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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Mother Jones, SB Nation, Wired, Dissent Magazine, Playboy, fiction from The American Reader, and Mike Spry’s guest pick from GQ.
The Eat, Pray, Love author talks to the Lucky Peach editor about how she became a writer, and the key to creativity:
“I was just so committed, and I did have six years of rejection letters. And it really didn’t break my heart. Some of them made me really excited because some of them had little handwritten notes at the bottom. Pretty good, but not our thing. And I was like, I got a really great handwritten note from Harper’s! And I would hang it on my wall, like, That’s such a great rejection letter! I don’t know why I felt like I had the right to do it. I don’t know. I’ve always been really surprised—and I really remain very surprised—at people who don’t think they have the right to do their work, or feel like they need a permission slip from the principal to do it, or who doubt their voice. I’m always like, What? What? Fucking do it! Just fucking do it! What’s the worst that could happen?! You fucking fail! Then you do it again and you wear them down and they get sick of rejecting you. And they get tired of seeing your letters and they just give up. They don’t have any choice. So part of it was real confidence, and part of it was fake confidence, and part of it was insecurity. It was a combination of all them.”
Internal memos and documents show how the sugar industry worked to cover up evidence of its dangerous health effects:
“In January 1976, the GRAS committee published its preliminary conclusions, noting that while sugar probably contributed to tooth decay, it was not a ‘hazard to the public.’ The draft review dismissed the diabetes link as ‘circumstantial’ and called the connection to cardiovascular disease ‘less than clear,’ with fat playing a greater role. The only cautionary note, besides cavities, was that all bets were off if sugar consumption were to increase significantly. The committee then thanked the Sugar Association for contributing ‘information and data.’ (Tatem would later remark that while he was ‘proud of the credit line…we would probably be better off without it.’)
The committee’s perspective was shared by many researchers, but certainly not all. For a public hearing on the draft review, scientists from the USDA’s Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory submitted what they considered ‘abundant evidence that sucrose is one of the dietary factors responsible for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.’ As they later explained in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, some portion of the public—perhaps 15 million Americans at that time—clearly could not tolerate a diet rich in sugar and other carbohydrates. Sugar consumption, they said, should come down by ‘a minimum of 60 percent,’ and the government should launch a national campaign ‘to inform the populace of the hazards of excessive sugar consumption.’ But the committee stood by its conclusions in the final version of its report presented to the FDA in October 1976.”
Monopoly has become “the world’s best-selling proprietary board game,” but the original game allowed players to cooperate so that everyone could prosper:
“With us in Jarrell’s cottage was Mike Curtis, an Ardenite who twenty years earlier had played a round of Magie’s original 1906 Landlord’s Game (one of his opponents, as it happened, was Patrice McFarland). The Georgist rules by which Curtis had played were known as the Single Tax set, and they went beyond having players simply pay rent into Magie’s ‘Public Treasury.’ They also aimed to teach the shared ownership of public goods. Under Single Tax rules, when the amount in the treasury reached fifty dollars, the player who owned the lighting utility was forced to sell it, and thereafter the utility cost no money to land on, as it was now publicly owned. This process repeated itself with the Slambang Trolley, then with the railroads, then with the Go to Jail space, which became a public college that, instead of sending players to jail, provided extra wages at the end of the game. After that, each fifty-dollar deposit in the treasury raised players’ wages by ten dollars. A ‘win’ in Single Tax, which Magie later dubbed Prosperity Game, occurred when the player with the least amount of money had doubled his original capital. ‘The Landlord’s Game,’ said Magie, ‘shows why our national housekeeping has gone wrong and Prosperity Game shows how to start it right and keep it going right.’ Curtis admitted that he didn’t think much of the game, pronouncing it ‘kind of boring after a while.'”
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Mother Jones, SB Nation, Wired, Dissent Magazine, Playboy, fiction from The American Reader, and Mike Spry’s guest pick from GQ.
“Coach: A Local Legend and a Young Man’s Search to Find Himself.” — William Browning, SB Nation
The writer, a former American prisoner in Iran, goes inside America’s prisons and examines the solitary confinement system. He discovers “a recipe for abuse and violation rights”:
“As I read the medical literature, I remember the violent fantasies that sometimes seized my mind so fully that not even meditation—with which I luckily had a modicum of experience before I was jailed—would chase them away. Was the uncontrollable banging on my cell door, the pounding of my fists into my mattress, just a common symptom of isolation? I wonder what happens when someone with a history of violence is seized by such uncontrollable rage. A 2003 study of inmates at the Pelican Bay SHU by University of California-Santa Cruz psychology professor Craig Haney found that 88 percent of the SHU population experiences irrational anger, nearly 30 times more than the US population at large.
