Search Results for: The Nation

Does Luxembourg Have Any Business Entering the Space Race?

Members of Luxembourg's royal family on National Day, 2015. (Mark Renders/Getty Images)

Once upon a time in the twentieth century, there was an era called the Space Race, a few glorious decades of scientific discovery in the name of national superiority. But once we got to space, what was there to do? Poke around? Send some cool tunes to the farthest reaches of the solar system? Launch a robot to go to Saturn and then burn it up twenty years later?

Now these activities are fun and good for countries that like to spend money, but what about countries that like to make money? Which will be the first nation to break the surly bonds of earth and touch the face of capitalism? The answer, as it turns out, could be Luxembourg,

Luxembourg is a small but savvy nation. With few natural resources — besides its valuable national sovereignty — the country has looked to the stars for its next big venture: asteroid mining. At The Guardian, Atossa Abrahamian lays out the galactic ambitions of a country that has fashioned itself as as tax haven to craft a thriving economy.  When it comes to legal loopholes, space may be the final frontier.

By crafting innovative rules, laws and regulations that only it could (or would) put on offer, Luxembourg has attracted banks, telecommunications companies and consulting firms before any of these industries came to dominate the global economy. Now, by courting asteroid miners before anyone else takes them seriously, it may very well end up doing the same thing for the commercialization of space…

The only catch was the ambiguity of space law: companies wanted assurances that the fruits of their extraterrestrial labour would be recognized here on Earth. This is not a given. Unlike on Earth, where a country can grant a company a mining concession, or a person can sell the right to exploit their land, no one has an obvious legal claim to what’s outside our atmosphere. In fact, the Outer Space Treaty, signed by 107 countries at the UN in 1967, explicitly prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty over celestial bodies. The question now is: if nobody owns or governs the great unknown, who is to say who gets to own a little piece of it?

Read the story

How a Tax Haven is Leading the Race to Privatize Space

Longreads Pick

Luxembourg is a small but savvy nation. With few natural resources — besides a long line of grand dukes, a legacy of skirting tax loopholes, and a valuable national sovereignty — the country has looked to the stars for its next big venture: asteroid mining. The only problem? The 1967 Outer Space Treat explicitly prohibits countries from claiming ownership of any object in space, including asteroids.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Sep 15, 2017
Length: 21 minutes (5,300 words)

Writing the Monsignor

Illustration by Nicole Rifkin

Mary O’Connell | Longreads | September 2017 | 18 minutes (4,609 words)

 

How we loved his very name: Monsignor Thomas O’Brien. The elevated French titlethat magnificent silent “g” — coupled with his sturdy Irish name, which, imbued with our cultural bias, suggested all good things. Monsignor O’Brien can tell a joke like nobody’s business! Monsignor O’Brien loves Jameson shots and telling stories late into the smoky night! Monsignor O’Brien always carries Tootsie Rolls to give to children! Monsignor doesn’t stand on ceremony, no sir! Did you hear him mumble “Holy Shit” when his sleeve brushed the altar candle and caught fire?

Now Monsignor O’Brien belongs to a lost age, our personal Pompeii. Excavate us from the lava ash and see us in our innocence: our voluminous eighties hair and hoop earrings, our hands clutching cassettes tapes, The Go-Go’s, A Flock of Seagulls, LL Cool J. See the random fortune that shaped our days and gave us our bold, laughing profiles, the lowered eyes and caved shoulders of a different experience. It was a time when “monsignor” or “priest” was spoken without the slightest wince, without the explicit worry — uh-oh — before the saddest of the sad trombones replaced the golden crash of church bells at Midnight Mass, before the newspaper stories and the movie and the documentaries told a truth more devastating and inconvenient to the faithful than anything Al Gore could conjure, before Sinead O’Connor ripped up a photo of John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. (Note to my outraged 24-year-old self: Go ahead and proclaim Sinead a delusional attention whore, for that will amp up your moral vigor and you will feel ever so righteous, ever so wholesome! But she knows things.)

Back then, we believed the Monsignor was a holy man, but he also walked among us as a totally regular guy, so we pitied him his natural yearnings stemmed by sacrifice. We mourned with him when he gave a Mother’s Day homily about missing his own mother. We spied him driving through McDonald’s with nobody in the passenger seat, nobody in the backseat. The lonely subtext: Having a family of his own to sit down to dinner with was pretty much off the table.

