To The Penal Colony
A jailed Pussy Riot activist’s family makes an 11-hour trek to visit her:
“Gera, you cannot pee every five minutes!” said Petya to his four-year-old daughter. “You cannot appraise a work of art from the point of view of effectiveness.” Now he was speaking into a lapel mic that belonged to the German television crew following us in another car. Before we left the hotel in Zubova Polyana where we had spent the night, I’d had to pull the car away from the back porch so the Germans could film the lanky Petya running to the car with huge, plaid, Chinese-made rectangular bags we were taking to the colony for Nadya, Petya’s wife and Gera’s mother. “This is the sixth time I’ve been filmed loading bags into a car for Nadya.” He laughed as he got into the passenger seat. He seemed to enjoy the publicity connected with his wife’s imprisonment, and only now, months after I first met him, was I starting to appreciate how hard, tedious, and unceasing was the work he did on her behalf.
Heroin in Charlotte
Alex Uhler was a straight-A student, an Eagle Scout, and earned a black belt in Taekwondo. And he was a heroin addict. Why are kids like him, from Charlotte’s wealthy neighborhoods and good schools, turning to the deadliest drugs?
Buying heroin in Charlotte is similar to ordering a pizza. Phone numbers of dispatchers float around the city. For an eager customer, dealers are easy to find. Call the number, place an order, and the dispatcher will instruct you to drive to a safe, public place—a mall parking lot, a suburban cul-de-sac. The park behind the Arboretum was once a popular place to buy. A runner—not the person who took the order—meets the buyer, and they can complete the deal window to window, without ever leaving their cars.
How to Write About Tax Havens and the Super-Rich: An Interview with Nicholas Shaxson
Last year Nicholas Shaxson published a Vanity Fair article, “A Tale of Two Londons,” that described the residents of one of London’s most exclusive addresses—One Hyde Park—and the accounting acrobatics they had performed to get there.
Shaxson’s piece was one of the best long-form pieces I read last year (I did in fact believe this before I met him, but you can take that with a grain of salt if you’d like), and last week I asked Shaxson to sit down with me for a proper conversation about how the story came about and whether it achieved what he wanted.
The Lucrative Crop That’s Not Cut Out for the California Drought
California almonds are popular and lucrative for farmers, but they also require a lot of water that the state doesn’t have:
Products like almond butter and almond milk have also become increasingly popular in health food stores. But growing almonds in an arid climate requires lots of water. In fact, Westlands’ almond orchards suck up nearly 100 billion gallons of water a year. Cotton, by contrast, needs 40 percent less water per acre, and tomatoes require about half as much water as almonds. Also, unlike cotton and tomatoes, almonds are a “permanent” crop, meaning the land they’re grown on can’t lie fallow when water is scarce. “It means farmers really do need to get a hold of water in dry years in order to keep the trees alive,” explained Ellen Hanak, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and an expert on water.
Almonds, in short, aren’t cut out for droughts. And unless the coming months bring a deluge of rain and snow to California, the almond growers of the western San Joaquin Valley could be in for a catastrophic year.
Cool Like Me: Are Black People Cooler Than White People?
From the late, great Might Magazine, Donnell Alexander on the racial roots of cool:
I’m the kinda nigga who’s so cool that my neighbor bursts into hysterical tears whenever I ring her doorbell after dark. She is a new immigrant who has chosen to live with her two roommates in our majority-black Los Angeles neighborhood so that, I’m told, she can “learn about all American cultures.” But her real experience of us is limited to the space between her Honda and her front gate; thus, much of what she has to go on is the vibe of the surroundings and the images emanating from the television set that gives her living room a minty cathode glow. As such, I’m a cop-show menace and a shoe commercial demi-god—one of the rough boys from our ‘hood and the living, breathing embodiment of hip hop flava. And if I can’t fulfill the prevailing stereotype, the kids en route to the nearby high school can. The woman is scared in a cool world. She smiles as I pass her way in the light of day, unloading my groceries or shlepping my infant son up the stairs. But at night, when my face is visible through the window of her door lit only by the bulb that brightens the vestibule, I, at once familiar and threatening, am just too much.
