The Longreads Blog
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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek treks through “the hunger zone” in northern Kenya with a nomadic goat herder to get a better understanding of a region persistently devastated by famine. While describing his experience, Salopek also takes us through a history of hunger and foreign food aid:
Mister Inas then showed us a few wild plants the Daasanach resorted to during famines: the berries of the kadite bush and a gnarled tree that produced a currant-like fruit called miede. People were forgetting their use. “Today, we eat food aid instead,” he said.
At that time, the U.N. World Food Program was helping feed 265,000 people in the Turkana region. The nomads, once canny at eking out a livelihood on the gauntest of Kenyan landscapes, had been settling into ramshackle outposts, essentially rural slums, where each household received a monthly allotment of 10 kilograms of maize. They were losing what relief workers termed “famine-coping mechanisms” — their ancestral survival skills. Cutting off assistance cold was unthinkable; countless people would die. So after having helped fund these supplemental feeding programs for decades, the U.S. government, through its African Development Foundation, decided last year to put its foot down. It earmarked $10 million for a pilot program in the Turkana area that might be called aid methadone — still more aid, but this time in the form of fishponds and irrigated market gardens, all intended to pry people off the old aid.
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[May 2005] How Steve Martin transitioned from comedy to writing, and how celebrity affected his day-to-day life:
SM: You know, there’s a moment when you’re famous when it’s unbearable to go out because you’re too famous. And then there’s a moment when you’re famous just right. [Laughs] And then there’s kind of a respect or distance or something, but you have a little bit more grease.
BLVR: When did the “just right” occur for you?
SM: I would say mid-eighties. There’s a kind of heat fever that just dissipates. You’re not someone who’s constantly being followed.
“Interview: Steve Martin.” — Meghan Daum, The Believer (May 2005)
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A group of teenagers in a small town mysteriously fall ill, suffering from uncontrollable twitching. Was the cause environmental, or psychological?
Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question after question, Katie Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleader from Le Roy, N.Y., woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Her chin was jutting forward uncontrollably and her face was contracting into spasms. She was still twitching a few weeks later when her best friend, Thera Sanchez, captain of one of the school’s cheerleading squads, awoke from a nap stuttering and then later started twitching, her arms flailing and head jerking. Two weeks after that, Lydia Parker, also a senior, erupted in tics and arm swings and hums. Then word got around that Chelsey Dumars, another cheerleader, who recently moved to town, was making the same strange noises, the same strange movements, leaving school early on the days she could make it to class at all. The numbers grew — 12, then 16, then 18, in a school of 600 — and as they swelled, the ranks of the sufferers came to include a wider swath of the Le Roy high-school hierarchy: girls who weren’t cheerleaders, girls who kept to themselves and had studs in their lips. There was even one boy and an older woman, age 36.
“What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy.” — Susan Dominus, New York Times Magazine
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Featured Longreader: Luke Hackney, writer/designer. See his story picks from Bloomberg Businessweek, The New Yorker, The Nation, plus more on his #longreads page.
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How the former baseball star went from unlikely business success to financial ruin—and now sentenced to three years in prison:
Even after his financial and legal troubles came to public light, Dykstra refused to give up the trappings of the gilded life. He continued to fly on private planes, and the charges that landed him in prison—many details of which have not been previously reported—stemmed from his apparently insatiable appetite for flashy cars, some of which he obtained using falsified financial documents. “He had to have all of these trappings to prove to himself he was as good as he thought he was,” L.A. County Deputy DA Alex Karkanen told SI after Monday’s sentencing.
In the unreleased documentary, filmed after his bankruptcy filing, the former Met and Phillie explains the importance of a private plane to his contentedness. “I said, O.K., I know I’ll be happy when I buy my own Gulfstream,” says Dykstra, reflecting on the plane he purchased in 2007. “But I got down to the end of the nose, I looked back and I said, O.K., happy, come on, come on. So it’s not about the Gulfstream. But it is about the Gulfstream. Meaning it just wasn’t as good a Gulfstream as I wanted.”
“How Lenny Dykstra Got Nailed.” — David Epstein, Sports Illustrated
See also: “Going…Going…Gone.” — Gabriel Sherman, GQ, April 1, 2009
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A moment-by-moment reconstruction of last year’s U.S. embassy attack in Kabul:
In an image that remained strangely fixed in her mind afterward, Howell watched as he slowly peeled the skin off. As he was peeling off the very last bit, there came a heart-stopping screech and then the bang and shock of an impact. Something had just blown up in her waiting room, and though the thick glass had protected the office, they had all felt the concussion and could smell the acrid stench of burning.
“That was an RPG!” one of her Afghan colleagues said as they scrambled to their feet. All Howell could think of was the other recent attacks in Kabul, where explosions had been a prelude to armed strangers coming in on foot and slaughtering anyone they could find. She called out to see if everyone was all right and then told her staff to evacuate. As they were moving toward the door, security officers came through, shouting, “Let’s go, let’s go!”
Howell glanced back at the glass that looked out on the waiting room, where the little girl had been playing before. There was just an opaque wall of smoke.
“The Siege of September 13.” — Matthieu Aikins, GQ
More GQ: “The Boy from Gitmo.” — Michael Paterniti, Feb. 1, 2011
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[Fiction] Taking a trip to Times Square:
Ginny had promised to take the girls to M&M World, that ridiculous place in Times Square they had passed too often in a taxi, Maggie scooting to press her face to the glass to watch the giant smiling M&M scale the Empire State Building on the electronic billboard and wave from the spire, its color dissolving yellow, then blue, then red, then yellow again. She had promised. “Promised,” Olivia said, her face twisted into the expression she reserved for moments of betrayal. “Please,” Olivia whined. “You said ‘spring.’”
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Featured Publisher: The Observer, Britain’s oldest Sunday newspaper. See their story picks on their #longreads page.
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Which would be worse: Iran developing a nuclear weapon, or waging a war to prevent it? An examination of both scenarios:
Given the momentousness of such an endeavor and how much prominence the Iranian nuclear issue has been given, one might think that talk about exercising the military option would be backed up by extensive analysis of the threat in question and the different ways of responding to it. But it isn’t. Strip away the bellicosity and political rhetoric, and what one finds is not rigorous analysis but a mixture of fear, fanciful speculation, and crude stereotyping. There are indeed good reasons to oppose Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, and likewise many steps the United States and the international community can and should take to try to avoid that eventuality. But an Iran with a bomb would not be anywhere near as dangerous as most people assume, and a war to try to stop it from acquiring one would be less successful, and far more costly, than most people imagine.
“We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran.” — Paul Pillar, Washington Monthly
See also: “The Sabotaging of Iran.” — Financial Times Staff, Financial Times, Feb. 11, 2011

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