Search Results for: Outside

Murder by Craigslist

Longreads Pick

A killer enlists the help of a high school student to target unemployed, middle-aged men by luring them with a job listing on Craigslist:

“Jeff Schockling was sitting in his mother’s living room, watching Jeopardy, when he heard the doorbell. That alone was strange, as he’d later explain on the witness stand, because out there in the boondocks, visitors generally just walked in the front door. Besides, he hadn’t heard a car drive up. Schockling sent his 9-year-old nephew to see who it was, he testified, and the kid came back yelling, ‘There’s a guy at the door! He’s been shot and he’s bleeding right through!’ Schockling assumed his nephew was playing a prank, but when he went to the door, there was the stranger, holding his right arm across his body, his sleeve and pant leg soaked with blood. The guy was pale and fidgety and wouldn’t sit down at the picnic table outside. But he asked Schockling to call 911.

“Sheriff Stephen Hannum of Noble County arrived after about 15 minutes. He would later describe Davis as remarkably coherent for a man who had been shot and was bleeding heavily. But what Davis was saying made no sense. He claimed that he’d come to the area for a job watching over a 688-acre cattle ranch, and that the man who’d offered him the job had shot him.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 14, 2013
Length: 39 minutes (9,933 words)

The Summer of Love and Newsweek

Longreads Pick

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg reflects on his early career working as a correspondent for Newsweek in San Francisco, covering Jefferson Airplane, Ronald Reagan and hippies:

“If the S.F. music scene (I quickly learned that ‘Frisco’ was a no-no) was scarcely known outside the Bay Area, and neither was the larger cultural phenomenon it drew strength from. The word ‘hippie’—derived from ‘hipster,’ the nineteen-forties bebop sobriquet revived sixty years later in Brooklyn, Portland, and food co-ops in between—had been coined only a few months earlier, by Herb Caen, the Chronicle’s inimitable gossip columnist. (At the time, as often as not, people spelled it ‘hippy.’) Ralph J. Gleason, the Chron’s jazz critic, was the scene’s Dr. Johnson. (Pushing fifty, he was too old to be its Boswell.) Gleason’s protégé was the pop-music critic for the U.C. Berkeley’s student paper, the Daily Californian, Jann Wenner. But the national press had not taken much notice, if any. So getting something into Newsweek was a coup.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 15, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,143 words)

Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?

Longreads Pick

They once struggled for funding. Now, Carl June and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are drawing attention for a trial that uses gene therapy—engineered T cells—to fight cancer:

“In their natural state, T cells usually aren’t able to kill tumor cells, partly because they can’t latch on strongly enough. But June was fascinated by scientific papers showing it was possible to change this. A few researchers—first an Israeli named Zelig Eshhar in the ’80s, then other investigators around the world—had discovered that you could force a T cell to stick to a tumor cell and kill it. To pull this off, you built an ‘engineered T cell’—a T cell never before seen in nature. You altered the T cell’s genetic blueprint by injecting a new gene into the cell. The new gene would tell it to build a new molecular limb. The limb, called a ‘chimeric antigen receptor,’ would sit partly inside the cell and partly outside, and it could send signals either in or out. One signal it could send was: kill. Another was: replicate.

“June loved this approach. So elegant. Put the immune system on steroids. What if you could train the body to fight cancer on its own? What if, instead of replacing a patient’s immune system (as in a bone-marrow transplant) or pumping him full of poison (chemo), you could just borrow some cells, tweak them, and infuse them back into the patient? In theory, the engineered cells would stay alive in the blood, replenishing themselves, killing any tumors that recurred. It occurred to June that one infusion could last a lifetime.”

Published: Aug 14, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,145 words)

Interview with My Mom, One Who Stayed Home

Longreads Pick

After reading the New York Times Magazine story on women who “opted out,” Gay asks her mom about her own experience:

Sometimes when people talk about women and the workforce, they say a woman cannot truly be equal to a man unless she has her own income. What do you think?

“Well. Equality. What a word. When we choose go outside in the world, when we come home, we’re still mommy. The second shift starts. Equality doesn’t exist, period, even when you share the chores. Some days it can be 70/30 and other days it is 30/70. I don’t think that’s what we should be fighting for.

What should we be fighting for?

“Men participating more in the home, but it’s petty to say 50/50, because life doesn’t allow that.”

Author: Roxane Gay
Source: The Hairpin
Published: Aug 13, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,650 words)

Marketing Portland’s Music to the Masses

Longreads Pick

A profile of the music supervisors in Portland, Ore. who are getting local musicians exposure and money by licensing their music for films and advertisements:

“By profession, Matarazzo is known as a ‘music supervisor.’ Marketing companies, brands, and filmmakers hire her to find that perfect song—such as an electronic track by the artist Dabrye that sonically propelled a Motorola commercial in which a sleek room fractures and folds up into a Moto Razr phone. When she can’t find the right song, she hires someone to write it, to order. The string quartet she commissioned from the young composer Nicholas Wright for Nike’s ‘Find Your Greatness’ London Olympics spot, showing everyday athletes around the world, won the Association of Independent Commercial Producers’ award in June for best original music. Often, the tracks she discovers come from Portland’s fertile independent music scenes. She’s placed the swinging rock of Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside in ads for Target and J. Crew, casting the band’s songs farther than any radio play has. Given the otherwise dismal state of the music industry, any of those phone calls Matarazzo relentlessly places or receives could change the life of a starving songwriter or a scruffy band.

