Search Results for: New York Times

Desperately Seeking Daniel Day-Lewis

(John Shenton / Mirrorpix / Getty Images)

In 1989, during a performance of Hamlet at the National Theater, Daniel Day-Lewis walked off the stage. Like Hamlet, he claimed, he’d seen his father’s ghost. He never took to the stage again. With this week’s announcement that Day-Lewis is retiring from acting, it looks like his film days are over, too. And when Daniel Day-Lewis commits to something, he really commits.

Cue the public mourning for one of our most dedicated actors, a man as famous for avoiding the cameras as he is for standing in front of them. Day-Lewis embodied Acting with a capital A, embracing all of its finicky pretense. The end of his career may also be the end of an era for the great method actor — and the brilliant, if reluctant, male movie star.

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Two-And-a-Half Minutes to Midnight: Our Fear of Nukes and How We Got Here

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

 

Elizabeth King | Longreads | June 2017 | 10 minutes (2645 words)

 

Bug-out bags, self-designed evacuation plans, stockpiles in the garage. Most Americans born in or after the 1970s have probably never thought much about these items. But ever since the Doomsday Clock, which measures how close the world is to a major anthropogenic disaster, was introduced after World War II, the public has kept a nervous eye on the likelihood of nuclear wars. With the cable news cycle’s predictable turn toward semi-obsessive coverage of North Korea and President Trump’s responses to the small nation’s nuclear program, fear has become a fixture in many households. Understandably so, as the Doomsday Clock now indicates the world is the closest it has been to disaster since 1953.

The urge to protect ourselves and control our fate is natural, but there’s no need to let nuclear angst run our lives. Through thoughtful examination of our nation’s history with nuclear weapons and the anxiety they bring, we can better understand these fears and work to address them.

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A Portrait of the Artist as an Undocumented Immigrant

The U.S.-Mexico border at the Pacific Ocean. Via Wikimedia Commons.

J.M. Servín| For Love of the Dollar: A Portrait of the Artist as An Undocumented Immigrant | Unnamed Press | translated by Anthony Seidman | March 2017 | 18 minutes (4,894 words) 

The excerpt below is adapted from For Love of the Dollar, in which Mexican novelist and journalist J.M. Servín recalls the 10 years he spent living and working illegally in the United States (with a brief interlude in Ireland). This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

* * *

No one would investigate anyone else’s experience because they were all identical.

The average wage for undocumented workers was six dollars an hour. With a Social Security card, even if it was fake, nobody could avoid paying taxes, unless they paid you under the table. I asked questions of other day laborers, who were often hostile or suspicious, as to how they got hired. Almost all of them were recommended by a family member or someone from their hometown. Those with most experience said that after two years of work, things would improve. The trick was to grin and bear it. Bosses liked inexhaustible workers who kept their mouths shut. No one would investigate anyone else’s experience because they were all identical. And for each poor soul who had a tragedy to share, there was someone else with an even more gruesome Calvary. I lived surrounded by tough types, in a religious sense: Jesuit-like, ready for the most absurd sacrifices as long as they could get a pot to piss in.

I worked my ass off just like them and I never complained because they were the first ones to test me. Working alongside them, each task proved to be a lonely and tough affair, until I proved my mettle and that I wasn’t going to desert my job. They were bent on destroying anyone who threatened their jobs with scheming and other tricks.

Parrot had given me my fake papers, but with my birthdate making me seven years younger. The signatures on the work permit and Social Security card looked as if they had been scrawled by a second grader. All in all, though, the papers seemed passable.

That same Tuesday night, the chef stopped serving a couple of hours earlier than usual; it was around two in the morning on a rather slow shift. I had finished washing a battery of enormous aluminum pots and had hooked them above the stoves. It was the least they expected of me. Nobody complained, but everyone else seemed to work harder. They were oiled up with pride itself. All the while I worked there I barely had the opportunity to size up the dimensions of the kitchen. We were able to move about with ease, but nobody stepped over the boundaries of his workstation. Each to his own, ignoring what was going on elsewhere. Waiters and busboys came down for their orders, and they shouted some praise at us if only to hurry us on, as their tips were at risk.

