The Longreads Blog

The Spectacular Explosion of Cannabis’ Ambitious Startup MedMen

AP Photo/Richard Drew

The collapse of MedMen is a tale for the microdosing, CBD-soda-drinking tech era. The company itself couldn’t always figure out if it was a tech company or a cannabis company. It just knew it was racing to capitalize off the lucrative opportunity presented by cannabis’ legalization. In an incredible, deep, absorbing investigation for ProPublica, Ben Schreckinger and cannabis policy reporter Mona Zhang narrate the rise and fall of this ambitious startup, which they call the “Apple of Pot.” MedMen modeled their stores after the Apple Store. They published a glossy culture magazine called Ember that ran articles like “Is CBD the New Tylenol?” In an attempt to reach the masses and normalize cannabis consumption, they ran expensive ad campaigns where they’d cross out the word ‘stoner’ and replace that loaded term with words like “Grandmother.” “One image,” the story says, “featured a uniformed police officer.” As the story put it, “MedMen stands as a cautionary tale of American Wild West capitalism.“ It all started simply enough.

At first, as he recounts the story in interviews, Bierman thought his new client had misspoken. The elderly woman with wild hair kept saying she brought in $300,000 in revenue monthly, when she meant to say annually. There was no way, he thought, that her run-down little pot dispensary on Sunset Boulevard could be raking in $3.5 million a year.

It was 2009, long before the advent of legal recreational weed, and Bierman was not aware of California’s mom-and-pop medical pot industry—if you could even call it an industry. At the time, he and his young business partner, Modlin, were running a branding firm, mashing up the names MODlin and bierMAN and calling it ModMan. ModMan helped small, wellness-related companies like the old lady’s dispensary upgrade their image.

When Bierman finally gathered that the old woman had her numbers right, he realized that he was in the wrong business. ModMan became MedMen, and Bierman’s trade became medical marijuana.

Read the story

Japan’s Lonely Cherry Blossoms

The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images

In spring, when the cherry blossoms start to open on Japan’s island chain, tourists begin arriving and locals start planning their visits. Sakura season is an important cultural tradition. People plan spring vacations around it. Entire websites are devoted to tracking the blooms across Japan’s five islands, and predicting exactly when the first blooms will begin. “Sakura means everything in Japan,” writes John Gapper in The Financial Times. It’s big business. In 20018, cherry blossoms generated $5.8 billion dollars in related revenue. Gapper writes about how the usual crowds didn’t show up this year. President Abe encouraged people to stay at home, and people didn’t want to risk infection. Popular sakura sites like Tokyo’s Ueno Park and Kinuta Park were colored with anxiety as much as a pink hue, and crowds were thin. Naturally, businesses that rely on the annual traffic suffered from crowds’ absence.

But nature sprung a surprise this year, with the coronavirus pandemic curbing the picnics and frustrating people who had looked forward throughout winter to the usual party. Nature also changed the season: after an unusually mild January, the famously co-ordinated somei-yoshinos started to bloom in Tokyo in mid-March, two weeks ahead of schedule. This allowed some celebrations before the coronavirus clampdown, but climate change is a worry.

As he points out, sakura’s symobolism was also fitting for a time of death and change:

Coronavirus intruded this year, but the shadow it cast is not entirely alien to the season. Sakura does not just mean love and renewal, but also evanescence and the fleeting nature of existence. “The Japanese are implanted with sakura as a symbol not only of the season but of ourselves,” says Mariko Bando, author and chancellor of Showa Women’s University in Tokyo. “The blossom is beautiful but it goes away. Our lives are not eternal.”

Read the story

What Didn’t Kill Her

Photo illustration by Longreads

Bernice L. McFadden | Longreads | June 2020 | 8 minutes (2,024 words)

My brother never calls just to say hello.

On that warm, blue-skied, beautiful May day, I was sitting in the backyard of my cousins’ home, the sun warming my bare legs.

“Hello?”

He didn’t sound frantic, but his words were halting. It was clear that he was upset.

“Mommy fell and hit her head,” he said. “The ambulance is on the way.”

My chest tightened.

“Let me speak to her.”

You sounded a little out of breath and a tad bit embarrassed that he was causing such a fuss. You couldn’t explain exactly how you’d ended up on the floor. You did remember that you were standing at the bottom of the stairs watching my brother and his friend carry a love seat to the second floor apartment and then, the next thing you knew, my brother and his friend were standing over you calling your name as they shook you back to consciousness.
Read more…

Jericho Brown: ‘Write into the Deep Dark Wreck’

Jericho Brown (Getty Images)

At The Bitter Southerner, Josina Guess profiles Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown. In this inspiring piece, she learns about the duplex — a new form of poetry he invented — the cadence of his creative process, how the pandemic offered the forced respite he needed to work on his health, and the three problems he works to solve with each of his poems.

