Search Results for: The Nation

Bath Salts: Deep in the Heart of America’s New Drug Nightmare

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] A new lab-brewed drug epidemic has law-enforcement officials scrambling to contain it.

“The last four decades have seen plenty of whipped-up hysteria about various fad intoxicants of the moment. But the fear generated by bath salts seems well earned. Dr. Mark Ryan, director at the Louisiana Poison Center, called bath salts ‘the worst drug’ he has seen in his 20 years there. ‘With LSD, you might see pink elephants, but with this drug, you see demons, aliens, extreme paranoia, heart attacks, and superhuman strength like Superman,’ Ryan has said. ‘If you had a reaction, it was a bad reaction.’

“Starting in late 2010, an influx of violent, irrational, self-destructive users began to congest hospital ERs throughout the States. A 19-year-old West Virginia man claimed he was high on bath salts when he stabbed his neighbor’s pygmy goat while wearing women’s underwear; a Mississippi man skinned himself alive while under the influence. Users staggered in, or were carried in, consumed by extreme panic, tachycardia, deep paranoia, and heart-attack symptoms. (Perhaps the most infamous incident tied to bath salts is Rudy Eugene’s horrific naked face-eating attack in Miami in May, although conclusive toxicology reports have yet to be released; still, the fact that this feels like the closest thing to a credible explanation for chewing a homeless man’s head for 18 minutes speaks volumes about the drug’s reputation.)”

Source: Spin
Published: Jun 14, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,173 words)

Bully Pulpit

Longreads Pick

How rhetoric from an evangelist talk-show host led to the resignation Mitt Romney’s openly gay national-security spokesman:

“Fischer’s attack against Grenell started on Friday, April 20th, with a post on Twitter. ‘Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman,’ he tweeted, soon after learning of the hire. ‘If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.’ The next Monday, Fischer opened his show—which is broadcast, he likes to say, on ‘the most feared radio network in America!’—by telling his listeners that he had ‘kicked up a dust storm in the Twitterverse.'”

Author: Jane Mayer
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 14, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,052 words)

The Vanishing

Longreads Pick

Over the last four decades, at least 18 women have disappeared from British Columbia’s Highway 16. Inside the investigation:

“In testimony to B.C.’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry—formed in 2010, mainly to investigate why it took law enforcement so long to catch Willie “the Pig Farmer” Pickton, a serial killer who preyed on Vancouver women from 1995 through 2001—First Nations bands and local community groups claimed that as many as 43 women have been killed or gone missing along Highway 16. In 2005, the RCMP created a special unit calledE-Pana (E is the RCMP designation for all things British Columbian, and Pana is an Inuit god who caretakes souls in a frozen underworld before reincarnation) to examine some of the disappearances and to determine whether another serial killer was at work. Its investigators eventually sorted through hundreds of unsolved murders, missing women, and sexual assaults in B.C. over the past four decades and found that 18 cases shared enough similarities to be possibly linked.”

Author: Bob Friel
Source: Outside
Published: Jun 13, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,919 words)

Life as a mob boss’s girlfriend:

By the early 1990s, Stanley began to crack under the years of control and psychological domination. She and Bulger were arguing constantly, sometimes violently, at home and in public. Once, at a wedding party, Teresa was approached by Bulger’s partner, Flemmi, who said, ‘Teresa, I know you and Jimmy are going through a rough patch, but there’s something you need to understand. That man will never let you go.’

Stanley felt trapped. She went into a deep depression. She had become financially and emotionally dependent on Bulger; she could see no way out. Then, the ‘other woman’ entered the picture.

Stanley was home alone one night when she got a call. An unfamiliar female voice said, ‘I think we need to talk.’

“Whitey Bulger’s Women.” — T.J. English, The Daily Beast

More from The Daily Beast

Whitey Bulger’s Women

Longreads Pick

Life as a mob boss’s girlfriend:

“By the early 1990s, Stanley began to crack under the years of control and psychological domination. She and Bulger were arguing constantly, sometimes violently, at home and in public. Once, at a wedding party, Teresa was approached by Bulger’s partner, Flemmi, who said, ‘Teresa, I know you and Jimmy are going through a rough patch, but there’s something you need to understand. That man will never let you go.’

