The Longreads Blog

It’s All In the Wrist (and the Blatant Lying)

A gendarme, left, looks at French soldiers searching for art objects in a canal in Gerstheim, France, in 2002. Investigators partly emptied the canal to find objects and paintings stolen by Stephane Breitwieser, 31, suspected of stealing more than 172 art objects and paintings. Many of the treasures were discarded or destroyed by the his mother. (AP Photo/Cedric Joubert)

Forget grand, high-tech, multi-level Ocean’s Eleven-style heists; Stéphane Breitwieser robbed nearly 200 museums of $1.4 billion worth of art without a single computer hack. Instead, he relied on patience, a Swiss army knife, brazenness, and the fact that people — including museum security guards — are really bad at noticing things. Michael Finkel tells his story (and that of his girlfriend and accomplice, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus) at GQ.

On their way to the exit, they’re stopped by a guard. They feign calm, but Breitwieser has a terrible feeling that the end has come. The guard wants to see their entrance tickets. Breitwieser, unable to move his left arm, awkwardly reaches across his body with his right to fish the tickets from his left pocket. He wonders if the guard senses something amiss.

A guilty person would cower and try to leave, so Breitwieser boldly tells the guard that he’s heading to the museum café for lunch. The guard’s suspicion is defused, and the couple actually eat at the museum, Breitwieser’s arm held rigid the entire time.

They rent a cheap hotel room and wait two days and return yet again, newly disguised, and he steals four more pieces. That’s a total of 13, and such is their level of euphoria that on the drive home they can’t contain themselves and stop at an antiques gallery displaying an immense ancient urn, made of silver and gold, in the front window.

Breitwieser enters, and the dealer calls from atop a staircase that he’ll be right down, but by the time he descends no one is there. Nor is the urn. They return to France plunder-drunk and giddy, and for fun, Breitwieser recalls, Kleinklaus phones the gallery and asks how much the urn in the window costs. About $100,000, she’s told. “Madame,” says the dealer, “you really must see it.” He hasn’t yet noticed it’s gone.

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Helen Oyeyemi on ‘Gingerbread,’ Fairy Tales, and What Self-Branding Is Doing to Childhood

Historical Picture Archive / Corbis / Getty, Penguin Random House

Rae Nudson | Longreads | March 2019 | 12 minutes (3,277 words)

 

In Helen Oyeyemi’s books, reality can twist and bend until the distinction between what’s fantasy and what’s real disappears entirely. In previous novels, Oyeyemi takes familiar tales, like Bluebeard’s unlucky wives and Snow White’s unlucky youth, and breaks the well-known stories, putting them back together in new ways that jump through time and space. The result is always something weird, dark, and unfailingly interesting. Her latest book, Gingerbread, uses a well-known symbol from fairy tales, the eponymous dessert, rather than a tale itself to spark the story, one in which children take on adult responsibilities and come to experience the effects of work, capitalism, and the complexities of family.

Gingerbread is narrated with the help of a Greek chorus of dolls who come to life to hear the story that the gingerbread-maker Harriet is telling to her daughter Perdita about where Harriet came from — a place called Druhástrana that may or may not exist at all. While evidence of Druhástrana’s existence is scarce (it’s name translates to “the other side” in Czech), Harriet’s memories of growing up there are vivid.

It is during her childhood in Druhástrana that Harriet learns how to make gingerbread, a treat that provides sustenance to her family when times are hard and eventually provides a path to leaving Druhástrana behind — Harriet makes friends with a changeling named Gretel and moves to the city to work in a gingerbread factory, sending her wages home to her family. As she grows up, Harriet learns more about what’s true and what’s false and what matters in life. But one thing Harriet remains sure of is the quality of her gingerbread. She knows it’s good, and she knows that she can add value to the world through the treat she bakes. Read more…

Where the Trouble Started

Illustration by Hanna Barczyk

Saidee Sonnenberg | Longreads | March 2019 | 14 minutes (3,467 words)

