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The Devil on Paradise Road

Longreads Pick

A man murders a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State on New Year’s Day leading to an active manhunt in subfreezing temperatures.

“The SWAT guys found climbing notches in the roadside berm and postholes leading into the trees. No innocent park visitor would continue to posthole up to his crotch. This had to be their guy.

“Heads swiveled. The Y had been a forward tactical post for the past three hours. All that time, it was now clear, the shooter had been moving above them, below them, all around. The team strapped on snowshoes and followed the holes.

“Around the next bend, a second SWAT team searched Barnes’ Impala. One officer cut the car’s distributor-cap wires to disable it. From the trunk, deputy John Delgado removed a lever-action rifle, several packs of AR-15 ammunition, and heavy body armor. Another officer pulled an AK-47 and several .223 magazines from the passenger seat.”

Source: Outside
Published: Sep 13, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,929 words)

20% of Anorexics Are Men

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] More men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders, but are struggling to receive help:

“As recently as a decade ago, clinicians believed that only 5 percent of anorexics were male. Current estimates suggest it’s closer to 20 percent and rising fast: More men are getting ill, and more are being diagnosed. (One well-regarded Canadian study puts the number at 30 percent.) It’s unclear why, but certainly twenty years of lean, muscular male physiques in advertising, movies, sports, and of course, magazines like GQ—from Marky Mark to Brad Pitt to David Beckham—have changed the way both men and women regard the male body. And thanks to the web, those images are easy to seek out and collect. For American men, the chiseled six-pack has become the fetishized equivalent of bigger breasts. Like all fetish objects, it stands for something deeply desired: social acceptance, the love of a parent or partner, happiness.

“But many afflicted men feel too stigmatized to go to a doctor—and many doctors don’t recognize the early, ambiguous symptoms. ‘It is not what a primary-care physician will consider at first glance,’ says Mark Warren, founder of the Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders. ‘Often it won’t be what they consider at fourth or fifth glance.’

“Diagnosis is hard. Finding treatment is even harder. Many residential centers don’t admit men, out of a belief that treatment should be sex-specific.”

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 13, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,008 words)

“Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?” — Ben Makuch, Vice

More from Vice

Mindy Kaling has quickly progressed from a writer and cast member on NBC’s The Office to a best-selling author and star of her own new sitcom:

To people who know her, it makes perfect sense that she would now have her own sitcom. It was simply a matter of course, on par with how, at 30, she decided to write a book of memoirish essays and observations called ‘Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)’. What’s interesting is that the book exists at all. In the introduction, Kaling apologizes for its not being Tina Fey’s ‘Bossypants’, anticipating that the two will be compared, even though Fey published her book amid huge anticipation as the fortysomething lead and creator of ‘30 Rock’ who was also starring in movies and thriving off her Sarah Palin impersonation. Kaling wrote hers amid demand from herself and her publisher. One of the chapters is a detailed breakdown of just how famous she’d like to be, which is to say, famous enough that teenagers will copy her look and, when she’s old, she’ll be used as a sight gag on TV shows.

“The New New Girl.” — Jada Yuan, New York magazine

More from New York

Solvency has haunted Antioch College, a liberal arts school in Yellow Springs Ohio with a storied history, which shuttered its doors in 2008. The college reopened last year with 35 students, and is looking for new ways to draw students and maintain financial stability:

When the first students arrived on campus last fall, they found themselves with an unprecedented amount of influence over what Antioch would be. Administrators had set up a schedule that included intensive study of one subject over a few weeks; what that meant in reality was that students had mid-term exams about two weeks after starting a course. They complained, and in a major change that affected class sequences and faculty, the school dropped the schedule in favor of a more traditional one. Another adjustment: The school had planned to offer Portuguese to help with co-op positions in Brazil, but students persuaded administrators to replace it with Japanese. Students also sit in on faculty interviews and help write visitors’ policies, which is not a common practice at most colleges.

That kind of influence is possible because Antioch, despite its rich history, is essentially a start-up, with all the opportunities and challenges that go along with a new venture. Money is a constant concern; the school’s endowment, which helps pay for current students’ tuition, is $44.5 million, far smaller than most liberal arts institutions, which means it can’t afford to spend the $75,000 or more per student that high-end liberal-arts colleges do. That’s led Antioch officials to focus on a narrow mission and do it well, acknowledging what they are not and what they cannot do.

