Opportunity’s Knocks
The fastest growing job in America—working as a nurse aide—is also among the hardest. The reporter follows a single mother hoping to find a stable job and build a better life for her family:
“I’m getting desperate, to be honest,” she told her classmates. “I need something good to happen. I’m hoping this might be it.”
Her hope was placed in the fastest-growing job in America – cornerstone of the recovery, what government economists referred to as “the opportunity point” in the greatest economy in the world. It was changing bedpans, pushing wheelchairs, cleaning catheters and brushing teeth. Pay was just better than minimum wage. Burnout rates were among the highest of any career.
Yes, All Women: A Reading List of Stories Written By Women
This week, I present a long list of essays, articles and interviews written by women. Many are about women, too. Some are lighthearted; others reflect on the events of the past week.
On Going Back Home: A Reading List
We are expats and nomads. We are products of multiple countries. We run away from places that don’t feel quite right, only to never find where we belong. These stories celebrate the journey of returning to (or discovering) our roots, and the elusive, ever-evolving concept of home.
Life in the Valley of Death
In Srebrenica, reconciliation between Muslims and Serbs have remained difficult nearly 20 years after the Bosnian Genocide:
Among the Muslims who have returned, the outspoken Fazila Efendic is the anomaly. Far more common is the case of Suleiman Mehmedovic, a 31-year-old laborer who lives with his wife and two children in a tiny apartment at the edge of the town of Srebrenica. Only 12 in July 1995, he left the enclave on a bus with his mother, but his father perished; his wife lost her father and all five brothers. “We just keep to ourselves,” Suleiman said of his life today. “I work alongside Serbs, and it’s O.K. We just never talk about what happened at all.”
To Milos Milanovic, a Serbian member of the Srebrenica City Council, that’s the best that can be hoped for. “There is never any discussion about these things, only arguing,” he told me. During the war, Milanovic, now 50, was a member of the Srspka armed forces and was present at the fall of Srebrenica. “It’s mostly propaganda,” he said of the numbers killed in the July 1995 massacre. “The Muslims have even presented our victims as their victims. They need to keep the death count high to present Serbs as the only criminals and to cover up their own war crimes.”
A Search for the ‘Defensive Player of the Year’ from Humans of New York
Why Humans of New York is so beloved: A writer for Sports Illustrated sees a photo of an anonymous construction worker who was once a “Defensive Player of the Year.” He goes searching for the person:
The picture of Mr. Defensive Player of the Year sparked varied, frenzied, often contradictory reactions. Some saw work ethic; others laziness. Some saw certain retired NFL players. Some saw a fallen, humbled star; others, a depressed, older man; still others, a proud husband or father, a provider, a man who made the most of whatever happened to him.
“His hands and his boots look rough, worn and used. My husbands hands and boots look the same way. I know how physically hard you have to work to accomplish that. Back breaking, knuckle busting. Day after day.”
“ … then I tore my ACL.”
“This looks like my cousin!”
“Love the composition – a football player on the bench.”
From one photo, all of that.
The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas
A profile of poet Patricia Lockwood (“Rape Joke,” Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals):
“People don’t necessarily respond as their best selves in the moment. The initial conversations were not totally ideal. But when you make art out of something, they get another chance.”
Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community.
The Exorcists Next Door
On saving souls in the suburbs:
Ruth morphs into another person altogether when Larry commands these spirits to manifest. Either she is an Academy Award-winning horror-film actress, with Ferrari-smooth shifts of body and voice, or she is encountering something in a subconscious realm. At one point, she speaks the name of a demon in a distinctly foreign voice: “Ba-al.” Later, in casual conversation, the pronunciation comes out differently: “Bail,” with a bit of a twang—the name of a Canaanite god mentioned numerous times in the Bible.
She describes the experience as sitting in a passenger seat, watching things unfold beside her as though another part of her brain controls them. “It becomes our little scavenger hunt,” Ruth says cheerily. “What’s the crazy little person inside me going to say next?”
How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment
The Founders never intended to create an unregulated individual right to a gun. Today, millions believe they did. Here’s how it happened.
“A fraud on the American public.” That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun. When he spoke these words to PBS in 1990, the rock-ribbed conservative appointed by Richard Nixon was expressing the longtime consensus of historians and judges across the political spectrum.
Twenty-five years later, Burger’s view seems as quaint as a powdered wig. Not only is an individual right to a firearm widely accepted, but increasingly states are also passing laws to legalize carrying weapons on streets, in parks, in bars—even in churches.
Meet the Man Hired to Make Sure the Snowden Docs Aren’t Hacked
Micah Lee is the digital bodyguard who protects Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and other reporters working on the Snowden documents.
Since the beginning, Greenwald had stored the files in a computer completely disconnected from the Internet, also known as “air-gapped” in hacker lingo. He let Lee put his hands on that computer and pore through the documents. Ironically, Lee used software initially designed for cops and private investigators to sift through the mountain of seized documents.
Sitting inside Greenwald’s house, famously full of dogs, Lee spent hours reading and analyzing a dozen documents containing once carefully guarded secrets.
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