 

“Your lips are like Brigitte Bardot’s.” He had one sweaty, shaking hand between my legs under my field hockey skirt and the other gripped tight on my ass, holding me to him. The alcohol that burned off him was suffocating. I could smell and taste it, and even at 11 I knew well the half-mast cast of those eyes and wasn’t sure who to hate more for the place I found myself, because surely I knew better than to trust those eyes. His hands dug deeper. “You know who that is?” he asked. He moved to kiss me but held himself in the almost of it — in the conflict of it. I hated the fear revealed by the sound I made to swallow the saliva over-pooled in my mouth from anxiety and threatening to drown me.

“No,” I pouted. I had been told I looked like Jean Seberg and sometimes Marlene Dietrich, which I thought was just wrong. I didn’t want what was happening, but I did want to know if Brigitte Bardot was beautiful. I wanted to know if he thought I was beautiful. It was a thrill I wouldn’t know how to stop chasing. I wanted to be famous, to be a star, even though I seemed to possess no obvious talents. But I wanted to be the center of something, and right there in that moment, I was.

No one was home. I’d let him in because he had gone out with my mom the night before and she seemed to like him a lot, even though he was married. He was going through a hard time. I heard her tell that to a friend on the phone. He came to the door with pizza and wanted to wait for her. I called around looking for her at various places but didn’t find her. My little brother was out somewhere too. I let the man in. It was my fault he was sitting at our dining room table and I was caught up in his hands like I was.

“Get me that book,” he said nodding to the shelf where the art books were. There was a big coffee table book of the silver screen. “I bet she’s in there.” He didn’t let go of me. He pulled me tighter to him, his face traveling around the front of my body to smell me. His smile was reptilian, it implored me to understand and pity his delight — like it couldn’t be helped. I pushed away and got the book. I could have not taken it to him, but then what? I understood how to look at a book with another person and maybe that was to be the end of it. I put it on the table and he told me to look her up in the index. One hand went back up my skirt and he used the other to pull me into his lap. I found her name as he rubbed my lips and the letters — all those Bs and Ts — stung me. I turned to the page where I would find her. He was hard against me. Brigitte Bardot’s face was not quite vacant but it was staring off in the distance at something unseen. I looked out there with her as he fumbled behind me.

Those are details burned in — the simple world splitting beginning of it — but I can’t remember what else happened that night, or how it ended. It is buried deep in my middle school psyche under layers of becoming a smoker, a drug user, and promiscuous.

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The Beautiful Politics of the Backyard Barter System

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In this moving installment of her Catapult column, Backyard Politics, Christine H. Lee recounts how her prolific chickens and their eggs spawned a chain of generosity that helped her to discover a new appreciation for the good of humanity and to rekindle a tenderness in herself — one she never knew she needed. Lee discovers equilibrium in sharing her farm’s bounty and in the beauty of simple, impromptu barter arrangements.

It all started with chickens.

When our flock of chickens came of age on our farm and began laying in earnest, we were inundated with eggs. Chickens ovulate approximately every twenty-five hours (yes, a chicken egg is that kind of an egg). If there is a rooster, the egg is fertilized. If there is no rooster, the egg remains unfertilized. Either way, that means a chicken at peak fertility lays five to six eggs per week. Also, now you know a chicken egg is essentially its period.

We had six chickens, so that meant almost thirty-six eggs per week. I should say: We do not eat anywhere near thirty-six eggs per week.

As someone who finds it hard—so so so hard—to ask for help, because it makes me feel vulnerable, weak, and in debt, which in turn has historically led to being abused, bartering is a safe exchange. Bartering equalizes exchange. There is no counting the change, because there is no change to give. Bartering involves consent; the exchange of two items must be deemed acceptable by agreement between two traders. You need. I have. You have, I need. You want. I want. We both want.

Here’s the thing: I thought the farm would yield fruit and produce and some time with fresh air.

