The Longreads Blog

Yes, We Do Have Bananas Today (For the Bargain Price of $17)

two perfect watermelons on pedestals at japan's famed sembikiya fruit store
Behold, the $45 watermelon at Sembikiya. (Photo by Jen Leonard via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0).

For Roads & Kingdoms, Bianca Bosker explores the world of high-end Japanese fruit: $500 strawberries and $27,000 melons. The epicenter of the luxury-fruit business is Sembikiya, the Bergdorf Goodman of fruit markets.

When I arrive in the marble lobby of the high-rise to which I’d been directed, I pass back and forth in front of what appears to be a jewelry store before finally realizing it is Sembikiya. Dark, polished wood and sheer curtains line the walls, and sparkling chandeliers shaped like exploding snowflakes twinkle overhead. Glass display cases hold meticulous rows of fruit tended by prim women in starched black uniforms and berets ready to share anecdotes about the sweetness of the pears ($19 each), or Sekai-ichi apples ($24 each). Middle-aged women with Chanel bags and teased up-dos inspect plump, jade-colored Seto grapes swaddled in crisp white paper, while their husbands admire the altarlike case of muskmelons at the center of the floor, each one perched on its own wooden box lined with mint-colored paper ($125 each).

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Month 13: What Happens After the Year-Long Syrian Refugee Sponsorship Ends?

Tima Kurdi, left, who lives in the Vancouver area, lifts up her 5-month-old nephew Sherwan Kurdi after her brother Mohammad Kurdi and his family, who escaped conflict in Syria, arrived at Vancouver International Airport, Monday, Dec. 28, 2015, in Richmond, British Columbia. Kurdi's three-year-old nephew, Alan Kurdi, drowned along with his five-year-old brother and their mother while crossing the waters between Turkey and Greece in September. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)

It’s a year-long commitment to privately sponsor a Syrian refugee family in Canada, where sponsorship includes funding and helping the family navigate Canadian culture and society. Sponsors assist newcomers with daily tasks of living, including grocery shopping, banking, getting jobs, learning English, and ferrying families to appointments and activities. In the fourth and final installment of Refugees WelcomeThe New York Times’ year-long series on Syrian refugees in Canada — Jodi Kantor and Catrin Einhorn profile the Hajj family and members of their sponsorship group, reporting on what happens at month 13 — the point at which the sponsorship agreement officially ends.

Still, with the deadline nearing, the Hajj sponsors faced uncomfortable, nagging questions: Were they doing too much for the Syrian family? Should they stand back and stop acting as chauffeurs, planners and all-around fixers? Were they willing to let the family make mistakes? Even if they wanted to stop helping, would they be able to?

The sponsors, mostly retirees, had the time to help, and they thrived on their shared sense of mission. They wanted so much for the Hajjes: not just the basics, like language and literacy, but for them to participate in the mainstream of Canadian life. They could not bear the thought of the family becoming isolated, the parents marginalized, the children missing out on activities their own children had taken for granted.

One morning in February, Moutayam’s school bus failed to appear, so the boy dialed one sponsor after another until he got Ms. Karas, who rushed right over instead of letting his mother figure it out. She feared the boy would miss a day of school if she did not step in.

“The dependency comes from both sides,” said Sam Nammoura, a refugee advocate who observed similar situations in Calgary, Alberta, where he served as a liaison between sponsors and Syrians. “The newcomers fear taking risks, and the minute they take a risk, the sponsor thinks, ‘They don’t speak English, I will help them,’” he said.

Across the country, as Month 13 turned into Months 14 and 15, the early results of private sponsorship of Syrians looked a lot like Mr. Hajj’s progress — still tentative, but showing forward motion. According to early government figures, about half of privately sponsored adults were working full or part time.

As a group, they were outpacing the thousands more refugees who did not have sponsors and were being resettled by the government — only about 10 percent of them had jobs (on the whole, they were less educated and had higher rates of serious health problems and other needs). Previous refugees to Canada over the past decade — a mix of Iraqis, Afghans, Colombians, Eritreans and more — had followed the same pattern, with privately sponsored refugees more likely to be employed after a year at similar rates.

