Search Results for: The Nation

Death Rattle: The Body’s Betrayals

Transi tomb, Lula Tahula

Ellen-Wayland Smith | Longreads | March 2018 | 15 minutes (4,127 words)

One morning about a year ago I was sleeping on the sofa in my parents’ apartment when I was woken by the sound of my father dying in the next room.

At first I couldn’t tell what the noise was, or even locate where it was coming from. It was a ragged, scraping sound, like metal being pulled through tightly-packed glass. Then it shifted: like someone breathing in a viscous liquid in greedy gulps, aspirating yogurt. When I realized the noises were coming from my father’s throat, I froze.

According to the hospice manual I had scanned the night before, “death rattle” refers to the sound produced by “the pooling of secretions” in the throat after the body loses its ability to cough them up. “The air passing through the mucus causes this sound,” the booklet instructed me matter-of-factly. This symptom is listed under the rubric “When Death is Near.” Family members of the dying person frequently find this noise upsetting, according to the medical literature. Hospice workers recommend an anti-secretion medicine to dry up the mucous: one syringe-full against the gum.

We had had almost no time to prepare. A mere ten days earlier, my father had gone in to his doctor’s office to pick up the results of a routine scan, which turned out not to be routine at all: stage four pancreatic cancer. His physician, an old family friend, almost teared up when he delivered the news. “It is very difficult for me to say this to you,” he’d begun, gingerly. “Not as difficult as it is for me to hear it,” my father responded. He was 81 but looked much younger: six-foot-two, straight as a poker, salt-and-pepper hair and beard. After a bout with polio when he was 14, he’d never been sick a day in his life. We thought he was invincible.
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How Do You Control One of Nature’s Biggest Rivers?

AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

The 2,350-mile long Mississippi River is the world’s fourth longest river and it functions as America’s economic lynchpin. As one Missouri farmer put it, “To understand America at this time, you have to understand the river.” For the Washington Post, journalist Todd C. Frankel and a group of photographers took a close look at the river’s problems and ongoing struggles to solve them. The obvious problems are navigation and flood control, but this massive river historically shifted channels and meandered widely, so, against all logic, people continuously labor to keep its course in place.

Concrete enforces the river’s banks, levees hold back floods, and locks and bridges make it navigable. Much of that aged infrastructure needs improvement. The river drains parts of 31 states, and with so many competing interests, it’s hard to coordinate efforts, let alone fund them. Ecology complicates things: changes in one section of the river often affect other sections, especially when it comes to levees. The Army Corps of Engineers has always treated flood control on the Mississippi as a battle, but many people who rely on the river view that as an ineffective strategy which creates more problems than it solves. Trump wants a $1.5 billion infrastructure plan to fund vague, various repairs, but why should anyone trust him? Read more…

The Island that Disappeared

A remote corner of the island of Providencia, Colombia. (Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)

Tom Feiling | The Island that Disappeared | Melville House | March 2018 | 10 minutes (2,711 words)

“Tank’s empty,” said the attendant at the island’s only gas station, who I found dozing in a hammock strung up between the pumps. It wasn’t a problem, he assured me — any cargo ship leaving San Andres for Providence knew to bring gas. One would be arriving the following day — probably. I used the little fuel I had left to scooter back to Town for something to eat. I found nothing open bar a white-tiled, fluorescent-lit box opposite the mayor’s office, where I bought a hot dog bursting with salty, molten fat and topped with broken crisps. There were a few more options for the handful of Colombian tourists staying in the chalets at Freshwater Bay, but they weren’t cheap.

The following morning I headed to what looked to be the most popular of the three little supermarkets in Town for a look around. The wooden shelves were laden with tins of spaghetti and meatballs from Ohio, pork and beans from Medellin, tomatoes from Nebraska, and Spam from Brazil. In the vegetable aisle were some pitifully shriveled onions, garlic, and red peppers, which had been flown in from Costa Rica, and some Chilean apples. The only things that hadn’t been imported were the shelves, which had been coated in thick layers of gloss paint to keep the termites at bay. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

National Geographic magazine in 1975
Reading a copy of National Geographic magazine in 1975. (Jorgen Angel/Redferns)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Susan Goldberg, Leslie Jamison, Jacqueline Keeler, Max Genecov, and Ryan Bradley.

