Search Results for: Outside

Budd and Leni

Longreads Pick

Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, who was arrested and asked to provide evidence at Nuremberg against war criminals:

“In subsequent interviews he continued the story: ‘I had this warrant for her in my pocket. It was like burning a hole in my pocket … Finally I took the thing out and said, ‘Miss Riefenstahl, I’m sorry, but I have to take you to Nuremberg.’ And that’s when she screamed, “Puppi, Puppi … he’s arresting me.”‘ The little majordomo raced into the room, with Schulberg now realizing he was her husband. ‘I tried to reassure her,’ Schulberg continued. ‘I said, “Look, you’re not being put on trial with Goering and von Ribbentrop, but we do need you as a material witness.”‘ He took her outside, where his driver and his vehicle awaited. The trip from Kitzbühel to Nuremberg was roughly 150 miles. ‘She didn’t say anything on the way … She was very ticked off—very. And I guess scared.'”

Source: Tin House
Published: Mar 2, 2013
Length: 27 minutes (6,763 words)

Splendid Visions

Longreads Pick

A father considers his young son’s life in the city of Boston, and wonders if his son would be better off with “a life in nature”:

“If it’s true that children raised in cities often grow into shrewd, incisive adults wise to the crooked ways of the world, that being exposed daily to a wealth of cultures, languages, libraries, bookstores, theaters, and museums can make impressive people, Wordsworth might argue that those individuals lack a ‘sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’—that is, a sense of the unity, harmony, freedom, and ‘unwearied Joy’ exemplified by nature. Who doesn’t want ‘unwearied Joy’ for his child? Emerson might go a bit further and say that those divorced from nature have a thinking deficiency, because ‘Nature is the vehicle of thought.’ For Emerson, as for Wordsworth, Nature is synonymous with Life—our lives simply refuse to cohere outside the context of the natural world. Will Ethan the city boy forever lack something sacred in his mind and spirit? Will he lack a certain useful knowledge? When my paternal grandfather was in Korea during the war, his platoon mates from Manhattan ‘thought the crickets were North Korean soldiers sending evil signals to one another in the nighttime. They never got a good night’s sleep.”

Source: Orion Magazine
Published: Mar 1, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,375 words)

A Suitcase Named Desire

Longreads Pick

A writer spends time with Victor Campbell, a former lover of playwright Tennessee Williams:

“Outside Napoleon House the day had died and the light had shrunken into the tiny bulbs of street lamps. Campbell, who had hardly touched his beer, removed a tape player from his briefcase. Over the years, he recorded Williams reading his poems. ‘I told him a dirty joke right before I started to record, this first time, to get him relaxed before he read.’ It took some prodding, but Campbell divulged the story. He stood up at the table, placed one hand behind his back, and cleared his throat. ‘I said, ‘Hey, Tom, I was over at the pharmacy this morning and guess what I got? A penis enlarger.’ Tom looked at me, a bit shocked. He wanted to know how it worked. I said, ‘I’ll show you.’ So I pulled down my pants.’ Campbell feigned unzipping his fly and yanking down his pants. Couples sitting at two nearby tables cast furtive glances toward us. Campbell pantomimed bringing something from behind his back, holding it over his crotch. ‘Then I held up a magnifying glass.'”

Source: Oxford American
Published: Feb 26, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,560 words)

The Princess and the Trolls

Longreads Pick

The story of Adalia Rose, a 6-year-old girl with progeria whose YouTube videos became an Internet sensation—and soon faced online attacks and death threats:

“Adalia knows she’s different. She can see she’s bald. She’s aware how small she is—at 14 pounds, she weighs less than Marcelo, and he’s one year old, a baby still, really. Unlike Mommy or Daddy or Gama, she doesn’t have eyebrows or eyelashes. Other children sometimes mistake her for a boy, even though she’s usually outfitted in pink. She needs help walking up a staircase. She can’t go outside alone to play. She doesn’t go to school. At the mall, people look at her funny. Her parents explain it’s ‘because they’ve never seen an angel.’

“Adalia knows that her difference has a diagnosis, progeria, a condition affecting approximately one child in four million. What she doesn’t know is how progeria ends: The average lifespan is 13 years. At six, there’s a distinct possibility she’s almost halfway through her short life. Natalia and Ryan refuse to talk about that. They focus on the present, not the future.”

Source: Gawker
Published: Feb 22, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,118 words)

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

Longreads Pick

An investigation into the complicated and costly world of medical billing in the U.S.:

“Out of work for a year, Janice S. had no insurance. Among the hospital’s charges were three ‘TROPONIN I’ tests for $199.50 each. According to a National Institutes of Health website, a troponin test “measures the levels of certain proteins in the blood” whose release from the heart is a strong indicator of a heart attack. Some labs like to have the test done at intervals, so the fact that Janice S. got three of them is not necessarily an issue. The price is the problem. Stamford Hospital spokesman Scott Orstad told me that the $199.50 figure for the troponin test was taken from what he called the hospital’s chargemaster. The chargemaster, I learned, is every hospital’s internal price list. Decades ago it was a document the size of a phone book; now it’s a massive computer file, thousands of items long, maintained by every hospital.

“Stamford Hospital’s chargemaster assigns prices to everything, including Janice S.’s blood tests. It would seem to be an important document. However, I quickly found that although every hospital has a chargemaster, officials treat it as if it were an eccentric uncle living in the attic. Whenever I asked, they deflected all conversation away from it. They even argued that it is irrelevant. I soon found that they have good reason to hope that outsiders pay no attention to the chargemaster or the process that produces it. For there seems to be no process, no rationale, behind the core document that is the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars in health care bills.”

