The Longreads Blog

All Dressed Up: Five Stories About Style

In my not-so-past life as a fashion magazine addict (let’s be real—I bought seven of last month’s fashion mags for a quarter each at a recent library sale), this time of year was crucial to me. What kinds of skirts would appear on the pages of Seventeen? Would I be able to afford them? Would one-piece swimsuits finally be cool? Was this the year I started blow-drying my hair?! Each issue was a mini-New Year’s. Anything was possible.

These days, I love fashion for its feminist and political sensibilities, and I am far more into comfort than trends. I work at a job where I push the style envelope, but hey, no one said anything to me when I wore combat boots every day this winter. (That doesn’t mean I’m going to start wearing shorts to the office, though, much as I crave a temperature-sensitive dapper aesthetic. Even I have my limits.) But style? Style has no limits. Wear socks with sandals. Dress as a different character every day. Admire your reflection in the subway windows. Here are five stories about our connection with the clothes we wear. Read more…

What It’s Like to Be an FBI Agent in a Border Town

Laredo, Texas. Photo by philipbarrett2003, Flickr

Lawson moved out of his extended-stay hotel and into a house in Laredo, not far from some of the Treviños’ extended family, he says. He came to appreciate the camaraderie of working the border, a destination so low on agents’ wish lists that the bureau lets them transfer wherever they want after five years. Most of the agents were young and single, since no one with any seniority lasts, and the bosses nurtured a culture that felt more like a cop shop than a federal bureau, with a loose dress code and looser language. They played poker and went to happy hour when they could.

The FBI agents felt some kinship with those from the other federal agencies in Laredo, which all share an office. There was also competitiveness, though. They were all chasing Zetas, whose fight with the Gulf Cartel had grown so violent that agents sometimes went to the border to listen to gunfights.

Joe Tone, writing in the Dallas Observer about how the Feds took down a drug cartel’s horse-racing empire.

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National Audubon Society v. Jonathan Franzen

Ghostly Bird Trace on a Window, Photo by Alan Hensel Wikimedia Commons

It’s not clear what the Audubon Society did to piss off Jonathan Franzen. But the Audubon that emerges from Franzen’s essay is a band of once-scrappy conservationists who have grown content to peddle squeaky plush toys and holiday cards; we’ve seized on climate change, apparently, in a last grab at relevance.

In order to gin up that caricature, however, Franzen, who has no journalism experience that I know of, was forced to ignore or actively distort a great deal of inconvenient truth. In fact, the very examples he cites in his piece of the kind of retail, grassroots protections we should be offering to birds (and the very kind that would presumably be subsumed in a wave of climate neurosis) were spearheaded by . . . Audubon.

—From “Friends Like These,” a short response by Mark Jannot at the National Audubon Society to Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker essay on the organization’s efforts to have bird-safe glass installed at the new Vikings stadium, and climate change’s effects on conservation efforts.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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

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Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War

Saad Hossain | Escape from Baghdad! | Unnamed Press | March 2015 | 23 minutes (6,311 words)

 

Below are the opening chapters of the novel Escape from Baghdad!, by Saad Hossain, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

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A NOTE ON THE GLOSSARY AT THE END

There is a glossary of mostly factual terms and names at the end of the text (“factual” being a relative idea open to loose interpretation (“loose interpretation” meaning we’re aiming for a 50% chance of something on the page tallying with someone else’s verified opinion.)) So, if you find yourself wondering: Who’s Moqtada Al-Sadr again? Or what does JAM stand for? Or, bless you, IED? Just refer to the helpful, mostly factual glossary. Read more…

Keeping a University Accountable: Our College Pick

A late-night encounter with a drunken classmate is at the beginning of many college sexual assault stories. But in the one Gracie Ryan tells, the woman—a third-degree taekwondo black belt—feels uncomfortable, gets up, and leaves. “Even if a girl is scared to death,” she tells Ryan, “if she walks into a room tall and confident, it’s like, don’t fuck with me.” Ryan’s article checks in on the progress of various sexual assault prevention programs offered at the University of Montana following federal investigations into mishandling of reports of sexual violence in 2012. Students formed self-defense classes. The university requires students living in dorms to undergo bystander-intervention training. Ryan checks in on each program and pairs text and photos to chronicle a university and its students trying lots of different ways, with varying success, to solve a problem that plagues too many campuses.

