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A daughter recounts the difficult experience of getting her bipolar father the help he needed to get better:

I could feel everyone getting tired. The emergency-screening service kept sending the same patient to the psychiatric hospital, only to see him again the following week. The hospital had to baby-sit for a man who refused to comply with treatment. I made dozens of phone calls and was getting nowhere. The only people who hadn’t succumbed to fatigue were my mother, though her fingers were cramped from praying so many rosaries, and the local police, who had no choice in the matter. The same roster of officers responded to each call, shepherding my father from the street to the emergency room to PESS to jail, and periodically driving past my mother’s house to make sure things were calm. I worried that before long they, too, would give up and release my father, on his own recognizance, to the street.

And then what?

I imagined him circling a drain, the pull of love and obligation dragging my mother and siblings and me behind him.

“When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind.” — Jeneen Interlandi, The New York Times Magazine

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Does our body tell us when we can’t go any farther, or does our brain? A look at marathon runners and the science behind human endurance.

A classic situation in which athletes believe they have hit a true physical limit is ‘bonking’ during a marathon: you stagger to a halt, ostensibly because your body runs out of carbohydrates. When Noakes started running in the 1970s, the standard advice was to drink only water during long races. Then, in the late stages of a sixty-four-kilometre race one year, he tried a few spoonfuls of corn syrup. ‘Five minutes later, I just started running. I finished that race faster than I ever finished,’ he recalls. ‘It was like the brain released something.” The discovery led to the first external funding (‘a thousand rand in a brown paper packet,’ he says) for his nascent sports science lab, to study the effects of corn syrup on participants in South Africa’s Stellenbosch marathon.

The fact that the corn syrup worked seems to support the idea that the body is limited by its finite store of carbohydrates. But it almost worked too well, and Noakes began to question whether carbohydrates could even reach the muscles that quickly. Sure enough, recent experiments in Britain have shown that your brain picks up the presence of carbohydrates in your mouth via previously unknown sensors, anticipates that fuel is headed to your muscles, and allows you to go a bit faster — even if you trick it by spitting out the carbs rather than swallowing them to replenish your muscles.

“The Race Against Time.” — Alex Hutchinson, Walrus Magazine

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A lost weekend, or several weeks, with Fiona Apple:

A week later, my phone beeped. It was a heavily pixelated video. She was wearing glasses, looking straight at me:

‘Hi, Dan. It’s Fiona. [She moves the camera to her dog.] This is Janet. [She moves it back.] Um, are you coming out here tomorrow? Um, I, I, I don’t know—I’m baffled at this thing that I just got, this e-mail shit, I don’t know what these people—are they trying to antagonize me so that I do shit like this, so that I start fights with them? I don’t understand why there are pictures of models on a page about me. Who the fuck are they? What? What?’

The text attached read: ‘And are you western-bound? And hi there! F’

I had no idea what she was talking about. Two days later, I landed at LAX.

“‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out with Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit.” — Dan P. Lee, New York magazine

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Avi Rubin, a 44-year-old computer science professor at Johns Hopkins, is obsessed with the math behind Texas Hold ‘em:

When he began studying poker, Rubin frequently thought in terms of how a computer might model the game. Several disciplines were applicable—game theory, expert systems, machine learning, combinatorics. The latter is a branch of mathematics concerned with finite countable structures. The various combinations of cards in a poker hand are finite countable structures. As he trained himself to be a better player, Rubin would make up combinatorics poker problems, then solve them on a computer. He has considered studying the game by creating decision trees, branching diagrams that plot a chain of if-then options and are routine for a computer scientist. For example, he could start with a single hand, then chart all the variables—his position in a round of betting, the texture of the flop (that is, does it have potential to create strong hands like straights or flushes), whether he is playing against three others or heads-up against a single remaining opponent—to see what might happen. ‘For any given spot in the decision tree,’ he says, ‘I could come up with a probability distribution of different plays. Then I could write a learning program that I could use as a simulator on the computer and play a thousand times with particular settings, then tweak the settings and run it again to see if I do better, and work backward from it to infer why that was a better play in that situation. The thing is, there are so many variables and so many factors you rarely find yourself in a precise situation that you’ve studied. What you have to do is abstract out the reasoning used to get to that decision, then apply that logic and process to whatever situation you’re in.’

“Computing Texas Hold ‘em.” — Dale Keiger, Johns Hopkins Magazine

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How Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, became a global, multibillion-dollar drug trafficking business:

Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America’s “insatiable demand for illegal drugs” is what drives the clandestine industry. It’s no accident that the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. “Poor Mexico,” its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. “So far from God and so close to the United States.”

“Cocaine Incorporated.” — Patrick Radden Keefe, The New York Time Magazine

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[Fiction] A couple returns home from Israel: 

It’s six-thirty now and the boys are back in bed; it’s early afternoon Israel time. For the moment, Noelle feels as if she’s in a bubble, lying awake next to Amram while the children are asleep. She presses her ear to the wall to see if her sisters are awake; it’s been a fitful night for them too.

She rolls over onto her stomach and back again. She wonders what she looks like from up on the ceiling, lying sleepless in her childhood bed. This is where she spent summer after summer. And Christmas vacation and spring break. Amram, who has risen, is in a T-shirt and cutoff jeans, his thighs thick as ham hocks, his prayer fringes sticking out from under his shirt, twisted as always around his belt loops. His yarmulke, blown by the breeze coming through the open window, flips over itself so that it’s barely hanging from a few tendrils of hair; it droops to the side like a single earmuff.

“The World Without You.” — Joshua Henkin, Guernica Magazine

More #fiction longreads

Japanese-pop star Hatsune Miku has millions of YouTube hits, sells tickets to her concerts at $76 a pop and has adoring fans from all around the world. She’s also not human:

Created by Crypton Future Media, Miku is the most popular avatar created to sell Vocaloid 2, the singing synthesizer application originally developed by Yamaha. In Japan, it is common to create a character associated with software, and at first glance, Miku may seem like little more than an animated mascot, not unlike the Pillsbury Doughboy or the Snuggle fabric softener bear. But Miku inspires an unparalleled creativity.

Instead of passively worshipping her, fans have mobilized into an interactive artistic community. Using Vocaloid 2, they write melodies and lyrics, sharing their songs on YouTube or the Japanese equivalent, niconico (“smilesmile”). Since Miku’s ‘birth’ in August 2007, amateurs have used her likeness in hundreds of thousands of songs, illustrations, videos, games, animations—and one rather creepy, dead-looking Miku robot. She’s a cosplay (costume role play) favorite at anime conventions and elsewhere.

“I Sing the Body Electric.” — Margaret Wappler, Los Angeles Times Magazine

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Cooper played heroic cowboys and espoused all-American values while the studio system helped hide his offscreen affairs:

Cooper became a hero to many, even as he developed a reputation as one of the most notorious philanderers in Hollywood. He had stiff competition — Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, the list goes on — but Cooper may or may not have slept with EVERY. SINGLE. CO-STAR. No matter his age, no matter their age, he was insatiable, before and during his marriage. How to reconcile his moral righteousness onscreen with his philandering offscreen? That was the work of Fixers, gossip magazines, and the studio system at large, which ensured that Cooper was never caught, never denounced, and held up as a paragon of American values. Of course, the way he looked in pants didn’t hurt.

“Scandals of Classic Hollywood: That Divine Gary Cooper.” — Anne Helen Petersen, The Hairpin

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