“Old College Try? Meet New College Try.” — Julie Irwin Zimmerman, Cincinnati Magazine

Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia:

Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included her being compromised outside of a hospital, lasting years on end.

‘I can’t kill you,’ I answered steadily. ‘I have a husband and two stepsons and a mortgage. Someone will find out, and then I’ll have to go to prison.’

She sighed, exasperated.

‘I know this issue has always been important to you,’ I said. ‘So if you feel strongly about it, I understand that. You can end your own life. There are plenty of places that can help you do that.’

She was monumentally offended. ‘Committing suicide is against the Jewish religion!’ she declared.

I was dumbfounded. ‘So is committing murder! Did you ever think of that?’

Apparently not.

“How My Mother Disappeared.” — Alex Witchel, New York Times Magazine

More Witchel

Interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo about the difficulties, rewards—and traps—that come with reporting on the poor: 

When I pick a story, I’m very much aware of the larger issues that it’s illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That’s just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they’re still people. Making them representative loses sight of that. Which is why a lot of writing about low-income people makes them into saints, perfect in their suffering. But you take Abdul, for instance. He’s diffident, he’s selfish, he’s not very verbal. Even his own family considers him charmless. But when the reader meets him, they sense he’s a real person, that he’s not a construct. And even Manchu—who’s good and generous in many ways—she’s good and generous as a way of getting back at her mother. The more righteous she can be, the better she can stick it to her mom. So you try to let the reader have a sense of this person and soul, as a recognizable human.

“Reporting Poverty.” — Emily Brennan, Guernica

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[Not single-page] A young man with developmental problems develops post-traumatic-stress disorder after receiving 31 shocks at the Judge Rotenberg Center, shedding light on the school’s controversial behavior-modification program:

At first there were no electric shocks. Israel and his workers relied instead on other ‘aversive treatments’: pinching the soles of their feet, squirting them in the face with water, forcing them to sniff ammonia. One student’s punishment for biting: ten spanks on the buttocks, a cool shower, ten ‘rolling pinches’ on the arm, and a time-out wearing a ‘white-noise helmet.’ New York State sent its first student to Israel in 1976.

A few years later, New York State officials did an inspection. ‘Superficially … the program is very impressive,’ they wrote in a subsequent report. ‘Children, who are obviously handicapped, are engaged in activities and are seldom exhibiting inappropriate behaviors.’ But, they concluded, ‘the children are controlled by the threat of punishment. When that threat is removed, they revert to their original behaviors.’ Ultimately, the officials found the program’s effect on its students to be ‘the singular most depressing experience that team members have had in numerous visitations to human-service programs.’

“31 Shocks Later.” — Jennifer Gonnerman, New York magazine

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, Outside Magazine, Rolling Stone, The American Conservative, The Walrus Magazine, fiction, plus a guest pick from Emily Douglas.

A political reporter desperately searches for a sign of joy in this year’s presidential race:

I am as cynical as any political reporter. And perhaps my recent craving for uplift was a sublimation of my own anger at being a small cog in a giant inanity machine. But I write and read and talk about politics because beneath that cynicism I understand that the stakes are high. On top of which, oddly, the job also keeps me patriotic, a byproduct of seeing — as I did at a Romney event in Ohio in July — things like a Korean War veteran in a wheelchair removing his insignia cap and struggling to his feet to salute the flag during the national anthem. (Immediately after which, I looked down at my BlackBerry to learn that the Democratic National Committee had just released a new ad ridiculing Ann Romney’s dressage horse.)

But what’s been completely missing this year has been, for lack of a better word, joy. Yes, it’s always kind of fun to follow Joe Biden around and wait to hear what will come out of his mouth next, and who knows what Paul Ryan has hidden under his oversize jacket. But the principals don’t seem to be experiencing much joy as they go through their market-tested paces. A kind of faux-ness permeates everything this year in a way that it hasn’t been quite so consuming in the past. The effect has been anesthetizing and made it difficult to take any of the day’s supposed gaffes, game-changers and false umbrages seriously. The campaigns appeared locked in a paradigm of terrified superpowers’ spending blindly on redundant warfare. How many times do they have to blow up Vladivostok?

“Feel the Loathing on the Campaign Trail.” — Mark Leibovich, New York Times Magazine

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