“Stanley felt trapped. She went into a deep depression. She had become financially and emotionally dependent on Bulger; she could see no way out. Then, the ‘other woman’ entered the picture.

“Stanley was home alone one night when she got a call. An unfamiliar female voice said, ‘I think we need to talk.'”

Source: The Daily Beast
Published: Jun 11, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,368 words)

How does the U.S. define what groups are terrorist organizations, and what groups are potential allies? Questions around the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK) in Iran:

The story of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, also known as the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK), is all about the way image management can enable a diehard enemy to become a cherished ally. The MEK is currently campaigning to be officially delisted in the US as a terrorist organisation. Once off the list it will be free to make use of its support on Capitol Hill in order to become America’s most favoured, and no doubt best funded, Iranian opposition group.

The last outfit to achieve something similar was the Iraqi National Congress, the lobby group led by Ahmed Chalabi that talked of democracy and paved the way for the US invasion of Iraq by presenting Washington with highly questionable ‘evidence’ of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qaida.

“Terrorists? Us?” — Owen Bennett-Jones, London Review of Books

More from the London Review of Books

Terrorists? Us?

Longreads Pick

How does the U.S. define what groups are terrorist organizations, and what groups are potential allies? Questions around the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK) in Iran:

“The story of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, also known as the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK), is all about the way image management can enable a diehard enemy to become a cherished ally. The MEK is currently campaigning to be officially delisted in the US as a terrorist organisation. Once off the list it will be free to make use of its support on Capitol Hill in order to become America’s most favoured, and no doubt best funded, Iranian opposition group.

“The last outfit to achieve something similar was the Iraqi National Congress, the lobby group led by Ahmed Chalabi that talked of democracy and paved the way for the US invasion of Iraq by presenting Washington with highly questionable ‘evidence’ of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qaida.”

Published: Jun 2, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,644 words)

A look at the Obama Administration’s process for approving drone strikes on Al Qaeda suspects. Insiders say President Obama is personally approving the final decisions:

President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.

‘How old are these people?’ he asked, according to two officials present. ‘If they are starting to use children,’ he said of Al Qaeda, ‘we are moving into a whole different phase.’ “It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.

“Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.” — Jo Becker, Scott Shane, The New York Times

More #longreads about Obama

Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will

Longreads Pick

A look at the Obama Administration’s process for approving drone strikes on Al Qaeda suspects. Insiders say President Obama is personally approving the final decisions:

“President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.

“‘How old are these people?’ he asked, according to two officials present. ‘If they are starting to use children,’ he said of Al Qaeda, ‘we are moving into a whole different phase.’

“It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.”

Published: May 29, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,301 words)

One of the greatest athletes of all time faded into the background while his wife and daughters became reality TV stars:

Fathers suffer a curse, and Bruce Jenner knows this curse better than most: The day you become a father, you stop being who you were. In the eyes of your children, your life began when theirs did.

The strange thing about Jenner, now that he’s sixty-two years old: It’s not just his glorious past that has disappeared. It’s as though all of him, every previous incarnation of him, has been flooded out of view: by the fame of his adopted family — his third wife, the former-and-sometimes-still Kris Kardashian, her son, Rob, and her collection of daughters, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, Kendall, and Kylie, the last two also Jenner’s — by the glib demands of reality-TV story lines, by dubious plastic surgery and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. Even in his own home, that familiar Spanish castle with the fountain splashing out front, you have to look hard to find those few traces of his existence. (‘My mom’s house,’ Kim calls it.) All of the photographs are of the children; all of the memorabilia and props are the product of their successes, not his. There is no red singlet in a frame; his gold medal is nowhere to be found. For the most part, Bruce Jenner, Olympian, has been banished to the garage.

“The Strange Thing About Bruce Jenner.” — Chris Jones, Esquire

More from Jones