The Longreads Blog

He Seemed Like the Real Thing, Until He Wasn’t

(The Los Angeles Times)

Journalist Christopher Goffard of The Los Angeles Times may be the bard of crime in Orange County, California. Last year, his six-part series “Framed” told the story of fear and loathing in an Irvine PTA. His 2017 opus is “Dirty John,” a seven-part series — and podcast — that unravels the life of a con man as he takes on his final victim.

When Debra Newell met John Meehan for a first date, she thought he was handsome and kind, but shabbily dressed and a little strange. He said he was a doctor, an anesthesiologist; he always wore medical scrubs but he never seemed to go to work. When they married in Las Vegas less than two months later, she kept her family in the dark. It was only after she learned about his past that she began to fear for her life, and the lives of her children.

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What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Michele Filgate | Longreads | October 2017 | 10 minutes (2,501 words)

Lacuna: an unfilled space or interval; a gap.

Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them. To know what it was like to have one place where we belonged. Where we fit.

My mother is hard to know. Or rather, I know her and don’t know her at the same time. I can imagine her long, grayish-brown hair that she refuses to chop off, the vodka and ice in her hand. But if I try to conjure her face, I’m met instead by her laugh, a fake laugh, the kind of laugh that is trying to prove something, a forced happiness.

Several times a week, she posts tempting photos of food on her Facebook page. Achiote pork tacos with pickled red onions, strips of beef jerky just out of the smoker, slabs of steak that she serves with steamed vegetables. These are the meals of my childhood; sometimes ambitious and sometimes practical. But these meals, for me, call to mind my stepfather; the red of his face, the red of the blood pooled on the plate. He uses a dishtowel to wipe the sweat from his cheeks; his work boots are coated in sawdust. His words puncture me; tines of a fork stuck in a half-deflated balloon.

You are the one causing problems in my marriage, he says.
 You fucking bitch, he says. 
I’ll slam you, he says. And I’m afraid he will, I’m afraid he’ll press himself on top of me on my bed until the mattress opens up and swallows me whole.
 Now, my mother saves all of her cooking skills for her husband. Now, she serves him food at their farmhouse in the country and their condo in the city. Now, my mother no longer cooks for me.

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When You’re Broken by Breaking News

Two mourners sit among crosses for those killed during the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

I managed to avoid most news about the mass shooting that occurred in Las Vegas this week, but it has been at the front of my mind. There were breaking news updates almost every hour, every day, but I didn’t click. I don’t know and still don’t want to know the gunman’s name. (I won’t use it here unless my editor tells me I have to.)

I was frustrated by the the breaking news updates, which was strange because I used to love being a breaking news reporter. I know the rush of unearthing a piece of information no one else has, of typing as fast as you can to get it out — the pride of being first. But something about this news cycle has changed that for me. I don’t care that the shooter was a gambler, or a loner, that he was cruel to his girlfriend in his local Starbucks, or otherwise unremarkable as he purchased multiple firearms. I don’t see what value that information has for the public.

Even as I type this, I know I’m wrong. Horrible, shocking events like mass shootings scare us, and information soothes us. On Monday, I asked an editor at a national news site, “Why did he do it?” He responded, “We’ll never know.” There was enough known about the shooter on day one to know he was as incomprehensible as the violence he perpetrated. That’s when I stopped paying attention. I know these little details, these constant updates, are attempts to create order out of chaos. I also know that effort is futile, and that futility frustrates me. The barrage of updates serves only to keep the horror in the national discourse. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(DEA Picture Library/ De Agostini / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from David Dobbs, Rachel Aviv, Max Read, Holly George-Warren, and Bianca Bosker.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Elvis Has Left the Makeup Trailer

Tom Petty recording tracks for the Johnny Cash album 'Unchained' in 1996. (Kevin Estrada / MediaPunch/IPX)

After his death, Oxford American re-upped an interview with Tom Petty from 2000. Did you ever wonder what got him into music? Wonder no more: It was Elvis. He tells interviewer Holly George-Warren about a childhood encounter with the King at a movie location near his home in Florida.

