The Longreads Blog

Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,”  the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) She dips Copenhagen tobacco and fights against wind farms. She e-mails stupid YouTube links to her old buddy Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.”

Barry reinvented herself as a creativity guru as the market for her comic strip dried up, publishing two boundary-blurring books on inspiration and teaching writing workshops for nonwriters. Barry’s advertising copy is clear: “THIS CLASS WORKS ESPECIALLY WELL FOR ‘NONWRITERS’ like bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on ‘being a writer’ but still wonders what it might be like to write.”

“Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself.” — Dan Kois, The New York Times Magazine

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Howie hemorrhaged information about Winfield and Steinbrenner, the mafia, prison, baseball, women, clothes, the weather, his parents, his health. He jumped from one tangent to another, many of them fascinating and relevant, some bizarre, others difficult to fathom. Like the time he told me Winfield held a gun to him. Or the time he said Steinbrenner had sent him a prostitute. Even a hint of incredulity nettled him: “I know what’s been told to me in the past 22 years. That I’m the biggest scumbag in the world, that I’m worse than a pedophile, than a terrorist. I’ve made innumerable mistakes, but the only thing I don’t do is lie.”

“The Last Act Of The Notorious Howie Spira.” — Luke O’Brien, Deadspin

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In a secluded area on the ground floor, six brave young men (three Russians, an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Chinese national) are simulating a mission to Mars. For 520 straight days—that’s more than 17 months—the volunteers will be sequestered in a tubular steel stand-in for a spacecraft whose 775-square-foot living area is so cramped and spare it might have been designed by Dostoyevsky himself. Mars500, as their mission is called, is jointly sponsored by the Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency. It seeks to answer a question that looms as the EU, the US, Russia, and India all look to put a man on Mars by the 2030s: Can the human animal endure the long isolation and boredom implicit in traveling to a planet that is, at its closest, 35 million miles—and roughly six months of rocket travel—away? Will one of the volunteers crack before the faux mission’s scheduled conclusion on November 5, 2011?

“6 Guys in a Capsule: 520 Days on a Simulated Mars Mission.” — Bill Donahue, Wired

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Featured Longreader: Gabrielle Gantz, arts & culture blogger/publicist at Viking & Penguin. See her story picks from The Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg Businessweek and more on her #longreads page.

So the way my father used to tell it, my parents’ second date went something like this:

My father was positively smitten after his blind date with my mother, and wanting to spend as much time with her as possible made sure that the activity for date number two was an all-day event. This being Salt Lake City in the 1950s, a day of skiing was just the trick. He picked her up, and together they made their way up the winding Wasatch switchbacks in his new Ford Crestliner. At some little town along the way, probably Solitude or Brighton, my father pulled off the highway for gas and got… well, let’s just say he got turned around.

“The Second Second Date Story.” — Tod Kelly, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

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It’s been two autumns now since Russell last played a down of organized football. This fall, when capable quarterbacks have been in high demand and short supply, he’s gotten no calls. The Raiders lost his successor, Jason Campbell, to a broken collarbone on Oct. 16, and last week they acquired 31-year-old Carson Palmer, who had chosen to retire rather than play for the Bengals. Oakland sent Cincinnati a first-round pick in 2012 and a conditional second-rounder in ‘13, and will pay him a guaranteed $7.5 million over the next two years. Yet Russell still counts himself among Mobile’s legion of unemployed.

“The Man Who Isn’t There.” — L. Jon Wertheim, Sports Illustrated

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Featured Longreader: Todd Olmstead, grad student at NYU’s Studio 20, and community intern at Mashable. See his story picks from GQ, Grantland and more on his #longreads page.

[Fiction]

The pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms hulked to the mudroom closet and requisitioned Dad’s white coat. Then requisitioned the boots he’d spray-painted white. Painting the pellet gun white had been a no. That was a gift from Aunt Chloe. Every time she came over he had to haul it out so she could make a big stink about the woodgrain.

“Tenth of December.” — George Saunders, The New Yorker

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Tonight, in a modest brick row house in the sleepy city of Carthage, beyond the Ozark Mountains and the mines of southwest Missouri, past the poultry plants and churches along Interstate 44 and U.S. 71, down the block from the Jasper County courthouse and historic town square, a five-year-old boy is going to bed.

Chances are the boy is unaware of the battery of lawyers debating his future. He’s probably oblivious to the national immigration debates he has stirred, the newspaper headlines he has generated, the two school-district employees whose firings are directly linked to his circumstances. He very likely has no idea that the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington, D.C., is in his corner, or that a lone circuit court judge will decide his fate this winter.

“In a tiny town just outside Joplin, a landmark adoption case tests the limits of inalienable human rights.” — John H. Tucker, Riverfront Times

See also “Parents of a Certain Age.” Lisa Miller, New York Magazine, Sept. 26, 2011

I went up to the 14th floor and rang the bell. A middle-age African-American woman opened it and I told her I had her Chinese-food order. She was noticeably shocked and concerned.  “They don’t come up here for deliveries,” she said.

She asked me if I knew how dangerous it was there.

I asked how dangerous it could possibly be.

Really dangerous, she said.

When I left, I casually told her to take care and she said urgently, seriously, No, you take care. She was petrified for me, and petrified of the building she was living in. She gave me a two-dollar tip.

“Takeout story: Behind bulletproof glass and out on a bike for a Chinese restaurant in Mott Haven.” — Kevin Heldman, Capital New York

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