Source: Time Magazine
Published: Feb 20, 2013
Length: 102 minutes (25,502 words)

Return to River Town

Longreads Pick

A writer returns to Fuling, China more than a decade after he lived there as a Peace Corps volunteer. He witnesses major changes:

“The writer’s vanity likes to imagine permanence, but Fuling reminds me that words are quicksilver. Their meaning changes with every age, every perspective—it’s like the White Crane Ridge, whose inscriptions have a different significance now that they appear in an underwater museum. Today anybody who reads River Town knows that China has become economically powerful and that the Three Gorges Dam is completed, and this changes the story. And I’ll never know what the Fuling residents of 1998 would have thought of the book, because those people have also been transformed. There’s a new confidence to urban Chinese; the outside world seems much less remote and threatening. And life has moved so fast that even the 1990s feels as nostalgic as a black-and-white photo. Recently Emily sent me an email: ‘With a distance of time, everything in the book turns out to be charming, even the dirty, tired flowers.'”

Published: Feb 15, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,286 words)

Disaster at Xichang

Longreads Pick

An American’s eyewitness account of the 1996 rocket accident at China’s Xichang spaceport, which killed six people and injured 57:

“What Campbell witnessed over the next few days has haunted him ever since. Like most veterans of the Intelsat-708 launch, he hasn’t discussed the event in public. I got to know him while gathering material for a book on the Russian space program, and during one of our many conversations, Campbell mentioned his participation in the 1996 launch. Then he went on to tell the whole story. When I asked why he was willing to talk about it now, he answered, ‘The truth shall set you free.’

“The night of the launch, Campbell and his colleagues at the hotel boarded vans and headed to the satellite processing building. As they passed the center’s main gate, they saw a crowd gathering outside to watch the liftoff. ‘Everybody was dressed in his or her best clothes,’ he recalls. ‘It was a party atmosphere. There were many dozens, if not hundreds, of people there.’ Despite the previous accidents, it seemed to Campbell that these people must have been accustomed to gathering at this spot to watch launches.”

Source: Air & Space
Published: Feb 12, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,880 words)

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II

Longreads Pick

In the summer of 1978, a group of geologists traveled into Siberia and discovered a family that had not had outside contact with anyone in four decades:

“In some respects, Peskov makes clear, the taiga did offer some abundance: ‘Beside the dwelling ran a clear, cold stream. Stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch yielded all that anyone could take.… Bilberries and raspberries were close to hand, firewood as well, and pine nuts fell right on the roof.’

“Yet the Lykovs lived permanently on the edge of famine. It was not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins. Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion. Dmitry built up astonishing endurance, and could hunt barefoot in winter, sometimes returning to the hut after several days, having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frost, a young elk across his shoulders. More often than not, though, there was no meat, and their diet gradually became more monotonous. Wild animals destroyed their crop of carrots, and Agafia recalled the late 1950s as ‘the hungry years.'”

Author: Mike Dash
Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jan 29, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,447 words)

Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?

Longreads Pick

The U.S. Postal Service is losing $25 million per day—but its leadership is not giving up:

“The investment in the shipping and trucking and sorting infrastructure has already been made, so they’re exploring whether there are ways to get more value from it. Postal carriers already deliver one million packages of drugs and contact lenses per day. For an aging, longer-living, and ever-more-medicated population, Rx by mail could be vastly expanded. Delivery is confidential, tamper-proof, and utterly dependable. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when subways and many drugstores in the Rockaways and elsewhere were shut down, the postal service was still delivering medicine to many of the elderly in the worst-hit areas.

“But there may also be other opportunities outside of mail and packages. The main battle in retail right now is over the ‘last mile.’ Amazon, Walmart, and eBay all want to be able to deliver their goods almost instantly. The postal service is uniquely suited to offer this. The idea would be that if you order a new toaster or jacket in the morning, your mail carrier would bring it to your door by dinner. According to Leon Nicholas, an analyst at consulting firm Kantar Retail, there have been high-level discussions between the postal service and Walmart over such an arrangement.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Jan 26, 2013
Length: 39 minutes (9,958 words)

We Must Build An Enormous McWorld In Times Square, A Xanadu Representing A McDonald’s From Every Nation

Longreads Pick

What if there were a flagship McDonald’s store that served all the variations of country-specific fast food items found in chains from around the world?

“Everyone talks about how globalization ‘McDonalds-izes’ the world, but the funny thing about a place like New York is that you can get basically every kind of food *except* whatever they serve at the foreign outposts of our proud American chains. I would say I know more people who have had a lamb face salad from the Xi’an Famous Foods in the Golden Mall in Flushing than have had the poutine from the Montreal McDonalds, never mind something you really have to travel for, like a Chicken Maharaja Mac. Frequently, when I travel outside of the USA, my trips to the local McDonald’s are the most genuinely foreign-feeling and disorienting part of the trip. I went to Paris last year. There are probably ten restaurants within walking distance of my old Williamsburg apartment that are varyingly obsessive imitations of Parisian bistros, Parisian bars, Parisian brasseries. If they were hung in museums, the wall texts next to them would say ‘School of Keith McNally.’ But there is not a single place in New York that serves a Croque McDo.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 23, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,406 words)