I remembered when I worked as a butcher at an expensive restaurant in Mexico City, how the waiters would toss us a few bones gathered from their tips. Here, hell no. We should be grateful that they even spoke to us. There was a red-haired waiter of Greek origin who would rush down the stairs each night, get down on one knee, throw us kisses, extending his arms, as if he were on the Broadway stage, all while shouting: “Thank you!” He would respond to our catcalls by inviting us to go out with him. He was always in a good mood, and he called all of us Pepes. One of the cooks gave him the nickname Puputo. It was the only word in Spanish that he understood.

Upon finishing my job, I went to the changing area. The Puerto Rican was there asking if anyone wanted to wash the shelves in the refrigerator the size of a guestroom on the rooftop, in order to place the meat, vegetables, and rest of the food that they had used during the day. Afterward, the volunteer would have to gather all the work uniforms, separate them, and then bring them up to the truck for linen service. The guy in charge of this hadn’t shown up. He started his shift when Parrot did. No one answered. They continued to quickly change, ready to get home. I raised my hand, and without glancing around to see if anyone else would do it, I received the extra pay, and I went to the restaurant to get to work.

I had to go up the stairs. The kitchen was in the basement of a twenty-three-story building. I finished almost three hours later, drugged from exhaustion. Read more…

Happy Birthday to Gemini-in-Chief, Donald Trump

Madame Tussauds unveils a wax figure of Donald J. Trump ahead of the inauguration. (Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

We’re not saying astrology is or isn’t real, but Donald Trump is a Gemini and we could talk about this. Why not seek insight into the leader of the free world by any means available? We thought polls were a science and that was wrong. We thought climate change was a science, but that’s apparently now up for grabs. Maybe astrology is the real science? Who’s to say!

So what’s the deal with Geminis? They’re volatile, prone to mood swings and abrupt changes in opinions. Writing on Huffington Post about Gemini and disgraced governor Eliot Spitzer in 2008, Vanity Fair astrology columnist Michael Lutin writes:

When dealing with Geminis, remember that when they are in front of you they usually say what they mean and they mean what they say at that exact moment. There’s always another side to them they would rather not show you, however, mainly because it is usually diametrically opposed to the image they have created in their relationship with you. It doesn’t always mean that they are insincere, fraudulent shape shifters who say one thing, do another.

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A Heart That Watches and Receives

New York Times newsroom.
The newsroom of The New York Times. Photo: Getty Images, Jonathan Torgovnik / Contributor

Hampton Sides | Longreads | June 2017 | 13 minutes (3,083 words)

 

 

Hampton Sides, historian and author of bestselling books including Ghost Soldiers and In the Kingdom of Ice, gave the following commencement address to graduating students of Colorado College on May 22, 2017. Our thanks to the author for allowing Longreads to reprint it here.

***

Warm greetings to the Class of 2017! It’s such a tremendous honor to be here today, to wish you well as you begin your life’s adventures. I’ve taught some of you, I’ve read your work in the college publications, I’ve rooted for you on the soccer fields. I’ve even tested my hand-eye coordination skills with some of you in the exacting sport . . . . of beer pong. I’ve greatly enjoyed my experience teaching here at this most unique and authentic school set at the foot of Rockies, a school that has perfected the fine art, the almost forgotten art, of doing one thing at a time. Read more…

Pee and Fury: Testing the Limits of Bladder Control

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad (Images by Colorblind and ugurhan for iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Nina Sharma | Longreads | June 2, 2017 | 9 minutes (2,322 words)

 

The first night of our vacation, I wake up in the middle of the night needing to pee. I’m tired, nestled in the hotel bed, and I debate getting up or not. I have a love-hate relationship with my bladder. I hate how much I have to pee; it feels as if upon the hour sometimes. “Ugh, it’s at it again,” I often groan to my husband, Quincy. “But Nina, it’s your body,” he’ll say. In the rivalry between team Nina and team Nina’s bladder, he always sides with the bladder.

