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Longreads Member Exclusive: The Miracle Man

Our latest Exclusive comes from Andrew Rice, a contributing editor to New York magazine whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and we’re excited to feature “The Miracle Man,” a story that Andrew wrote in Uganda as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, about a pastor accused of working for the devil. See an excerpt here.

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Member Exclusive: The Miracle Man

Longreads Pick

Our latest Member Exclusive (sign up here to join) comes from Andrew Rice, a contributing editor to New York magazine whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and we’re excited to feature “The Miracle Man,” a story that Andrew wrote in Uganda as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs. He explains:

“This piece, ‘The Miracle Man,’ is one my all-time favorite articles. On one level, it’s a small tale of scandal—the sort of colorful story that you only pick up on if you actually live in a place, and one you’d have a hard time selling to a New York editor. But I think it speaks volumes about an enormous transformation of African society: the rise of a new brand of evangelical Christianity, which doesn’t always conform to American expectations.”

Published: May 1, 2003
Length: 39 minutes (9,750 words)

The writer, a former American prisoner in Iran, goes inside America’s prisons and examines the solitary confinement system. He discovers “a recipe for abuse and violation rights”:

The cell I am standing in is one of eight in a ‘pod,’ a large concrete room with cells along one side and only one exit, which leads to the guards’ control room. A guard watches over us, rifle in hand, through a set of bars in the wall. He can easily shoot into any one of six pods around him. He communicates with prisoners through speakers and opens their steel grated cell doors via remote. That is how they are let out to the dog run, where they exercise for an hour a day, alone. They don’t leave the cell to eat. If they ever leave the pod, they have to strip naked, pass their hands through a food slot to be handcuffed, then wait for the door to open and be bellycuffed.

I’ve been corresponding with at least 20 inmates in SHUs around California as part of an investigation into why and how people end up here. While at Pelican Bay, I’m not allowed to see or speak to any of them. Since 1996, California law has given prison authorities full control of which inmates journalists can interview. The only one I’m permitted to speak to is the same person the New York Times was allowed to interview months before. He is getting out of the SHU because he informed on other prisoners. In fact, this SHU pod—the only one I am allowed to see—is populated entirely by prison informants. I ask repeatedly why I’m not allowed to visit another pod or speak to other SHU inmates. Eventually, Acosta snaps: ‘You’re just not.’

“Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons.” — Shane Bauer, Mother Jones

More from Mother Jones

A look at a struggling diner in northeastern Ohio. This is the first of five columns by Dan Barry about Elyria, Ohio, a town which is “the kind of place where Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each hope that his promise of a restored American dream will resonate”:

‘Is she O.K.?’ a customer asks one difficult day.

‘My mom?’ asks Kristy, the waitress.

‘Yes,’ the customer replies.

‘No.’

Sometimes you can see why, as Donna hunches into the desk space she has carved from the back-room clutter and works through the mound of mail. ‘I’m looking for shut-off notices,’ she says, half-joking.

“At the Corner of Hope and Worry.” — Dan Barry, New York Times

More by Barry

A writer takes a trip to visit his wife’s family. What has changed in the country over the years, and what hasn’t:

For obvious reasons, the actual Cuban peso is worth much less than the other, dollar-equivalent Cuban peso, something on the order of 25 to 1. But the driver said simply, ‘No, they are equal.’

‘Really?’ my wife said. ‘No … that can’t be.’

He insisted that there was no difference between the relative values of the currencies. They were the same.

He knew that this was wrong. He probably could have told you the exchange rates from that morning. But he also knew that it had a rightness in it. For official accounting purposes, the two currencies are considered equivalent. Their respective values might fluctuate on a given day, of course, but it couldn’t be said that the CUP was worth less than the CUC That’s partly what he meant. He also meant that if you’re going to fly to Cuba from Miami and rub it in my face that our money is worth one twenty-fifth of yours, I’m gonna feed you some hilarious communist math and see how you like it. Cubans call it la doble moral. Meaning, different situations call forth different ethical codes. He wasn’t being deceptive. He was saying what my wife forced him to say.