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Treating the Insects of the Mind

Another woman, who lives in Atlanta, said she was misdiagnosed with scabies, and then humiliated in a hospital corridor by a doctor shouting that she was psychotic. She agreed to see a psychiatrist, but is still convinced that her skin is covered with bites. When she scratches, red, black, or white specks come out; they look like roach turds or eggs, she said. “Anybody with eyes can’t help but see it.”

For another Atlanta woman, a psychiatrist recognized the problem behind her itchiness and her obsessive cleaning, but those appointments haven’t helped. “She wants me to cut down on the cleaning … but in my mind I can’t stop, because if my kids start getting more attacked and I haven’t cleaned …” she said over the phone. “I’m sitting here right now and I feel things crawling all over my feet. I’ve been tested for neuropathy, MS, and cancer. I’ve been tested for everything.”

By now, she hopes the condition is psychological; she just can’t convince herself of it. “It’s ruined my life,” she said. She began to cry.

In STAT, journalist Eric Boodman profiles the etymologists who have the unusual task of helping the public deal with all kinds of insect-related issues, including working with people who suffer from insects scientists cannot find. It’s part of an increasingly-recognized condition known as delusional parasitosis, or DP, and neither science nor medicine understand much about it.

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We’re Living in the Golden Age of the Corporate Takedown

Elizabeth Holmes. Photo: AP Images

Miki Agrawal, co-founder and “She-EO” of menstrual underwear phenom Thinx, raised eyebrows when she stepped down from her role in the company in early March. Agrawal had long been infamous for her company’s boundary-pushing ads and her well-publicized hesitance to use the word “feminist.” Within days of Agrawal’s announcement, Racked published a gripping article examining corporate dysfunction and alleged sexism at Thinx, and Agrawal struck back with a lengthy post on Medium that detailed her “incredible ride” with the company. “I didn’t put HR practices in place because I was on the road speaking, doing press, brand partnerships, editing all of the creative and shouting from the rooftops about Thinx,” she wrote. Less than a week later, Agrawal was accused of sexual harassment by a former employee.

Such is the power of the corporate hit piece: Fueled by eyewitness accounts, scorned ex-employees, and juicy tidbits about a CEO’s bad behavior, a corporate identity that took years to build can unravel in days. These piquant stories might smack of a slow-motion trainwreck, but they satisfy more than our inner gossips and gawkers. Today, the myth of a CEO is often of their own making—once minted by years of climbing the corporate ladder, now CEOs are made in weeks or months. CEO, we are told, is less a work status than a state of mind.

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Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Minda Honey | Longreads | March 2017 | 12 minutes (2,986 words)

“And sometimes you meet yourself back where you started, but stronger.”
—Yrsa Daley-Ward

I sat alone at a picnic table sipping a hot can of beer in Sequoia National Park under the stingy shade of a nearby tree. I was surrounded by families. White families. Sequoia was the first of four national parks I had planned to visit on my summer road trip from Southern California to a writer’s retreat in Lake Tahoe, and from Lake Tahoe to my hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. I needed to get out and away. I’d just completed two years as a POC in an MFA program. Two years in classrooms at long tables surrounded by faces as white as the paper we printed our work on. I felt like the black text on that paper, forcefully marching across the landscape of my peers’ white lives.

I’d decided to spend four weeks as a woman of color in wide-open spaces detoxing from whiteness. But when I pitched my tent, I hadn’t known that about 80% of National Parks visitors and employees are white. Essentially, I’d leapt from the Ivory Tower into a snowbank. I should have known that Black folks weren’t the target audience for all those memes about the cleansing, revitalizing effects of the Great Outdoors. I should have known from the people in the images. Always white people in zip-up North Face fleeces, stretchy yoga pants, and hiking boots. But I didn’t know, and I gassed up my car and went.

It was July, the busiest time of year for the National Park Services. A narrow road ran past my campsite and the gravel grumbled in protest at the occasional passing car. No one bothered me. No one acknowledged me. I was just a lone Black woman day-drinking at a picnic table. I’d drained three cans with no buzz before realizing it was only 3% alcohol. It would do nothing to calm my anxiety about spending my first night in a tent alone.