Fight: Missoula combats sexual assault

Gracie Ryan | Montana Kaimin | March 20, 2015 | 2,388 words (Ten minutes)

The Answer Is Never

Illustration by Devon Kelley-Yurdin

Sabine Heinlein | Longreads | April 2015 | 16 minutes (3,886 words)

 

One time, when I was in my early twenties, I shared a hospital room with a mother of many. I had a skin infection that wouldn’t respond to oral medication, and the 50-something-year-old woman had severe, inexplicable hives. Our main topic of conversation revolved around neither of our ailments. It was about my not wanting to have children. She was insistent, which seemed ironic considering her hives flared up whenever her family visited her on Sundays. I eventually compromised with the woman. Okay, I said, I will put off my decision until I reach my thirties. “You are starry-eyed,” she huffed. “You young women want it all. But you can’t have it all!” Maybe, I thought, some of us don’t want it all. Read more…

Six Years of Longreads

April 17 marks six years since we started this community—growing from just a few readers to over a million, with people now sharing stories in dozens of different languages from hundreds of publishers. Christian Jørgensen put together a really nice Storify timeline of how the Twitter hashtag #longreads first evolved.

This community also has grown from sharing stories to actually funding them. Longreads Members have already helped us finance dozens of stories from outstanding writers and publisher partners. You can see them here. (We’re also celebrating our one-year anniversary being part of the Automattic / WordPress.com family, and we couldn’t be prouder to be at a company dedicated to helping independent publishers succeed.)

Thank you to everyone has helped make this community of readers so special. We’re excited for what’s next, from new originals to live events in San Francisco and New York.

Understanding the ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ of Error

The human lapses that occurred after the computerized ordering system and pill-dispensing robots did their jobs perfectly well is a textbook case of English psychologist James Reason’s “Swiss cheese model” of error. Reason’s model holds that all complex organizations harbor many “latent errors,” unsafe conditions that are, in essence, mistakes waiting to happen. They’re like a forest carpeted with dry underbrush, just waiting for a match or a lightning strike.

Still, there are legions of errors every day in complex organizations that don’t lead to major accidents. Why? Reason found that these organizations have built-in protections that block glitches from causing nuclear meltdowns, or plane crashes, or train derailments. Unfortunately, all these protective layers have holes, which he likened to the holes in slices of Swiss cheese.

On most days, errors are caught in time, much as you remember to grab your house keys right before you lock yourself out. Those errors that evade the first layer of protection are caught by the second. Or the third. When a terrible “organizational accident” occurs — say, a space shuttle crash or a September 11–like intelligence breakdown — post hoc analysis virtually always reveals that the root cause was the failure of multiple layers, a grim yet perfect alignment of the holes in the metaphorical slices of Swiss cheese. Reason’s model reminds us that most errors are caused by good, competent people who are trying to do the right thing, and that bolstering the system — shrinking the holes in the Swiss cheese or adding overlapping layers — is generally far more productive than trying to purge the system of human error, an impossibility.

Dr. Bob Wachter writing in Backchannel about the errors that led a young patient to receive a massive overdose of antibiotics at one of the nation’s best hospitals. The above excerpt is from the third installment of a multi-part series called “The Overdose.” The series has been looking at the nature of error in tech-driven medicine.

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The 1944 Court Decision That Changed Hollywood

Olivia de Havilland in "The Dark Mirror," 1946. Photo by Jack Samuels, Flickr

The showbiz press has been abuzz all day with news of a surprise shake-up (a group of high-powered talent agents defected en masse from one top agency to another). Most of the coverage has been inside baseball, but an analysis in The Hollywood Reporter by Matthew Belloni provides some interesting insight into Hollywood history:

Consider the case of the late legendary agent, who spent most of his career at ICM before defecting to William Morris in 2007, taking with him such clients as Denzel Washington, Steve Martin and more. [Ed] Limato was under contract to ICM but when the agency tried to diminish his status, he argued, in effect, that his contract was “illegal” because it violated California’s strict “seven-year rule” for personal services contracts. That law dates back to actress Olivia de Havilland’s lawsuit against Warner Bros. in the 1940s for repeatedly extending her contract with the studio after “suspending” her for rejecting suggested roles. In 1944, the California Court of Appeal ruled that de Havilland — or any other actor, director or other talent in the entertainment industry — could not be subject to a contract to perform personal services beyond seven years from the beginning of the deal. The so-called “de Havilland law” fundamentally changed Hollywood, brought about the end of the old studio system and allowed talent agencies to amass power.

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