But nature is never obedient. It spills over.

The bartering and consent and ensuing community became a part of my life. I thought the farm would be a place to sequester myself and lick my wounds—recover from a divorce, recover from postpartum depression, and spend time in new motherhood with a backdrop of fruit and vegetables.

But what it did was bring community to me. A community I didn’t think I wanted or needed. But I did want it. I did need it. The community helped me recover—more than recover; it brought me a whole new model for living.

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What’s a Good Hourly Wage for Developing PTSD?

If you haven’t read Casey Newton‘s haunting story about Facebook moderators at The Verge, it’s not too late. Next time you’re mindlessly scrolling there and liking dank memes, spare a moment for moderators like Chloe, who are shouldering a traumatic burden — but at an outsourced content moderating center, so they aren’t supported or compensated like actual Facebook employees.

The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

Chloe cries for a while in the break room, and then in the bathroom, but begins to worry that she is missing too much training. She had been frantic for a job when she applied, as a recent college graduate with no other immediate prospects. When she becomes a full-time moderator, Chloe will make $15 an hour — $4 more than the minimum wage in Arizona, where she lives, and better than she can expect from most retail jobs.

The tears eventually stop coming, and her breathing returns to normal. When she goes back to the training room, one of her peers is discussing another violent video. She sees that a drone is shooting people from the air. Chloe watches the bodies go limp as they die.

She leaves the room again.

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The Problem With Nostalgia

Sascha Kilmer/ Getty, Unsplash, Illustration by Katie Kosma

Michael Musto | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,048 words)

Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used To Be was the hilarious title of Oscar winning actress Simone Signoret’s memoir in 1978, and it’s truer than ever. Seeing the past through rose colored glasses is an increasingly myopic process, especially as technology makes giant strides forward and former modes of communication resound with an astounding obsolescence. As I handily crank out articles like this on my computer and shoot them to my editor via email, do you really think I miss the days when I had to type out a piece on a ratty Smith Corona, make changes with Wite-Out, scissors and Scotch tape, and then hand deliver the thing — sometimes in a blizzard or rain storm — to the publication, only to have to redo the whole process when a rewrite was required (after pre-Google fact-checking took up to an entire day)? Do you somehow assume that I long for a return to the time when I was terrified to leave the house because I could miss a business call? (In the ‘70s, answering machines were not prevalent and cell phones hadn’t yet been invented.) The time when I would regularly cut calls short — even with my own mother — for fear that someone more important, career-wise, might be trying to reach me? (There was no call waiting. You had to pray that anyone who’d gotten a busy signal would try again and again. And not talk too long.) Some survivors and observers longingly look back at eras like that as “a simpler time” and “a more personal moment,” but for a writer like me, it was actually a personal nightmare.
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When Music Speaks to Our Experience

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From his father’s bass-playing to his own teenage piano compositions, writer Mark Wallace has lived a musical life. Although he eventually dropped out of music school and turned a different direction, his passion for music never diminished. At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wallace writes about how Anton Webern’s Concerto, Opus 24 captivated him and helped him understand the shape of his own life. “Perhaps I was drawn to Webern’s structure,” Wallace writes, “because my hear life had had so little. The music was a kind of homecoming, after years of instability and constant uprootings.”

If there was a plan to our life in that time, though, a method, it was not one comprehensible to the limited scope of a child’s mind. Stability answers something in us, when we are young. The world should not be nuanced, since we are only just getting our heads around ideas of black and white, forward and back, right and wrong. It was impossible for me to grapple with notions of impermanence when notions of permanence were still only just forming in my mind. I didn’t consciously crave stability in the years in which we knocked around upstate New York; instead, I developed a keen sensitivity to the unstable, a deep and abiding confidence that, at any moment, everything about the scene around me was liable to be upended, that at any moment things could radically change.

