Sixty-nine Days
An in-depth account of how the Chilean miners survived during the 2010 Copiapó mining accident:
At noon on the second day, Sepúlveda lined up thirty-three plastic cups and scooped one teaspoon of canned fish into each, then poured in some water, making a broth. He passed out two cookies to each man. “Enjoy your meal,” he said. “This is delicious stuff. Make it last.” Each cup probably contained fewer than a hundred calories.
Several times during those first days, the mountain rumbled as though it were exploding again. Lobos said that, outside the Refuge, “I always slept with one eye open, and when the mountain made noises I’d go running back inside.” A few of the men took the stretchers and used them as beds; others put cardboard onto the tile floor. The men were covered in soot. The Refuge, without any ventilation, started to smell like their fetid, unbathed bodies. “We didn’t have water we could spare to clean our private parts,” one miner said. Another said, “I’ve smelled corpses before, and after a while it smelled worse than that.”
Yes, All Women Part II: A Reading List of Stories Written By Women
My last Yes, All Women reading list was a hit with the Longreads community, so here’s part two. Enjoy 20 pieces by fantastic women writers.
A Doctor’s Quest to Save People by Injecting Them With Scorpion Venom
A profile of Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can make cancer cells glow for easy removal:
A scorpion-venom concoction that makes tumors glow sounds almost too outlandish to be true. In fact, Olson explains, that’s what troubled the big grant-making organizations when he came to them for funding. But when those organizations dismissed his ideas as too bizarre, Olson started accepting donations from individuals—particularly the families of current and former patients—quickly raising $5 million for his research. It was a bold and unprecedented tactic: Though patients and their families are often asked to donate to foundations with broad goals, Olson raised money for one specific, untested technology—a much riskier gamble. But thanks to his efforts, Olson’s fluorescent scorpion toxin is now in Phase I clinical trials, an impressive accomplishment for a compound with such a peculiar lineage. The University of Washington students are clearly awed by the work.
The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis
In this classic 1984 essay—reprinted on The Daily Beast—Richard Ben Cramer wonders if Jerry Lee Lewis got away with his wife’s murder.
Jerry Lee wasn’t showing his moods the night of that first party. A great party, Shawn told her friends. Actually, it was just a few drinks in his suite. A couple of other women were already up there. Jerry Lee played piano and sang, while Pam’s little Chinese Shih Tzu dog sat up with him on the stool. Shawn knew she was looking good, in her jeans, cowboy boots and a huggy little white rabbit jacket. And Jerry Lee treated her so nice! He’d turn away from the keyboard as he’d slow down his rhythm for a snatch of a love song. She felt him sing straight to her. It was February 1981. Shawn was twenty-three.
No Country for Old Pervs
Lambert looks at the sex scandals involving photographer Terry Richardson and American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, and asks: how did they stick around for so long anyway?
I remember thinking in 1999 that we were finally on the brink of the future. I saw how wrong I was about that repeatedly. After 9/11, the culture became demonstrably more conservative. Gender essentialism returned, and the ’90s were suddenly considered a failed experiment, like the ’60s, in pushing the boundaries for sex roles too far.
The Arranged Marriage That Ended Happily Ever After: How My Parents Fell In Love, 30 Years Later
The writer on watching her parents fall in love three decades after their arranged marriage and what she learned from it:
I was 24, and deeply absorbed in my own dramas. I barely noticed how close my mother was sitting to my father at dinner at our favorite restaurant. They watched me with giddy smiles. Poor parents, I thought. So lonely when I’m not here. Then I saw them playing footsie under the table.
That night, after we’d all gone to sleep, I woke up to the sound of them laughing. “You!” my mother squealed. “No, you!” my father insisted. I’d never heard them speak that way to each other in my life. Were they . . . flirting? The next morning, just as I was beginning to think it had all been a strange dream, I walked into the kitchen, and my parents sprang to opposite corners, blushing.
Street Fighter
A Canadian youth worker has become a social justice celebrity, utilizing social media to advocate for his vulnerable teen clients. Many call him a hero, but others question the safety and ethics of his work.
Mark Cherrington’s phone rings for the first time well before 4 a.m., the Samsung glowing in the dark as he grabs it off the bedside table. His wife barely notices. In nine years of marriage, she’s grown accustomed to late night phone calls, and she usually turns over and goes back to sleep. The girl calling just needs to talk. If she needed help right then, Cherrington would be up and gone. Instead, he speaks to her until she feels better, then catches a few minutes of sleep before crawling out of bed.
Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 1
10 stories we love right now, featuring The Awl, Harper’s, Grantland, the Washington Post, and more.
A Bitter End
A daughter gets caught up in a right-to-die case after she hands morphine to her 92-year-old father, who, for a long time, had expressed a desire to die:
Mancini had explained to the nurse that her father wanted to die, and that he had a DNR on file. To her shock, the nurse called 911, and the police and paramedics arrived. “I told them, ‘He asked me for his morphine, and I handed it to him,’ and they said, ‘Well, let’s go to the hospital,’” says Mancini. Despite her pleading, Yourshaw was loaded into the ambulance and taken to the hospital. “I said, ‘He’s suffering! He wants to die!’ And that got turned into, ‘She gave him his morphine so he could die.’” That phrasing appears many times in official documentation of what happened.
Why We Play
Reconciling our love of sports with the risks associated with them:
When I graduated after four seasons of high school rugby, and prepared to head off for four more seasons in college, I felt transformed. I no longer called myself a tomboy, and rugby was no longer a crutch.
So much for the revenue side of the balance sheet. Rugby had, for a time, given me everything. But around the same time I’d begun to outgrow my need for it, I’d also begun to understand its potential cost. I racked up pulled muscles and strained ligaments, and chipped a bone in my ankle that still aches under pressure, more than 15 years later. I played with women sporting twin scars on their knees from ACL surgeries. I saw a man come off the pitch one afternoon with his ear torn half off. I helped concussed teammates stagger off the field, unable to remember their own names, and suffered one concussion myself — a minor one, but still an injury with the terrifying power to reach back in time and erase my memories from even before the hit. I had one friend, on my college’s men’s team, who swore he would quit after three concussions, but he only counted the big ones. Once, I saw him pick himself up after a collision and line up alongside the wrong team. And then, finally, I watched that young man break his neck under the floodlights on a cold night in northern England. I was haunted by the question of my own potential regrets.
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