The Longreads Blog

A first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next:

My coach calls me up and says, ‘Listen, If you want to keep your scholarship’—by the way, he’s totally devious here —he said, ‘If you want your scholarship, all you have to do is show up for the meets. Don’t do anything else. Just show up. You don’t have to come to a single practice. You don’t have to warm up. Just show up at the meet.’

Well, I was unhappy with how the first warmup went. I didn’t think I was in good enough shape for the first warmup, but I won all my events, OK? And so before the second time I thought, I’ll just go to a few workouts, you know. And then slowly, but surely…

He was just so spot on. So then, sure enough, I’m now going to two workouts a day. I’m lifting weights and I totally get the hunger in a big, big way and my time was the third-fastest in the country. It wasn’t like the end-of-the-year time, which would be much faster, but I was really psyched that I could go that fast and do that well with just the amount of training that I had had.

“How A Career Ends: Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist.” — Rob Trucks, Deadspin

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The hype and marketing behind the “fastest man in the world”:

It’s no surprise that every sports meeting in which he participates is organized around him. When he ran in Ostrava in the spring, there were posters featuring Bolt all over the Czech city, the stadium was sold out weeks ahead and there were young blonde girls in the stands who had painted the Jamaican national colors on their cheeks.

‘Usain?’ the stadium announcer shouted.

‘Bolt!’ the crowd shouted back. And there were still three hours to go before the 100-meter race.

The other athletes were mere accessories, Olympic and world champions playing the opening act for the fastest man in the world. The journalists were interested in only two other athletes. One was Oscar Pistorius, who is running the 400-meter race on prosthetic lower legs, and the other was 800-meter runner Caster Semenya who, for a time, was rumored to be a man.

“Myths, Legends and the Making of Usain Bolt.” — Alexander Osang, Spiegel Online

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A sitcom writer recalls a memorable meeting with Al Franken in the spring of 1998:

After a few moments the telephone rang at the host’s station, which sat in the lobby, a few feet outside the dining room entrance, and about 20 feet from where I was sitting. The host answered the call, listened for a moment, then went inside and came back with Franken. The writer with whom Franken had just met, their meeting now concluded, continued through the lobby and left. Franken picked up the phone. Here’s what I heard him say:

‘Hi, honey… No, still having meetings. What? CNN? No, why?’ He listened for a long moment, and then I saw all the color drain from his face.

“Me, Al Franken and the Worst Meeting in the History of Show Business.” — Bill Barol, Boing Boing

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[Not single-page] On the lives of three gay men who live as a “throuple”:

It is important, perhaps, that each pair within the throuple has a private bond: Jason and Adrian have their history, ­Jason and Benny work together, and ­Benny and Adrian are close in age. Benny tells me there is zero jealousy among the three. ‘That’s probably the thing that leaves people the most incredulous,’ he says. ‘It just doesn’t exist with us. If it did, then our relationship sure as hell would not have lasted as long as it has.’ Sometimes there are pangs of jealousy over guys outside of the relationship. But that, Benny says, is rare.

Most of the men’s parents are not aware of the arrangement (and so I have agreed not to include Jason’s and Adrian’s full names). In a way, they’ve eloped.

“He & He & He.” — Molly Young, New York magazine

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Alfred Hitchcock made Tippi Hedren into a star—and then sabotaged her career when she rejected his advances:

It started at the end of The Birds. To depict the notorious final sequence, when Melanie is attacked by dozens of birds on her own in an upstairs bedroom, Hedren was reassured that mechanical birds would be used. Yet Hitchcock had always planned otherwise. She arrived on set to discover cages of live birds were being put in position for the terrifying denouement. The reality was as horrific as the film. ‘I just kind of did it,’ says Hedren, with her eyes shut. ‘It was hardly even acting. They put bands around my waist and these bands had elastics pulled in different places through my dress. And the bird trainers tied the elastics to the feet of the birds, so they were all around me. One was even tied to my shoulder. At one point, it jumped up and almost clawed my eye.’

The torment went on for five days. ‘At the end, I was so exhausted I just sat in the middle of the stage, sobbing.’ In the BBC film, Hedren is shown with clothes ripped, skin bleeding from pecks, hysterical, while Hitchcock impassively looks on, almost as if he is willing his film to break her.

