Search Results for: Outside

Dispossessed: Haunted Houses of the Great Recession

In The Paris Review Daily, Colin Dickey searches for a house among foreclosed properties, and finds uncanny forces at work:

My wife and I walked, zombie-like, through home after home, throughout that stifling summer, into homes that had been closed against the light but bristled with claustrophobic air. We took to nicknaming these places: the Flea House, after whatever it was that bit our realtor; the Burn House, with its charred patches of wall and blackened carpets; Tony’s House, after the name on the novelty license plate still stuck to a bedroom door, a detail particularly creepy amid the otherwise empty gloom of the house, as though Danny Torrance would big-wheel down the hall at any moment.

For the most part, these homes were on regular streets, among other unexceptional homes. It was strange to find them in Los Angeles; the haunted house is usually built outside of some small town, a nightmare in the wilderness that beckons just beyond some tiny hamlet. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, as Eleanor Vance makes her way to Hillsdale, Illinois, she’s told not to ask about Hill House: “I am making these directions so detailed,” Dr. Montague writes to her in a letter, “because it is inadvisable to stop in Hillsdale to ask your way. The people there are rude to strangers and openly hostile to anyone inquiring about Hill House.”

It’s a common trope: the unaware traveler and the wary, even hostile townspeople. Why, in all these stories, do the poor townspeople hate the haunted mansion? Well, because they’re poor. They can’t afford to move away, to uproot their families, even after some rich eccentric has unleashed an unspeakable evil just beyond the town limits. “People leave this town,” a Hillsdale resident tells Eleanor, “they don’t come here.” The archetypal haunted house story is often really about class, about the rich who don’t understand the land or the people or the history and blunder into the landscape, attempting to buy their way into a community, blithely oblivious to the locals nearby. The town grows resentful because, by the force of economics, they are imprisoned by the rich and their folly—haunted by forces beyond their own control.

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Photo: US National Archives, Flickr

'You Hollywood Idiots!' George R.R. Martin on Collaboration and the Creative Process

I think the look of the show is great. There was a bit of an adjustment for me. I had been living with these characters and this world since 1991, so I had close to twenty years of pictures in my head of what these characters looked like, and the banners and the castles, and of course it doesn’t look like that. But that’s fine. It does take a bit of adjustment on the writer’s part but I’m not one of these writers who go crazy and says, “I described six buttons on the jacket and you put eight buttons on the jacket, you Hollywood idiots!” I’ve seen too many writers like that when I was on the other side, in Hollywood. When you work in television or film, it is a collaborative medium, and you have to allow the other collaborators to bring their own creative impulse to it, too.

Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, in an in-depth interview with Vanity Fair’s Jim Windolf, about the HBO show, his progress on completing the seven-book series, and working inside and outside Hollywood. Read more on Martin and Game of Thrones.

Remembering Is a Social Act

The worry about mental laziness is a really big one; the idea that because we can turn to Wikipedia or turn to our phone and we can get an answer to a question that somehow our brain is becoming slack like an empty wine bladder. In a way, when I started the book [Smarter Than You Think], I worried about that myself. I felt everyone else’s sense of, “Wow, I don’t really remember phone numbers anymore. Is that a metaphor or metonym for the overall inability for my brain to retain things?”

But the more I looked at the way memory works what I learned was the fragility of human memory is such that we’ve always been really terrible at the details of knowledge. We’re really good at retaining the meaning of something — we study something, we read about it, we talk about it with someone. We’re good at cementing the gist of something but we’re really bad at the details.

Historically, we’ve had all these ways of storing the details, the stuff we want to remember. We think of a lot of it as happening in paper — we write this knowledge down in books and we write in articles and we save them and store them so we can look at them — but the truth is that most of the knowledge we store outside of us is stored in other people, it’s this thing called “transactive memory” … we each rely on each other for these details. … We’re actually using each other to help remember these things because our brains are dreadful, dreadful at the details. This has been something we’ve done for hundreds and thousands of years; it’s why socially we’re smarter when we’re around each other. We’re not just social thinkers, we’re social rememberers.

Clive Thompson, on the You Are Not So Smart podcast (2013), talking about the limitations of memory. See more podcast picks.

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Photo: GallivantingGirl, Flickr

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Soundproof Room

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Lacy M. Johnson’s memoir The Other Side, which details Johnson’s experience of being held prisoner in a soundproofed room by her ex-boyfriend and what followed after she escaped:

The Detective follows me to my new apartment in the unmarked car. He offers to come inside, to stand guard at the door, but I don’t want him to see that I have no furniture, no food in the fridge, nothing in the pantry, or the linen closet, or on the walls. I ask him to wait outside. I call my boss at the literary magazine where I am an intern and leave a message on the office voice mail: Hi there. I was kidnapped and raped last night. I won’t be coming in today. I call My Good Friend’s cell phone. I call My Older Sister’s cell phone.

While I’m in the shower, the apartment phone rings and callers leave messages on the machine: My Good Friend will stay with her boyfriend; she’s delaying her move-in date. Of course she hates to do this, but she’s just too scared to live here, with me, right now. You should find somewhere to go, she says. My Handsome Friend’s message says he heard the news from My Good Friend. He’s leaving town and doesn’t think it’s safe to tell me where to find him. The message My Older Sister leaves says she wants me to come stay at her place, which sounds better than sleeping alone in this apartment on the floor.

