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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Wired, The Verge, Rolling Stone, ESPN The Magazine, VICE, fiction, plus a guest pick by Joanna Lin.
The founding editor of Sassy and Jane brings a new cast of characters to her site xoJane:
“Jane Pratt has been 15 for an awfully long time now.
“She calls that her ’emotional age,’ and she thinks we all have one: It’s the time in our past that we can’t entirely let go, because of something that happened to us then. Ask her and she’ll guess yours, along with your birthday (this is a trick she sometimes does with callers to her Sirius satellite radio show). You see, she describes herself as being “psychic-intuitive,” which is something like having ESP. Not long ago, she tells me, she guessed the emotional age of one of her employees and it turned out that was the year she’d been raped. After we talked in her office for two hours, at her latest venture—an online women’s magazine called xoJane—she told me that she’d put mine at 13. And maybe she’s right, and I’ll always be that lonely kid in a new school.
“Or just as likely, Pratt knows that a lot of us have felt that way and don’t really get over it, but form ourselves around that hoarded trauma. Whether or not this comes by way of paranormal talent, it’s a great insight, and the reason why Sassy, the nonconformist’s teen magazine she was hired to edit when she was just out of college, in 1987, was so beloved. Her Sassy understood.”
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Wired, The Verge, Rolling Stone, ESPN The Magazine, VICE, fiction, plus a guest pick by Joanna Lin.
A trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, joining a UN mission to investigate the massacres there:
In the last few months, I’ve spent time in the Democratic Republic of Congo where I used an embarrassing fuck-up by one of the world’s most publicly accountable organizations as a bargaining tool to get a story. A mistake by the United Nations means I saw something I shouldn’t have*, and when I agreed to agree it never happened, they reluctantly allowed me to join a massacre investigation mission in the most damaged part of what is, if their own statistics are to be trusted, the most damaged country in the world.
I was to accompany a three-person Human Rights Team into one of the remotest parts of the Masisi district in Eastern DRC. I was expecting something like the cast of The Matrix, but what I got was a Head of Mission who wore Prada loafers, a spherical Congolese lady with a kind smile and another guy who wore a Thailand tourist T-shirt and fell asleep all the time. The UN histrionics surrounding our departure made it seem like we’d be spat out into an as yet unseen sequel of a Hollywood blockbuster, but in truth, we were middle-class happy campers on holiday.
How a second-generation Chinese daughter of two doctors in Birmingham, Mich., became one of New York City’s finest chefs:
Wanting to expand her culinary outlook to include more Eastern flavors, Lo moved to a French-Vietnamese restaurant, Can, where she met Scism, who was working as a grill cook. But it was when Lo took the helm of a Korean restaurant called Mirezi that she caught the attention of the New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl, who praised her inventive dishes and ‘beautifully arranged food’ in a glowing review. After Mirezi closed in 1998, Lo and Scism spent a year traveling the world.
‘Anita will eat anything,’ says Scism, recalling a day in Bangkok when a vendor challenged Lo to eat a cockroach. ‘At one point, I told her she had a wing stuck in her two front teeth,’ says Scism with a laugh. ‘The thing about Anita is, she didn’t try the bug because she was challenged; she tried it because she really was curious about how it would taste.’
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Deadspin, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Financial Times, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Megan Hess.
Cosmopolitan magazine is often spurned as “mindless,” but it has also grown into 64 editions worldwide, and a readership of 100 million teens and young women in more than 100 nations—including those “where any discussion of sex is taboo”:
Akisheva, the editor in Kazakhstan, told me that until recently, she received a handwritten note from Brown after the publication of each issue. ‘Our readers might not be very familiar with Helen Gurley Brown’s books and biography,’ she said, ‘but they surely are influenced by her original ideas. Because this is what Cosmo keeps telling them: You are strong, you can control your life, you can earn as much as men do and you can have sex before marriage and not be condemned by society.’
But what about the other stuff that Cosmo is telling them? One morning at Cosmic, a panel discussion included talk of some favorite Cosmo topics: sex toys (said to produce ‘the most incredible combinations of orgasms’), how to help men get erections more quickly and anal sex (‘backdoor booty’ as the magazine has called it). One panelist, a young Spanish woman, said that she teases her boyfriend with anal sex and then, jokingly, that she has to save something for marriage. The crowd roared. ‘Only at Cosmo,’ said the editor of Cosmo Australia, Bronwyn McCahon, between bites of miniature muffins and sliced melon, ‘will you be talking about anal sex at 10 a.m.’
