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A Palestinian-American writer flies to Israel on her way to visit her sister. Despite having an American passport, she doesn’t make it far:

An hour later, the bearded young man who had originally questioned me at the immigration hall became my guard. When I tried to go to the bathroom, he said I was not allowed. This made me nervous. I had been allowed to go before. I told him so. ‘Well, it’s different now,’ he said.

‘Different how?’ I asked. ‘Am I under detention?’

He would not answer me. I told him that I was an American citizen and that I demanded to know whether or not I was under detention. He closed his eyes, then opened them, and said, reluctantly, ‘Yes.’

I lost it. I demanded to see someone from the embassy or the consulate. He ignored me. I said that he needed to take me to the bathroom. He said no. I lifted up my dress and pretended to squat, and shouted, ‘Fine, then I will go to the bathroom right here!’

“Imagining Myself in Palestine.” — Randa Jarrar, Guernica

More #longreads from Guernica

[Not single-page] The case against Rudy Kurniawan, who arrived on the wine scene less than a decade ago and now stands accused of selling millions of dollars in fake wines:

Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan’s quirks and résumé gaps were of much less interest than his generosity. After one tasting, Wasserman hailed him for having ‘poured the sickest lineup of wines I have ever had in one evening’ and told him that ‘the scepter, the crown, the ermine cape is yours.’ Meadows, too, became a beneficiary of Kurniawan’s largesse, through which he tasted wines even he had never encountered. Grateful, he took pains to field Kurniawan’s often arcane queries about labeling and capsule nomenclature. ‘I thought at the time, “Jesus Christ, he must take these bottles to bed,” ’ Meadows says. Soon, he was publishing tasting notes based on Kurniawan bottles, lending his blue-chip imprimatur to the young man and his wines. Robert Parker, the world’s most powerful wine critic, also drank them and pronounced Kurniawan ‘a very sweet and generous man.’

“Château Sucker.” — Benjamin Wallace, New York magazine

More #longreads from Benjamin Wallace

[Fiction] A couple prepares for another predictable evening with old friends:

Later, he came out of the bathroom just as the toilet was completing its roar. She was no longer in the kitchen. He took another cheese and cracker. He walked past the dressed table to the living room. She sat on the sofa reading the same magazine he had been reading. He stood in the middle of the room and raised his hands. ‘Where are they?’

‘If there’s one thing that’s predictable,’ she said.

‘But it’s almost forty-five minutes.’

‘They’ll be eating some very cold appetizers.’

“The Dinner Party.” — Joshua Ferris, The New Yorker, 2008

See more #fiction #longreads

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Monthly, #fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Amy Whipple.

The Dinner Party

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A couple prepares for another predictable evening with old friends:

“Later, he came out of the bathroom just as the toilet was completing its roar. She was no longer in the kitchen. He took another cheese and cracker. He walked past the dressed table to the living room. She sat on the sofa reading the same magazine he had been reading. He stood in the middle of the room and raised his hands. ‘Where are they?’

“‘If there’s one thing that’s predictable,’ she said.

“‘But it’s almost forty-five minutes.’

“‘They’ll be eating some very cold appetizers.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 11, 2008
Length: 20 minutes (5,210 words)

Inside the boardroom battles that led to the hiring (and firing) of CEO Léo Apotheker, formerly of SAP. Meg Whitman is now in charge of finding ways to fix the legendary tech company:

A few months after she took over as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard last September, Meg Whitman held one in a series of get-to-know-you meetings with employees. To say the audience, a group of software engineers and managers, was sullen would be an understatement. As Whitman spoke, many of them glared at her. Others weren’t making eye contact with their new boss. Their heads were down, and they were tapping furiously on handheld devices.

‘Your comments are being live-blogged,’ one employee told her defiantly. Whitman challenged the man. ‘You all have taken leaking to a new art form,’ she said. ‘It’s a sign of an unhappy company. You wish HP ill.’ The tapping suddenly stopped, and as the room fell silent, the mobile devices were lowered.

“How Hewlett-Packard Lost Its Way.” — James Bandler, Doris Burke, Fortune magazine

More from Fortune magazine

[Not single-page] Facebook staffers once told Mark Zuckerberg he needed to take “CEO lessons.” How Zuckerberg responded, and what it means for Facebook leading up to its IPO:

‘Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,’ a former Facebook employee explains. ‘You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing.’ Zuckerberg has been really good at firing. ‘We made some hires that weren’t the right ones. And we were pretty good at correcting that quickly. Mark deserves the credit for identifying and following through with that.’ In other cases, key personnel who were good fits simply got outgrown by the company. It can be even harder to jettison those kinds of employees, whose contributions have earned them the loyalty of business partners and colleagues. But here too Zuckerberg did not flinch.

“The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man.” — Henry Blodget, New York magazine

See more #longreads from New York magazine

A new book explains how “social jet lag” is interfering with our internal clocks:

Modern human beings are not much like mimosas. It’s true that both have biological clocks, but only one of us has culture. And culture, delightful as it is, turns out to radically complicate—“fuck up” would not be an overstatement—our relationship to time.

Among species, we humans are to time what Polish villagers have long been to place: unhappy subjects of multiple competing regimes. The first regime is internal time: the schedule established by our bodies. The second is sun time: the schedule established by light and darkness. These two we share with houseplants and virtually every other living being. But we are also governed by a third regime: social time. That sounds benign enough, like afternoon tea with a friend. But don’t be fooled. Social time is the villain in this drama, out to turn you against health, happiness, nature, sanity, even your own inner self.

“Cuckoo.” — Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine

More #longreads from Kathryn Schulz

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: GQ, The New Yorker, Inc. Magazine, The Classical, New York Magazine, #fiction from Guernica, plus a guest pick from Largehearted Boy’s David Gutowski.

On the 25th anniversary of “Licensed to Ill,” an oral history of the birth of the Beastie Boys.

Then we were like, ‘Oh, shit, we should get a D.J.! Like rap groups. They have a D.J.!’ Nick Cooper knew about this guy Rick Rubin who went to NYU and would throw parties and had turntables. And a bubble machine. We were like, ‘If we had a fucking D.J. and a fucking bubble machine, we’d be fucking killing it.’

“Rude Boys.” — Amos Barshad, New York magazine, April 24, 2011