Lately, even if I wake up feeling like a dangerously over-filled waterbed has sprouted up inside of me, I can avoid the half-awake march to the bathroom and fall back to sleep. When I wake up a few hours later, my thought almost always is, “I won.” It’s a relief to know that should the apocalypse require me holding my bladder for an extended period of time, I can do it.

As I contemplate listening to my bladder this time or not, I hear commotion in the hallway. A man yells, “Get down on the ground! Now!” He is yelling this in a voice so certain and sturdy it feels like the scariest part of the whole thing.

A woman chimes in. “Why would you do that!” she screams. I try to imagine what “that” is but I can’t get past my body, which I realize is shaking now, head to toe, a shudder I would otherwise think is reserved for cartoons but it’s real and upstaging my bladder. I draw myself close to Quincy, who pulls me into his arms tightly.

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West Virginia: Still High on Hope

Dr. John Aldis holds a naloxone nasal spray kit with the instruction sheet in Martinsburg, W.Va. Aldis trains people so that they can administer naloxone to an individual in the midst of a heroin overdose. (Jenni Vincent/The Journal via AP)

At The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot reports on the opioid epidemic in West Virginia. There, the overdose rate is the highest in the United States and many are fighting to help loved ones, friends, neighbors, and sometimes complete strangers get healthy: An emergency paramedic who routinely sees multiple overdoses a day, sometimes the same people on repeat. A team of moms called “The Hope Dealers” who drive addicts hours away to get the treatment they need. A 71-year-old doctor offering free public classes on how to administer Narcan, a drug that reverses the effects of these now-commonplace overdose. All this in an opioid epidemic fueled by cheap highs and small-town despair over limited prospects.

We were driving away from Hedgesville when the third overdose call of the day came, for a twenty-nine-year-old male. Inside a nicely kept house in a modern subdivision, the man was lying unconscious on the bathroom floor, taking intermittent gasps. He was pale, though not yet the blue-tinged gray that people turn when they’ve been breathing poorly for a while. Opioid overdoses usually kill people by inhibiting respiration: breathing slows and starts to sound labored, then stops altogether.

As we drove away, Barrett predicted that the man would check himself out of the hospital as soon as he could; most O.D. patients refused further treatment. Even a brush with death was rarely a turning point for an addict. “It’s kind of hard to feel good about it,” Barrett said of the intervention. “Though he did say, ‘Thanks for waking me up.’ Well, that’s our job. But do you feel like you’re really making a difference? Ninety-nine per cent of the time, no.” The next week, Barrett’s crew was called back to the same house repeatedly. The man overdosed three times; his girlfriend, once.

But a larger factor, it seems, was the despair of white people in struggling small towns. Judith Feinberg, a professor at West Virginia University who studies drug addiction, described opioids as “the ultimate escape drugs.” She told me, “Boredom and a sense of uselessness and inadequacy—these are human failings that lead you to just want to withdraw. On heroin, you curl up in a corner and blank out the world. It’s an extremely seductive drug for dead-end towns, because it makes the world’s problems go away. Much more so than coke or meth, where you want to run around and do things—you get aggressive, razzed and jazzed.”

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From a Hawk to a Dove

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Ray Cocks | Longreads | May 2017 | 11 minutes (2,844 words)

Our latest Exclusive is an essay by Vietnam veteran Ray Cocks, co-funded by Longreads Members and published in collaboration with TMI Project, a non-profit that brings empowering memoir writing and true storytelling workshops to underserved populations.

When I graduate high school in the spring of 1967, I’m determined to go to war. I enlist in the army and prepare to leave, proudly, for Vietnam.

Before I go I encounter some older guys coming back home. They speak out against the conflict, but I don’t believe them. “Don’t go,” they tell me. “It’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit.” I think they’re just hogging all the glory for themselves.

Nothing is going to stop me. Besides, what ever happened to “My country, right or wrong”?

***

To tell my story, It helps to back up and start with my father’s.

During World War II, he was a gunner’s mate, third class, on board the aircraft carrier Yorktown — the second one, commissioned after the first was sunk. He was on a five-inch cannon, information that means little to me when I first learn it as a kid. But then I wind up on a four-inch cannon in Vietnam.