“99 Ways to Be Naughty in Kazakhstan.” — Edith Zimmerman, New York Times Magazine
Cosmopolitan magazine is often spurned as “mindless,” but it has also grown into 64 editions worldwide, and a readership of 100 million teens and young women in more than 100 nations—including those “where any discussion of sex is taboo”:
“Akisheva, the editor in Kazakhstan, told me that until recently, she received a handwritten note from Brown after the publication of each issue. ‘Our readers might not be very familiar with Helen Gurley Brown’s books and biography,’ she said, ‘but they surely are influenced by her original ideas. Because this is what Cosmo keeps telling them: You are strong, you can control your life, you can earn as much as men do and you can have sex before marriage and not be condemned by society.’
“But what about the other stuff that Cosmo is telling them? One morning at Cosmic, a panel discussion included talk of some favorite Cosmo topics: sex toys (said to produce ‘the most incredible combinations of orgasms’), how to help men get erections more quickly and anal sex (‘backdoor booty’ as the magazine has called it). One panelist, a young Spanish woman, said that she teases her boyfriend with anal sex and then, jokingly, that she has to save something for marriage. The crowd roared. ‘Only at Cosmo,’ said the editor of Cosmo Australia, Bronwyn McCahon, between bites of miniature muffins and sliced melon, ‘will you be talking about anal sex at 10 a.m.'”
The troubled life of Sage Christensen, who was born in the Ukraine and adopted by a man who would later be accused of sexual abuse. Christensen would eventually be charged with murder:
After being taken from Myers, Sage spent the next three years in a blur of foster homes. Myers fought for custody, spending more than $300,000 on attorneys and eventually filing for bankruptcy, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
In June 2005 Sage was adopted by Dean Christensen and Jane Olingy, a married couple in Wilmington. He became Sage Christensen, his third name in 12 years. A social worker told his new parents about his rough upbringing in the Ukraine and about Myers. Sage, they were informed, had recently torn up every picture he had of Myers. ‘When he first moved in with us,’ Jane tells me, ‘he made sure the doors were locked 24/7, even during the day…. He told us there was always the shadow of a man outside of his window.’ At times, Sage went to bed with a knife under his pillow. He had frequent nightmares, and woke his new parents in the middle of the night with his screaming in Russian. Sage’s parents say that he was generally outgoing and playful, but became quiet whenever the subject of Myers arose.
Still, the couple fell in love with the 12-year-old’s teasing sense of humor, quick mind, and desire to be part of a family. Olingy calls their first three years together ‘the honeymoon.’ But when Sage hit puberty, the trouble started. Small and skinny, Sage was picked on. A girl shoved him into a locker during his first day at middle school. Bigger students bullied him. ‘We told Sage that if you start a fight, we won’t support you,’ Christensen says. ‘But you have to stand up for yourself.’
How the down-on-its-luck city ended up becoming a stronghold for the Occupy movement—and whether the radicals will stick around when gentrification takes hold:
Their small capitalist enterprise — named to evoke the famous anti-capitalist tract — represents another side of Oakland, albeit one that’s still in its infancy. Think of it as a less twee, more D.I.Y. version of artisanal Brooklyn. Oakland even has its own take on the Brooklyn Flea, known as the Art Murmur, a sprawling hipster street fair, cultural bazaar and gallery-and-pub-crawl. At the Flea, you can buy refurbished manual typewriters; at the Murmur, you can buy Sharpie-on-foam-cup drawings by a local artist.
The collision between Oakland’s growing cadre of small-business owners and the local Occupy movement has produced some memorable moments of low comedy. In November, 30-year-old Alanna Rayford, who owns a showroom for local fashion designers in a Gothic Revival building downtown, closed up shop to join the march to the port. She returned the following morning to find the windows of her store smashed and some artwork missing. One of the paintings, a gorilla smoking a blunt, had been placed on prominent display at the entrance to the Occupy encampment.
“Oakland, the Last Refuge of Radical America.” — Jonathan Mahler, New York Times Magazine
After a couple has trouble having a second child, they turn to genetic screening and in vitro fertilization:
When I awoke, the embryologist relayed the excellent news: We had 20 eggs—five more than we thought possible. As soon as the April sunshine hit my face, I called my mom. Heath called his. For the first time in many months, our laughter was robust and genuine.
The next day, we learned that 16 of the eggs fertilized successfully. Even the embryologist seemed pleased. My mood lifted, despite being so sore that I couldn’t get in and out of bed on my own. Within 24 hours, we got another call: Ten embryos were progressing. From 20 chances to 10 in two day’s time; it was a pointed lesson in survival of the fittest. I’m not especially religious but I turned my head skyward, thankful we had so many miracles.
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