The Millionaire Couple Who Will End Divorce
Inside couples counseling with Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt:
Harville and Helen take turns talking and clicking through a PowerPoint that includes slides in both English and Spanish. Helen explains that half the people here tonight are the “draggers,” the other half are the “draggees,” and that it will actually be that second group that’s more excited by the end of the workshop. “See,” she says. “Your partner already decided that you’re the problem.”
Harville goes over what couples generally want from a relationship, which he boils down to: safety, a connected feeling, and joy. Helen explains that even if we forget everything else, they hope we remember three things. One idea: that childhood influences marriages. One skill: the ability to have safe conversations. One decision: a commitment to zero negativity.
We both bristle a bit at that last one.
In-N-Out’s Burger Queen
A profile of Lynsi Snyder, In-N-Out Burger’s 31-year-old president who drag races on the side:
Snyder, who inherited control of In‑N‑Out in 2006 when her grandmother died, and ascended to the corporate presidency in 2010, won’t be adding new products or expanding into new markets as new CEOs who want to put their stamp on a company often do.
“How we make our decisions is not looking to the right and left to see what everyone else is doing,” she explains. “It’s just looking forward and doing the same thing that we’ve done in the past, because it has worked. We don’t have plans to change the menu. We don’t have plans to crank up the growth. It’s just kind of doing the same thing and being smart, and everybody doing their job. Like a plane on autopilot. There’s so much momentum, with all the people who’ve been here and have tenure. There’s so much strength, as a whole. So we just keep on doing the same thing, and it runs pretty smoothly.”
Saying Goodbye to a Beloved Magazine
On the disappearance of the Wilson Quarterly:
The subject line worried me. “The Wilson Quarterly’s Final Happy Hour,” it said. Even the rosiest interpretation—that they’d decided, say, to discontinue their occasional get-togethers—was troubling. A link to an online invitation appeared below. The editors had completed the winter 2014 issue, a best-of collection drawn from “four decades of classic essays.” A few particulars followed and then the bad news, withheld for a bit, the way people do: “This will be our final quarterly issue,” they said.
Why Abercrombie Is Losing Its Shirt
In the early ’90s, Mike Jeffries gave struggling retailer Abercrombie and Fitch new life by selling a specific kind of lifestyle to teenage shoppers who “wanted to belong.” Times have changed, and the retailer needs to as well:
Until relatively recently, Abercrombie’s numerous press scandals followed a predictable pattern: a flood of petitions and angry phone calls; an army of talking heads on cable TV complaining about the pernicious influence of the brand; and then silence. Consumers seemed to accept that Abercrombie’s gleefully offensive vibe was part of the package, and the company’s bottom line was never truly threatened.
But sensibilities have since evolved; casual prejudice is not as readily tolerated. Today’s teens are no longer interested in “the elite, cool-kid thing” to the extent that they once were, says Gordon, the Michigan professor. “This generation is about inclusiveness and valuing diversity. It’s about not looking down on people.” And with the help of social media, for the first time critics have succeeded in putting Abercrombie on the defensive. Last year, blogger Jes Baker drew blood with her spoof photo series “Attractive & Fat,” which satirized the iconic Bruce Weber images. A video of activist Greg Karber distributing Abercrombie clothing to homeless people has been viewed upwards of 8 million times on YouTube.
Gaddafi’s Point Guard
When US basketball player Alex Owumi signed a contract to play for a team in Benghazi, Libya, he had no idea that his employer was the the most feared man in the country. Nor did he guess the country was about to descend into war.
A lot of the players had scratches and banged-up bruises on their arms. One had a black eye he was trying to conceal. Gaddafi’s security goons would push them up against lockers, things like that – and some of these guys were not big athletes like me and Moustapha. During practice you could see some of them were just scared to make mistakes. But in any sport you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to make bad plays. I can’t go into a game and trust people who are scared.
The next day, we travelled to a game in Tripoli on a private jet like we were a team playing in the NBA [the National Basketball Association in the US]. That’s how it was with Al-Nasr and the Gaddafi family – they got extra funding, extra millions of dollars. But the deal was we were supposed to win – and when we lost, it was a problem.
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