The Longreads Blog

The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused but rooted in his earlier suspicions that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more insidious and ran deep. He felt terrible for how the lifetime of competition between himself and Jonathan had fed his son’s ambition. He felt guilty about having pulled strings to get Jonathan into the 173rd. That was where the sense of betrayal was rooted. He had done his homework before approaching Preysler. In 2007 all of the official reports from Afghanistan had been rosy. The fighting was all but over, the assessments read; the work was all humanitarian projects and nation building. Brostrom now saw that as propaganda, and he had fallen for it.

“Echoes from a Distant Battlefield.” — Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair

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As I read, something quite unexpected occurred, an “aha” moment in the quiet of my kitchen, with the dog asleep on the floor and coffee cooling in a cup. I leaned against the cooktop. I realized I was writing the wrong story.

Forty-one years ago, while an exchange student living at a convent school in Belgium, I was sexually assaulted by a teacher, a married woman with an 8-month-old son. This is not a newly recovered memory. This is a story I have told repeatedly, though not publicly, for years. I needed to tell it to convince myself it was true.

I choose to tell it here, not because I wish to detract in any way from the severity of the alleged abuse that took place at Penn State but because it illustrates the power of the mind, as psychologist Richard Gartner, author of the definitive book on the subject, Betrayed As Boys, told me, “to put experience in a kind of box so that it doesn’t disturb the rest of you.” Because, while I am a reluctant citizen of the confessional states of America, my experience, which pales in comparison to the trauma described by the grand jury, illustrates the banal ubiquity of sexual abuse and its insidious aftermath.

“Grown-ups Must Act Like Grown-ups.” — Jane Leavy, Grantland

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, 5280 Magazine, New York Magazine, The Awl, plus a guest pick from technologist and writer Matt Langer.

Featured Longreader: Financial news reporter Shanny Basar. See her story picks from BBC News, The Guardian, Rolling Stone and more on her #longreads page.

My father and I would take an annual walk on the sandbars in Provincetown to take stock of our lives together. After feeling that he was my nemesis for years, I began to appreciate how similar we were. He became more affectionate and emotionally expressive. By the late ’80s, his own mother and father were dead, and sometimes he would burst into tears, crying that he had become “an orphan.” He began talking about mortality, predicting that he would die at the same age as his father, 69. He told me that he didn’t believe in an afterlife and would be “annihilated” after his death, which seemed like an oddly vivid choice of words, as if he was describing the obliteration of atomic particles or an entire city. But his worst fear was becoming an invalid. If I’m ever a vegetable, he would say, just pull the plug.

“Orphans.” — Steve Silberman, Fray

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To fight back against the warring gangs and violent offenders, the tribe has revived an ancient form of punishment: banishment. Legally called “exclusion,” it forbids the offender from entering the reservation’s trust land for at least five years.

When it was used centuries ago, banishment was a thinly veiled death sentence. Without the rest of the tribe’s support, an exiled member rarely survived for long in the wilderness.

But modern banishment means something entirely different.

“Where are they banishing them to?” asks Clyde Bellecourt, an Ojibwe civil rights leader. “They just come down to Minneapolis.”

“Mille Lacs Ojibwe Fighting Violent Offenders with Banishment.” — Andy Mannix, City Pages

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In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans and a do-rag to shield his head from the sun. He had lost his job prepping food at Applebee’s, and after spending a few months looking for work a friend told him about a Facebook posting for farm labor.

The money isn’t good—$2 per basket, plus $600 to clear the three acres when the vines were picked clean—but he figures it’s better than sitting around. Plus, the transportation is free, provided by Jerry Spencer, who runs a community-supported agriculture program in Birmingham. That helps, because the farm is an hour north of Birmingham and the gas money adds up.

Durr thinks of himself as fit—he’s all chiseled muscle—but he is surprised at how hard the work is. “Not everyone is used to this. I ain’t used to it,” he says while taking a break in front of his truck. “But I’m getting used to it.”

“Why Americans Won’t Do Dirty Jobs.” — Elizabeth Dwoskin, Bloomberg Businessweek

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Featured Longreader: Front-end developer Carlos Rodriguez. See his story picks from Bloomberg Businessweek, Yield Thought, Fortune Magazine and more on his #longreads page.

With some of these pop pieces, partly what you’re doing is writing your way out of a confused admiration for the subject. But Axl retains his power to disturb, always his greatest weapon. I don’t remember there being much resistance from the Quarterly. Which suggests either a level of confidence for which I’m grateful, or a level of drug abuse that is worrisome. Granted the brakes did screech a little when I called Joel from Bilbao asking if we could put Axl on the cover. His manager had said it was the only way we’d get an interview. (We didn’t do it.) In retrospect that was dumb of him/them, as it would have been killer PR for Axl and that incarnation of the band to grant us an interview, PR that didn’t really materialize further down the road; but Axl is not always focused on the smart thing to do; he asks himself instead, what is the most “Axl” thing to do?

“Pulp Fever.” — Daniel Riley, GQ

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And so began the improbable last chapter in the fall of a major newspaper, as chronicled by O’Shea in The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers. Among other things, the book is a reminder that whenever you think things can’t get worse, they can. They can get much, much worse.

I was there, at the paper, working at the magazine, with a good critic’s seat, up close and on the aisle. As we were living it, we knew this tawdry drama signaled yet another sea change for newspapers, with potentially devastating consequences for our democracy. It was also, thanks to Zell and his cronies, more entertaining than it had any right to be.

“Zell to L.A. Times: Drop Dead.” — Laurie Winer, Los Angeles Review of Books

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