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Trump Properties As Symbols of American Mediocrity and Lies

AP Photo/The Press of Atlantic City, Vernon Ogrodnek

From golf courses to vineyards, Donald Trump has invested in and licensed his name to many ventures around the world. They are not only gaudy and expensive, they often fail to live up to their hyperbolic promise.

For the Washington Post, travel writer Jason Wilson visits five Trump properties ─ in New Jersey, Virginia, Panama, Scotland, and Canada ─ to experience them as a customer and reviewer. He eats the food and sleeps in the rooms and describes the experience (though not the whole suckling pig for $495). What he finds is that these Trump businesses provide a dark vision of America and of Trump as “someone who would promise you the spectacle of a horse diving into the ocean, and then deliver a mule diving into a swimming pool.” This warped portrait includes classism, pettiness, poor taste, skeleton staffs, cosmetic bookshelves, unnecessarily tall structures, financial struggles, and false public narratives. In Vancouver, a woman drove past the Trump International Hotel & Tower and yelled, “Fuck you, Trump!” In Charlottesville, Wilson paid $15 to taste wine.

“Can I taste the sparkling rosé?” the young woman next to me asks. No, she’s told. She has to be a member of Trump Winery’s Wine Club to taste the sparkling rosé.

Trump-brand properties do not simply give tourists a taste of the good life or a successful business model. They’re portraits of exploitation and failure. The clearest image of salvation comes during the moment Wilson walks from Trump’s failed Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to the abandoned Trump Tower. “Here,” Wilson writes, “every mention of Trump has long been removed from the building, and grass now grows up through the pavement of the empty parking lots and entranceways. The Plaza will soon be demolished.” The best thing about Trump businesses is when they close.

Back in my room, still hungry, I open a container of honey roasted peanuts ($8) and a Mexican beer ($11) from the minibar, flip on CNN and lie on the bed watching reports on the first indictments in the Mueller investigation. As a jaded travel writer, someone who has stayed in many soulless hotels and eaten in many overpriced restaurants in many disappointing places, I’m completely at ease with a certain exquisite idleness and ennui. But there’s something profoundly unsettling about the sort of boredom that I’ve been feeling in the Trump properties over the past many weeks.

To be clear, none of my experience has been terrible, and some of it has been pleasant. Mostly, though, I’ve been overwhelmed by a relentless, insistent, in-your-face mediocrity: the scolding “Notice to Guests” in my room at the Trump MacLeod House & Lodge in Scotland, warning that I will be charged punitively if I take the lint brush, shoehorn, coasters or other Trump-branded amenities; the strange card displayed in my room at the Albemarle Estate in Charlottesville explaining that “Countryside stink bugs” will “occasionally be found” inside and the jar of stale chocolate chip cookies I’m told was the only food available later at night; the eerie near-emptiness and peeling paint of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Panama, touted as the tallest building in Central America. And it’s this mediocrity that’s the most disquieting.

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For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It

Longreads Pick

In her introduction to National Geographic‘s “Race Issue,” Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg looks back on the ways in which the magazine’s coverage, since its inception in 1888, has participated in othering of people of color, and used racial slurs.

Published: Mar 12, 2018
Length: 6 minutes (1,630 words)

Welcome to the Center of the Universe

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Shannon Stirone | LongreadsMarch 2018 | 22 minutes (5,546 words)

The power has just gone out in mission control. I look to Jim McClure, operations manager at the Space Flight Operations Facility, and he assures me that everything is fine. A power outage like this hasn’t happened at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearly eight years, and while it’s only been out for a few seconds, the Deep Space Network is disconnected and NASA has temporarily lost contact with Cassini, the nearly 20-year-old space probe in orbit around Saturn, as well as all spacecraft beyond the moon.

We’re standing in JPL’s mission control, known simply as the Dark Room to those who work here. Five men and women are glued to their screens, the artificial pink-and-white glow highlighting their faces. I’ve been here twice before, but I have never seen this many people running the consoles. The operators are calm and hyper-focused despite the unexpected hiccup, both hands typing, eyes darting at one another’s screens.

