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The Lobotomy Files: A Longreads Guest Pick By Nicole Greenfield

Nicole Greenfield
Nicole Greenfield is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.

I must admit it was the photo of 90-year-old Roman Tritz, clear blue eyes and a blank stare to the camera’s side, that initially drew me into one of my favorite longreads of the week. But the photo didn’t prepare me for the truly harrowing nature of Tritz’s story, a deeply personal look into one of the thousands of forced lobotomies the U.S. government performed on World World II veterans, the details of which are uncovered for the first time in this multimedia feature. The in-depth, but straightforward reporting of such a horrendous trend, performed in the absence of answers, begs all kinds of questions. How could this happen? And, importantly, could it happen again? For it’s impossible not to connect Tritz’s struggle and the stories of veterans today also suffering from PTSD, also without adequate assistance, also afraid, also wondering, as Tritz himself did pre-operation, “Does anybody really care?” This is one that will stick with me for a while.

The Lobotomy Files

Michael M. Phillips | The Wall Street Journal | December 13, 2013 | 48 minutes (12,000 words)

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On Grieving: ‘If you think you’re doing okay, then you’re doing okay’

Grieving

“Bonanno doesn’t pretend that smiling is a magical elixir or that laughing will cure the hardest-suffering patients. Grief isn’t a single track, he’s found, but a long private journey that splits along three rough paths. Ten percent of us experience ‘chronic’ and relentless grief that demands counseling. Another third or so plunges into deep sadness and gradually begins recovery. But most of us—’between 50 and 60 percent,’ Bonanno said—quickly appear to be fine, despite day-to-day fluctuations. Scientists used to consider these patients tragic actors, shoving their feelings into the core of their bodies, where they would only explode with volcanic violence in dreadful ways later in life. But this, Bonanno says, might be the biggest myth of all. ‘If you think you’re doing okay,’ he said, ‘then you’re doing okay.'”

At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson talks about losing his mother to cancer and about the new science looking at the way we grieve.

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Image: George Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness

How Russia Began Using Poison in Assassinations

“The idea of poisoning — radioactive or otherwise — is not new to Russian intelligence. According to former Russian intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky, now a historian and one-time associate of Litvinenko, the Russians have a history of substance assassination going back nearly a century. It was Lenin who ordered the establishment of their first laboratory, known simply as the ‘Special Room’, for developing new lethal toxins.

“‘There is also a long succession of poisonings by Russian intelligence services in different countries, starting in the early 1920s,’ he says.

“At its height, says Volodarsky, the Soviet Union had the largest biological warfare program in the world. Sources have claimed there were 40,000 individuals, including 9,000 scientists, working at 47 different facilities. More than 1,000 of these experts specialized in the development and application of deadly compounds. They used lethal gasses, skin contact poisons that were smeared on door handles and nerve toxins said to be untraceable. The idea, at all times, was to make death seem natural — or, at the very least, to confuse doctors and investigators. ‘It’s never designed to demonstrate anything, only to kill the victim, quietly and unobtrusively,’ Volodarsky writes in ‘The KGB’s Poison Factory’. ‘This was an unbreakable principle.'”

At Matter, Will Storr tells the story of a Russian dissident who was murdered with radioactive poison. Read more about poison.

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Pictured: The grave of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko

Photo: Wikmedia Commons

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How Oil Money From Texas Fuels Hollywood

“The story begins in the 1930s, with Glenn McCarthy striking oil in Beaumont. McCarthy—who was the inspiration for the Jett Rink character in Edna Ferber’s Giant—used his millions to bankroll the 1949 drama ‘The Green Promise’, starring Natalie Wood and Walter Brennan. The movie was almost immediately forgotten, but McCarthy established a much-repeated role: the Texas oilionaire eager to rub shoulders with the stars.

“Fast-forward to the early 2000s, when Tim Headington, the CEO of Dallas-based Headington Oil, hooked up with Graham King, a British-born producer whose first credit was on the Dallas-shot film ‘Dr. T. and the Women’. The duo has since produced ‘Hugo’, ‘The Tourist’, and last year’s Best Picture winner, ‘Argo’. (The famously press-shy Headington has said little of his attraction to Hollywood, other than to tell Forbes, in 2012: ‘[M]ovies have intrigued me for many years, both as a fan and as a possible participant in the process.’

