The Longreads Blog

Vicissitudes, CA

[Fiction] A story about an unemployed ethnomusicologist, gray whales, and Miranda July:

‘Garfield was my favorite president,’ said Brandon.

‘James A. Garfield?’ said Kara. ‘President from March to July of 1881?’

‘From Ohio?’ she said.

‘That’s the one,’ said Brandon.

He said: ‘I think he would have proven to be an effective leader if he’d been given the chance.’

Charles put his hand on Kara’s knee.

‘That’s funny,’ said Charles. ‘Garfield’s killer, Charles Guiteau, is my favorite presidential assassin, and it’s not just because we share a name.’

“Vicissitudes, CA.” — Bryan Hurt, New England Review

More fiction

“How Much Tech Can One City Take?” — David Talbot, San Francisco magazine

More from San Francisco Magazine

The only American designer for high fashion retailer Hermés lives in Waco, Texas—and works as a postal worker:

Kermit was sitting in the living room, in an armchair covered by a red-and-white quilt. He stood up when I arrived. He was small-framed, with salt-and-pepper hair combed off his forehead. Dressed in loose khakis and an untucked plaid oxford shirt, he gave the impression of a small-town surgeon who’d just gotten off the late shift. His eyeglasses were in his hands, which continuously fidgeted while the rest of him stood still. ‘Why do you want to talk to me?’ he asked. 

I stammered something about his story, how interesting it was. He looked skeptical. ‘Why don’t you tell me what my story is,’ he said. I told him what they had said in Lyon, reciting the words almost like the first line of a fable: ‘There once was a postman who designed scarves for Hermès.’

‘Well, it’s never that simple,’ he said with a mysterious grin.

“Portrait of the Artist as a Postman.” — Jason Sheeler, Texas Monthly

More from Texas Monthly

How much blame for the financial crisis should be placed on people like Robert Rubin, former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Citigroup chairman? A fresh look at the decisions he made:

Like many Rubin defenders, Sheryl Sandberg suspects that her mentor has become a scapegoat for events beyond comprehension.’My own view is that, look, these have been hard times, and people need people to blame,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t mean they blame the right people.’

Nassim Nicholas Taleb doesn’t know Rubin personally. He admits that his antipathy, like that of so many Rubin critics, is fueled by symbolism. ‘He represents everything that’s bad in America,’ he says. ‘The evil in one person represented. When we write the history, he will be seen as the John Gotti of our era. He’s the Teflon Don of Wall Street.’ Taleb wants systemic change to prevent what he terms the ‘Bob Rubin Problem”—the commingling of Wall Street interests and the public trust—“so people like him don’t exist.’

“Rethinking Robert Rubin.” — William D. Cohan, Bloomberg Businessweek

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Narratively, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, fiction from New England Review, and a guest pick from Matthew Herper.

“The Boy They Couldn’t Kill.” — Thomas Lake, Sports Illustrated

More by Lake

A look at the 59-year-old Microsoft cofounder who has invested $500 million into the Allen Institute for Brain Science with the goal of decoding how the human brain works:

Four years later six brains have been donated and four analyzed to some degree. The project is due to be finished this year, but the first brain images, put online in 2010, are already yielding scientific results. So far, the gene expression from the first two human brains in the new atlas varies only a little, yielding hope that scientists will be able to understand some of what it all means.

How might this work? A young University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist named Bradley Voytek used software to match words that frequently appeared together in the scientific literature with matches of where genes are expressed in the Allen atlas. For instance, he found that scientists studying serotonin, the neurotransmitter hit by Prozac and Zoloft, were ignoring two brain areas where the chemical was expressed in their research. It might even play a role in migraines. This data-driven approach led to 800 new ideas about how the brain may work that scientists can now test, leading to hope that computational methods can help decipher the computer in our heads.

“Inside Paul Allen’s Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain.” — Matthew Herper, Forbes

More from Forbes

“The Birth of Bond.” — David Kamp, Vanity Fair

More by Kamp

A writer takes a trip to visit his wife’s family. What has changed in the country over the years, and what hasn’t:

For obvious reasons, the actual Cuban peso is worth much less than the other, dollar-equivalent Cuban peso, something on the order of 25 to 1. But the driver said simply, ‘No, they are equal.’

‘Really?’ my wife said. ‘No … that can’t be.’

He insisted that there was no difference between the relative values of the currencies. They were the same.

He knew that this was wrong. He probably could have told you the exchange rates from that morning. But he also knew that it had a rightness in it. For official accounting purposes, the two currencies are considered equivalent. Their respective values might fluctuate on a given day, of course, but it couldn’t be said that the CUP was worth less than the CUC That’s partly what he meant. He also meant that if you’re going to fly to Cuba from Miami and rub it in my face that our money is worth one twenty-fifth of yours, I’m gonna feed you some hilarious communist math and see how you like it. Cubans call it la doble moral. Meaning, different situations call forth different ethical codes. He wasn’t being deceptive. He was saying what my wife forced him to say.

“Where Is Cuba Going?” — John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Magazine

More by Sullivan

What end-of-life options do the terminally ill have? Should they be offered “aid in dying?”

When a patient in the Northeast contacts Compassion & Choices, he is referred to Schwarz, whose first order of business is to find out who the patient is and what his current medical situation entails. Then, Schwarz attempts to get a sense of what the patient is looking for. She tries to provide information to all callers, but to qualify for help, patients should be able to make their own decisions and be suffering, whether in a terminal stage of illness or not.

‘There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what we do,’ Schwarz said. ‘What we do is provide information about end-of-life choices to help patients make informed decisions that reflect their values and wishes. We don’t provide the means. We don’t administer. We don’t encourage or coerce. We have no agenda other than to provide complete and accurate information about end-of-life options.’

And in doing this, Schwarz’s role is to help a patient navigate the end of his life so he can maintain some control over it, instead of leaving it to doctors who are trained not only to lessen suffering but also to keep him alive and death at bay.

“Going Gently Into That Good Night.” — Daniel Krieger, Narratively