The Longreads Blog

Lobster Shells in the Fountain and Other Hotel Mysteries

Hotel Imperial, Vienna
Hotel Imperial in Vienna via Wikimedia

I’ve experienced excessive hotel luxury exactly one time, at the Hotel Imperial in Vienna, where I landed the lowest quality room at this self-described six-star hotel. The lowest quality room at the Imperial, with its heated marble floors, lush upholstery, and view down the Ringstrasse remains the nicest place I’ve ever stayed.

At breakfast the next day, the 70-something Viennese couple directly behind my husband began to speculate (in their Viennese German) how such sweater-and-jean-wearing riff-raff could afford to stay at the hotel. My Austrian husband smirked all through our meal, whispering “I’ll tell you later.” They’d decided we were Canadian oil money; we simply could not be Americans given our economy at the time. I still regret that he did not wish them a very good morning in his own distinctive Austrian accent upon their departure.

During our stay, the hotel staff were nothing but sunshine and discretion. As we prepared to leave the hotel, the lobby butler asked if we needed luggage retrieved from our room. We were carrying day packs only; our car was parked at a cousin’s house in a Vienna suburb. “No thanks,” I said, “this is all we’ve got.”

“That happens here too.” The butler shrugged and offered what appeared to be a genuine smile before wishing us safe journeys. Our status seemed of no concern to him, only our needs and that we felt welcome.

I could not do his job; I am too judge-y and can’t keep it to myself. I have more in common with those well-dressed Viennese seniors than they’d suspect. I am impressed by those who can pull off service work in a way that’s unobtrusive and helpful at the same time.

At Bloomberg, Brandon Presser joins the staff at another grand hotel, The Plaza New York, to see what it’s like to wear the white gloves. The requests are as silly and outlandish as you’d think. The discretion? Well, they don’t name names, until they do. (Spoiler alert: It’s Charlie Sheen.)

Over my short tenure, I delivered laundry to Middle Eastern princesses and fetched lobsters out of wishing wells—and listened to colleagues delight in the oddities of their jobs, from fielding requests for Viagra or comforting a weeping woman over spilled blueberries. Serving the world’s rich and famous, it turns out, plumbs the depths of an alternative universe that readily embraces the absurd without even batting an eye. And that was only the beginning of what I learned.

Read the story

The Beauty (and Predictability) of a Slot Machine’s Algorithm

A Russian mathematician from St. Petersburg named Alex has quite the talent: he reverse engineers the pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) that govern how slot machines behave. His team of field agents roams casinos around the world and “milk” the machines whose algorithms they’ve cracked.

Here’s how it works: an agent records a video of a targeted slot machine, sends the footage back to St. Petersburg, and Alex analyzes the slot’s behavior to determine the moment it will pay out. “By using these cues to beat slots in multiple casinos,” writes Brendan Koerner in Wired, “a four-person team can earn more than $250,000 a week.”

After interviewing Alex on the record, Koerner tells the story of this programmer-turned-hacker and what he views as his Robin Hood-like crusade against the global gambling industry.

In the course of reverse engineering Novomatic’s software, Alex encountered his first PRNG. He was instantly fascinated by the elegance of this sort of algorithm, which is designed to spew forth an endless series of results that appear impossible to forecast. It does this by taking an initial number, known as a seed, and then mashing it together with various hidden and shifting inputs—the time from a machine’s internal clock, for example. Writing such algorithms requires tremendous mathematical skill, since they’re supposed to produce an output that defies human comprehension; ideally, a PRNG should approximate the utter unpredictability of radioactive decay.

After wrapping up the casino gig, Alex spent six months teaching himself everything he could about PRNGs—in part because he admired their beauty but also because he knew that such expertise could prove profitable. “I mastered it to the point where I can develop such algorithms myself, on a level I am yet to see in a gambling machine,” says Alex, who will never be accused of lacking confidence. “It’s in my bloodstream now. I feel the numbers; I know how they move.”

Read the story

‘This Place, This Moment, Unplanned’: On Surviving a Heart Attack

Getty Images

After a heart attack (perhaps two heart attacks), Jeff Sharlet searches for meaning in his own mortality, “This brilliant darkness, with which I am coming to terms.” Read the full essay at VQR.

