The Longreads Blog

The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government:

What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the British government, which was attempting to drag the Roosevelt administration into WWII by any means necessary. De Wohl, who was employed by SOE (Special Operations Executive, the wartime sabotage unit), had been dispatched with instructions to present himself as a renowned astrologer with no connections to Britain, and to undermine America’s belief in the invincibility of Hitler. As the spy novelist William Boyd put it in a 2008 radio interview: ‘At the time, there was a perception of American people, in the minds of the British Security Services, that they were more gullible than us Brits.’

“The Inconvenient Astrologer Of MI5.” — Emma Garman, The Awl

See also: “CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split.” — Ian Shapira, Washington Post

First in a series on John Bolenbaugh, an oil cleanup worker who said he was fired for refusing to cover up oil from a spill that put millions of gallons of tar sands crude into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Complicating matters is his personality and his own criminal record:

Armed with a digital camera and a machine-gun delivery of baiting, rhetorical questions, usually directed at cleanup workers (‘What do you think of Enbridge covering up oil? Who do you think should pay for killing our fish and poisoning our river?’), Bolenbaugh’s caustic style has made him a divisive figure among locals — a selfless hero to some, a self-aggrandizing crusader to others. Enbridge claims that Bolenbaugh has had no effect on its cleanup efforts, but his picture (square-jawed with wild blue eyes and wearing an orange vest) hung for months inside the security box at the entrance to the Enbridge staging site under the heading: ‘All Personnel Be Alert.’

Even after countless conversations, I sometimes find it hard to tell whether Bolenbaugh is a legitimate whistleblower who refuses to look the other way or, as his critics deride him, a wack-job whose motor-mouth finally got him fired.

“The Whistleblower (Part 1).” — Ted Genoways, OnEarth

See also: “Drilled, Baby, Drilled.” — Alan Prendergast, Westword, Jan. 20, 2012

An essay from Bissell’s book Magic Hours: A film crew and actor Jeff Daniels arrive in the author’s Michigan hometown to shoot a movie:

As the sun sets behind the thick pine stand that perimeters the football field, the lack of extras begins to become a problem. To appreciate how crucial extras are to tonight’s filming, one must know several things about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. First, citizens of the Upper Peninsula are known as ‘Yoopers,’ an inelegant transliteration of ‘U. P.,’ as this underpopulated and fearsomely bleak stretch of land is known. The U. P. is separated from the rest of Michigan culturally and geographically, connected only by the Mackinac Bridge, an architectural marvel built as recently as 1957. The U. P. might be the most rural part of the country, as well as its least familiar. Some maps neglect to include the border separating the U. P. from Wisconsin, an accidental annexation that, if made official, would please the vast majority of Yoopers, who feel a stronger cultural identification with Wisconsin anyway. Finally—and in light of tonight’s scene, not to mention the whole film, this is a key point—for Yoopers, deer hunting has near religious significance. The first day of deer season is actually a school holiday—Deer Day, it is called—and the entire place is a hotbed of gun crazies and gun-craziness.

“Escanaba’s Magic Hour: Movies, Robot Deer, and the American Small Town.” — Tom Bissell, McSweeneys

See more essays from #longreads

How did pedestrians become an endangered species in the United States—and why is the word “pedestrian” wrong anyway? First in a four-part series: 

A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I drifted into a conference room where a sign told me a ‘Pedestrian Safety’ panel was being held.

The speaker was Michael Ronkin, a French-born, Swiss-raised, Oregon-based transportation planner whose firm, as his website notes, ‘specializes in creating walkable and bikeable streets.’ Ronkin began with a simple observation that has stayed with me since. Taking stock of the event—one of the few focused on walking, which gets scant attention at traffic safety conferences—he wondered about that inescapable word: pedestrian. If we were to find ourselves out hiking on a forest trail and spied someone approaching at a distance, he wanted to know, would we think to ourselves, ‘Here comes a pedestrian’?