The only other Black person I’d seen at the park was with his white wife and their children. As they ushered their brood onto the path that led to the giant sequoias, I heard him speak and suspected he was African. I’m not sure if he saw me, if he was tallying Black bodies like I was. Read more…

24-Hour Competitive Rock Climbing: Finger Tips as Rough as Rhino Skin

MR Free climber in action on a rock (Thomas Aichinger/VWPics via AP Images)

At Outside, Eva Holland profiles the sweaty, rhino-skinned, costumed competitors of Horseshoe Hell — a competitive rock-climbing race in Arkansas, in which participants attempt to complete as many climbs as they can in a 24-hour period in blazing temperatures.

The craziest rock-climbing event in the world happens annually in the Ozarks of Arkansas, in a u-shaped canyon with enough routes for 24 straight hours of nonstop ascents. They call it Horseshoe Hell, but don’t be fooled: for outdoor athletes who love physical challenges with some partying thrown in, it’s heaven.

From 10 a.m. today to 10 a.m. tomorrow, two-person teams will climb nonstop—or as close to nonstop as they can manage—­racking up points for each route they complete. To be considered official finishers, each climber will have to send at least one route per hour; to automatically qualify for next year, each will have to do 100. Some teams will climb hundreds of pitches.

Time crawls by in a blur of increasing pain and exhaustion. At 4 a.m., with six hours to go, there’s a scramble of activity as each team completes a mandatory check-in, the event volunteers verifying that nobody is so thrashed that they become a danger to themselves or others. The temperature has dropped to a halfway-reasonable 67 degrees, but the humidity has climbed to 98 percent. The night is a swamp, the darkness punctured only by headlamps bobbing up and down the rock walls. The cicadas scream. Flying, biting insects charge into every small pool of light.

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Seven Stories About the Science Behind Fast Food

(AP Photo/Sunday Alamba, File)

I am a pizza apostate. Not only do I use a fork and knife whenever I eat pizza, I also sometimes bypass my normal slice joint for the siren call of deliciously buttered-and-garlic salted crust that only Dominos can deliver.

According to Bloomberg, I am not the only one who can’t resist the Michigan chain’s pies: the company is now worth a staggering $9 billion—its share price has risen more than 2,000 percent since 2010 (outpacing the likes of Google and Apple)—and Dominos has not only been brought back to life, it is now the leading force in the intersection of fast food and technology. As Susan Berfield writes,

Domino’s has always understood the importance of not having to go anywhere. Although you can still walk into a restaurant if you must, there are at least a dozen ways to order a Domino’s pizza in absentia. Some are self-explanatory: mobile apps, Apple Watch, Facebook Messenger. Others need some explanation. To order via Twitter, you must create an online account, save a pizza as your favorite (known as your Easy Order), and connect it to your Twitter account. Then tweet a pizza emoji to @dominos. “We’ll know who you are, what pizza you want, your default location and payment,” Maloney says. “We send a ‘Sounds awesome, are you sure?’ You send a thumbs up.” But if you want to order something other than your favorite, you’re out of luck.

Maloney clears away the remains of our lunch (Pacific Veggie, thin crust) to show me option 12 on his phone: zero-click ordering. “This will freak you out,” he says. “What’s the easiest way to order? When you don’t have to do anything.” One day Maloney and Garcia were in the car with their ad guys, dreaming of how to one-up Amazon’s one-click ordering. Three months later they had their zero-click app, which does require one click to start. “Tap the Domino’s icon to open it and find my Easy Order,” Maloney says. That’s it. “I have 10 seconds before it automatically places the order.” A big countdown clock appears on Maloney’s screen. If he does nothing, his Easy Order, a 12-inch hand-tossed pizza, will be on its way to his home.

While Dominos is at the forefront of our fast food, it isn’t the only company to have paired food science and tech to deliver a product that is utterly craveable. The following are some of the best pieces in the past several years to capture this culinary shift. Read more…

The Anatomy of a TV Show: How ‘The Americans’ Is Made

Vox writer Caroline Framke shadowed the crew of FX’s Cold War spy drama The Americans during the production of season four episode “Clark’s Place” and, last year, explained how the TV show was made. With episode four of season five airing tonight, we revisit Framke’s time on the set, as well as co-showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields’ thoughts on carefully shaping the entire narrative of the series, which is arguably one of the best yet underrated shows on television:

“My brain right now is 90 percent focused on the episodes that we’re writing and shooting now,” Weisberg said. “I have about 10 percent of my brain that is thinking about next season and the whole story arc for the series.”

