.
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