This piece includes a video of Brown delivering his poem, “Foreday in the Morning.” Do not miss out on the chance to hear his words.

Jericho Brown is a harvester of sounds. All week long he gathers words, jots them down, collects a phrase here, a riff there. On Sundays, he prays, then takes printed sheets of his gathered words and cuts up the lines to create text that will carry meaning on the page and in the mouth in surprising ways. He pushes himself, reading other poets and forms, and pushes his poems, waking in the middle of the night, reciting them over and over until they are uniquely his. To aspiring poets in the room he recommended Langston Hughes’s, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and Adrienne Rich’s, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,” as formative texts.

Two single friends came to live with him when things started shutting down. “If I had been by myself, I would have made a series of poor decisions.” As an extroverted introvert Jericho knows he needs people and solitude and has been thankful for the balance this spring has brought.

Living with HIV has meant being vigilant on keeping doctors’ appointments, keeping up on medication and awareness of living with a tiny silent killer. The lines of “The Virus” ring with a terrifying prescience of the moment we find ourselves in:

To do the killing. I want you
To heed that I’m still here
Just beneath your skin and in
Each organ
The way anger dwells in a man
Who studies the history of his nation.

As COVID-19, like HIV, is disproportionately ravaging Black and already vulnerable communities I asked for his take on that.

“People are interested in making parallels to the ways in which these illnesses, these viruses, these diseases have made it clear who in our culture and who in our society is most vulnerable and who the society leaves vulnerable. I would actually prefer that we look at things not as a parallel, that we look at things as a continuum and that we understand that; whether it is by bullet, or by disease, or when I think about the murder of Troy Davis, by execution. People use diseases in order to somehow further the cause that they already have. And it’s a cause of hatred. You know, there are many ways to commit violence, and you know, only one of them is our fist, right? It’s par for the course. I wish I could say I was surprised. I’m shocked, but not surprised.”

When Jericho Brown writes poems he writes them primarily for himself, he is usually wrestling with three problems, a real life problem, like “I can’t afford to pay the water bill and the bill is due,” a spiritual problem like, “I don’t believe that I am worthy of light and water despite of the fact of all the water in the world,” and a poetry problem, “I’d like this poem to end with an abstraction.” He believes that that if he is completely honest in that poetic conversation and allowing his whole Black self and his whole queer self into his poems, then the poem will do its job. He hopes that by being as honest as he can be that his poems will be as accessible as they can be and that they will be put to good use.

Read the story

Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent

Photo courtesy of the author / UGA Press

Sejal Shah | UGA Press | excerpted from This Is One Way to Dance | June 2020 | 14 minutes (3,746 words)

 

“I think we’d like to make love now.” The words repeated: a murmur, a shimmer, a cat walking across covers. The woman saying these words had red hair and very pale skin. She wore sparkly eyeliner, purple. She lay next to a man beneath a brown sleeping bag. It seemed like a reasonable request. My eyes flickered open. I looked at their bare shoulders and collarbones. (Why were they saying this to me?) The night, absent of stars, wound itself around us. I lay curled near their blanket-covered legs. I closed my eyes and fell back to sleep.

I opened my eyes. The night lifted, a navy-blue scrim rising. The white man had dreads. The white woman told me that she had been a sixth-grade teacher. “I was a teacher, too,” I said. The man grinned. He reminded me of a former student who often argued with me and liked to talk. A lot. My student was tall but hunched over, always wore an olive-colored jacket, and something about him seemed oddly animal-like, but not in an unpleasant way. I paused. Then: “What am I doing in your car?”

Read more…

This Week in Books: Bullets and Gas

A protester reads a book with the title "Why i'm no longer talking to white people about race" during a spontaneous Black Lives Matter march at Trafalgar Square to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and in support of the demonstrations in North America on May 31, 2020 in London, England. (Photo by Hollie Adams/Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

The books newsletter seems a little irrelevant at the moment; it’s Monday night, and I’m pretty sure the president just pulled a reichstag. Ah, but ok, books, yes, that’s my job. So, first of all, I think you should read Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning and his follow-up How to Be an Antiracist. The former is a harrowing intellectual history of antiracism in America, and the latter is a how-to manual for antiracist living today.