Powerful music writing often charts the listener’s relationship to sound. It’s a treat when a close listener like Wallace is also a writer whose detailed descriptions allow us to hear complex music more clearly, and glimpse its larger meaning.

And this music made a kind of sense that had never been made to me before. I was instantly alert to it, attuned to its evolving three-note motif even as I realized it had none of the structure I had intuited from classical music, none of the same kind of balance and symmetry. This music had a different kind of structure: a framework I could hear, but one I didn’t yet understand. As unfamiliar as its style was, I was aware that it had a style, an internal consistency that told me the music was complete in itself, that it was whole. It was a different kind of wholeness than that of Bach or Mozart. The music was not in any key, and that was intriguing. There was no single tone here with that kind of gravitational pull. Instead, the music built on a foundation it seemed to devise itself, rather than one common to other pieces. It established its own terms with the notes and figures and structures that announced the piece, and then reshaped those arguments in subtle ways with each passing bar. There was much elusive quicksilver here, and little that one would call tuneful. Though I had heard nothing like it before, it was somehow not surprising. Its foundations felt solid and secure.

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Choosing Amputation Over Pain

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Morgan Stickney was a US Olympic swimming hopeful — until uncontrollable pain after a seemingly innocuous foot injury forced her to consume opioids to the point where she could no longer focus on her studies. In this story at the New York Times, David Waldstein reports on how hope came out of tragedy: the ground-breaking leg amputation surgery Stickney had maintains the critical connection between muscles, nerves, and the brain that could allow for greater success with robotic limbs currently under development. The surgical research and breakthroughs were funded in part by the Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation — an organization started by the family of Gillian Reny, one of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013.

Named the Ewing amputation, after Jim Ewing, the initial patient, the procedure is thought to be the first significant change to amputations in hundreds of years, Carty said.

During standard below-the-knee amputations, the muscles in the back and front of the lower leg, which naturally work in tandem, are shorn of their connection. In the new procedure, Carty uses material from the discarded portion of the limb to reconnect those tissues and the nerves that serve them. Doing so preserves the natural connection of the two muscles and the communication with the brain, he said, and, in most cases so far, allows them to work in concert as before.

Carty said he had been thinking of a better way to do amputations when the Boston Marathon bombings occurred in 2013. He and his colleagues treated dozens of victims after the attack, many of whom required complex reconstruction of their lower limbs. The family of one of the victims that day, Gillian Reny, donated $2 million to establish the Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation, which has helped finance Carty’s research, in collaboration with Hugh Herr, the M.I.T. scientist who is developing the robotic ankle and foot that Stickney and other amputees have tested in his lab. The Department of Defense has since provided an additional $6 million to help develop more sophisticated approaches to amputation.

Tony Stickney, Morgan’s father, initially opposed it, and even tried to dissuade his daughter as late as the day of the operation. But she was resolute.

“She wanted to be out of pain, and I didn’t know what else to do as a dad,” he said. “I knew we were losing her to the drugs. Dr. Carty’s surgery provided some hope.”

During the operation, Carty discovered that one of Stickney’s metatarsal bones — the five long bones in the foot — had died, probably as a result of the earlier staph infection. What he saw confirmed that any additional procedures to salvage the foot would have failed. Stickney’s decision to amputate only hastened the inevitable.

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Home Cooking: A Reading List

Getty Images / Katie Kosma

From second grade to eighth grade, cereal was my portal to the United States. Whenever my dad flew from where we lived in Indonesia to the U.S. on business, he’d bring a near-empty suitcase so he could fill it with Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, Captain Crunch, and whatever other colorful boxes caught his eye. When he came home, my brother and I would deliberate over which to open first, rationing ourselves. I treasured each bowl enough that once, when a gecko flung out of the box along with a kaleidoscopic pour of fruity pebbles, I simply brought the creature outside before dipping my spoon into the bowl.