“Fort Worth-based John Goff, chairman and CEO of Crescent Real Estate Holdings, invested a reported $2 million in the 2012 Glenn Close drama ‘Albert Nobbs’. Businessman Bob Kaminski led a group of approximately a dozen area investors to put up a third of the $12 million budget for the Navy SEAL thriller ‘Act of Valor’. According to Variety, at least one high-profile Hollywood producer, Brian Oliver (‘The Ides of March’, Ron Howard’s ‘Rush’), has been putting together financing packages ‘with coin coming mostly from oil and real estate investments in Texas.'”

— In D Magazine, Christopher Kelly examines the rise of Christian entertainment in North Texas, which is being funded in part with oil money. See more stories about movies.

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Photo: A Scene from the film Hugo

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Reading List: Teenage Girls As Role Models

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

When I was a teenager (I know, plop me in a rocking chair and call me Grandma), I pored over my mom’s Seventeen magazines from the ’70s and ’80s and amassed a huge collection of my own. My 13-year-old style icon was Lindsay Lohan’s character in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (I’m proud of that phase), and later, Freaky Friday. I studiously went out to Best Buy one January after reading the music issue of a now-defunct teen magazine and chose CDs that radically altered my future tastes in music. I was on the edge of the “nostalgia in real time” Tavi Gevinson discusses in her latest Editor’s Letter (see below), but didn’t yet have access to the unmitigated internet archivism and alt-teen community. I think part of me is trying to reclaim my teen years as I listen to One Direction at my nine-to-five job, collage and self-consciously drink coffee with a notebook at hand. I’m learning to be a post-teen: all the insecurity of a twenty-something with the creative menace of an adolescent. I’m navigating a transitional space; my role models are teenage girls.

1. “Lorde Sounds Like Teen Spirit.” (Ann Powers, NPR, December 2013)

Her stripped synth beats kicked Miley out of the number one spot, but Lorde’s not finished yet. Ann Powers posits that she’s the Nirvana of pop music and examines the intersection of class and race with Lorde’s bohemian roots and youth experience.

2. “What ‘Forever’ Means to a Teenager: Editor’s Letter.” (Tavi Gevinson, Rookie, December 2013)

Tavi is one of the most self-aware humans on the planet, so it’s no surprise that her analysis of “Forever” (“the state, exclusive to those between the ages of 13 and 17, in which one feels both eternally invincible and permanently trapped”) is stunning and tender and meta.

3. “Time for Teen Fantasy Heroes to Grow Up.” (Laura C. Mallonee, The Millions, November 2013)

I’d also like to add Eliana’s plea: “petition to make young adult authors stop writing about girls whose lives change when they meet a boy.”

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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How A Black High School Basketball Coach Transformed A White, Mennonite Town: A Longreads Guest Pick By Chris Mahr

Chris Mahr is the managing editor of Lost Lettermen, a college sports website and athlete database.

“Talk to any young sportswriter today and odds are that their introduction to both Sports Illustrated’s long-form journalism and renowned writer Gary Smith are one in the same: ‘Higher Education.’ Smith’s March 2001 masterpiece tells the tale of Perry Reese Jr., a black Catholic basketball coach at Hiland High in the predominantly Mennonite town of Berlin, Ohio. A man whose force-of-nature personality on and off the court transformed a town ‘whose beliefs had barely budged in 200 years’ and forced his players and neighbors to rethink their long-held tenets on race, religion and life.”