“Haney says there hasn’t been a single study of involuntary solitary confinement that didn’t show negative psychiatric symptoms after 10 days. He found that a full 41 percent of SHU inmates reported hallucinations. Twenty-seven percent have suicidal thoughts. CDCR’s own data shows that, from 2007 to 2010, inmates in isolation killed themselves at eight times the rate of the general prison population.
“In the SHU, people diagnosed with mental illnesses like depression—which afflicts, according to Haney, 77 percent of SHU inmates—only see a psychologist once every 30 days. Anyone whose mental illness qualifies as ‘serious’ (the criterion for which is ‘possible breaks with reality,’ according to Pelican Bay’s chief of mental health, Dr. Tim McCarthy) must be removed from the SHU. When they are, they get sent to a special psychiatric unit—where they are locked up in solitary. Some 364 prisoners are there today.”
Inside the imagination of Hilary Mantel, now two-time Booker Prize-winning author of historical fiction including Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies:
“When she wakes in the morning, she likes to start writing right away, before she speaks, because whatever remnants sleep has left are the gift her brain has given her for the day. Her dream life is important to the balance of her mind: it’s the place where she experiences disorder. Her dreams are archetypal, mythological, enormous, full of pageantry—there are knights and monsters. She has been to the crusades in her dreams more than once.
“When she’s starting a new book, she needs to feel her way inside the characters, to know what it’s like to be them. There is a trick she uses sometimes, which another writer taught her. Sit quietly and withdraw your attention from the room you’re in until you’re focussed inside your mind. Imagine a chair and invite your character to come and sit in it; once he is comfortable, you may ask him questions. She tried this for the first time when she was writing The Giant, O’Brien: the giant came in, but, before sitting down in the chair, he bent down and tested it, to see if it would take his weight. On that occasion, she never got any further, because she was so excited that she punched the air and shouted ‘Yes!’ But from then on she could imagine herself in the giant’s body.”
A lawyer and his pastor brother-in-law worked tirelessly to fight the Nazis from inside Germany—helping victims and even plotting to assassinate Hitler:
“Dietrich, embattled and frustrated, thought of going abroad, as he had in 1934 and 1935; perhaps some work in America might serve as a temporary alternative to military service—a dreaded, morally unacceptable prospect. His mentor Reinhold Niebuhr arranged a job for him in New York, where he arrived in late June 1939. But at once he was in spiritual turmoil: How could he contemplate living in a foreign country, at peace, when his own country was on the brink of war and desolation? He decided he must go back to Europe, explaining to Niebuhr:
“‘I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany…. Christians in Germany are going to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose.'”
The making of the boy and girl groups that are leading the international K-pop explosion:
“Lee founded S.M. in 1989. His first success was a Korean singer and hip-hop dancer named Hyun Jin-young, whose album came out in 1990. But, just as Jin-young was on the verge of stardom, he was arrested for drugs. Russell writes that Lee was ‘devastated’ by this misfortune, and that the experience taught him the value of complete control over his artists: ‘He could not go through the endless promoting and developing a new artist only to have it crash and burn around him.’
“In effect, Lee combined his ambitions as a music impresario with his training as an engineer to create the blueprint for what became the K-pop idol assembly line. His stars would be made, not born, according to a sophisticated system of artistic development that would make the star factory that Berry Gordy created at Motown look like a mom-and-pop operation. Lee called his system ‘cultural technology.’ In a 2011 address at Stanford Business School, he explained, ‘I coined this term about fourteen years ago, when S.M. decided to launch its artists and cultural content throughout Asia. The age of information technology had dominated most of the nineties, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next.’ He went on, ‘S.M. Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology.'”
It is “a national disgrace”: The U.S. prison system, for years, failed to stop rampant sexual abuse from occurring behind bars. Inside the new program to stop it:
“The review panel’s most recent report describes the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, a maximum-security state prison in Troy, Virginia. About 1,200 women are confined there, and when the BJS surveyed them in 2009, 11.4 percent said they’d been sexually abused by other inmates in the preceding year alone; 6.0 percent said they’d been sexually abused by staff.”
“The twelve months asked about in that survey came shortly after sexual misconduct by Fluvanna’s staff had already turned into scandal. Former inmate Melissa Andrews told the review panel about Patrick Owen Gee, who was chief of security at the prison—a man, she said, who seemed to hate women. When he started working at Fluvanna, he ‘went from wing to wing in each building and told us, “you bitches think you’ve been living in Kindercare…things are going to change.”‘ Andrews also testified that the warden to whom Gee reported, Barbara Wheeler, ‘said to officers many times, that if she took anything and everything from us including our humanity maybe we would not return to prison’ Gee was convicted of sexually abusing the inmates he was supposed to protect in 2008, and sentenced to five years in prison.”
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