Search Results for: The Nation

The Story of L.A.'s Insatiable Thirst for Water

Mulholland began looking throughout Southern California for an alternative supply of freshwater, but it was Fred Eaton who came up with a solution. On a camping trip to the Sierra in the early 1890s, Eaton had gazed down upon Owens Lake and thought about all the freshwater flowing into it and going to waste. Yes, Los Angeles was some 200 miles away, but it was all downhill. All one would have to do to move it to the city was dig some canals, lay some pipe and let gravity do the rest. Furthermore, he realized, several streams flowing out of the Sierra could be used to generate hydroelectric power. Imagine, a 200-plus-mile aqueduct running downhill to L.A. and “free” power to boot! Over the next two decades, as his civic interest joined his personal financial interests, Eaton grew increasingly evangelical about Owens Valley water.

In September 1904, he took Mulholland to Owens Valley with only “a mule team, a buckboard, and a demijohn of whiskey,” Mulholland later recalled. Despite the hooch, it was the water and not the whiskey that made a believer out of Mulholland. He readily endorsed Eaton’s proposal to build an aqueduct. Eaton, meanwhile, was buying water options from Owens Valley ranchers and farmers whose pastures bordered the river, without disclosing the city’s plan. He also purchased a 23,000-acre cattle ranch in Long Valley, most of which he hoped to sell to the city, at a tidy profit, for use as an aqueduct reservoir.

Mark Wheeler, in his 2002 Smithsonian feature on the history of Los Angeles and the water that helped it grow. Read more on California in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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First to the Ball

Longreads Pick

Willie Wood and the Making of the Modern Game: Michael Lewis on America’s first Super Bowl

The game itself lives only in memory: no filmed record exists of the first Super Bowl. It was broadcast on two networks but both of them lost or erased the program. All that remains are the few highlights culled by the N.F.L. before the tapes vanished. Their feel is archaic, of a game from a lost era. The lockers have metal grates and locks. Daring personal behavior consists of sneaking out of the hotel after bed check to dance with airline stewardesses. The kickers kick with their toe, and a sack is just another tackle, not an expression of personal domination to be followed by bestial gesturing. The biggest player on the field is the Chiefs’ Buck Buchanan, who at 6-foot-7 and 287 pounds is regarded as freakishly big. (Today the average fan would wonder why he hadn’t filled out.) It may not be a better time, but it certainly is a more credulous one. Everyone is readily believed, and so everyone is more easily deceived, or assumed to be. The example of the deceptive football mind at work is the play-action pass, in which the quarterback fakes a handoff to freeze the defense before making his throw.

Published: Feb 5, 2006
Length: 12 minutes (3,083 words)

When Richard Sherman Met Pete Carroll

I was a high school junior when I first met him. I got pulled out of class unexpectedly to see him waiting in the hallway—Pete Carroll, national championship-winning head coach. We stood and talked there by the lockers for a few minutes. I’ll never forget that—USC’s head coach coming to recruit me at Dominguez High School in Compton in 2004. At the time, it was one of the coolest experiences of my life.

He said, “you’ve got the perfect size to be a lock-up corner.” I’d never heard that before: “lock-up” corner. I made ‘lockup2006’ my email address and used it until I got to college. I didn’t end up going to USC, because my mind was already made up to go to Stanford, and there was no way I was passing up the opportunity to get a Stanford education, but I could tell then there was something that separated Carroll from others coaches who recruited me. You could feel the positive energy, how upbeat he was and how much he believed in what he was saying. He had a different aura to him.

Richard Sherman, in Sports Illustrated (2014), on the Seattle Seahawks coach.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The First 48 Makes Millions While the Innocent Have Their Lives Ruined

Longreads Pick

Once you’re charged with murder on A&E’s The First 48, you’re guilty for life – even if you’re innocent.

In July 2009, 18-year-old Cameron Coker’s life was ripped apart for future viewing by a national audience.
Coker, who’d previously been convicted of dealing drugs, was now the prime suspect in the shooting death of a 16-year-old boy at an apartment complex just east of Highway 6. For this homicide case, Harris County Sheriff’s investigators had company: A film crew from the A&E show The First 48 was there to show the nuts and bolts of the investigation. Entering its tenth season, the series was based on the premise that the first 48 hours of a police investigation are the most crucial. After that time frame, potential evidence goes missing; crime scenes become contaminated; witnesses disappear.