The longer I lived in Indonesia, the less I remembered about life in the United States, even though others reminded me that the U.S. was “home.” Whenever I ate cereal, I imagined an alternate version of myself. The girl I envisioned lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a brick house like that of my cousins. She wore outfits from Limited Too, a store I’d visited once during summer vacation. She somehow didn’t have braces or wear glasses. In imagining what I might be like if I lived in the U.S., I began to construct my own version of the country based on summer visits and foggy memories of early childhood. As a result, the U.S. became more artifice than reality, a place I imagined might absolve me of my complicated feelings about identity.

But my illusions about the U.S. were as sugary and insubstantial as the cereal I associated with the country; they dissolved as soon as I moved to Texas during my freshman year of high school. Once there, I realized that even though I spoke the language and looked the part, I felt different from my peers. As much as I wanted to feel at ease in the U.S., I found myself torn between the reality of the place where I lived – all cookie-cutter homes and gleaming aisles of grocery stores – and where I’d grown up. I felt homesick for Indonesia, a place I could never truly call home, privilege making thorny my presence there.

For years, I buried the feelings of loss that came along with leaving Indonesia and instead tried to forge different lives in the states I’ve lived since then. But, like the bowls of cereal of my past that once brought me back to a country I’d left behind, I was given a piece of Kopiko after a meal a couple years ago, and the even the sight of the wrapper was enough to transport me to my old house, one shaded by a rainbow eucalyptus trees and robust flower blooms. Food can be nostalgia embodied, a means of traveling to a place you wish you could return to, a way of bringing to life a memory. Candy in hand, I remembered wandering aisles of the outdoor market, where sounds became a kind of song: vendors chattering, pans clanging, someone calling nasi goreng! nasi goreng!, live birds chirruping from a small cage, knives whisking over metal sharpeners, chickens scuttling around table legs looking for scraps, and motorcycles chortling to life before whining down the road. For sale were tables of produce – spiky round rambutan, bundles of greens, starfruit stacked in precarious piles, shrink-wrapped mango, mounds of durian – slick bodies of fish gutted and chickens plucked clean of their feathers. Nothing went to waste. Blood was boiled down until it congealed, and intestines were arranged on plates like long tendrils of spaghetti.

Perhaps food isn’t a permanent means of returning to anywhere, but a taste can be enough to bring you home. In the following essays, writers interrogate the complicated pasts of place through food, express nostalgia for long-gone homes, and find belonging by sharing meals. As for me, when I put the Kopiko on my tongue, thousands of miles away, the blend of coffee and sugar resonated bittersweet, as it always had, before melting away.

1. I Want Crab. Pure Maryland Crab. (Bill Addison, September 15, 2016, Eater)

I moved away from Maryland over 25 years ago, but if I don’t make it back to the state at least once a year for steamed crabs, I’m like a bird whose migration pattern has been disrupted. I’m unsettled in the world.

Back in Maryland after time away, Bill Addison digs into a pile of local crab while ruminating on the history, preparation techniques, best places to eat, and future of crab in Baltimore.

2. NASA is learning the best way to grow food in space (Sarah Scoles, June 6, 2018, Popular Science)

Sure, astronauts can gaze down at Earth and see its most beautiful spots—literally all of them—every 90 minutes. But those places are always out of reach, reminders of how far away sea level is. Having something nearby that photosynthesizes might cheer the crew.

A complex set of factors such as humidity, mold, and a host of other ecosystem variants makes growing plants in space a challenge. But far away from the comforts of home, astronauts have begun cultivating zinnias and lettuce on board, thanks to the work of scientist Gioia Massa and her team, who are part of an experiment called Veggie.

3. Say It with Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food (Shing Yin Khor, February 27, 2018, Catapult)

In this beautiful illustrated essay, Shing Yin Khor expresses how difficult it is for her to communicate emotions verbally. She instead uses food as a means to share feelings of disappointment, love towards others and, eventually, love toward herself as well.