For two years I’ve been walking into the tall grass to take snapshots of this field at the top of the “crooked mile,” a winding hill that leads into the shallow valley of swamp and stream in which my house stands, just past the sign that reads pavement ends. I use my phone. I want the rough eye. The note. The diary. The record. The document. This time, this moment, unplanned.

This moment: stopped on the drive home from another trip to the hospital. One of many during the past two weeks, after two heart attacks, or maybe it was only one, rising and falling like a tide, across thirty hours. It began as night fell, as I wrote what I thought were the last words of a book I had begun two years before, following my father’s heart attack. Mine, like his, was “mild.” I’m told the pain can be instantly alarming. Not for me. I had been hitting snooze on this pain for months. Maybe years. Doing so was easy. It was only an ache, or sometimes a ripple, weak as chamomile, never sharper than nettles. That is, I did not know it was a heart attack. Then, after midnight, my chest began to fill as if with heavy water. My breath was cut into small and ragged pieces. I was being pressed, as if by a hard hand, back into the rocking chair in which I sat until dawn.

Waiting for the words to return. I’ve always had words, sentences that knitted themselves, paragraphs that fell into place. Always there was language, easy as air. I used to love a line by Catullus: “Calling all syllables!” They’d come. Now they don’t. I’m not sure I need them to. Even a snapshot of the dark-that-isn’t-dark-at-all might be more than I want to set down. Never before in my life has just being here—with the fox and the doe and the owl, with my pulse and my fears and the frozen air hot in my throat—felt so close to enough.

Read the story

‘You Start Hiring Job-Quitters’

Getty Images

When everyone is encouraged to think of herself as a business, working for anyone else can only ever be considered training ground.

As companies have divested themselves of long-term obligations to workers (read: pensions, benefits, paths to advancement), employees (read: job-seekers) have developed an in-kind taste for short-term, commitment-free work arrangements. Their aim in landing any given job has since become landing another job elsewhere, using the job as an opportunity to develop transferable skills — and then to go ahead and transfer. The appeal of any given job becomes how lucrative it will be to quit.

At Aeon, Ilana Gershon describes how this calculus of quitting changes workplace dynamics, management techniques, division of labor, and the nature of being co-workers. “After all,” Gershon writes, “everyone works in the quitting economy, and everyone knows it.”

If you are a white-collar worker, it is simply rational to view yourself first and foremost as a job quitter – someone who takes a job for a certain amount of time when the best outcome is that you quit for another job (and the worst is that you get laid off). So how does work change when everyone is trying to become a quitter? First of all, in the society of perpetual job searches, different criteria make a job good or not. Good jobs used to be ones with a good salary, benefits, location, hours, boss, co-workers, and a clear path towards promotion. Now, a good job is one that prepares you for your next job, almost always with another company.

Your job might be a space to learn skills that you can use in the future. Or, it might be a job with a company that has a good-enough reputation that other companies are keen to hire away its employees. On the other hand, it isn’t as good a job if everything you learn there is too specific to that company, if you aren’t learning easily transferrable skills. It isn’t a good job if it enmeshes you in local regulatory schemes and keeps you tied to a particular location. And it isn’t a good job if you have to work such long hours that you never have time to look for the next job. In short, a job becomes a good job if it will lead to another job, likely with another company or organisation. You start choosing a job for how good it will be for you to quit it.

Read the story

An Ode to Dishwashers, the Unsung Heroes of the Restaurant Kitchen

Dishwashers Esteban Soc, left, and Joselino Aguilar, right, at work in the kitchen of Mexican restaurant Caracol. (Photo by Scott Dalton for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

In the Washington Post, food critic Tom Sietsema signed up for a dishwashing shift at Caracol, a 250-seat Mexican restaurant in Houston to experience the job Anthony Bourdain said taught him “every important lesson of my life.”

Dishwashers get paid a median annual wage of $20,000 a year in the U.S. and are a critical component of the restaurant industry. As Emeril Lagasse puts it, “You can’t have a successful service in a restaurant without a great dishwasher.” More restaurants are finding ways to recognize and reward their dishwashers:

After years of performing tasks no one else wants to do — cleaning nasty messes, taking out trash, polishing Japanese wine glasses priced at $66 a stem (at Quince in San Francisco) — the unsung heroes of the kitchen might be finally getting their due.

