The Longreads Blog

How Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, became a global, multibillion-dollar drug trafficking business:

Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America’s “insatiable demand for illegal drugs” is what drives the clandestine industry. It’s no accident that the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. “Poor Mexico,” its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. “So far from God and so close to the United States.”

“Cocaine Incorporated.” — Patrick Radden Keefe, The New York Time Magazine

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How rhetoric from an evangelist talk-show host led to the resignation Mitt Romney’s openly gay national-security spokesman:

Fischer’s attack against Grenell started on Friday, April 20th, with a post on Twitter. ‘Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman,’ he tweeted, soon after learning of the hire. ‘If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.’ The next Monday, Fischer opened his show—which is broadcast, he likes to say, on ‘the most feared radio network in America!’—by telling his listeners that he had ‘kicked up a dust storm in the Twitterverse.’

“Bully Pulpit.” — Jane Mayer, New Yorker

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Over the last four decades, at least 18 women have disappeared from British Columbia’s Highway 16. Inside the investigation:

In testimony to B.C.’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry—formed in 2010, mainly to investigate why it took law enforcement so long to catch Willie “the Pig Farmer” Pickton, a serial killer who preyed on Vancouver women from 1995 through 2001—First Nations bands and local community groups claimed that as many as 43 women have been killed or gone missing along Highway 16. In 2005, the RCMP created a special unit calledE-Pana (E is the RCMP designation for all things British Columbian, and Pana is an Inuit god who caretakes souls in a frozen underworld before reincarnation) to examine some of the disappearances and to determine whether another serial killer was at work. Its investigators eventually sorted through hundreds of unsolved murders, missing women, and sexual assaults in B.C. over the past four decades and found that 18 cases shared enough similarities to be possibly linked.

“The Vanishing.” — Bob Friel, Outside

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A new lab-brewed drug epidemic has law-enforcement officials scrambling to contain it

The last four decades have seen plenty of whipped-up hysteria about various fad intoxicants of the moment. But the fear generated by bath salts seems well earned. Dr. Mark Ryan, director at the Louisiana Poison Center, called bath salts ‘the worst drug’ he has seen in his 20 years there. ‘With LSD, you might see pink elephants, but with this drug, you see demons, aliens, extreme paranoia, heart attacks, and superhuman strength like Superman,’ Ryan has said. ‘If you had a reaction, it was a bad reaction.’

Starting in late 2010, an influx of violent, irrational, self-destructive users began to congest hospital ERs throughout the States. A 19-year-old West Virginia man claimed he was high on bath salts when he stabbed his neighbor’s pygmy goat while wearing women’s underwear; a Mississippi man skinned himself alive while under the influence. Users staggered in, or were carried in, consumed by extreme panic, tachycardia, deep paranoia, and heart-attack symptoms. (Perhaps the most infamous incident tied to bath salts is Rudy Eugene’s horrific naked face-eating attack in Miami in May, although conclusive toxicology reports have yet to be released; still, the fact that this feels like the closest thing to a credible explanation for chewing a homeless man’s head for 18 minutes speaks volumes about the drug’s reputation.)

“Bath Salts: Deep in the Heart of America’s New Drug Nightmare.” — Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Spin

What to Do?

[Fiction] A man’s romance with a psychic:

The psychic from the Third Base suckered drunk-me into getting a reading: twenty buckaroos. She had a table set up and was circling the bar in her hoop earrings and a fake mole that was supposed to be gypsy somehow, looking for customers. Real gypsies have a hair coming out of that mole, but hers was bald. Real gypsies don’t have breast implants either, but she had those too.

I told her, ‘Say something about me first so that I know this is for real. That’s a lot of money. Look into the shithead future real fast.’ That’s how high my expectations were.

‘You like to drink,’ she said. ‘You can’t dance. You’re looking for women.’

‘That’s not psychic,’ I said. ‘This is a loser bar.’

“What to Do?” — Sean Ennis, Swink

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An open conversation with a man who pays for sex, and why he does it:

Rumpus: With any other job, it would be “working an extra shift” the doing more in order to buy shoes or pay for a vacation, but you’re also talking about another aspect of sex work: The part where one crosses lines drawn in the sand. At several points, I had disdain for certain acts, but when I felt trapped or needed rent or wanted those shoes, I crossed those self-imposed boundaries. The result was unexpected: It made me feel a stubborn and unspoken alliance with women I’d previously judged.  But it also felt like a relapse of sorts.