Yet we imagined that loneliness as sublime. It was the waxen sweetness of ivory altar candles and spent wedding roses, the scrape and rasp of his black wing-tips on the icy church steps at dawn, a dinner taken by himself, something hearty, we imagined, something priestly: Shepherds pie chased with Folgers coffee in an earthenware mug stamped with a chunky Celtic cross. Later, if he craved a treat and if it wasn’t Lent, Monsignor O’Brien might eat an off-brand sandwich cookie leftover from a funeral luncheon while he watched the Chiefs on the small TV in the rectory. Later still, he might lay in bed with a notebook, laboring over his upcoming homily.

Perhaps he would rise and pace for a bit; the business of inspiration and enlightenment was surely stressful, the word of the Lord so far-off, so starry and oblique. In his endearing humility, Monsignor O’Brien would never quite feel up to the task of interpreting God for the rest of us. Did he console himself by thinking that the valor was in the effort, not the accomplishment? Did he click off his bedside lamp and listen to jazz on his AM/FM clock radio as his eyelids fluttered shut? Did Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman take him to his rest? Goodnight, Monsignor O’Brien. Goodnight, Jesus. Goodnight to all those saints and angels who have sung your praises throughout the years.

Read more…

Jemele Hill Knows What You Really Want to Call Her

Jemele Hill. (Rich Polk/BET/Getty Images for BET)

Are you a sports fanatic? It’s okay. Neither am I. Truly the only thing I know about ESPN is it’s a channel featuring 24 hours of sport shows complete with CNN-like graphics that swirl in and out and flash like an Atlantic City tableau (that, and nine out of ten men you meet have ESPN push notifications on their phones which make more alarming sounds than Amber alerts for lost children).

Read more…

The Beer Drinker’s Guide to Getting Through 9/11

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Joshua Bernstein is one of the more prolific craft beer writers working today. (Longreads featured a Q&A with Bernstein after the publication of his recent book, Complete IPA) As he explains in an essay about living in New York on and after 9/11 for Good Beer Hunting, Bernstein’s path has been winding, including stints working at American Baby magazine, and editing a porn magazine.

His office was located in Chinatown, a brisk walk from the Twin Towers, and even before that clear blue morning, Bernstein liked to escape the doldrums of his office job by fleeing to his apartment’s rooftop in Astoria and doing what every New Yorker in their twenties has done: drink.

Read more…

The Mastery and Magic of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

Toni Morrison dancing at a disco party in New York City in 1974. "She wasn’t born Toni Morrison. She had to become that person," writes Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in her 2015 New York Times Magazine cover story on the author. (Photo by Waring Abbott/Getty Images)

Cashawn Thompson created the hashtag #BlackGirlsAreMagic on Twitter in 2013 to draw attention to the accomplishments and resilience of black women in the public eye like Michelle Obama. With T-shirts, tote bags, videos, and news headlines, #BlackGirlMagic soon went viral. Like “(To Be) Young, Gifted, and Black,” a song written by Nina Simone, and “Black Lives Matter,” the affirmation “Black Girls Are Magic” creates positive associations with blackness and reconstitutes its possibilities. “Say it loud!” James Brown sang in his 1968 song “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” In other words, let us not cower — let us like ourselves.

Affirmations like #BlackGirlMagic are important corrective tools, especially now, with a president in office who weaponizes language to stir up policies that are hurtful for communities of color. Still, I worry that a focus on black women’s extraordinariness obscures the unfairness of what we overcome. I wonder if, along with a litany of archetypes that have lingered in the public imagination, #BlackGirlMagic fortifies an idea that black women can endure anything, that we don’t need protecting.

Read more…

Hillary Clinton Looks Back in Anger

Longreads Pick

David Remnick’s ranging profile of Hillary Clinton, who has borne many titles: First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, Democratic Presidential candidate — the first woman to win a major party’s nomination — and author. Remnick interviews Clinton — and other players, both off-the-record and on — on the occasion of the publication of What Happened, her memoir of winning the popular vote but losing the more crucial electoral one to a crass, bigoted reality TV star.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 13, 2017
Length: 31 minutes (7,830 words)

180 Overdoses, 18 Deaths, One Week

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

In July, The Cincinnati Enquirer sent 60 reporters, photographers, and videographers into the community to chronicle an ordinary week during the height of the heroin epidemic in Ohio and Kentucky.

