The Longreads Blog

An oral history of the first all-sports talk station, WFAN, which included Don Imus, Mike Francesca, and Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo:

Jeff Smulyan (founder and CEO, Emmis Broadcasting): Imus was just getting out of rehab when we bought the station. His agent was a friend of mine; we laughed because we had a bad radio station and a bad personality who’s probably going to be a drug addict for the rest of his life and a baseball team [the Mets] with rumors about drugs. It was kind of like the grand slam.

Mike Breen (updates, ‘Imus in the Morning’): He was a bad drunk and a drug addict. You didn’t know what you were gonna get. The first day I started working with Imus at NBC, I asked the program director to bring me back to meet him; it was two o’clock in the afternoon and he was drunk. So the program director says, ‘Can this kid fill in on sports for Don Criqui tomorrow?’ And Imus was like, ‘Sure, now get out of my office.’ He didn’t even look up. When I went in the next day, I sat down and he had no idea who I was. So he shuts his mic off and he looks at me and he says, ‘Who the f—- are you?’ I said, ‘I’m filling in for Criqui.’ He turns his mic back on and he says to Charles McCord, ‘Charles, do you know this kid? He claims he’s fillin’ in for Criqui.’ Now this is on the air, this part. So he spent the next 10 minutes interviewing me, asking me how I got to work on his show.

“The Sound and the Fury.” — Alex French and Howie Kahn, Grantland

More from Grantland

‘More Will Be Revealed’: Advice to a Grieving Father

Cheryl Strayed’s collection of advice pieces, Tiny Beautiful Things, is one of our favorite collections. Here, she responds to a father who is grieving the loss of his son, who was killed by a drunk driver:

17. You have the power to withstand this sorrow. We all do, though we all claim not to. We say, ‘I couldn’t go on,’ instead of saying we hope we won’t have to. That’s what you’re saying in your letter to me, Living Dead Dad. You’ve made it so fucking long without your sweet boy and now you can’t take it anymore. But you can. You must.

18. More will be revealed. Your son hasn’t yet taught you everything he has to teach you. He taught you how to love like you’ve never loved before. He taught you how to suffer like you’ve never suffered before. Perhaps the next thing he has to teach you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.

Read the story

Buy the book

[Fiction] Excerpt from What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award: A father tells his son the truth about a man who beat him during wartime:

Not long into the fighting, an Israeli platoon came to rest at a captured Egyptian camp to the east of Bir Gafgafa, in the Sinai Desert. There Private Shimmy Gezer (formerly Shimon Bibberblat, of Warsaw, Poland) sat down to eat at a makeshift outdoor mess. Four armed commandos sat down with him. He grunted. They grunted. Shimmy dug into his lunch.

A squad mate of Shimmy came over to join them. Professor Tendler (who was then only Private Tendler, not yet a pro- fessor, and not yet even in possession of a high school degree) placed the tin cup that he was carrying on the edge of the table, taking care not to spill his tea. Then he took up his gun and shot each of the commandos in the head.

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.” — Nathan Englander (Excerpt on NPR)

See more fiction

After a Leukemia doctor and researcher develops the disease himself, he finds an effective treatment when his colleagues sequence his cancer genome:

Dr. Wartman’s doctors realized then that their last best hope for saving him was to use all the genetic know-how and technology at their disposal.

After their month of frantic work to beat cancer’s relentless clock, the group, led by Richard Wilson and Elaine Mardis, directors of the university’s genome institute, had the data. It was Aug. 31.

The cancer’s DNA had, as expected, many mutations, but there was nothing to be done about them. There were no drugs to attack them.

But the other analysis, of the cancer’s RNA, was different. There was something there, something unexpected.

“Genetic Gamble: New Approaches to Fighting Cancer.” — A three-part series by The New York Times on the new frontier of cancer treatment.

• Part One: “In Treatment for Leukemia, Glimpses of the Future”

• Part Two: “A New Treatment’s Tantalizing Promise Brings Heartbreaking Ups and Downs”

• Part Three: “A Life-Death Predictor Adds to a Cancer’s Strain”

[Not single-page] The origins and consequences of the Obama administration’s focus on drone strikes to kill enemy combatants:

Of course, the danger of the Lethal Presidency is that the precedent you establish is hardly ever the precedent you think you are establishing, and whenever you seem to be describing a program that is limited and temporary, you are really describing a program that is expansive and permanent. You are a very controlled man, and as Lethal President, it’s natural for you to think that you can control the Lethal Presidency. It’s even natural for you to think that you can control the Lethal Presidencies of other countries, simply by the power of your example. But the Lethal Presidency incorporates not just drone technology but a way ofthinking about drone technology, and this way of thinking will be your ultimate export. You have anticipated the problem of proliferation. But an arms race involving drones would be very different from an arms race involving nuclear arms, because the message that spread with nuclear arms was that these weapons must never be used. The message that you are spreading with drones is that they must be — that using them amounts to nothing less than our moral duty.

