Search Results for: The Nation

South L.A., Twenty Years Later

Longreads Pick

On riots and race. What has changed, and what’s still bubbling under the surface, 20 years after the riots in South Central Los Angeles:

“The L.A. Riots (or uprising, civil unrest, or rebellion, depending) are often considered the first ‘multiethnic’ riots. As a pivot point of race and urban relations, they constitute a resonant moment for immigrant America. Korean Americans living on the West Coast at the time remember the first day, 4-29, or sa-i-gu, with time-freezing clarity.

“For many of us, the riots were a schooling in color and class. Our household, run by two working-class parents, was consumed by frantic arguments and phone calls about race, cities, and the distribution of wealth. There was talk of structural, large-scale discrimination, not merely individual prejudice or circumstance, which shaped the course of my life. Last summer, approaching the riots’ twentieth anniversary, I sought out the lessons of 1992. I was drawn in particular to the riots’ crucible in South Central, since refashioned as ‘South L.A.,’ though its infamy and boundaries–set by highways and thoroughfares–remain unchanged.”

Published: Apr 15, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,322 words)

A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1953)

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A grandmother’s ruminations on a Southern road trip:

“The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. ‘Now look here, Bailey,’ she said, ‘see here, read this,’ and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. ‘Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.'”

Published: Jan 1, 1953
Length: 25 minutes (6,465 words)

[Not single-page] John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement: 

Sex with employees and marijuana in the mail is garden-variety stuff, hardly scandalous in many contexts—but the site brought to light other, more outlandish features of Friend’s secret world. Specifically, it said that he had established a Wiccan coven with six women, some of whom were Anusara teachers and a few of whom were married, as a way to raise ‘sexual/sensual energy in a positive and sacred way.’ As proof, there was a letter that Friend had written to the coven, in which he apologized for attracting a former member ‘into my life, into our lives, by vibrating in my mind-body with a frequency of deception and lack of integrity.’ This woman hadn’t left quietly, Friend wrote: Her ‘vampire novel imagination conjured JF … as the next Aleister Crowley or Pierre Arnold Bernard! The Texas Tantric guru is the Big Bad Wolf in magick cloaks taking innocent girls from their faithful husbands and wrecking families to drink the juice of innocent Little Red Ridinghoods—Wow!’

“Karma Crash.” — Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York magazine

See also: “Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph High School Basketball Scandal.” — Michael J. Mooney, GQ, June 30, 2011

Karma Crash

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement:

“Sex with employees and marijuana in the mail is garden-variety stuff, hardly scandalous in many contexts—but the site brought to light other, more outlandish features of Friend’s secret world. Specifically, it said that he had established a Wiccan coven with six women, some of whom were Anusara teachers and a few of whom were married, as a way to raise ‘sexual/sensual energy in a positive and sacred way.’ As proof, there was a letter that Friend had written to the coven, in which he apologized for attracting a former member ‘into my life, into our lives, by vibrating in my mind-body with a frequency of deception and lack of integrity.’ This woman hadn’t left quietly, Friend wrote: Her ‘vampire novel imagination conjured JF … as the next Aleister Crowley or Pierre Arnold Bernard! The Texas Tantric guru is the Big Bad Wolf in magick cloaks taking innocent girls from their faithful husbands and wrecking families to drink the juice of innocent Little Red Ridinghoods—Wow!'”

Published: Apr 16, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,897 words)

La Moretta

[National Magazine Awards finalist] [Fiction] A honeymoon set in Eastern Europe in the 1970s:

Since the beginning of their honeymoon, whenever something went wrong she had been eager to remind him. Is this enough of an adventure for you? Aren’t adventures fun? But here they were, in Bucharest, sitting on the edge of a fountain and looking at an elegant, dormered building that could have been in Paris except for the soldiers standing guard in ill-fitting green uniforms.

“La Moretta.” — Maggie Shipstead, VQR

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La Moretta

Longreads Pick

[National Magazine Awards finalist] [Fiction] A honeymoon set in Eastern Europe in the 1970s:

“Since the beginning of their honeymoon, whenever something went wrong she had been eager to remind him. Is this enough of an adventure for you? Aren’t adventures fun? But here they were, in Bucharest, sitting on the edge of a fountain and looking at an elegant, dormered building that could have been in Paris except for the soldiers standing guard in ill-fitting green uniforms.”

Source: VQR
Published: Sep 1, 2011
Length: 33 minutes (8,259 words)

The Devil in Deryl Dedmon

Longreads Pick

A killing in Mississippi is the first in the state to lead to a hate-crime conviction. Deryl Dedmon is going to prison for killing a 47-year-old black man, James Anderson, with his truck:

“The Dedmon case is shocking for many reasons, but none more disturbing than this belief that a churchgoing white teenager could kill a blameless African-American man he called a ‘nigger’ and not be a racist. By all legal definitions, what he did was a hate crime. And yet it also appears to have been a chillingly unacknowledged one—an extreme example of white people doing racist things while rejecting the R word itself. David Duke. George Wallace. James Watson. Michael Richards. Don Imus. The list is long and always growing, the rolls swelling in banal and not-so-banal ways. At root, all this ‘nonracism’ reflects a national confusion—now that police dogs and burning crosses are behind us—about just what a 21st-century racist is.”

Source: Newsweek
Published: Apr 9, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,579 words)

[National Magazine Awards Finalist] [Fiction] A tattoo artist meets a middle-aged mom:

The woman stood in the doorway, twisting her head at odd angles like a goddamn owl to see our designs on the walls, before walking up to the counter.

‘Sure you’re in the right place?,’ I asked. ‘This ain’t no nail salon.’

‘Is Nate here?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘what’s up?’

‘Marion,’ she said, reaching her hand over the counter. I took it and shook. ‘You came highly recommended by my niece, Janice. You tattooed a rose on her hip.’

She looked at me like she expected me to remember. Shit, if I could remember every rose I tattooed on some girl’s hip, I’d be in the Guinness World Records for the best fuckin’ memory.

“Scars.” — Sarah Turcotte, The Atlantic

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Scars

Longreads Pick

[National Magazine Awards Finalist] [Fiction] A tattoo artist meets a middle-aged mom:

“The woman stood in the doorway, twisting her head at odd angles like a goddamn owl to see our designs on the walls, before walking up to the counter.

“‘Sure you’re in the right place?,’ I asked. ‘This ain’t no nail salon.’

“‘Is Nate here?’

“‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘what’s up?’

“‘Marion,’ she said, reaching her hand over the counter. I took it and shook. ‘You came highly recommended by my niece, Janice. You tattooed a rose on her hip.’

“She looked at me like she expected me to remember. Shit, if I could remember every rose I tattooed on some girl’s hip, I’d be in the Guinness World Records for the best fuckin’ memory.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 1, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,759 words)

[National Magazine Awards finalist, Public Interest] An investigation of rampant sexual violence that goes unpunished at a Sioux reservation:

Kim reported the rape, and Mike was arrested and jailed. As soon as she returned to the reservation, his family began threatening her, calling her a liar and a bitch. Whenever they saw her on the street, they told her they would beat her up and make sure her son was taken away from her if she didn’t drop the charges. Kim believed they could do it, since some of Mike’s family members worked in the tribal court. ‘I was getting threats right and left, and I wasn’t scared. I was going to go through with it—they had him in jail, and it was all going to work out. But then they let him out,’ Kim said. ‘Nobody would do anything. He just walked around town.’

“Tiny Little Laws.” — Kathy Dobie, Harper’s

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