“Hitchcock’s Girl.” — Rosie Millard, Financial Times

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A look at the rights of same-sex parents after a mother abducts her daughter and heads to Nicaragua after a civil union dissolves:

Isabella’s tumultuous life has embodied some of America’s bitterest culture wars — a choice, as Ms. Miller said in a courtroom plea, shortly before their desperate flight, ‘between two diametrically opposed worldviews on parentage and family.’

Isabella was 7 when she and Ms. Miller jumped into a car in Virginia, leaving behind their belongings and a family of pet hamsters to die without food or water. Supporters drove them to Buffalo, where they took a taxi to Canada and boarded a flight to Mexico and then Central America.

Ms. Miller, 44, is wanted by the F.B.I. and Interpol for international parental kidnapping. In their underground existence in this impoverished tropical country, she and Isabella have been helped by evangelical groups who endorse her decision to flee rather than to expose Isabella to the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ of her other legal mother, Janet Jenkins.

“Which Mother for Isabella? Civil Union Ends in an Abduction and Questions.” — Erik Eckholm, New York Times

A memoir of “growing up black, on parole, in Mississippi”:

I enroll at Jackson State University in the Spring semester, where my mother teaches Political Science. Even though, I’m not really living at home, everyday Mama and I fight over my job at Cutco and her staying with her boyfriend and her not letting me use the car to get to my second job at an HIV hospice since my license is suspended. Really, we’re fighting because she raised me to never ever forget I was on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking the king’s English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students and most importantly, always remembering that no matter what, white folks will do anything to get you.

Mama’s antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom; it’s to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain’t no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.

“How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance.” — Kiese Laymon, Gawker

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For centuries, humans who were infected with the rabies virus had a fatality rate of 100 percent. A new treatment is providing hope, but its effectiveness is being called into question:

Not long ago, the medical response to this grim situation would have been little more than ‘comfort care’: administration of sedatives and painkillers to ease the suffering. Untreated, this suffering can be unbearable to watch, let alone experience. That telltale difficulty in swallowing, known as hydrophobia, results in desperately thirsty patients whose bodies rebel involuntarily whenever drink is brought to their lips. Soon fevers spike, and the victims are subject to violent convulsions as well as sudden bouts of aggression; their cries of agony, as expressed through a spasming throat, can produce the impression of an almost animal bark. Eventually the part of the brain that controls autonomic functions, like respiration and circulation, stops working, and the patients either suffocate or die in cardiac arrest. A decade ago, the only choice was to sedate them so their deaths would arrive with as little misery as possible.

But today, after millennia of futility, hospitals have an actual treatment to try. It was developed in 2004 by a pediatrician in Milwaukee named Rodney Willoughby, who, like the vast majority of American doctors, had never seen a case of rabies before. (In the US, there are usually fewer than five per year.) Yet Willoughby managed to save a young rabies patient, a girl of 15, by using drugs to induce a deep, week-long coma and then carefully bringing her out of it. It was the first documented case of a human surviving rabies without at least some vaccination before the onset of symptoms.

“Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery.” — Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik, Wired

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, The Rumpus, Financial Times, Newsweek, fiction from Boston Review, plus a guest pick from Brian Kahn.

A review of new book Demon Fish and the truth about sharks—from their mating rituals to the real odds of being attacked: 

There were 75 verified shark attacks last year, and 12 fatalities. Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to be hospitalised by a Christmas tree ornament than by a shark. Meanwhile, to supply the shark fin soup trade alone, an estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year. Many shark populations have declined by 70 per cent or more in the last thirty years. One reason little is done about this is that although their fins fetch high prices, shark fisheries are of negligible economic value compared to, say, tuna or cod or herring, so little is done to protect stocks. And then of course humans tend to make more of a fuss over animals we can relate to – because they stand on two legs or live in charming family units, or are unthreateningly charismatic. One of the recent PR successes of the shark conservationists is the ‘walking shark’, which crawls along the sea bottom on its fins and has an appealing little face. The best-protected species are the big, peaceful filter feeders, the basking shark and particularly the whale shark, with its photogenic polka dots and mysterious long-range migration patterns. But we’re gradually becoming more enlightened. The third best-protected species is the great white, described approvingly here by E.O. Wilson as ‘one of the four or five last great predators of humanity’.

“Don’t Wear Yum-Yum Yellow.” — Theo Tait, London Review of Books

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