Over at Jacobin, Robert Greene II wrote about how this moment feels like an echo of the Red Summer of 1919, which was a series of pogroms against blacks perpetrated by whites, and which also followed on the heels of a global pandemic. His article reminded me that we ran an interview with Eve Ewing last year about her book 1919, a collection of poetry written in response to the Red Summer attacks. “These kinds of violent histories are all around us,” Ewing said in the interview. “We have to take the time to stop and seek them out if we’re ever going to have any hope at social reconciliation.”

Another book that’s come to mind these last fews days is Anna Feigenbaum’s Tear Gas, which we excerpted a couple years ago. The book tells the story of the “full-scale multimedia marketing campaign to promote ‘war gases for peace time use’” that a few retired military grifters cooked up to pitch local governments on gassing their own citizens. And man did those local governments sure love the idea!

1. “What’s Happening?” by Elvia Wilk, Bookforum

Elvia Wilk surveys post-apocalyptic novels like Doris Lessings’ The Memoirs of a Survivor, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker in an attempt to imagine the post-covid world. “What will ‘after’ the pandemic look like? In some ways it is the wrong question to ask, because… giving it an after implies that there was a true before. Yet as writers of dystopian novels know, there was no before, there was only a time when ‘it’ wasn’t quite so unavoidably visible.”

2. “Brit Bennett’s New Novel Explores the Power and Performance of Race” by Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

While reviewing Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Parul Seghal dwells on the “uniquely American” genre that is the “passing” story; she writes that Bennett subverts the narrative’s expectations. “Brit Bennett brings to the form a new set of provocative questions: What if passing goes unpunished? What if the character is never truly found out? What if she doesn’t die or repent? What then?”

3. “Wartime for Wodehouse” by Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker

I never realized that P.G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves novels, was persona non grata in the UK after the Second World War. Apparently he made a deal with the Nazis to do a little propaganda work for them in exchange for release from the camps. Rivka Galchen dives into the controversy, trying to get to the bottom of whether Wodehouse was just so irrepressibly upbeat that he couldn’t understand why his work for German broadcasters would be seen as propaganda.

4. “You Shall Also Love the Stranger” by Max Granger, Guernica

Max Granger effusively reviews John Washington’s The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond, a book that Granger says “reads like a novel… It is a beautiful and grievous tangle of history, reportage, philosophy, and testimony…” Focusing on the story of one migrant family, Washington also spins his tale outward and inward, touching on the history, philosophy, and future of migration.


Sign up to have this week’s book reviews, excerpts, and author interviews delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up


5. “Les Goddesses” by Moyra Davey, The Paris Review

A sly and delicate essay from photographer Moyra Davey that skips between the lives and letters of various literary luminaries, never quite settling before it hops again. “Sitting on the floor in sunlight and reading through eight small notebooks going back to 1998, looking for a phrase about Goethe… I never found the reference; it was something I had stumbled across on the internet, but it led me to The Flight to Italy, Goethe’s diary (recommended by Kafka, in his diary), in which G. abruptly takes leave of a turgid existence in Weimar and travels incognito to Italy for the first time in his life.”

6. “On the Many Mysteries of the European Eel” by Patrik Svensson, Lit Hub

An excerpt from Patrik Svensson’s charming Books of Eels. “This is how the birth of the eel comes about: it takes place in a region of the northwest Atlantic Ocean called the Sargasso Sea, a place that is in every respect suitable for the creation of eels. The Sargasso Sea is actually less a clearly defined body of water than a sea within a sea. Where it starts and where it ends is difficult to determine, since it eludes the usual measures of the world… The Sargasso Sea is like a dream: you can rarely pinpoint the moment you enter or exit; all you know is that you’ve been there.”

7. “A Brief History of the Codpiece, the Personal Protection for Renaissance Equipment” by Dan Piepenbring, The New Yorker

Dan Piepenbring reviews Michael Glover’s Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art, which is, yes, a pictorial history of the codpiece. “Historians… not[ed] that it was ‘so voluminous it could serve as a pocket.’ And indeed it did, offering convenient storage for one’s hankie or a stray orange, in addition to ‘ballads, bottles, napkins, pistols, hair, and even a looking glass,’ as the scholar Will Fisher has written. With great size comes great decorative responsibility, and men of means rose to the occasion. They brocaded, damasked, bejewelled, embroidered, tasseled, tinseled, and otherwise ornamented their codpieces until they became like walking Christmas trees.”

