On College Media Coverage of the UC Santa Barbara Shootings

“This week we salute the staffs of two college newspapers, The Channels (Santa Barbara City College) and The Daily Nexus (UC Santa Barbara) for their ongoing coverage of this tragedy.”

Source: Longreads
Published: May 28, 2014

Overcome Your Programming And Be A Better Man

Comedian Chris Gethard on being an angry high school outcast, and how he found a place in a world that “doesn’t owe you anything”:

As someone who’s spent most of his life feeling like a round peg running into many square holes – it is so much more gratifying when you stop trying to force yourself into those square holes, or prove to those square holes that you’re valid too, and instead go out and find the round holes, and even better, the other round pegs. To try to be something you’re not, to try to go places that reject you, to try to fit in, to try to force people who aren’t accepting you to accept you… it drains you of energy and it never works and it makes you bitter and tired and angry.

But to find the other round pegs out there, those loners, those wanderers, those people who get rejected for whatever reason, that’s the ultimate gratification. They’re out there. I just turned 34, and at this age I am friends almost exclusively with other people who didn’t say much growing up, who felt scared a lot of the time, and who felt like they shouldn’t say what they were thinking because it didn’t fit and they didn’t have a right to speak up. A lot of my friends were people who could never get dates, most of my social circle is composed of people who had reasons to feel angry or alone or scared or sad.

And now we have each other.

Published: May 27, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,259 words)

Billie Bob’s (Mis) Fortune

Less than two years after Billie Bob Harrell Jr. took the $31 million lottery jackpot, he took his own life.

He sat in his easy chair one evening and looked at his Quick Pick and then at the Sunday newspaper. Harrell studied the sequence of numbers again and began to realize the wildest of notions. He and wife Barbara Jean held the only winning ticket to a Lotto Texas jackpot of $31 million.

Harrell, a deeply religious man, knew he had a godsend from heaven. After being laid off from a couple of jobs in the past few years, Billie Bob had been reduced to stocking the electrical-supply shelves of a Home Depot in northeast Harris County. He was having a damn hard time providing for himself and Barbara Jean, much less for their three teenage children.

Source: Houston Press
Published: Feb 10, 2000
Length: 17 minutes (4,375 words)

Shame and Survival

Monica Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair essay, now online in full:

In my own case, each easy click of that YouTube link reinforces the archetype, despite my efforts to parry it away: Me, America’s B.J. Queen. That Intern. That Vixen. Or, in the inescapable phrase of our 42nd president, “That Woman.”

It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: May 28, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,051 words)

Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119

From 1990: George Plimpton interviews the acclaimed poet, who died Wednesday at age 86:

When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them—fifty acceptable pages—it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.

Published: May 28, 2014
Length: 26 minutes (6,569 words)

When Dickens Met Dostoevsky

Eric Naiman unearths one of the most elaborate academic hoaxes in recent memory:

Chekhov wrote a story, “In the Ravine”, where the father of a counterfeiter begins to worry that every coin passing through his hands is a fake. A similar feeling might befall any researcher trying to keep track of this mutually supportive network of scholars and writers. As one writer collapses into another, anyone who has anything positive to say about Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay or A. D. Harvey falls under suspicion and has to be thoroughly investigated for evidence of a more robust existence.

Published: Apr 10, 2013
Length: 41 minutes (10,279 words)

Sacrament

Ross Andersen explores the history and rituals of winemaking—including the current-day growth of “biodynamic wine”:

I had come back to AmByth to help hasten the vines’ resurrection by taking part in a ritual. I’d been invited the month before, while dining with Philip Hart and his wife, Mary. We’d talked for several hours that night, around their fireplace, wine glasses in hand. They asked me why I was so interested in biodynamic wine. I told them it was the relationship between wine and mysticism that really interested me. The conversation drifted to religion, and Mary told me she was a Christian, and considered herself born again. Philip didn’t come out and say what he believed, but it was clear he took Steiner’s metaphysics quite seriously. A disagreement between them broke out at one point: Mary said, ‘as a Christian’, she was turned off by the pagan elements of biodynamics.

Source: Aeon
Published: May 27, 2014
Length: 26 minutes (6,500 words)

Waiting for Exile

<On getting by and getting out of modern-day Cuba:

“I think I know who can find you an apartment,” Lucía said. I was on her couch picking at its fraying white vinyl. My address book lay open on my knees. I’d moved to Cuba with two suitcases, a ten- month student visa, plans to take a weekly class on popular culture, and visions of a terrace, balustrades, maybe an apartment in Vedado, the downtown heart of Havana. But after two weeks, I’d found nowhere to live. A legal resident foreigner could rent only from an authorized case particular or directly from the state— apartments that were usually bugged, priced for businesspeople and reporters on expat packages. I’d met a “real estate agent” with frosted pink lipstick who set foreigners up in long- term casas and took a cut, but she shook her head when I told her I hoped to pay less than $25 a night for a monthly rent. On a full apartment! She didn’t return my calls. Lucía, the most connected twenty- six- year- old I’d ever met in Havana or anywhere else, was my best hope to map out opportunities.

Source: VQR
Published: May 1, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,039 words)

The Other Side of Deportation

An American struggles to prepare for life without her husband.

For the past five months, she had been documenting the gradual unraveling of their lives, in moments both mundane and monumental: the first visit to their home by immigration officers, the delivery of Zunaid’s deportation orders, his final trips to eat American ice cream and watch American basketball. Now only four days remained before he would be sent off to Bangladesh, a deportation that would upend not just one life but two. Zunaid would be forcibly separated from the United States after 20 years; his wife, an American citizen, would be forcibly separated from her husband.

Author: Eli Saslow
Source: Washington Post
Published: May 25, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,672 words)

The Dogs of War

The canines and their handlers out on the front line:

Two years of training with your dog, three months in-country, every day with Zenit at your side, eating MREs, packing your gear—and your dog’s—humping, working, waiting, waking at midnight to make sure Zenit pees and poops in the designated spot, and suddenly everything, your life as a soldier and handler, your life as hood rat and outsider and striving human being, gets compressed into 15 minutes and 60 yards.

Jose believes he’s onto the pattern. It seems the Taliban have buried IEDs at the access points to the wadi, assuming the troops would feel safer out of sight down in the dry riverbed than exposed in the open fields. It’s all happening so quickly now. He takes deep breaths to tame his excitement and maintain focus.

Published: May 23, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,585 words)