The Longreads Blog

A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1953)

[Fiction] A grandmother’s ruminations on a Southern road trip:

The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. ‘Now look here, Bailey,’ she said, ‘see here, read this,’ and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. ‘Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.’

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” (1953) Flannery O’Connor

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Featured Longreader: Hugh Lilly, film critic and blogger. See his story picks from the New Yorker, Triple Canopy, GQ, plus more on his #longreads page.

The complicated business of helping Cuban baseball talent find their way to the U.S., and eventually the Major League:

At some point — either before leaving Cuba or postdefection — every player needs a baseball agent. The seedier practitioners of this trade are often called buscónes, or searchers. Sometimes they bully clients into paying. ‘I’ve heard of agents who hold players at gunpoint,’ says Gus Dominguez, a Cuban-American from Los Angeles who has negotiated contracts for major-league Cuban exiles such as Rey Ordóñez and Yuniesky Betancourt. ‘I’ve heard of agents who threaten to break their clients’ legs or arms.’

Dominguez should know about the dark seams of the business. In 2006, he was indicted for smuggling ballplayers through Key West. The feds built their case on the word of a convicted drug trafficker who claimed Dominguez had paid him $225,000 — borrowed from major-league catcher Henry Blanco — for the work.

“Cuban Baseball Agents: Risks and Lies.” — Gus Garcia-Roberts, Miami New Times

See more #longreads about baseball

On riots and race. What has changed, and what’s still bubbling under the surface, 20 years after the riots in South Central Los Angeles:

The L.A. Riots (or uprising, civil unrest, or rebellion, depending) are often considered the first ‘multiethnic’ riots. As a pivot point of race and urban relations, they constitute a resonant moment for immigrant America. Korean Americans living on the West Coast at the time remember the first day, 4-29, or sa-i-gu, with time-freezing clarity.

For many of us, the riots were a schooling in color and class. Our household, run by two working-class parents, was consumed by frantic arguments and phone calls about race, cities, and the distribution of wealth. There was talk of structural, large-scale discrimination, not merely individual prejudice or circumstance, which shaped the course of my life. Last summer, approaching the riots’ twentieth anniversary, I sought out the lessons of 1992. I was drawn in particular to the riots’ crucible in South Central, since refashioned as ‘South L.A.,’ though its infamy and boundaries–set by highways and thoroughfares–remain unchanged.

“South L.A., Twenty Years Later.” — E. Tammy Kim, Guernica Magazine

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[Fiction] A teenager’s grief and its aftermath:

Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.

You’d fuck anything, someone jeered.

And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.

“Miss Lora.” — Junot Diaz, The New Yorker

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The complete origins story of the Huffington Post. How Arianna Huffington, Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti first connected, and how they turned the company into a media empire, and now Pulitzer winner: 

In the course of a few hours, Peretti would watch with wonderment as Arianna Huffington eased herself from setting to setting, all the while making the person she was talking with feel like the most interesting and important person in the world, hanging on every word, never shifting her attention to check one of three BlackBerries. ‘I loved being a gatherer,’ Huffington would later say. ‘I don’t really think you can make gathering mistakes.’

Peretti saw this talent through a different prism. ‘Arianna,’ he says, ‘can make weak ties into strong ties.’

“Six Degrees of Aggregation.” — Michael Shapiro, Columbia Journalism Review

See also: “BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?”

[Not single-page] The departing congressman reflects on what’s wrong with Washington, and how his coming out in the 1980s was first received by his Democrat and Republican colleagues: 

Robert Bauman had written a book in which he outed me. He incorrectly referred to somebody as my boyfriend—he wasn’t; he was a close personal friend—but he referred to me as gay. The press didn’t pick it up, but I thought, I’d better tell Tip. So I went to Tip. We were sitting on the floor, it was a bad day, we were losing the vote on the Contras, and I sat next to him. I said, ‘Tip, I’ve got to tell you something. Bob Bauman is coming out with a book that says I’m gay.’

‘Awww, Bahney, don’t listen to that shit. You know they say these things about people.’ I said, ‘Well, Tip, the point is it’s true.’ He said, ‘Oh, Bahney, I’m so sad.’ That’s when he told me he thought I was going to be the first Jewish speaker. He acted as if it was the end. But he was wonderfully supportive.

“In Conversation: Barney Frank.” — Jason Zengerle, New York magazine

See also: “The One-Man Political Machine.” Scott Turow, New York Times, Feb. 17, 2011

Longreads presents a collection of links to this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners.

The untold story of George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard. Hagan revisits the mystery that led to the downfall of CBS’s Dan Rather—with new details on what may have really happened when Bush suddenly stopped flying in the spring of 1972:

The CBS documents that seem destined to haunt Rather are, and have always been, a red herring. The real story, assembled here for the first time in a single narrative, featuring new witnesses and never-reported details, is far more complex than what Rather and Mapes rushed onto the air in 2004. At the time, so much rancorous political gamesmanship surrounded Bush’s military history that it was impossible to report clearly (and Rather’s flawed report effectively ended further investigations). But with Bush out of office, this is no longer a problem. I’ve been reporting this story since it first broke, and today there is more cooperation and willingness to speak on the record than ever before. The picture that emerges is remarkable. Beyond the haze of elaborately revised fictions from both the political left and the political right is a bizarre account that has remained, until now, the great untold story of modern Texas politics. For 36 years, it made its way through the swamps of state government as it led up to the collision between two powerful Texans on the national stage.

“Truth or Consequences.” — Joe Hagan, Texas Monthly

See also: “Dear President Bush,” — Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic, Oct. 1, 2009