While the quiet panic plays out, I walk over to a sunken plaque in the middle of the room that glows with blue neon lights: the center of the universe. Above it is a large metal coin embossed with the images of three spacecraft and a DSN antenna, below is JPL’s motto, “Dare Mighty Things.” Teddy Roosevelt offered these words during an 1899 speech in approbation of the virtues of a “strenuous life” and they are now synonymous with the risks taken when it comes to spaceflight. “Far better is it to dare mighty things,” he said, “to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

I catch a bit of conversation. “Are you having any luck over there?” the data controller asks the person sitting at the Tracking Support Specialist desk. “Not yet.” Above the consoles near the ceiling are six large television screens that curve around the room. Usually, these screens stream real-time telemetry from dishes around the world and are labeled with the name of the spacecraft they’re talking to. Right now, most of them are blacked out. The only active monitors display images of celebrities who’ve visited JPL: Matt Damon in the Mars Yard, William Shatner giving the Vulcan salute. Read more…

“Hey, Can I Sleep In Your Room?”: Studying Love with Elizabeth Flock

AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh

Jonny Auping | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (4,156 words)

 

In her recently published book, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, Elizabeth Flock aims to tell authentic stories of love in the city of Mumbai. But in a place where the notion of flashy Bollywood romance is ubiquitous, Flock went about her mission as a diligent reporter, spending close to a decade observing the daily lives of married couples in the eighth largest city in the world — interviewing them, living with them — even sleeping on their bedroom floors.

Flock, who spent two years in Mumbai in her early twenties, returned in 2014 to embed with her book’s subjects — three couples she had previously met. “I liked them because they were romantics and rule breakers,” Flock writes. “They dreamed of being married for seven lifetimes, but they didn’t follow convention.”

The deeply reported chronicles of these middle-class Mumbai couples depict the sometimes painful push and pull between love, breaking convention, and the ingrained duty to generations of tradition.

True to the diversity of the city, the book follows three couples from different religious and cultural backgrounds: Maya and Veer are Marwari Hindus, Shahzad and Sabeena are Sunni Muslims, and Ashok and Parvati are Tamil Brahmin Hindus.

But as Flock’s writing illustrates, these backgrounds were contextual and monumentally significant to their circumstances, but not even close to wholly representative of their identities.

Although Flock removes herself from these narratives, the stories feel complete and candid in a way that seems remarkable considering they are told by an outsider. The years worth of trust she built with her subjects — at times even babysitting their children — led to revealed secrets and emotions that take the accounts from ordinary to captivating.

Some of the obstacles these six people face — religious restrictions, gender expectations, antiquated laws and practices — are unique to their cultural environment. But what all of them are after — a successful marriage — is universally relatable.

Flock took the time to speak with Longreads about her reporting process, the state of marriage in India, and how love does or does not transcend culture and region.

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The Best Food Is Somewhere Else

A handicapped Chihuahua dog is dressed up as a taco truck
A handicapped Chihuahua is dressed up as a taco truck that covers his harness. (Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images)

My favorite food truck in Austin was closed last Sunday.

This particular truck is a neighborhood mainstay. (DM me if you are wildly curious about my taste in trucks. I’ll reply in the form of a koan, like a fortune cookie. May we all selfishly hoard the best things in life for as long as we can keep them secret.) It’s open every day; it’s been there for years. It is usually up and running, rain or shine, weather be damned. But last Sunday it was closed.

Look, it’s a truck. It was purposely designed to drive off into the sunset. But this one is supposed to be a food truck only in name. It was present and closed, crucially, as opposed to absent and lost to time. (Although the window was boarded up, and the grain of the wood was ominous.) It could disappear, but it doesn’t. It’s been stationary for at least five years.

Did someone die? Was someone sick? It might’ve just been a peculiar forecast situation, but I just don’t really know. And the not knowing hurt.

Apparently, I metabolize (get it?) disappearing restaurants differently than people who know insider things about roving food options. If the limited-edition dishes at a truck or a pop-up are insanely good, I figure the foldable version was always intended to serve as a low-overhead test kitchen. If there are regularly lines snaking around the block, I just assume the plan is to size up locally, secure a larger space, and graduate gracefully into sustainability and permanence. Good food is good! I like good things to stay.