Source: Houston Press
Published: Jan 29, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,301 words)

What It’s Like to Grow Up Gay in Russia

Edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon | OR Books | February 2014 | 11 minutes (2,575 words)

 

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This week we are proud to feature a chapter from Gay Propaganda, a collection of original stories, interviews and testimonials from LGBT Russians both living there and in exile. The book was edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon, and will be published by OR Books in February. We’d like to thank them for sharing this chapter with Longreads Members. 

 

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TATIANA ERMAKOVA

“I had a career in Russia, a nice apartment, friends, family. 

I sacrificed all that to be with Ana.”

I was born and grew up in Saratov, Russia. It’s a provincial town, built on a mix of old-fashioned Orthodox Christian values (which condemned homosexuality as a sin) and Soviet beliefs (when most people thought that homosexuality didn’t exist in the Soviet Society at all).

Both of my parents worked, and I was on my own a lot. I was a good kid, though. I did my homework, stayed home, and didn’t get into trouble. I was also shy and sometimes had a hard time socializing. My father was a history professor at the university, and my mom worked for a non-profit organization. Read more…

The Death of the FCC Indecency Complaint

As society has reached a consensus that there’s no way to control everything children see, the number of indecency complaints has decreased significantly. When Miley Cyrus twerked at the Video Music Awards last summer, the FCC received only 161 complaints (of course, as a cable channel, MTV doesn’t answer to the commission anyway). The moment became fodder for celebrity bloggers and morning show chatterboxes but was never treated as a problem that needed to be legislated away. The PTC dutifully issued a statement denouncing MTV for “sexually exploiting young women,” but no national outcry resulted. Perhaps not coincidentally, CBS never actually paid a fine in connection with Nipplegate—an appeals court ruled in 2008 and again in 2011 that CBS could not be held liable for the actions of contracted performing artists and that the FCC had acted arbitrarily in enforcing indecency policies. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2012.

So for [former Chairman of the FCC Michael] Powell, the halftime show represents “the last great moment” of a TV broadcast becoming a national controversy—the last primal scream of a public marching inexorably toward a new digital existence: “It might have been essentially the last gasp. Maybe that was why there was so much energy around it. The Internet was coming into being, it was intensifying. People wanted one last stand at the wall. It was going to break anyway. I think it broke.

“Is that all good? Probably not, but it’s not changeable either. We live in a new world, and that’s the way it is.

“They said the same thing when books became printed, right? They said it was the end of the world.

“But it wasn’t.”

Marin Cogan in ESPN Magazine (2014) on how the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII changed live television and American audiences.

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A Botched Operation: How a Substandard Abortion Provider Stays In Business

Longreads Pick

Steven Brigham’s abortion clinics keep being sanctioned for offering substandard care. Why is he still in business?

Brigham began placing ads for abortion services in the Yellow Pages. The ads drew a steady stream of pregnant women to his office—and a steady stream of protesters, armed with placards and bullhorns. The commotion escalated, eventually prompting the owners of the building to petition a judge for a temporary injunction against the protesters; after the request was denied, they successfully obtained an injunction against Brigham, who, they claimed, had misrepresented the nature of his medical practice. The controversy attracted extended scrutiny in the local press. One morning, Brigham later recalled, he glanced at the front page of the Reading Eagle and spotted a story, below the fold, about a minor international development: the implosion of the Soviet Union. Above it was yet another story about the turmoil outside his clinic.

Author: Eyal Press
Source: New Yorker
Published: Feb 3, 2014
Length: 41 minutes (10,470 words)

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta: Our Longreads Member Pick

Jessica Wilbanks | Ninth Letter | Fall/Winter 2013 | 27 minutes (6,860 words)

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share “On the Far Side of the Fire,” an essay by Jessica Wilbanks, which first appeared in Ninth Letter and was awarded the journal’s annual creative nonfiction award. This is the first time it has been published online.

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A brief excerpt is below. Longreads Members, login here to get the full story and ebookRead more…

On the Far Side of the Fire: Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta

Child Rights and Rehabilitation Center, Eket, Nigeria

Jessica Wilbanks | Ninth Letter | Fall/Winter 2013 | 27 minutes (6,860 words)

 

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One of our previous Longreads Member Picks, an essay by Jessica Wilbanks, is now free for everyone. “On The Far Side of the Fire” first appeared in Ninth Letter and was awarded the  journal’s annual creative nonfiction award. This is the first time it has been published online.

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