Source: Tin House
Published: Mar 12, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,918 words)

After Action Report

Phil Klay | Redeployment, The Penguin Press | March 2014 | 24 minutes (5,940 words)

 

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Our latest Longreads Member Pick is from Redeployment, a collection of short stories by Phil Klay, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a Public Affairs Officer.

Thanks to Klay and Penguin Press for sharing it with the Longreads community, and special thanks to Longreads Members, who make this service possible. Join us.

 

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Remembering the Life and Work of Journalist Matthew Power (1974-2014)

Matthew Power

Matt was the bravest writer I’ve ever known. He covered conflict, climbed mountains, and followed in the exploratory footsteps of so many unfortunate travelers of yore in order to write his own account of what such trips felt like today, to a modern consciousness. This last piece was his specialty. They were why we read him, why people sent him places. He did those pieces better than anyone. Matt was living testimony to a core belief of mine, a belief shaped by my many conversations on the subject with Matt: If you travel, you must trust. Openness is not gullibility. A willingness to be vulnerable does not endanger you.

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On The Benefits of “Leaning Out”

Soon, the rewards of leaning in doubled.

Then they quadrupled. Then they began to increase exponentially.

I leaned in some more. I ate protein bars and made important telephone calls during my morning commute. I stopped reading novels so I could write more articles and memos and make more handicrafts to contribute to the school auction. I put in extra hours at work. When I came home, I did radio interviews over Skype from my living room while supervising the children’s math homework.

And I realized that I hated Sheryl Sandberg.

Because, of course, I was miserable. I never saw my friends, because I was too busy building my network. I was too tired to do any creative, outside-the-box thinking. I was boxed in. I wondered if foreign-policy punditry was just too much for me. I wondered if I should move to Santa Fe and open a small gallery specializing in handicrafts made from recycled tires. I wondered if my husband and kids would want to go with me.

—Rosa Brooks, The Washington Post.  Brooks’ piece looks at what happens when a woman takes Sheryl Sandberg’s advice and leans in (spoiler: good things at work and exhaustion at home). She posits that maybe the answer lies in a different kind of feminism manifesto, a “Manifestus for the Rest of Us,” wherein women fight for the right to “lean out,” relax a little, and maybe even find time “for the kind of unstructured, creative thinking so critical to any kind of success.”

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The Innovation That Helped 'El Chapo' Create a Multi-Billion-Dollar Drug Trafficking Empire

But Chapo’s greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be a water faucet outside the home of a cartel attorney in the border town of Agua Prieta was in fact a secret lever that, when twisted, activated a hydraulic system that opened a hidden trapdoor underneath a pool table inside the house. The passage ran more than 200 feet, directly beneath the fortifications along the border, and emerged inside a warehouse the cartel owned in Douglas, Ariz. Chapo pronounced it “cool.”

When this new route was complete, Chapo instructed Martínez to call the Colombians. “Tell them to send all the drugs they can,” he said. As the deliveries multiplied, Sinaloa acquired a reputation for the miraculous speed with which it could push inventory across the border. “Before the planes were arriving back in Colombia on the return, the cocaine was already in Los Angeles,” Martínez marveled.

Eventually the tunnel was discovered, so Chapo shifted tactics once again, this time by going into the chili-pepper business. He opened a cannery in Guadalajara and began producing thousands of cans stamped “Comadre Jalapeños,” stuffing them with cocaine, then vacuum-sealing them and shipping them to Mexican-owned grocery stores in California. He sent drugs in the refrigeration units of tractor-trailers, in custom-made cavities in the bodies of cars and in truckloads of fish (which inspectors at a sweltering checkpoint might not want to detain for long). He sent drugs across the border on freight trains, to cartel warehouses in Los Angeles and Chicago, where rail spurs let the cars roll directly inside to unload. He sent drugs via FedEx.

But that tunnel into Douglas remains Chapo’s masterpiece, an emblem of his creative ingenuity. Twenty years on, the cartels are still burrowing under the border — more than a hundred tunnels have been discovered in the years since Chapo’s first. They are often ventilated and air-conditioned, and some feature trolley lines stretching up to a half-mile to accommodate the tonnage in transit.

The New York Times reports that Joaquín Guzmán Loera—leader of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel—has been arrested. Nicknamed El Chapo, Guzmán’s cocaine and marijuana trafficking empire is believed to be worth several billion dollars. Patrick Radden Keefe closely examined the Sinaloa Drug Cartel and Chapo’s leadership of the organization for The New York Times Magazine in the summer of 2012.

See also: “Inside the Incredible Booming Subterranean Marijuana Railroad.” (GQ, Jan. 12, 2014)

And: “The Narco Tunnels of Nogales.” (Businessweek, Aug. 2, 2012)

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Photo of elaborate cross-border drug smuggling tunnel discovered inside a warehouse near San Diego via Wikimedia Commons

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

 

Read more…