I remember a long line of white Cadillacs that came in, and getting out were guys in mohair suits—really very flashy lookin’ cats in sunglasses. Every time one would get out, I’d say to my aunt, “Is that Elvis?’’ and she’d say, “No.’’ Then all of the sudden, she went, “That’s Elvis.’’ And it really was a semireligious experience. I mean, he glowed to me. I’d never seen anyone’s hair dyed so black that it was blue—it shone blue in the front. He looked amazing. My uncle was there, and he says, “Elvis, these are my nieces and nephews.’’ He said hi, and then he went in his trailer. And we stayed and watched them film throughout the day. I remember at one point a crowd was handing records over the fence for him to sign and then hand them back. And I was like, “Damn, if I had an Elvis record, I could get an autograph.’’ So when we went home, I was a changed person. I set about finding Elvis records, so I could get Elvis’s autograph in case I went back. That was how I fell in love with rock ’n’ roll records—and that was my only interest ever since.

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Trans, Homeless, and Turning Tricks to Survive

(William Murphy/ Flickr)

At Rolling Stone, Laura Rena Murray chronicles the dangers young trans women face as they struggle to survive on the streets of New York City. Often the targets of violence, one in two trans women in the city will become HIV-positive before she turns 24. Turning tricks to bring in cash, some have gone so far as to attempt suicide simply to gain access to a bed for the duration of the mandatory 72-hour watch period. “I just needed a bed,” says Scarlet. “I did what I had to do to sleep for Christmas.”

In the Dominican Republic, where Sophie was born, her mother struggled with addiction and sent Sophie to live with her grandmother in New York when she was six months old. Her grandmother, who was able to send the family money, food and clothing, Sophie says, by pimping out undocumented girls, was nearly beaten to death by two men when Sophie was in the fourth grade. Both her grandmother and her father hit her, she says, and sometimes locked her out of the house. “It was more hatred than discipline,” she recalls. “My dad would beat me in the shower with a belt and punch me in the face, calling me a faggot. Then he’d turn around and say, ‘I love you.’ How can you treat me like this if you love me?”

She began living on the streets at 16, attending school whenever possible, but more often worrying about where to eat, shower and sleep each night. “You can’t go to school smelly and drawing attention,” she says. “I would take cat baths at Starbucks.” Now, at 21, she’s hoping to build a civil-rights career, either as a lawyer or a social worker. The next morning, in fact, she has an interview for an eight-week internship at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I know I’m going to be a very successful person,” she says. “I want [my father] to learn he lost something.”

There are now more than 350,000 transgender people under the age of 25 in the United States, the majority in the largest cities of New York, California, Florida and Texas – and an estimated 20 percent of them lack secure housing, though many service providers believe that figure is low. Craig Hughes of the Coalition for Homeless Youth notes that the federal definition of homelessness does not include those who trade sex for shelter; instead, they are considered “unstably” housed. “There are thousands who go uncounted,” Hughes says. “They are disconnected from services, sleep on multiple couches a month and spend some nights trading sex for shelter.”

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Can a Sports-Crazed City Turn a Theater Person into a Baseball Person?

World Series 1960 at Forbes Field (AP Photo)

Shannon Reed | Longreads | October 2017 | 16 minutes (3,891 words)

 

All Pittsburghers, even those who can’t be bothered with baseball, know what happened on October 13, 1960: the Pirates’ second baseman, Bill Mazeroski, hit a walk-off home run, which shot over the left field fence of Forbes Field in Oakland, and into history, securing for the Pirates the World Series in the seventh game. In the photos of Mazeroski rounding third and heading for home, the joy is palpable, as teammates and fans rush toward him, arms extended, faces actually aglow. Forbes Field, where the game was played, arches upward in the background, almost like a sanctuary; apt, because that home run was miraculous. The city exploded with happiness.