My generation was raised by World War II veterans — the iron men who served on such ships and watched as their friends were burned to death, blown to hell, drowned, eaten by sharks, shot to pieces literally. World War II, “the big one,” — a massive, global stroke of insanity that brewed from the ashes of World War I, the war that was to make the world safe for democracy.

These men went through the rest of their lives, for the most part, with untreated PTSD. My father was no exception. Read more…

Chasing the Harvest: ‘It Used to Be Only Men That Did This Job’

Illustration by José Cruz

Gabriel Thompson | Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture | Voice of Witness / Verso Press | May 2017 | 22 minutes (6,254 words)

The stories of the more than 800,000 men, women, and children working in California’s fields—one third of the nation’s agricultural work force—are rarely heard. The new book Chasing the Harvest compiles the oral histories of some of these farmworkers. Longreads is proud to publish this excerpt about Maricruz Ladino, who shared her story with journalist Gabriel Thompson.

***

Maricruz Ladino

Age: 44

Occupation: Produce Truck Driver

Born in: Sonora, Mexico

Interviewed in: Salinas, Monterey County

Agricultural region: Salinas Valley

 

Sexual harassment and violence in agriculture is both widespread and underreported. For years, the everyday threats and assaults faced by female farmworkers was a story that mostly stayed in the fields. In the past decade, however, a number of investigations—made possible by the bravery of women who have come forward—have uncovered a human rights crisis. In 2010, UC Santa Cruz published a study based on interviews with 150 female farmworkers in California. Nearly 40 percent reported that they had experienced sexual harassment, often from their supervisors; this harassment ranged from unwanted verbal advances to rape. Two years later, Human Rights Watch published a report, “Cultivating Fear,” based on interviews with more than fifty farmworkers across the country, which concluded that the persistent harassment and violence faced by women in the fields was “fostered by a severe imbalance of power” between undocumented farmworkers and their supervisors.

Maricruz Ladino knows all about that imbalance of power. “A supervisor can get you fired with the snap of his fingers,” she tells me. And so she stayed quiet, putting up with her supervisor’s daily harassment—and later, violent sexual assault—in order to hang on to her job at a lettuce packing plant in Salinas. Then came the day she gathered the courage to walk into the company’s office and file a complaint. She feared the worst: she could lose her job, or be deported. Both came to pass. But she has never regretted her decision.

We meet at a vegetable cooling plant in early October, where Maricruz welcomes me aboard her truck, which is carrying pallets of iceberg lettuce eventually destined for Honolulu. While she waits for more produce to be loaded, she talks about growing up on the border, her intense drive to always keep moving forward, and why she eventually broke the silence about the abuse she suffered. Read more…

Getting Out the Message To Save Himself

Photograph by Grant Faint

Don Waters | The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain: Stories | University of Nevada Press | May 2017 | 25 minutes (6954 words)

From altar boys to inmates, ranches to hotels, the characters in Don Waters’ new collection of short fiction struggle with faith and meaning as much as the landscape of the American Southwest. In this story, “Full of Days,” the protagonist’s antiabortion billboard and surrogate daughter force him to reexamine his controlling behavior and own deep loss, in a city known for sin. Our thanks to Waters and University of Nevada Press for letting us share this story with the Longreads community.

* * *

“So Job died, being old and full of days.”  —Book of Job 42:17

Marc Maldonado sensed the Kingdom of God within him on Sundays, driving sun-scorched trash-scattered freeways to his temple of worship, and he felt the emptiness of his own realm whenever he set the table for one, whenever he aligned his socks in the hollow dresser drawer. In this hot, high-voltage city, with its pulsing neon, with its armies of fingers slamming on video poker buttons, he felt the loving kindness, the light ache of breath in his nostrils, and he knew he was necessary.

On that day Marc drove the freeways, analyzing angles for the best possible exposure. The great desert opened to him as he cruised I-15 North-South, I-515 East-West, changing direction where the freeways intersected and formed a concrete cross. Read more…