Search Results for: Outside

The Visitor

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.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 3, 2007
Length: 25 minutes (6,358 words)

Meltdown

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.

Source: Foreign Policy
Published: Jun 20, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,569 words)

Women in China: A Social Revolution

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.

Published: Jun 5, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,398 words)

The Mystery Guest Has Arrived

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.

Source: ESPN
Published: Jun 2, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,743 words)

Basta Bunga Bunga

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.

Author: Ariel Levy
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 6, 2011
Length: 39 minutes (9,909 words)

The Beast Within

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.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 10, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,503 words)

City of Dreams

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.

Author: Evan Osnos
Published: Apr 12, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,801 words)

America’s Ancient Cave Art

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.”

Published: Mar 21, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,220 words)

The Madoff Tapes

The Madoff Tapes

Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America

Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America