Search Results for: The Nation

Longreads Best of 2013: Favorite New Writer Discovery

Above: Thomas “TJ” Webster Jr.

***

Ross Andersen is a Senior Editor at Aeon Magazine. He has written extensively about science and philosophy for several publications, including The Atlantic and The Economist.

“Flinder Boyd’s piece about an aspirational streetballer and his cross-country trip to New York’s legendary Rucker Park had me from the very first word. The story is about basketball, a minor obsession of mine, but it’s also about poverty and the kinds of dreams it nurtures. Boyd gives us an unflinching portrait of his subject, an underskilled, overconfident young ballplayer from Sacramento without ever stripping him of his dignity as a human being. I read it twice, straight through.”

20 Minutes At Rucker Park

Flinder Boyd | SB Nation | October 2013 | 31 minutes (7,805 words)

More stories from Boyd in the Longreads Archive

***

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Ground Control

Longreads Pick

What will it look like when drones (like those envisioned by Amazon’s Prime Air) come to U.S. airspace?

In this property-rights-obsessed nation, it turns out you actually don’t have a clear right to shoot down a drone hovering low over your backyard unless it’s putting you in imminent physical danger.

“You have to acknowledge in this day and age that stuff flies over your house,” Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in robotics and the law, told me. That puts him at odds with conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, who voiced a more typical reaction on Fox News last year: “The first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.”

Source: The Magazine
Published: Dec 1, 2013
Length: 30 minutes (7,500 words)

Reading List: Leaving the Places We've Lived

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there are stories of people leaving cities outside of New York. Here are four essays about leaving some of these cities, and maybe coming back to them.

1. “The Last City I Loved: Omaha, Nebraska.” (Gene Kwak, The Rumpus, June 2013)

I found myself floating in the details of Kwak’s friendships and favorite places. I’ve never been to Omaha, but now I want to go. It doesn’t need promotion, though — I just need to remember it’s there. And you just need to read this essay.

2. “London’s Great Exodus.” (Michael Goldfarb, The New York Times, October 2013)

Middle-class London residents can’t afford to live in a city where property is currency and international moguls move in.

3. “Farewell to the Enchanted City.” (Elizabeth Minkel, The Millions, July 2013)

A well-written meta examination on the classic Leaving New York essay: “But New York, though — maybe it’s the preponderance of writers here, the narcissism and the navel-gazing, that turns our comings and goings into a series of extended metaphors? … When we manage to leave, if we manage to leave, escape becomes a genre in and of itself.”

4. “Why I Am Leaving New York City.” (Mallory Ortberg The Toast, November 2013)

Let’s end on a lighter note: Mallory Ortberg (perhaps the funniest human on the internet?) hasn’t lived in NYC before, but she’s not going to let that stop her from writing an essay about leaving.

***

Photo: Don O’Brien

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Long Way Home

Longreads Pick

Rosanne Cash on life in Tennessee and memories of her father, Johnny Cash:

My second Tennessee began in 1967, when I was twelve years old. My parents had just separated the previous winter, and that first summer my mom let my sisters and me go to Tennessee to spend several weeks with my dad. He had just bought the big house on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, about twenty miles from Nashville.

Dad was just emerging from the depths of his drug addiction, but he was clean and sober, if gaunt and a little shaky. He and June were not married yet, but she and her daughters, Rosie and Carlene, were around a lot and we befriended our soon-to-be stepsisters. The next several summers were glorious, each better than the one before. Dad had a little speedboat, and he taught all of us to water ski. He was the most patient teacher in the world. We jumped in the water, hooked our feet into the skis, and he gunned the engine. We fell and fell and fell. And then, eventually, we got up and he whooped and waved his arm at us as he pulled us around the lake. We did this every day for hours. Once I was sitting in the boat with him while he pulled one of my sisters up on the skis when the glove box popped open and money—bills of all denominations—flew out and away. My dad glanced at the currency as the wind carried it out of the boat, but never looked back, never said a word. That gave me an insight into my dad’s relationship with money: He let it fly and never looked back.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Nov 25, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,580 words)

How a Calf Head Roasted in a Pit Became a Popular Mexican Delicacy

“The historical method of preparation of calf head developed from the practice of baking an entire calf in the ground overnight, a practice designed to feed a significant number of people with a single large protein source, baked in the only structure available everywhere for free: the earth itself. This was a crude but effective technique: a hole was dug in the ground and lined with porous or volcanic stones or bricks to absorb heat, then a large bonfire was set alight inside it and allowed to burn down to coal, at which point the calf would be wrapped in leaves and tossed in and the cover sealed so no oxygen could enter the pit. The fuel, the material used to line the pit, and the material used to cover the pit all vary from culture to culture, but the basic principles are found in native cookeries the world over, from the Polynesian brick-lined pits used to cook entire pigs to the tandoors used across the Indian subcontinent.

“Where did the below-ground method originate? It’s difficult for either archaeologists or anthropologists to pinpoint, but in the New World, the method tends to correspond to a map of Spanish colonialism, so it isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that Native Americans, who had previously been roasting their kills over an open fire, learned to bake whole animals in the earth from the conquistadores. On the other hand, the method also shows up in places like Maine, where they cook beans and clams in the earth, and I don’t think Cabeza de Vaca quite made it up to Bangor, so the origins remain firmly in the scope of speculation.