. . . Fields doesn’t argue the point; he loves looking at the big picture. “If you’re just doing the episode that’s in front of you,” he said, eyes lighting up, “you’re not telling a big story.”

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The Immigration-Obsessed, Polarized, Garbage-Fire Election of 1800

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Images via Wikimedia Commons

A. Roger Ekirch | American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution | Pantheon | February 2017 | 33 minutes (8,149 words) 

Below is an excerpt from American Sanctuary, by A. Roger Ekirch.

For background, it is important to know that a seaman named Jonathan Robbins participated in a mutiny on the HMS Hermione in 1797, the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history. Afterward, he joined the American navy, but he was eventually recognized and jailed. To justify his actions, Robbins claimed he was an American citizen who had been impressed—that is, captured and forced into servitude—by the British navy. However, his American citizenship was disputed. The British sought his extradition, which the president, the Federalist John Adams, granted—an action which had disastrous political consequences for his party. Robbins was found guilty by a British naval court and hanged from the yardarm of the HMS Acasta in 1799.

This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

Revisiting the History of the Oakland Raiders Courtesy of Hunter S. Thompson

Credit: NFL/Twitter

The Oakland Raiders have been a thorn in the NFL’s side for decades. From pugnacious owner Al Davis to the team’s raucously rowdy fans and years of mediocrity, the Raiders reveled in being the league’s black sheep. And on the rare occasion when the team was competitive, like during the late 1970s and early ’80s when the franchise won three Super Bowls, the Silver and Black still seemed to thumb its collective nose at the league’s Brooks Brothers-outfitted executives on NYC’s Park Avenue.

Well, those execs enacted their own form of revenge: thanks to a league vote this week, the Raiders will leave the Bay Area for Las Vegas. Much like the neutering of Cleveland’s Dawg Pound (when the Cleveland Browns left for Baltimore in the late 1990s), the vote was put to the NFL owners, and only one—the Miami Dolphins—voted against the move, marking the third team in the past 14 months to relocate. While the Raiders’ new stadium won’t be ready until 2019 (at the earliest), the Raiders will have a two-year memorial for the city that loved them like no other.

It’s worth revisiting when the Raiders were weird and good. In 1973, Rolling Stone sent Hunter S. Thompson to embed with the AFC West team. Thompson was deep into gonzo journalism by this point, and as an avid football fan, he desperately wanted to chronicle a season with what was arguably the NFL’s strangest team. Trouble was, Davis didn’t entirely trust Thompson, and neither did the Raider players, who the Rolling Stone writer plied with cocaine in order for them to open up (according to Robert Draper’s history of the groundbreaking magazine, Thompson then tried to write the coke off as a business expense).

What follows is Thompson’s first interaction with Davis as reported in Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl: No Rest for the Wretched:

…the other was a small wiry man in a tan golf jacket with a greasy duck-tail haircut who paced along the sidelines of both fields with a speedy kind of intensity that I never really noticed until he suddenly appeared very close to me and I heard him ask a sportswriter from the San Francisco Chronicle who I was and I was doing there…

The conversation took place within 10 yards of me, and I heard most of it.

“Who’s the big guy over there with the ball in his hand?” asked the man with the DA.

“His name’s Thompson,” replied Chronicle sportswriter Jack Smith. “He’s a writer for Rolling Stone.”

“The Rolling Stones? Jesus Christ! What’s he doing here? Did you bring him?”

“No, he’s writing a big article. Rolling Stone is a magazine, Al. It’s different from the Rolling Stones; they’re a rock music group… Thompson’s a buddy of George Plimpton’s, I think… and he’s also a friend of Dave Burgin’s-you remember Burgin?”

“Holy shit! Burgin! We ran him out of here with a cattle prod!”

I saw Smith laugh at this point, then he was talking again: “Don’t worry, Al. Thompson’s okay. He wrote a good book about Las Vegas.”

Good god! I thought. That’s it… If they read that book I’m finished. By this time I’d realized that this strange-looking bugger named “Al,” who looked like a pimp or a track-tout, was in fact the infamous Al Davis-general manager and de facto owner (pending settlement of a nasty lawsuit scheduled for court-action early this year) of the whole Oakland Raider operation.

Davis glanced over his shoulder at me, then spoke back to Smith: “Get the bastard out of here. I don’t trust him.”

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