Higher Education

Gary Smith | Sports Illustrated | March 2001 | 35 minutes (8,619 words)

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What ‘Forever’ Means to a Teenager

“Forever is when you have the height and width of a miniature person with the density of an alpha-person. Forever is when you’re a human cartoon with every vein and skin cell as exaggerated as Minnie Mouse’s gloves. Forever is when you experience all kinds of things for the first time, as do your hormones, which will never again be this crazed, never again experience things as either so bleak or so Technicolor. Forever is when your brain is still developing, so everything sticks, like a lot. Forever is when you have tunnel vision because you (I) have not yet understood that you (I) are (am) not the center of the world, so you (I) grant yourself (myself) permission to see things as though you (I) are (am). I don’t recommend it as a lifestyle, but there’s something to be said for having this much time to just think about you, what you like, what you believe in, how you feel. When I asked Sofia Coppola why she continually writes movies about teenagers, she said, ‘It’s a time when you’re just focused on thinking about things, you’re not distracted by your career, family […] I always like characters that are in the midst of a transition and trying to find their place in the world and their identity. That is the most heightened when you’re a teenager, but I definitely like it at the different stages of life.'”

– At Rookie, Tavi Gevinson describes what it’s like to be between the ages of 13 and 17.

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Photo: Petra

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The Complicated Relationship Between a Reporter and a Source

“The reporter-source relationship is a complicated one that defies easy description. It borrows a little from the salesman-buyer relationship, the therapist-patient relationship, the police officer-witness relationship, sometimes even the growing intimacy of a friendship. We work hard to gain access and trust, and generally we avoid doing anything that stops a source from talking once she gets started.

“‘How are you now?’ I asked at the time.

“‘I’m suffering horribly . . . but I’m not suicidal,’ she said. ‘It’s a soothing thing. I don’t really want to do it. But it helps me calm down, it helps me sleep to think about the possibilities to end the suffering.’

“If I had possessed some sort of device that could peer inside her brain and pick up some biological trace amongst the billions of nerve cells and circuits that would indicate she was likely to commit suicide, would I have stopped the interview?”

— In the Tampa Bay Times, Leonora LaPeter Anton examines the suicide of one of her sources, a woman named Gretchen Molannen who was suffering from an embarrassing genital arousal disorder. Was there anything Anton could have done to prevent the death?

Read the story

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Photo: Roger H. Goun

Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there are stories of people leaving cities outside of New York. Here are four essays about leaving some of these cities, and maybe coming back to them.

1. “The Last City I Loved: Omaha, Nebraska.” (Gene Kwak, The Rumpus, June 2013)

I found myself floating in the details of Kwak’s friendships and favorite places. I’ve never been to Omaha, but now I want to go. It doesn’t need promotion, though — I just need to remember it’s there. And you just need to read this essay.

2. “London’s Great Exodus.” (Michael Goldfarb, The New York Times, October 2013)

Middle-class London residents can’t afford to live in a city where property is currency and international moguls move in.

3. “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” (Elizabeth Minkel, The Millions, July 2013)

A well-written meta examination on the classic Leaving New York essay: “But New York, though — maybe it’s the preponderance of writers here, the narcissism and the navel-gazing, that turns our comings and goings into a series of extended metaphors? … When we manage to leave, if we manage to leave, escape becomes a genre in and of itself.”

4. “Why I Am Leaving New York City.” (Mallory Ortberg The Toast, November 2013)

Let’s end on a lighter note: Mallory Ortberg (perhaps the funniest human on the internet?) hasn’t lived in NYC before, but she’s not going to let that stop her from writing an essay about leaving.

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Photo: Don O’Brien

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The Future of Online Education: A Longreads Guest Pick by Teddy Worcester

Above: Sebastian Thrun

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Teddy Worcester resides in San Francisco and helps to build products that support the free and open web.

Max Chafkin’s Fast Company story covering Sebastian Thrun’s change of course for Udacity is a must-read for anyone interested in online education. The brilliant Thrun admits that MOOCs are not necessarily the right course for Udacity, with staggeringly low class completion rates and weak test performance. Chafkin eloquently covers Udacity’s pivot toward offering a vehicle for “academic branding.” Highlighting Udacity’s recent deal powering Georgia Tech’s AT&T-sponsored academic program, Chafkin quotes Thrun lauding corporatized higher education, “If you focus on the single question of who knows best what students need in the workforce, it’s the people already in the workforce. Why not give industry a voice?”

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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