But no! This is only a thing sometimes! It’s true that a number of temporary dining operations start out as low-risk test runs to prove or disprove long-term viability, but now a great many more are specifically designed to flame out. There are city-block queues of eaters out there who live for limited time offers, for trick candle food that’s here one day and gone the next. They’re tickled by the vanishing acts that fill my stomach with so much dread.

The entire point of pop-ups is to expire. That limit then feeds into a ticking time-bomb of popularity that is as temporary as a wet nap at a hipster barbecue. To get to the bottom of this evaporating attraction, GQ sent Ryan Bradley to eat his way across Los Angeles to help us all digest why pop-ups and ephemeral dining experiences have become the fastest-moving craze in food:

As attention spans shortened and experiences became the new status symbols, disappearing restaurants gained more cultural capital than their stodgily static alternatives.

This shift has created entire multimillion- and even billion-dollar real estate interests (malls, mostly) with spaces devoted to pop-up restaurants at New York’s South Street Seaport, Platform in Culver City, and Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, among others. A company based in San Francisco, called Cubert, manufactures purpose-built pop-up stalls. High turnover is now a virtue. Which means the latest food trend isn’t an ingredient or a cuisine; it’s a length of time. The most successful pop-up operations are those that can burn brightly, then quietly (and quickly) disappear to make room for something new.

Chefs have adapted to the churn. Time was, an accomplished chef would rarely up and leave a restaurant for something else. Now it happens all the time. Michelin-starred chef Dan Barber decamped from his idyllic Blue Hill at Stone Barns in the Hudson Valley for an international jaunt making luxury meals out of food waste. Chad Robertson, of San Francisco’s cultishly loved bakery Tartine, has done so many collaborations that his sourdough starter is everywhere from New York to Stockholm, as iconic as a gurgling blob of yeast can be. René Redzepi has taken Noma (and its dedicated fans) on the road from Copenhagen to Sydney, Tokyo, and Tulum. At Lalito in New York, Gerardo Gonzalez hosts regular pop-ups that often turn into dance parties you see on Instagram the next day and wish you’d been at. I recently ate ramen from Oakland’s Ramen Shop without having to leave Los Angeles, which was honestly very convenient. A few years ago, Google hired a whole crew of chefs to run a “world” café pop-up for the tenth anniversary of Google Translate. And last summer, Jessica Koslow, of L.A.’s now iconic breakfast-and-lunch spot Sqirl, started cooking out of the Food Lab, that space in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport built specifically for pop-up restaurants. And eaters, well, we lined up around the block, flew halfway around the world, and paid premium prices just for a chance to say we were there.

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The Billionaire Philanthropist

Photo: AP Images

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | March 2018 | 9 minutes (2,268 words)

 

 

During the political chaos of the last year, one American institution has emerged stronger than ever. As its revenues soared, Amazon’s stock price has steadily ascended, cresting $1,500 and beyond. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO, has experienced what The New York Times described as “what could be the most rapid personal-wealth surge in history.” His net worth hovers somewhere around $130 billion. His 400,000 acres in land holdings — much of it in west Texas, where Blue Origin, his space company, is based — makes him the 28th largest landowner in the country, according to the magazine The Land Report. By any standard, Bezos is one of the richest people to have ever lived, while Amazon exerts an impossible-to-overstate influence on a range of fields, from retail to publishing to cloud computing. As part of the highly touted HQ2 contest, twenty North American cities — finalists winnowed from a list of hundreds of applicants — are falling over themselves to offer tax breaks and other inducements so that Amazon will choose their municipality for its next headquarters. The power of Bezos, and Amazon, seems unbridled.

Reckoning with Bezos’s influence means approaching Amazon and its “notoriously confrontational” culture, as Brad Stone described it in The Everything Store, with a critical eye. Paging through Stone’s 2013 book on the ecommerce giant and its founder, and watching the many Bezos interviews available on YouTube, yields a picture of a smart, cunning, singularly driven executive with total confidence in his vision. Amazon is run on lean budgets, almost like a startup, in an atmosphere of high expectations and continual performance assessments that cause some employees to “live in perpetual fear.” Stone explains that if you’re seeking the source of this tense, high-achieving environment, you should look to the founder: “All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world.” Read more…