This spring, chef Rene Redzepi of the world-renowned Noma in Copenhagen made headlines when he made his dishwasher, Ali Sonko, a partner in his business. The Gambian native helped Redzepi open the landmark restaurant in 2003. And in July, workers at the esteemed French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., one of master chef Thomas Keller’s 12 U.S. restaurants and bakeries, voted to give their most prestigious company honor, the Core Award, to a dishwasher: Jaimie Portillo, who says he has never missed a day of work in seven years.

Read the story

Radical Candor and Radical Comfort: The Road to Danish-ness

cyclists ride along a blue bike path in copenhagen, denmark
Cyclists in Copenhagen, photo by Tony Webster via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Andrew Richdale wants to feel at home in Denmark, but is he ready for the brutal (to an American) honesty? His first forays into communicating like a Dane, chronicled in a fun piece in Saveur, leave him nowhere to hide.

“Well, to be honest—”

“No!” Bo snaps. “That! That was not Danish. We do not say ‘To be honest’ in Denmark! What you just told me is ‘Oh, now I will begin being honest.’ To be Danish is to not be afraid of saying exactly what is happening at any moment, with elegance and wit.”

I ask Bo how to shake the feeling that I’m a self-conscious visitor passing through a foreign land—how to, instead, feel I belong.

“Do you ever Instagram certain obligatory places or dishes to prove you’ve properly ‘done’ somewhere? I know it’s bullshit but—”

“Andrew! What is this thing you have, this real you and this other you?” Bo asks. “The way you live—you are in danger.”

A bit embarrassed, I ask to be excused, to go to the bathroom “real quick.”

“You can also do it real slow!” he shouts as I walk away.

Read the story

In Foreign Territory, Wondering: Who is the Alpha Monkey?

Illustration by Rebekka Dunlap

Leigh Shulman | Longreads | August 2017 | 20 minutes (4,962 words)

 

Still breathless from dragging our heavy bag down the hill and through the mud, I never expected to be turned away on arrival. “No children allowed here,” he tells me.

“But Rafael,” I explain after introductions, “Monica knows we’re coming. Por favor ask her.”

What Rafael doesn’t tell me is that Monica, the owner of this magnificent animal sanctuary in the middle-of-nowhere jungle, left two days earlier for La Paz to tend to her sick father. She neglected to inform anyone that my nine-year-old daughter Lila and I would be landing on their doorstep. It’s a 20 km walk to the nearest town and no more buses for the day. How did I get us into this mess?

Thirty-six hours earlier, we locked the door of our house in Argentina, cabbed to the terminal and hopped a late bus headed for Bolivia. Lila snuggled against my shoulder, attempting to sleep through her excitement over our first night away. The driver rolled to a halt in every tiny dirt-pathed town, belching passengers into the cool Andean night. We touched the border before dawn.

Four hours and two passport stamps later, an unrelenting Bolivian sun burned our skin as we breakfasted on buttery rolls and coffee.

“How long is the next ride?” my little one asked.

“Twenty hours from here to La Paz.”
Read more…

Hard Lessons in Living Off the Grid

Photo: Grist / Amelia Urry

 

Amelia Urry | Grist | August 2017 | (3,139 words)

GristThe following Longreads Exclusive was produced in partnership with Grist.

 

When people ask Luke Evslin why he decided to live off the grid, he starts with the time he almost died.

Evslin grew up on Kauai, a nub of a former volcano at the oldest end of the Hawaiian archipelago, but he was living on nearby Oahu at the time of the accident, working and competing in races with an outrigger canoe club.

The biggest race of the year is a daylong ocean crossing from the island of Moloka’i to Oahu’s Waikiki Beach, which can take between five and eight hours. Exhausted paddlers rotate out of the canoe during the race, jumping into the water to be scooped up by a waiting motorboat. During the first switch, Evslin was getting ready to heave himself into the canoe when the motorboat struck him.

The propellor sliced across his back in five places, severing muscle and bone along his spine and pelvis, each cut a potential death blow. His teammates pulled him out of the ocean and rushed him to shore. Judging from the looks on everyone’s faces, Evslin wasn’t sure he would survive the hour-long trip to land.

“I wasn’t scared to die,” he wrote a month later from his hospital bed, “but I was sad to die. I realized how much I love our beautiful world and everyone that is a part of it … and I was sad that I’d only just noticed.”