“This power has helped Matarazzo and a few local colleagues make Portland a fulcrum for a major shift in how the music business works, especially for the kind of independent, edgy, underground artists the city prides itself on breeding.”

Published: Jul 23, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,445 words)

How a Convicted Murderer Prepares for a Job Interview

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Sabine Heinlein | University of California Press | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,132 words)

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prison, by Sabine Heinlein.

Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world.  Read more…

How a Convicted Murderer Prepares for a Job Interview

Longreads Pick

Today we’re excited to make another recent Longreads Member Pick free for everyone. It’s a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prisonby Sabine Heinlein.

Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world. (She’ll be speaking about the book this Thursday at the Mid-Manhattan Library.)

Published: Jul 31, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,132 words)

5 Great Stories on the Lives of Poets

Sylvia Plath. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

“If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there.” —Michael Longley

Below are some of my favorite #longreads that fall under the umbrella of “the lives of the poets.” Each is paired with a favorite poem by the poet in question. Quite a few of these stories are personal, not just about the poet, but about the authors of the pieces themselves. Which is unsurprising, especially because, as Billy Collins put it in a 2001 Globe and Mail piece: “You don’t read poetry to find out about the poet, you read poetry to find out about yourself.”

* * *

1. ‘River of Berman,’ by Thomas Beller (Tablet Magazine, Dec. 13, 2012)

David Berman is perhaps best known for his work with the indie-rock band Silver Jews, but his poetry is a thing to behold, as accessible as it is awesome (in the true sense of the word). Beller’s piece, a “tribute to the free-associating genius of the Silver Jews,” delves not just into the beauty of Berman’s free-association, but also his Judaism, his place in the New York literary scene of the 1990s, and his public pain.

Poem: “Self Portrait at 28” by David Berman

2. ‘The Long Goodbye,’ by Ben Ehrenreich (Poetry Magazine, Jan. 2008)

The details of poet Frank Stanford’s life are as labyrinth-like as his most famous work, an epic poem titled, “The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You.” His life was in many ways a series of contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a backwoods outsider who maintained correspondence with poets ranging from Thomas Lux to Allen Ginsberg; and posthumously, he is both little-known and a cult figure in American letters. In seeking to unravel the man behind the myth, Ehrenreich heads deep into the lost roads of Arkansas: the result is a haunting and vivid portrait of both Stanford’s life and his own quest.

Poem: “The Truth” by Frank Stanford

3. ‘Zen Master: Gary Snyder and the Art of Life,’ by Dana Goodyear (New Yorker, Oct. 20, 2008)

Dana Goodyear’s profile of Gary Snyder provides a rich rendering of the Beat poet, Buddhist, and California mountain man.

Poem: “Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin” by Gary Snyder

4. ‘On Sylvia Plath,’ by Elizabeth Hardwick (New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1971)

It is likely that if you have made it this far down the list you already know a fair amount about Sylvia Plath, but what makes this piece interesting is Elizabeth Hardwick’s take on her, and her lovely, clear-eyed prose. Hardwick, who co-founded the New York Review of Books, was herself no stranger to the lives of poets, having spent 23 years married to Robert Lowell. It is also—maybe—of interest that the same girls who fall mercilessly hard for Plath at 16 and 21 and often discover Hardwick with a similar fervor a few years down the road (myself included).

Poem: “Cut” by Sylvia Plath

5. ‘Robert Lowell’s Lightness,’ by Diantha Parker (Poetry Magazine, Nov. 2010)

Widely considered one of the most important 20th century American poets, Lowell’s biographer called him “the poet-historian of our time.” Parker’s piece examines a much more personal history, that of Lowell’s relationship with her father, painter Frank Parker.

Poem: “History” by Robert Lowell

Nothing Like Being Scared

Longreads Pick

At the height of her fame, “The Lottery” writer Shirley Jackson’s life was falling apart. Victoria Best chronicles the author’s personal pain as she finished her 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

“For some time, Jackson had been battling serious health issues: she was morbidly obese, suffering from asthma, arthritis and the side effects of a cocktail of amphetamines and tranquillisers. In the three years it had taken her to write We Have Always Lived in the Castle – three times longer than any of her other books and yet this was her shortest – everything had worsened. She began to be troubled by attacks of colitis that left her sick and faint. The anxiety that they could occur at any time kept her ever closer to home, and she was aware, with her sharply-honed sense of humour, that the book was mining too close to her own fears. ‘I have written myself into the house,’ she declared in a letter to a friend, and in one to her parents, describing how well her work was going: ‘there’s nothing like being scared to go outside to keep you writing.’”

Published: Jul 24, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,926 words)

‘My Body Stopped Speaking to Me’: The First-Person Account of a Near-Death Experience

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.

“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995. Read more…