“Where Is Cuba Going?” — John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Magazine

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“Neil Young Comes Clean.” — David Carr, New York Times Magazine

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An excerpt from Kriegel’s new book, on the fatal fight between Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and Duk-koo Kim, and 30 years later, how it changed both families: 

In early November, Young-mi found herself on a second-floor balcony at Incheon International Airport. In observing that ancient Asian prohibition against fighters taking lovers, she could not be seen with Duk-koo’s modest entourage, or by the gaggle of reporters following them as they boarded their flight to the United States for the Mancini fight. Her fiancé had made news with intemperate remarks that he would beat Mancini, that only one of them would return home alive.

‘Either he dies,’ Duk-koo said, ‘or I die.’

And now Young-mi was forced to watch without saying goodbye. She could not so much as wave. Even as tears streamed down her face, the dance had begun, the ballet of blood and light in her tummy. She was pregnant with Duk-koo’s son.

“A Step Back.” — Mark Kriegel, New York Times

More on boxing

Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia:

Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included her being compromised outside of a hospital, lasting years on end.

‘I can’t kill you,’ I answered steadily. ‘I have a husband and two stepsons and a mortgage. Someone will find out, and then I’ll have to go to prison.’

She sighed, exasperated.

‘I know this issue has always been important to you,’ I said. ‘So if you feel strongly about it, I understand that. You can end your own life. There are plenty of places that can help you do that.’

She was monumentally offended. ‘Committing suicide is against the Jewish religion!’ she declared.

I was dumbfounded. ‘So is committing murder! Did you ever think of that?’

Apparently not.

“How My Mother Disappeared.” — Alex Witchel, New York Times Magazine

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[Not singe-page] The rap superstar discusses his career and how he’s remained relevant:

In the years since his masterpiece ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ the rapper has often been accused of running on empty, too distant now from what once made him real. In ‘Decoded,’ he answers existentially: ‘How distant is the story of your own life ever going to be?’ In the lyrics, practically:

Life stories told through rap/Niggas actin’ like I sold you crack/Like I told you sell drugs, no, Hov’ did that/So hopefully you won’t have to go through that. But can’t a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite? Out hustlin’, same clothes for days/I’ll never change, I’m too stuck in my ways. Can’t he still rep his block? For Jay-Z, pride in the block has been essential and he recognized rap’s role in taking ‘that embarrassment off of you. The first time people were saying: I come from here — and it’s O.K.’ He quotes Mobb Deep: ‘No matter how much money I get, I’m staying in the projects!’ But here, too, he sees change: ‘Before, if you didn’t have that authenticity, your career could be over. Vanilla Ice said he got stabbed or something, they found out he was lying, he was finished.’ I suggested to him that many readers of this newspaper would find it bizarre that the reputation of the rapper Rick Ross was damaged when it was revealed a few years ago that he was, at one time, a prison guard. ‘But again,’ Jay says, ‘I think hip-hop has moved away from that place of everything has to be authentic. Kids are growing up very differently now.’

“The House that Hova Built.” — Zadie Smith, New York Times

A political reporter desperately searches for a sign of joy in this year’s presidential race:

I am as cynical as any political reporter. And perhaps my recent craving for uplift was a sublimation of my own anger at being a small cog in a giant inanity machine. But I write and read and talk about politics because beneath that cynicism I understand that the stakes are high. On top of which, oddly, the job also keeps me patriotic, a byproduct of seeing — as I did at a Romney event in Ohio in July — things like a Korean War veteran in a wheelchair removing his insignia cap and struggling to his feet to salute the flag during the national anthem. (Immediately after which, I looked down at my BlackBerry to learn that the Democratic National Committee had just released a new ad ridiculing Ann Romney’s dressage horse.)

But what’s been completely missing this year has been, for lack of a better word, joy. Yes, it’s always kind of fun to follow Joe Biden around and wait to hear what will come out of his mouth next, and who knows what Paul Ryan has hidden under his oversize jacket. But the principals don’t seem to be experiencing much joy as they go through their market-tested paces. A kind of faux-ness permeates everything this year in a way that it hasn’t been quite so consuming in the past. The effect has been anesthetizing and made it difficult to take any of the day’s supposed gaffes, game-changers and false umbrages seriously. The campaigns appeared locked in a paradigm of terrified superpowers’ spending blindly on redundant warfare. How many times do they have to blow up Vladivostok?

“Feel the Loathing on the Campaign Trail.” — Mark Leibovich, New York Times Magazine

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