In the interactive feature, “Seven Days of Heroin,” Terry DeMio and Dan Horn piece together a timeline from dozens of videos, transcripts, and field notes. It starts on Monday, July 10, and ends on Sunday, July 16, 2017.

It’s a little after sunrise on the first day of another week, and Cincinnati is waking up again with a heroin problem. So is Covington. And Middletown. And Norwood. And Hamilton. And West Chester Township. And countless other cities and towns across Ohio and Kentucky.

This particular week, July 10 through 16, will turn out to be unexceptional by the dreary standards of what has become the region’s greatest health crisis.

This is normal now, a week like any other. But a terrible week is no less terrible because it is typical. When heroin and synthetic opiates kill one American every 16 minutes, there is little comfort in the routine.

The accounts are harrowing. Vivid, often silent videos punctuate paragraph after paragraph of breathless bodies, emergency dispatches, orphaned children, and death tallies. Loved ones look on as lips turn blue, turn purple. As soon as the reader becomes accustomed to the rhythm of hourly tragedy, each story, like the drug, takes a turn for the worse.

Gaffney, 28, quit cold turkey after learning she was pregnant. She’s living now with the baby at First Step Home, a treatment center in Walnut Hills. They plan to move into an apartment together soon.

After years of addiction, Gaffney’s goals are modest. She wants to raise her child in a normal home. She wants a normal life.

Uebel finishes the examination. “She looks real, real good,” she says.

Gaffney is relieved. She scoops Elliana into her arms and takes her appointment card for her next visit to the clinic in December.

“See you then,” she says.

(Ten days later, Gaffney is dead from a heroin overdose.)

Peter Bhatia, editor and vice president for audience development at the Enquirer and Cincinnati.com, shares why they took on this 7-day project in a postscript:

We undertook this work – spreading our staff throughout courtrooms, jails, treatment facilities, finding addicts on the streets and talking to families who have lost love ones – to put the epidemic in proportion. It is massive. It has a direct or indirect impact on every one of us. It doesn’t discriminate by race, gender, age or economic background. Its insidious spread reaches every neighborhood, every township, every city, regardless of demographics. And it is stressing our health-care systems, hospitals and treatment capacity.

We set out to do this project not to affirm or deny differing views on the cost of battling addiction and its impact. Rather, we set out to understand how it unfolds day in and day out. I believe you will find what we found to be staggering. In the weeks ahead, The Enquirer will build on this effort, devoting more attention to actions our communities can take to make a difference against heroin’s horrible impact.

Hence the title of this ongoing project: “Heroin: Reclaiming Lives.”

Read the story

The Oldest Restaurant in Kabul: Where Tradition Trumps Rockets

Illustration by Joe Gough.

Maija Liuhto | Longreads | September 2017 | 10 minutes (2875 words)

 

In the Old City of Kabul, there is an area known as Ka Forushi, the bird market. Visiting this old, roofed bazaar with its tiny lanes, spice sellers, and dancing boys is like walking into a scene out of “One Thousand and One Nights.”

It is here, among the clucking chickens, crowing roosters, and cooing doves, that Kabul’s oldest restaurant, Bacha Broot, has been serving delicious chainaki — traditional lamb stew — for over 70 years. Bacha Broot, named after the original owner who had peculiar facial hair, is from the Dari, meaning “boy with a mustache.”

While wars have raged on the restaurant’s doorstep, very little has changed inside. The claustrophobic stairs, the sparse interior, the tiny door easily missed in the maze-like bazaar; all in their original state. While modern fast food joints lure Afghanistan’s younger generations with pizza and burgers, Bacha Broot stays loyal to its recipe for success. The famous chainaki — lamb on the bone, split peas, and onions cooked for four hours in tiny teapots — has drawn customers for decades, during war and peace, good times and bad.

Read more…

The Trump Whisperer: A Conversation with Washington Post Reporter David Fahrenthold

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Fahrenthold (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | September 2017 | 8 minutes (2193 words)

 

Before David Fahrenthold won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for covering Trump’s candidacy, he spoke to the then-candidate on the phone last May. Trump called Fahrenthold “a nasty guy.”

One of Fahrenthold’s most impressive journalistic pursuits came after that conversation, when he began to investigate Trump’s charitable giving. Trump had long made loud claims about his charitable donations, but Fahrenthold discovered that although Trump claimed to have donated millions of dollars spread among 400 charities, very few of those charities had any record of Trump’s supposed contributions.

Read more…