Max: Yeah, you go into this with a list of things you’ll never do. Lines you’ll never cross. You’ll never get a blowjob without a condom (until you find out how uncommon covered blowjobs are, and well, that’s an easy temptation to give in to.) You’ll never see a girl who’s being coerced by a pimp, and then you find out that, well, you’ve been doing it, and now what? Try harder to screen people? You’ll never see a girl who’s got a bad drug habit, but then you run into one, and now what? That list of things you’d never do becomes the list of things you’ve done.

“Paying to Play: Interview with a John.” — Antonia Crane, The Rumpus

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Bill Gates and George Soros are handing out billions, but there are downsides to foundation giving:

The new focus on metrics has brought with it a new breed of nonprofit and for-profit partnerships. Foundations such as the Omidyar Network, established in 2004 by eBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, provide both investments in for-profit companies and charitable grants.

This approach is called by various names such as ‘social entrepreneurship,’ ‘venture philanthropy,’ and ‘philanthrocapitalism,’ but it all amounts to rather the same thing: controlling charitable giving in order to produce measurable, ‘sustaining’ and/or profitable results.

‘Philanthrocapitalism’ is an especially curious coinage, giving rise to a hitherto unarticulated contrast—namely, with the kind of capitalism that is not-philanthro-.

“Our Billionaire Philanthropists.” — Maria Bustillos, The Awl

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The demolition of the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago was supposed to open up new opportunities for low-income families. But the community has disappeared:

The fifteen-story high-rise was known by its address, 1230 N. Burling. Already stripped of every window, door, appliance, and cabinet, the monolith was like a giant dresser without drawers. The teeth tore off another hunk of the exterior, revealing the words I NEED MONEY painted in green and gold across an inside wall. Chicago was once home to the second-largest stock of public housing in the nation, with nearly 43,000 units and a population in the hundreds of thousands. Since the mid-1990s, though, the city has torn down eighty-two public-housing high-rises citywide, including Cabrini’s twenty-four towers. In 2000, the city named the ongoing purge the Plan for Transformation, a $1.5 billion, ten-year venture that would leave the city with just 15,000 new or renovated public-housing family units, plus an additional 10,000 for senior citizens. Like many other U.S. cities, Chicago wanted to shift from managing public housing to become instead what the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) called ‘a facilitator of housing opportunities.’

“The Last Tower: The Decline and Fall of Public Housing.” — Ben Austen, Harper’s

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Musician Jim White on Knoxville, and how Cormac McCarthy saved his life:

In my left coat pocket is a dog-eared copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, which happens to be set here in Knoxville way back in the ’50s. I’m not much of a planner, so to some extent or another (depending on your take on the mechanics of serendipity) it’s sheer coincidence that it ended up in my suitcase as I packed for this tour. Likewise I’m no great bibliophile, certainly not one of those types who might find it exhilarating to locate and use, say, the exact toilet that Jack Kerouac took a shit in while writing On the Road. That said, I’m happy it ended up with me here in Knoxville, as the city itself is practically a character in the novel. Gay and Central Streets, where Walter’s barbershop is, are mentioned frequently, so it’s interesting to be in the physical locale where the action takes place. I’m about halfway through Suttree this time around. I’ve read it front to back many times, usually when events in my life have gone spiraling out of control and that black cloud of depression that’s dogged me off and on for much of my adult years descends.

“The Bottom.” — Jim White, Radio Silence

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Twenty years later, how Michael, Magic and the NBA’s best players sought to regain U.S. dominance in Olympic basketball:

Nathaniel Butler (official NBA photographer): We were sitting on the baseline. Magic is backing a guy down, and the guy on defense is yelling at his bench, “Now! Now!” And on the bench, one guy’s pulling a camera out of his sock and taking a photo of his teammate.

Hubbard: One time they were playing against Venezuela, and the guy who was guarding Magic kept on saying, “I need your shoes! I need your shoes!”During the game. And Magic goes, “Look, I need my shoes!”

“The Dream Will Never Die: An Oral History of the Dream Team.” — Lang Whitaker, GQ

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