I was born 14 years too late to witness it, but grew up in a Pirates-loving household two hours east of Pittsburgh. People in Johnstown still talked about Mazeroski’s miracle in the late 1980s. My dad went to a banquet then at the Holiday Inn downtown at which Mazeroski received an award. Dad took to recapping his conversation with the slugger as often as possible in the weeks following it, and people always listened intently, as though some great wisdom were being passed along, instead of a simple exchange of pleasantries.

But I rolled my eyes every time he told the story. Back then, I thought Mazeroski’s triumph was ancient history, something vaguely important, but that had happened a long time ago on a field far, far away. I was busy defining myself as a theater kid, so Pittsburgh’s allure was in the promise of high school drama club trips to see touring Broadway shows at the Benedum Center downtown. I liked baseball well enough, more than any other sport, having played catcher on a Little League team for a few years. But still, I wasn’t especially keen on it, even when the Pirates made it to the postseason in 1990, 1991, and 1992.

Even though great baseball was still happening in Pittsburgh, it seemed to me at 16, 17, and 18 that the best days of the sport in the city were far behind. This, I know now, is what history does. It telescopes, so that dozens of years compress into one memory, while the present moves serenely forward at its usual stately pace. The thousands of past years you did not experience blend together, while those in your own recent past are distinct as memory. Thus, I saw the Pirates’ days of triumph, long before I was born, as history, while my then-present awareness of the team, with their parade of good and bad games, fair and foul seasons, were memories that couldn’t compete with past glories frozen, triumphant, in time.

But when I enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh in 2012, suddenly the history of Pirates baseball became real to me. Walking around the campus one day I stumbled upon the actual physical remnants of those glory days. From 1909 to the 1970 season, the Pittsburgh Pirates had played on Forbes Field, and now its back wall, flag pole, and home base are preserved on Pitt’s campus, an athletic shrine in the heart of an academic neighborhood. The carefully preserved fragments immediately reminded me of the abandoned, disintegrating cathedrals, abbeys, and chapels I had visited in Ireland. Great wonders had been glimpsed here, seen by the community, but now all was quiet.

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‘This is the Most Inexplicable Story in Sports of the Last 20 Years’

(AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Matt Giles | Longreads | October 2017 | 7 minutes (1,769 words)

When Erik Malinowski was wrapping up the proposal for what would eventually become Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in Historyhe happened to spot the latest cover story for the New York Times Magazine and his heart nearly stopped. The feature, written by Bruce Schoenfeld in March 2016, detailed the rise of the Golden State Warriors through the guise of its front office and the team’s devotion to analytics and data, which sounded much like the book Malinowski was trying to pitch.

“I was gutted at first,” says Malinowski, a prolific freelance writer who also hosts one of the most insightful and interesting sports writing newsletters. “I thought [the New York Times Magazine] blew up my spot. The story’s framework was in parallel of what I was proposing with book.” But then he took a step back and realized there was so much more to the rise of the Warriors (which has won two of the last three NBA titles) than could be covered in just one magazine piece. It was proof of concept: “If the New York Times Magazine put a story on the Warriors on the cover, then this is a thing people want to read about.”

One year later, Malinowski’s book is a deep-dive into not only the fraught history of the Warriors’ franchise, a once proud team at the NBA’s founding that had been reduced to a bumbling and mismanaged group of castaways, but also a team that had essentially redefined the NBA. Sure, having a player like Steph Curry, a once-in-a-generation talent with endless range, helped fuel its rise, but Malinowski also details how the Warriors helped to drag basketball into the modern age—and, in the process, transformed into an annual title contender.

I recently spoke with Malinowski about the ordeals of writing his book, whether this type of embedded sports journalism is still possible, and why the Warriors represent not just a shift in playing style but also political and societal awareness. Read more…

The Vegan Mayo that Dare Not Speak its Name

Image: AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Unlike a small appliance that squeezes juice out from a pouch or a vending machine that sells stuff (looking at you, Juicero and Bodega), vegan mayonnaise actually has a distinct value proposition, a quality that sets it apart from its yolk-rich, emulsified step-cousin. It’s odd, then, that a key moment in vegan-mayo startup Hampton Creek’s trajectory was to stop using “vegan” in describing their products. At The Atlantic, Bianca Bosker charts co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick’s transition from outspoken animal-rights rabble-rouser to a Silicon Valley executive fluent in the complementary discourses of wellness, environmental consciousness, and instant gratification.