4. Eating to America (Naz Riahi, November 2018, Longreads)

Two years after the Iran-Iraq war ended, and six months after her father, a political prisoner, was executed, Naz Riahi and her mother, Shee Shee, move to the U.S. There, homesick and grieving, Riahi finds happiness and hope through food.

The food sat inside me, taking over spaces that had been full of worry just minutes before and making the worry go away.

5. An Adopted Obsession with Soondubu Jjigae, Korean Silken-Tofu Stew (Bryan Washington, February 20, 2019, The New Yorker)

I first tasted gochujang because of a boy. We were in a busted strip mall, just west of Houston’s I-610 loop. A lot of things were changing in my life, and I hadn’t been home—home home—in a minute, and we were too broke to go most places.

Though he ends up splitting up with his partner, Bryan Washington’s love for soondubu jjigae remains strong. Washington recounts his efforts to figure out how to make the stew on his own, and eventually brings the recipe home.

6. The Food of My Youth (Melissa Chadburn, July 9, 2018, The New York Review)

In search of a better future, Melissa Chadburn’s mother brings her family to northern California, where they “lived on saltines with peanut butter and beans from a can.” At fifteen, Chadburn is taken to a group home where her hunger is satiated, but she is treated as a case number rather than a child.

Only, for us, the explosions had already happened. The places we’d called home had been lit up and burned to the ground, with nothing left save for the blackened foundations of our past. We kids were screaming for love, for touch, for home.

7. Chop Suey Nation (Ann Hui, June 21, 2016, The Globe and Mail)

After a blogger wrote a post called “I can’t believe there’s a Chinese restaurant in Fogo,” Ann Hui, influenced by her family, for whom “food was an obsession,” sets out to drive across Canada to figure out how the restaurant owners decided to open shop in such an isolated location and why there’s a Chinese restaurant in nearly every Canadian town. Hui wrote a book, Chop Suey Nation, based on her article.

The name “chop suey” translates more or less into “assorted mix,” and refers to a repertoire of dishes mostly developed in North America in the mid-20th century. A mix of ideas both East and West and, to my eyes, frozen in time.

8. Farm to Table (Laura Reiley, April 13, 2016, Tampa Bay Times)

This is a story we are all being fed. A story about overalls, rich soil and John Deere tractors scattering broods of busy chickens. A story about healthy animals living happy lives, heirloom tomatoes hanging heavy and earnest artisans rolling wheels of cheese into aging caves nearby.

Skeptical of the chalkboard menus touting local, organic ingredients in front of nearly every restaurant in Tampa, Laura Reiley stops at farms, contacts vendors, and “for fish claims that seemed suspicious, I kept zip-top baggies in my purse and tucked away samples” in order to determine the extent to which restaurant owners lie about obtaining ingredients from sources close to home.

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

At Glen Mills Schools, the Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Glen Mills, just outside of Philly, is considered the “Harvard of reform schools,” all brick buildings and grassy quads. It has a stellar athletics program that sends players to the NFL, and has served as a model for reform schools across the country. And as Lisa Gartner uncovers for the Philadelphia Inquirer, it’s built on serious physical violence against students enabled by the barest training and standards for staff that are selected for brawn rather than skill.

According to sworn testimony from Glen Mills’ in-house trainer, Carmelo Mustaccio, the school had not devised, let alone demonstrated, specific techniques for properly restraining students.

Instead, Mustaccio recertified Glen Mills’ counselors each year by showing them a PowerPoint, demonstrating “gently” lowering others to the ground, and then giving out an open-book, multiple-choice quiz.

“Very rarely” did anyone fail the 15-question quiz, Mustaccio said. The third question asks: “Which of the following does Glen Mills NOT allow when addressing student behavior?” The options are “verbal ridicule,” “poking and slapping,” “kicking and choking,” or “all of the above.”

The counselors graded one another’s papers. They could miss three questions and still pass. If someone failed the quiz, they stayed after class while the trainer went over the right answers, Mustaccio said. Then they took the same quiz again.

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