“At any rate, the traditional method of preparation, which included the entire animal, eventually gave way to a predilection for the soft tissues of the head. The word ‘barbacoa’ is actually a corruption of the phrase ‘de la barba a la cola,’ which translates into ‘from the beard to the tail.’ In South Texas bricks or stones line the pit, mesquite is the heat source, and the whole thing is covered with sheet metal. When I was a kid, the barbacoa that emerged was composed of three parts: cachete (cheek), lengua (tongue), and mixta (a mixture of brains, lips, eyeballs, and probably, if you’re not careful, ears).”

– In Texas Monthly, National Book Award finalist Domingo Martinez recalls eating barbacoa with his family in South Texas, and examines how the meat was traditionally cooked and served. Read more food stories in the Longreads Archive.

***

Photo: Neil Conway

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Riders on the Storm

Longreads Pick

An examination of Colorado’s mental health care system after the Aurora theater shooting. The state passed a $25 million initiative to restructure its crisis system for mentally ill patients, but still has a lot of work to do:

Colorado has underfunded mental health care for decades. Exactly how much is uncertain because there are at least 34 separate mental health line items in the state budget. “At the state Legislature, we cut provider rates for Medicaid and for drug and alcohol [programs] in 2002, when we had the downturn,” says Moe Keller, who spent 16 years in the state Legislature and is now the vice president of public policy and strategic initiatives at Mental Health America of Colorado , the local outpost of a national group that advocates for mental wellness reform. “We cut beds, and we closed a couple of units around the state. We never really re-funded that when the economy came back.” Then in 2008, the state again cut Medicaid providers and closed more units along with consolidating and reducing services. “Today, the prison system is by default the largest behavioral health center,” Keller says. “Police are the first responders.”

Source: 5280 Magazine
Published: Nov 26, 2013
Length: 31 minutes (7,839 words)

This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading

Longreads Pick

The author of nearly three dozen books on the decline of manufacturing in America, and a future in which innovation can’t save us but reducing our consumption might:

Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.

Look at LCD screens. Most of the advances are coming from big industrial conglomerates in Korea like Samsung or LG. The only good thing in the US is Gorilla Glass, because it’s Corning, and Corning spends $700 million a year on research.

Source: Wired
Published: Nov 26, 2013
Length: 7 minutes (1,807 words)

Who Invented Skiing?

“Serik describes a hunt when Tursen skied down on a bounding deer, leaped on its back, grabbed its antlers, and wrestled it down into the snow, the animal kicking and biting. It is a scene that has been repeated for thousands of years in these mountains. Within the Altay, a handful of petroglyphs have been discovered depicting archaic skiing scenes, including one of a human figure on skis chasing an ibex. Since petroglyphs are notoriously hard to date, it remains a controversial clue in the debate over where skiing was born. Chinese archaeologists contend it was carved 5,000 years ago. Others say it is probably only 3,000 years old. The oldest written record that alludes to skiing, a Chinese text, also points to the Altay but dates to the Western Han dynasty, which began in 206 B.C.

“Norwegian archaeologists also have found ski petroglyphs, and in Russia, what appears to be a ski tip, carbon-dated to 8,000 years ago, was excavated from a peat bog. Each nation stakes its own claim to the first skiers. What is widely accepted, however, is that whoever first strapped on a pair of skis likely did so to hunt animals.”

– In National Geographic, Mark Jenkins travels to the Chinese Altay Mountains to join a semi nomadic hunting party who may be descendants of the first skiers. Read more stories from National Geographic.

***

Photo: Sheffield Tiger

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

The Things They Buried

Longreads Pick

Domingo Martinez, a 2013 National Book Award finalist, recalls Sunday luncheons with his family in South Texas eating pit-roasted barbacoa:

As soon as I was old enough, which in rural Brownsville was around fourteen, it was my job to get up before anyone else those mornings and drive to the barbacoa place for our ration. I was expected to have the food on the table before the rest of the family woke up. Dad would leave $20 on the dining room table the night before, and I would find my favorite mixtape and then zoom off about seven-thirty or so in my sister’s Volkswagen Rabbit. I looked forward to those Sunday mornings—the simple rush of freedom as I pulled away, that transcendental sense of liberation when you lock into fourth gear and hit 55 on a dirt road, as some ageless punk rock blares from the speakers. It should give you a sense of how malnourished the rest of my life was that this was magical to me, this drive to some nearby colonia where Dad knew someone who was making backyard barbacoa in a burst of free enterprise that may or may not have been legal, churning out tortillas in their garage on a tortilla-making machine (I don’t know what those are called). I took my job very seriously, though I didn’t really understand why. I just wanted to take the car out for a spin.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Nov 24, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,385 words)

The Truth About Domestic Abuse Involving Police Officers

“Domestic abuse is believed to be the most frequently unreported crime, and it is particularly corrosive when it involves the police. Taught to wield authority through control, threats or actual force, officers carry their training, their job stress and their guns home with them, amplifying the potential for abuse.

“Yet nationwide, interviews and documents show, police departments have been slow to recognize and discipline abusers in uniform, largely because of a predominantly male blue wall of silence. Victims are often reluctant to file complaints, fearing that an officer’s colleagues simply will not listen or understand, or that if they do, the abuser may be stripped of his weapon and ultimately his family’s livelihood.”

Walt Bogdanich and Glenn Silber, in the New York Times, on the botched investigation into the death of Michelle O’Connell, the girlfriend of a Florida sheriff’s deputy. Read more from the New York Times.

***

Photo: roland, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.