Though he said he still believes “every single word” of his past entreaties, Tetrick has largely sanitized his public remarks of references to animal abuse since finding that they fell flat with the broad group of retailers and shoppers he hopes to attract. He now hews closer to lines such as “We’ve made it really easy for good people to do the wrong things.” Though Tetrick has been a vegan for the past seven years, he discourages his marketing team from using the word vegan to describe Just products. The term, he says, evokes arrogance and wealth and suggests food that “tastes like crap.” Instead he promises customers a bright future where they can eat better, be healthy, and save the environment without spending more, sacrificing pleasure, or inconveniencing themselves. “A cookie can change the world,” Hampton Creek has asserted in its marketing materials.

The message is a rallying cry for a particular kind of revolution. Tetrick launched Hampton Creek in an era when investors were reaching beyond traditional tech companies, and businesses that might otherwise have been merely, say, specialty-food purveyors could leverage software—and grand mission statements tapping into Silicon Valley’s do-gooder ethos—to cast themselves as paradigm-breaking forces. Venture capitalists have poured money into start-ups aiming to disrupt everything from lingerie to luggage to lipstick, with less emphasis on the product than on the scope of the ambition and the promise of tech-enabled efficiencies. Hampton Creek offered idealism that could scale.

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Nestlé Is Sucking the World’s Aquifers Dry

Nestle takes about 25 million gallons of water a year from the San Bernardino National Forest under a permit that expired decades ago. (Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun via AP)

At Bloomberg Businesweek, Caroline Winter visits Nestlé’s bottling plant in Mecosta County, Michigan to analyze how the multinational corporations targets small communities with promises of jobs, and buys up public land to gain control of water resources. Nestle sold $7.7 billion dollars worth of bottled water last year, making it the world’s largest bottled water company. It made that money partly by paying a pittance for its product. Nestlé pays the U.S. Forest Service only $524 a year to draw 30 million gallons of public water in San Bernardino, California, and Nestlé pays the city of Evart, Michigan just $250,000 a year for its water. Consumers drink bottled water because they assume it’s safer than tap, but that makes us complicit in what many analysts and activists warn is the gradual privatization of water. These multinational corporations don’t have the public’s best interests in mind, activists warn. If anybody should own water, it’s the public.

Nestlé has been preparing for shortages for decades. The company’s former chief executive officer, Helmut Maucher, said in a 1994 interview with the New York Times: “Springs are like petroleum. You can always build a chocolate factory. But springs you have or you don’t have.” His successor, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who retired recently after 21 years in charge, drew criticism for encouraging the commodification of water in a 2005 documentary, saying: “One perspective held by various NGOs—which I would call extreme—is that water should be declared a human right. … The other view is that water is a grocery product. And just as every other product, it should have a market value.” Public outrage ensued. Brabeck-Letmathe says his comments were taken out of context and that water is a human right. He later proposed that people should have free access to 30 liters per day, paying only for additional use.

Compared with the water needs of agriculture and energy production, the bottled water business is barely responsible for a trickle; in Michigan, it accounts for less than 1 percent of total water usage, according to Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). But it rankles many because the natural resource gets hauled out of local watersheds for private profit, not used in the service of feeding people or keeping their lights on. There’s also, of course, the issue of plastic pollution.

In the U.S., Nestlé tends to set up shop in areas with weak water regulations or lobbies to enfeeble laws. States such as Maine and Texas operate under a remarkably lax rule from the 1800s called “absolute capture,” which lets landowners take all the groundwater they want. Michigan, New York, and other states have stricter laws, allowing “reasonable use,” which means property owners can extract water as long as it doesn’t unreasonably affect other wells or the aquifer system. Laws vary even within states. New Hampshire is a reasonable-use state, but in 2006, the municipality of Barnstead became the first nationwide to ban the pumping of its water for sale elsewhere.

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