“The Crisis in American Walking.” — Tom Vanderbilt, Slate

See more #longreads from Tom Vanderbilt

Featured Publisher: ProPublica. Check out their latest piece on foreclosures, plus more on their #longreads page.

"My So-Called Ex-Gay Life."

What it was like for a teenager to go through “ex-gay” therapy—and how the movements associated with such practices have fallen apart:

After our initial  meeting, I spoke with Nicolosi weekly by phone for more than three years, from the time I was 14 until I graduated high school. Like a rabbi instructing his student in understanding the Torah, Nicolosi encouraged me to interpret my daily life through the lens of his theories. I read in one of Nicolosi’s books, Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, that he tries to position himself as a supportive father figure, typifying the sort of relationship that he believes his patients never had with their own father. I indeed came to see him this way.

We mostly talked about how my damaged masculine identity manifested itself in my attractions to other boys. Nicolosi would ask me about my crushes at school and what I liked about them. Whether the trait was someone’s build, good looks, popularity, or confidence, these conversations always ended with a redirect: Did I wish I had these traits? What might it feel like to be hugged by one of these guys? Did I want them to like and accept me?

“My So-Called Ex-Gay Life.” — Gabriel Arana, The American Prospect

Featured: Eric Steingold’s #longreads page. See his story picks from The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, plus more.

[National Magazine Awards Finalist] [Fiction] A tattoo artist meets a middle-aged mom:

The woman stood in the doorway, twisting her head at odd angles like a goddamn owl to see our designs on the walls, before walking up to the counter.

‘Sure you’re in the right place?,’ I asked. ‘This ain’t no nail salon.’

‘Is Nate here?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘what’s up?’

‘Marion,’ she said, reaching her hand over the counter. I took it and shook. ‘You came highly recommended by my niece, Janice. You tattooed a rose on her hip.’

She looked at me like she expected me to remember. Shit, if I could remember every rose I tattooed on some girl’s hip, I’d be in the Guinness World Records for the best fuckin’ memory.

“Scars.” — Sarah Turcotte, The Atlantic

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Retracing the steps of a Marine who went missing in the Montana wilderness. Family, friends and fellow Iraq veterans struggle to understand what happened to 30-year-old Noah Pippin:

Pierce remembers the stranger as none too friendly. Pippin kept his back turned when Pierce started asking questions and said curtly that he’d hiked in from Hungry Horse. Seeing the fatigues, Pierce asked if he was military, and Noah told him he was a vet. 

‘You been over in Iraq?’

‘Got back a little while ago.’

‘I was in Vietnam,’ said Pierce, hoping to break the ice. ‘Navy.’

Noah didn’t answer. 

‘If you’re going hiking in these parts, you need a gun,’ said Pierce. ‘Do you have one?’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘Just a .38.’

‘That ain’t much to stuff in the face of a grizzly when he’s chewing on your foot.’

‘It’s all I got.’

“Why Noah Went to the Woods.” — Mark Sundeen, Outside

See also: “The Waiting.” — Ashley Halsey III, Lonnae O’Neal Parker, Washington Post, Nov. 23, 2010

How the introduction of stats into MMA (mixed martial arts) will change how the matches are fought:

For all that enthusiasm, however, the sport has had a weak spot: It can be surprisingly difficult to say with any specificity what makes a mixed martial artist great, or what makes one fighter better than another. In baseball, there are home run tallies and RBIs and countless more obscure measures of a player’s skills. In MMA, fans find it easy to call someone a force of nature, but historically, it’s been impossible to back it up with data. In some cases, it is frustratingly hard to tell who is even winning a match.

That uncertainty can be traced back to the sport’s origins. When the Ultimate Fighting Championship was created in the early 1990s, the point was to give pairs of tough, bloodthirsty fighters an open venue in which to attack each other in whatever way they pleased. There were no standard measures of anything. There were barely any rules at all, and the only statistic anyone kept track of was who was still standing at the end.

“Ultimate Fighting vs. Math: No Holds Barred.” — Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe

See also: “Fighting + Otherwise.” — Neil Chamberlain, The Classical, Dec. 7, 2011