“The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama.” — Tom Junod, Esquire

More from Tom Junod

A minute-by-minute account of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the American Care Act, and how some news organizations initially got it wrong:

Into his conference call, the CNN producer says (correctly) that the Court has held that the individual mandate cannot be sustained under the Commerce Clause, and (incorrectly) that it therefore ‘looks like’ the mandate has been struck down.  The control room asks whether they can ‘go with’ it, and after a pause, he says yes.

The Fox producer reads the syllabus exactly the same way, and reports that the mandate has been invalidated.  Asked to confirm that the mandate has been struck down, he responds: ‘100%.’

The Bloomberg team finishes its review, having read the Commerce Clause holding and then turned the page to see that the Court accepted the government’s alternative argument that the individual mandate is constitutional under Congress’s tax power.  At 10:07:32 – 52 seconds after the Chief Justice began speaking – Bloomberg issues an alert:  ’OBAMA’S HEALTH-CARE OVERHAUL UPHELD BY U.S.SUPREME COURT.’  Bloomberg is first, and it is right.

“We’re Getting Wildly Differing Assessments.” — Tom Goldstein, SCOTUSblog

More #longreads on health care

[Fiction] A run-in with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer after a rodeo:

Victor saw Nachee and Billy Cosa looking toward the entrance and turned his head to see a Riverside County deputy talking to the manager. Some more law was outside. They’d go around to the kitchen and check on Mexicans without any papers. Victor saw the Riverside deputy look his way. No, he was looking at the white guy at the next table, the guy wearing a straw Stetson he’d fool with, raising the curled brim and setting it close on his eyes again. Never changed his expression. He had size, but looked ten years past herding cows. It was the man’s U.S. Government jacket told Victor he was none of their business.

“Ice Man.” — Elmore Leonard, The Atlantic

See more fiction

A percussionist’s nerve-wracking audition for the Boston Symphony Orchestra:

The classical audition ranks among the world’s toughest job interviews. Each applicant has 10 minutes at most to play in a way so memorable that he stands out among a lineup of other world-class musicians. Tetreault has prestigious degrees from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music in London, and he’s studied under the world-renowned performer Christopher Lamb, but at his audition, the only thing that will matter is how he performs in the most pressure-packed few minutes of his life. If he squeezes his glockenspiel mallet too hard, choking the sound, or if he overthinks the dotted rhythm or fails to adjust to the BSO’s oddly scaled xylophone bars and misses a few notes, the whole thing will be over. Mark Volpe, managing director of the Boston Symphony, sums up the audition process this way: ‘I want someone to be so brilliant that there’s no question.’

“The Audition.” — Jennie Dorris, Boston magazine

More from Boston mag

[Fiction] A young girl encounters an older group of students:

The morning of the abduction, Mrs. Allsop—dishevelled in a limp linen shirtdress—was wielding her secateurs up a ladder, pruning the climbing roses. She was immensely capable; tall and big-boned with a pink, pleasant face and dry yellow hair chopped sensibly short. Jane admired her mother greatly, especially when she transformed herself at night, for a concert in London or a Rotary Club dinner, with clip-on pearl earrings and lipstick and scent, a frilled taupe satin stole. Jane coveted this stole and tried it on when her mother was at the shops, making sultry faces at herself in the mirror—although sultry was the last thing her mother was, and everyone told Jane that she looked just like her. She certainly seemed to have her mother’s figure, with not much bust, no waist to speak of, and a broad flat behind.

‘Why don’t you call up some of your old friends?’ Mrs. Allsop suggested from the ladder top. ‘Invite them round to play Ping-Pong.’

“An Abduction.” — Tessa Hadley, The New Yorker

See more #fiction

A marriage of convenience between two socialites in D.C. leads to murder:

Drath’s murder seized the front page of The Washington Post, which was as awkwardly tangled in the story as the rest of the city’s elite. One of The Post’s columnists attended the couple’s dinners, as did the reporter who covered the case for The Wall Street Journal. Over the years, Muth flooded the in-boxes of his media contacts with messages containing his thoughts on the day’s events and knowing tidbits of insider gossip — speculations about covert operations gone awry or rumors about fights between top generals — a habit that didn’t end with his wife’s death. Four days after he supposedly found Drath’s body, Muth forwarded a note that he originally sent to officials in the Pentagon. He intimated that the police considered Drath to be the unfortunate victim of an assassin who was hunting for him. ’ have to take a slain wife out to Arlington,’ he wrote, ‘mourn her, then find her killer.’

“The Worst Marriage in Georgetown.” Franklin Foer, New York Times Magazine