Stay safe out there,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
Sign up here

How Travel Writing May Look After the Pandemic

AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner

Speaking on a podcast about Coronavirus, Best American Travel Writing series editor Jason Wilson “declared that this was ’the extinction event’ for a certain type of travel publishing.“ In an essay for Guernica, Wilson expounds further, considering the ways travel restrictions and fears about infection will shape the way people write about travel, while acknowledging that all we can do is speculate and wait. And until then, we can read travel books like Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana as Wilson did. We can reminisce about past journeys, and we can see how the stories in future editions of Best American Travel Writing look compared to ones before COVID-19.

In the months that have passed since my pessimistic podcast appearance, I’ve had a change of heart about the future of travel writing. Of course it will survive, as it has before, even if the publishing models radically change. Travel writers, once again, will embrace new forms, experiment, borrow from other genres and find novel approaches. Many people have suggested that, once we’re free from lockdown, more modest domestic or local travel, rather than exotic foreign adventures, will take center stage. They say narratives about home might become significant and popular.

When I think of local travel, I think of Hopkins Pond, a small body of water in the wooded park near my home in Haddonfield, New Jersey. The park is not very well maintained by the county, but on sunny days it’s still beautiful. I often take long walks there around the edge of pond, where I’ll encounter a handful of people fishing, joggers, or families riding bikes. In most ways it’s a completely typical suburban recreational area.

Read the story

Public Education’s White Flight Problem

Compassionate Eye Foundation / Robert Daly / OJO Images

Livia Gershon| Longreads | June 2020 | 6 minutes (1,576 words)

Last year, the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education came and went, and America’s public schools are the most segregated they’ve been in decades. According to a report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1988 to 2016 the share of “intensely segregated” schools in which 90 to 100 percent students are non-white more than tripled. Forty percent of black students and 42 percent of Latinx students now attend these super-segregated schools, which are often in high-poverty areas. The average white student, meanwhile, attends a school that is 69 percent white. Read more…

How Covid Is Decimating British Music Journalism

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Few countries have a more robust culture of music journalism than England. “Music is such an inescapable part of the British cultural landscape,” journalist Pat Long writes in the book about the famous music weekly NME, “that it’s strange to think of a time when it wasn’t ghettoised in a weekly newspaper, when families didn’t spend their summer attending well-provisioned inter-generational rock festivals, when parents didn’t swap music with their teenage children.” Imagination is no longer necessary. British listeners have no concerts to attend. Advertisers have no events to sell. And with few stores open to sell physical issues of magazines, Covid-19 is threatening UK music publications, from Uncut to Metal Hammer, the way it has so many communities and business. For The Guardian, Laura Snapes writes about how British music publications are struggling during the pandemic, how they are working together, and what it might take to survive.

Music magazines have “been on the edge of sustainability” for a long time, says Douglas McCabe, of the media research group Enders Analysis. Print advertising has dwindled. There are plentiful free online publications. Key titles have closed: in 2018, NME axed its 66-year print incarnation (the brand survives online). Every year brings headlines about shrinking sales figures.

But many British music magazine editors and publishers say they were thriving in straitened times, at least before the pandemic. “The huge drop-off that most magazines experienced in the early 2010s has, relatively speaking, flattened out for many brands,” says the editor of Metal Hammer, Merlin Alderslade. “Most of our issues in 2019 were actually up year on year.”

Paul Geoghegan, the editor of global music magazine Songlines and managing director of Mark Allen Group music publications including Gramophone and Jazzwise, said the brand’s titles were sustainable before March. Stuart Williams, the publisher at Future Publishing – home to publications including Classic Rock and Metal Hammer – said its 13 music titles were profitable in April 2020, “when half the shops in the UK were closed and the population was barely allowed out.”

Read the story

The NHL’s Lacrosse Takeover

Bill Armstrong, who played a single NHL game in the '90s, is often overlooked as the originator of the "lacrosse-style" goal. Photo courtesy of the author.

Sam Riches | Longreads | June 2020 | 21 minutes (5,399 words)

During the third period of a late October game between the Carolina Hurricanes and the Calgary Flames, Andrei Svechnikov, a right-winger for the Hurricanes, corrals the puck deep in Calgary’s offensive zone.

Sensing the presence of the 19-year-old Russian, Flames goaltender David Rittich seals his body against the post. It’s textbook positioning, a preventive measure in case Svechnikov — the second overall pick in the 2018 NHL draft — attempts a centering pass or a sneaky shot from a bad angle. Unfortunately for Rittich, who has seen, studied, and saved a lot of shots in his life, there is no playbook for what’s about to happen. Read more…