Longreads Pick
(Fiction) The new boy was three-quarters gone. Both legs below the knee and the left arm at the shoulder. Candy spent her lunch hour lying on the lawn outside the V.A. hospital, sending nicotine clouds into the cloudless sky, wondering whether it would be better to have one leg and no arms—or, if you were lucky enough to have an arm and a leg left, whether it would be better to have them on opposite sides, for balance. In her six months as a nurse’s aide, she had become thoughtful about the subtle hierarchy of human disintegration. Blind versus deaf—that was a no-brainer, no brain being perhaps the one wound in her personal calculus that could not be traded in for something worse.
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Published: Dec 3, 2007
Length: 25 minutes (6,358 words)
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Longreads Pick
“That scum!” Boris Yeltsin fumed. “It’s a coup. We can’t let them get away with it.” It was the morning of Aug. 19, 1991, and the Russian president was standing at the door of his dacha in Arkhangelskoe, a compound of small country houses outside Moscow where the top Russian government officials lived. I had raced over from my own house nearby, after a friend called from Moscow, frantic and nearly hysterical, insisting that I turn on the radio. There had been a coup; Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had been removed from power.
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Published: Jun 20, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,569 words)
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Longreads Pick
When I arrived in the university town of Nanjing on my first visit to China in 2007, I spent days on end watching and talking to students, marvelling above all at the confidence, competence and poise of the girls. I was working on a book about Pearl Buck, who grew up in the Chinese countryside before teaching on the Nanjing campus in the 1920s, so I knew a lot about the world of these girls’ grandmothers: a slow-moving world where traffic went by river steamer or canal boat, and the only wheeled vehicle most people ever saw was a wheelbarrow. Girls were shut up at home on reaching puberty with no further access to the outside world, and no voice in their own or their family’s affairs.
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Published: Jun 5, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,398 words)
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Longreads Pick
If you ask Erik Spoelstra how he rose up through the ranks from The Dungeon all the way to the Miami Heat head coaching position, he’ll offer you a self-deprecating variation of Woody Allen’s old adage that 80 percent of life is just showing up. His willingness to stay late and do the work nobody else wants to do is enough to keep him around. As people come and go from the organization, he invariably moves up because Pat Riley and the organization prefer to tap someone in-house over bringing in someone from the outside.
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Published: Jun 2, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,743 words)
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Longreads Pick
These days, you would have to possess an unusually pure mind to look at that pool full of young women without picturing the pool at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s estate, Arcore, just outside Milan. Along with the basement disco and the upstairs bedrooms, the pool is featured almost daily in Italian newspapers as one of the sites where the Presidente reportedly hosted scores of orgies—or, as they have become known around the world, Bunga Bungas.
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Published: Jun 6, 2011
Length: 39 minutes (9,909 words)
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Longreads Pick
Turned on by “Taking On Tyson,” earlier this spring I immersed myself in the variegated programming of Animal Planet. As buds popped outside the window and vernally intoxicated squirrels chased their tails, I watched “Animal Cops: Miami, Infested!,” “Fatal Attractions” (exotic pets attacking their owners), and “Yellowstone: Battle for Life.” I watched and watched. Love the honey-colored Labrador, revile the giant stingray: this is the spectrum of human response to animals, more or less, and wherever along it you care to place your finger, you’ll find an Animal Planet show.
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Published: May 10, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,503 words)
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Longreads Pick
An outsider might imagine that the novel that captures China’s current gilded-age mood would be set in Shanghai, the financial capital elbowing its way into competition with New York and London, or Shenzhen, the megalopolis built on marshland. But Shanghai was punished by the Communist party for the city’s history of cosmopolitanism, and is still shaking off the effects of that cultural paralysis. Shenzhen, for its part, is a transient place that sanctifies commerce, not ideas. Beijing, by contrast, stands alone in China as simultaneously the center of authority and a hotbed of creative thinking. It is home to thousands of apparatchiks in the machinery of the Communist party, as well as to many of the nation’s most provocative artists, writers, activists, and filmmakers.
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Published: Apr 12, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,801 words)
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Longreads Pick
And now we arrived at the panel of birds. Tiny birds, each about the size of a silver dollar. Turkey. Hawk. At least one small songbird. Very finely etched into the limestone with a flint tool. Another cave that began and ended in birds. Outside and resting before the hike back to the truck, Simek said, “Think about it. What was there none of in that cave?” I had no answer. Hadn’t there been everything in that cave? “Out of more than three hundred images, there wasn’t a single weapon anywhere,” he said. “We have here an early Mississippian art in which there are no images of violence, where the birds are pure birds, not linked to war—they’re in flight. Even the human figures are not obviously warriors.”
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Published: Mar 21, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,220 words)
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Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America
“As a couples therapist, I tell people that we take things so personally,” he says as we near the Whitestone Bridge, on the first dedicated bike path we’ve seen in more than two hours. It’s easy, when a car edges too close or cuts him off, to “go to that paranoid place where they’re just trying to fuck with me. We’re so worried that someone else can steal our sense of self that we fight for it at every turn.” But it could have been just that the driver didn’t see him. Under the spell of what’s called “inattentional blindness,” people have been known to miss obvious things simply because they’re not looking for them. Either that or what seems inconsequential in a car—passing by within a foot or two—can be terrifying to someone on a bike.
By Tom Vanderbilt, Outside Magazine
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