Search Results for: The Nation

The Cuban Grapevine

Longreads Pick

Somehow I’ve ended up helping to cater a party in Havana, and a burly, jovial architect called Rafael is asking me whether I’ve heard of Radio Bemba. Basically it’s the Cuban grapevine: “Bemba” is a slang word for big lips, and the expression has its origins in the way Fidel Castro communicated with his men in the 1950s when they were holed up in the Sierra Maestra building the revolution. Today, in a nation where the only official media are state-controlled, Radio Bemba has become shorthand for the word-of-mouth information network, which is by far the quickest (and often the most reliable) way to find out about anything from baseball chat to celebrity gossip to news of the latest defection to the United States.

Published: Jul 12, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,446 words)

What Makes Life Good?

Longreads Pick

All over the world people are struggling for lives that are worthy of their human dignity. Leaders of countries often focus on national economic growth alone, but their people, meanwhile, are striving for something different: meaningful lives for themselves. Increased GDP has not always made a difference in the quality of people’s lives, and reports of national prosperity are not likely to console those whose existence is marked by inequality and deprivation.

Source: The Nation
Published: Apr 13, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,355 words)

Catastrophic ‘News of the World’: Some Salvage Jobs Are Impossible, Even for Rupert Murdoch

Longreads Pick

We’ve seen scandals before at News Corp. properties, and in normal circumstances, the obsession with the fates of these editors would be a matter of forgetfulness. Do we not already know that top editors and executives in Rupert Murdoch’s international media empire, like naughty nephews of the Caesar, need only to be assigned to a lush manor in a remote province for a time before their behavior there necessitates their return to Rome, their old sins in the capital long-forgotten?

Published: Jul 25, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,269 words)

The Day Kennedy Died

Longreads Pick

As they get settled, ready to hear about surgical manipulation of the biliary tract, Jennings notices a magazine on the coffee table. From the cover, it appears the entire magazine is dedicated to conspiracy theories revolving around the John F. Kennedy assassination. Six floors and 44 years separate the place where they are sitting from that moment in November 1963 when the president of the United States was carted into the emergency room in a condition witnesses would later describe as “moribund.” Andrew points to the magazine. “Were you here when they brought him in?” “Yeah, I helped put in the trache,” McClelland says matter-of-factly.

Source: D Magazine
Published: Oct 24, 2008
Length: 16 minutes (4,044 words)

The Lonesome Independence Day Of Kobayashi, Eater In Exile

Longreads Pick

Kobayashi is living in New York, but he will not be at Nathan’s tomorrow. The man and the event, having made each other internationally famous, are in a long-running contractual dispute, one which landed Kobayashi in jail after he showed up at last year’s contest. Questions abound. Is he trying to blaze a trail for independent eaters? Is he clinging to past glory? Or is he just crazy? According to Rich Shea, one of the Nathan’s promoters, Kobayashi has to decide “whether he’s the Che Guevara of gurgitation or the Kenny Powers of power eating.”

Source: Deadspin
Published: Jul 3, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,448 words)

The Molecatcher’s Daughter

Longreads Pick

James Curtis was part of the first generation of reporters to work what we now think of as the crime beat. Of course, criminal proceedings had always held a fascination for readers: ever since the 1600s there’d been a roaring market in broadsheets that relished the details of a crime and a malefactor’s bloody end, usually with a crude accompanying woodcut showing them dangling from a gallows.

Source: The Believer
Published: Nov 1, 2006
Length: 40 minutes (10,128 words)

The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox

Longreads Pick

When an attractive young woman from a privileged British family is murdered in Italy, you’ve got a popular crime story. When the person suspected of killing her is an attractive young woman from a privileged American family, you have tabloid gold. When the prosecutor hypothesizes that the victim was slaughtered during a satanic ritual orgy, you’ve got the crime story of a decade. When a sitting U.S. senator declares that the case “raises serious questions about the Italian justice system” and asks if “anti-Americanism” is to blame, and when 11 Italian lawmakers in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition request a probe of the prosecutor’s office — well, at that point, you have an international crisis.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jun 28, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,382 words)

Transgender: America’s Next Great Civil Rights Struggle

Longreads Pick

On April 18, a transgender woman named Chrissy Lee Polis went to the women’s bathroom in a Baltimore County McDonald’s. When she came out, two teenage girls approached and spat in her face. Then they threw her to the floor and started kicking her in the head. As a crowd of customers watched, Polis tried to stand up, but the girls dragged her by her hair across the restaurant, ripping the earrings out of her ears. The last thing Polis remembers, before she had a seizure, was spitting blood on the restaurant door. The incident made national news—not because this sort of violence against transgender people is unusual, but because a McDonald’s employee recorded the beating on his cell phone and posted the video on YouTube.

Author: Eliza Gray
Published: Jun 28, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,721 words)

Blow-Up: An Oral History of Transformers Director Michael Bay

Longreads Pick

In 1998, a national magazine asked in an article “Is Michael Bay the Devil?” Thirteen years later, you can still buy T-shirts that answer yes. The 46-year-old director has long been treated by cineastes as the macho spawn of Ed Wood—a testosterone-sweating embodiment of everything that is wrong with modern Hollywood. (Those quotes up there are from actual reviews of his movies.) It also doesn’t help his image that on his film sets he can be a notoriously domineering prick. Bay has flourished, though, not just because his eye-strafing event movies rake in so much money but also because—and let’s whisper here, lest the film snobs are listening—so many of them kick ass. Sure, the dialogue is often subliterate and his fast-cutting style can cause epilepsy. But! Movie stars look dripping hot, never better, in front of his camera.

Source: GQ
Published: Jun 27, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,146 words)

‘86.74 Is Going to Stand for a Long Time’

Longreads Pick

No athlete has ever mastered that equation better than Yuriy Sedykh, who refers to his elegant throwing motion simply as “the dance.” But his physical gifts are far from the only reason his record is so untouchable. Sedykh entered his prime just as the Soviet sports machine was at its peak, creating an environment in which even hammer-throw success was considered essential to national pride. The machine provided him with advantages that today’s hammer throwers can only dream of: generous financial support and state-of-the-art coaching. It also blessed him with that one key factor that few aspiring record-breakers can live without. A nemesis.

Source: ESPN
Published: Jun 21, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,074 words)