Soon after, still recovering from his wounds, “I made the terrible choice to read Walden,” Evslin recalls. He came across these famous words from Henry David Thoreau: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Evslin began dreaming of a self-sufficient life, in touch with nature and free of the careless consumption of modern society. He convinced his then-fiancee, Sokchea, to move to a rainy acre on his native Kauai, where they built an off-grid yurt powered by six solar panels and a bank of batteries.
Read more…

The Case for Believing Women Who Are In Pain

If there’s only one important takeaway from the backlash to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, it’s that women seek alternative medicine — and therefore the “wellness” movement — because traditional doctors have never taken them seriously.

As Annaliese Griffin pointed out for Quartz, the American healthcare system, while undeniably terrible for nearly everyone, damages women to an extreme. Their “experience of pain is routinely minimized by health practitioners,” resulting in longer wait times, misdiagnoses and even an increased chance of death from things as common as heart attacks.

When Maxwell Williams learned a female friend of his was incapable of having sex without feeling excruciating pain but struggled to find a doctor who would take her pain seriously, he decided to investigate what was really causing the stabbing sensation that doctors kept telling his friend was all in her head. (Never mind that the head is part of the body, indeed controls all of the body, so it makes little sense to discount it.)

For his piece for GOOD Magazine, Williams spoke with about a dozen women who shared his friend’s experience, including one whose marriage unraveled because of it, and he learned of vulvodynia, a Latin medical term that roughly translates to “vulva pain.” The condition plagues far more than the dozen women he spoke with — as much as 16 percent of the female population, or 14 million women, markedly more than those who experience endometriosis or breast cancer. So why don’t we know about it? And why are treatment options so scarce?

“If you were a woman and you were asked, ‘In your last sexual encounter or your last series of sexual encounters, did you experience pain?’ what would you think the answer would be?” he says. “It’s a little over a third. That’s a freaking epidemic. One third of women in our environment are having pain during sex. That’s an unnecessary, bothersome, distressing issue. We need a lot more effort in understanding it.”

Read the story

The Engineers Who Can’t Quit Voyager

A copper record containing sounds of the Earth, greetings in 60 languages, songs of birds, whales and animals, is mounted onto Voyager 2. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

For the New York Times Magazine, Kim Tingley profiles the nine flight-team engineers of the 1977 Voyager mission, who have been putting off retirement to see through one of NASA’s most successful missions all the way to the end. They estimate Voyager will run out of energy by 2030 at the latest, marking the end of an era when deepest space was seen by the government, and the public at large, as a mystery worth exploring.

The two Voyager spacecraft famously carried a “golden record” to the deepest reaches of the universe, which contain sounds and images of Earth, selected by a committee helmed by Carl Sagan, should Voyager encounter any intelligent life. The mission was one of optimism and wonder. But with the end of the shuttle program in 2011, and NASA under threat of severe cuts from the Trump Administration, the wonder of space is under attack from those who would commodify it. What is the purpose of space if you can’t make money from it?

The mission quite possibly represents the end of an era of space exploration in which the main goal is observation rather than commercialization. In internal memos, Trump-administration advisers have referred to NASA’s traditional contractors as ‘‘Old Space’’ and proposed refocusing its budget on supporting the growth of the private ‘‘New Space’’ industry, Politico reported in February. ‘‘Economic development of space’’ will begin in near-Earth orbit and on the moon, according to the president’s transition team, with ‘‘private lunar landers staking out de facto ‘property rights’ for Americans on the moon, by 2020.’’

All explorations demand sacrifices in exchange for uncertain outcomes. Some of those sacrifices are social: how many resources we collectively devote to a given pursuit of knowledge. But another portion is borne by the explorer alone, who used to be rewarded with adventure and fame if not fortune. For the foreseeable future, Voyager seems destined to remain in the running for the title of Mankind’s Greatest Journey, which might just make its nine flight-team engineers — most of whom have been with the mission since the Reagan administration — our greatest living explorers. They also may be the last people left on the planet who can operate the spacecraft’s onboard computers, which have 235,000 times less memory and 175,000 times less speed than a 16-gigabyte smartphone. And while it’s true that these pioneers haven’t gone anywhere themselves, they are arguably every bit as dauntless as more celebrated predecessors. Magellan never had to steer a vessel from the confines of a dun-colored rental office, let alone stay at the helm long enough to qualify for a senior discount at the McDonald’s next door.

Read the story