The Race to Save Mali’s Priceless Artifacts
A secret operation to save medieval manuscripts in Timbuktu:
The jihadists soon shoved aside the secular Tuaregs, declared sharia law and began attacking anything they perceived as haram—forbidden—according to their strict definitions of Islam. They banned singing and dancing, and forbade the celebration of Sufi Islamic festivals. They demolished 16 mausoleums of Timbuktu’s beloved Sufi saints and scholars, claiming that veneration of such figures was a sacrilege. Eventually the militants set their sights on the city’s ultimate symbols of open-mindedness and reasoned discourse: its manuscripts.
A network of activists was determined to thwart them. For five months, smugglers mounted a huge and secret operation whose full details are only now coming to light. The objective: to carry 350,000 manuscripts to safety in the government-held south. The treasures moved by road and by river, by day and by night, past checkpoints manned by armed Islamic police. Haidara and Diakité raised $1 million to finance the rescue, then arranged for safe storage once the manuscripts arrived in Bamako.
I Smoked Pot with David Brooks
A satirical response to New York Times columnist David Brooks, from his “stoner friend,” about giving up smoking pot:
Now that he’s gone and outed himself, I guess I’m free to tell the secret. I smoked pot with David Brooks. I was one of that “clique” with whom he had “those moments of uninhibited frolic.” There were seven of us. We all know what happened to Dave. The rest: a surgeon (rich), a dentist (gay), two lawyers (one dead already), one teacher and one househusband/artist (that’s me). I never spoke up before because I figured if I threw mud at someone whose whole career rests on being squeaky clean, well, that’s just mean. And it’s mostly irrelevant now. I mean, like he said, we’ve “aged out” and “left marijuana behind.”
‘There Is Nothing New in Wall Street’: A Stock Trader’s Life in the 1920s
Our latest Longreads First Chapter comes recommended by Michelle Legro:
Long before the “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort made his first million or snorted his first line of cocaine, turn-of-the-century trader Jesse Livermore, the “Great Bear of Wall Street,” accumulated over $100 million short-selling stocks before the crash of 1929. His life and times were immortalized in 1923 by author Edwin Lefèvre in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. The novel became a bible for those looking to get rich quick (though rarely succeeding), and Livermore’s advice became legendary. “There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.”
What It’s Like to Outrun Death: The Survival Story of a New Orleans Blues Legend
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to feature “The Gutbucket King,” a new ebook by journalist Barry Yeoman and The New New South, about the tumultuous life of blues singer Little Freddie King, who survived stabbings, alcoholism and personal tragedy. You can read a free excerpt below.
Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and ebook, or you can purchase the story at Creatavist or Amazon.
A Speck in the Sea
A fisherman’s improbable rescue after going overboard in the middle of the night:
The first thing you’re supposed to do, if you’re a fisherman and you fall in the ocean, is to kick off your boots. They’re dead weight that will pull you down. But as Aldridge treaded water, he realized that his boots were not pulling him down; in fact, they were lifting him up, weirdly elevating his feet and tipping him backward. Aldridge’s boots were an oddity among the members of Montauk’s commercial fishing fleet: thick green rubber monstrosities that were guaranteed to keep your feet warm down to minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature Montauk had not experienced since the ice age. Sosinski made fun of the boots, but Aldridge liked them: they were comfortable and sturdy and easy to slip on and off. And now, as he bobbed in the Atlantic, he had an idea of how they might save his life.
‘A Hive of Mysterious Danger’
The author, on teaching a literature class at Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York:
As I mentioned earlier, the class I taught at Auburn was on existentialist literature, with works by Camus, Kafka, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on the syllabus. Existentialism, I told my students, and winced as I heard myself say it, is a “philosophy of the streets.” It was an overly dramatic statement, but I meant that existentialism is a style of thinking grounded in the messy ambiguities of life. One thing that distinguished philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard from the philosophers who preceded them was a willingness to reflect seriously about human emotions that, while not wholly neglected in the Western philosophical tradition, had tended to take a backseat to reason: emotions such as love, terror, pity, revenge, grief and joy. The prisoners in my class had an entire grammar of experiences to draw from, a familiarity with the courts, for instance, which gave them a special insight into Kafka’s The Trial, or a knowledge of what it means to be an outsider, which made them sympathize with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and they quickly warmed to the idea of drawing connections between their experiences and the concepts they encountered in the readings.
Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014
In 1964, science fiction author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov envisioned what life would be like in 2014:
Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare “automeals,” heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be “ordered” the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming.
Reading List: A Brief History of Epic Parties
No doubt you are on your way to one right now: an epic party, a night to end all nights. But will your epic party be as legendary as those thrown attended by Truman Capote, Cher Horowitz, Jay Gatsby, Jordan Belfort, Silvio Berlusconi, or the kids from Saturday Night Fever?
The Newspaper War That Gave Birth to Color Comics
How William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper battles kickstarted the modern era of comics:
The sudden explosion of color comics had been facilitated by new high-speed four-color printing presses, but “lead pipe” may have been the operative term in Hearst’s boast. The original comics were designed to stun—both their startling graphics and their rambunctious antics. “Mit dose kids, society is nix!” an adult character says of Hans and Fritz, the daemonic, chortling child protagonists of The Katzenjammer Kids which, although inspired by the German artist Wilhelm Busch’s humorous picture book Max und Moritz, may be considered America’s first fully realized comic strip.
‘Did Your Father Touch You?’
A daughter regrets the lie that sent her father to prison:
When he asks Chaneya why she told officials at the medical clinic that her father had sexually assaulted her, she gives the same answer three times: “I don’t know.”
When he asks what she’d say to the judge if he interrogated her about why she lied, she doesn’t quite answer the question, instead saying, “I want my father to come back home.”
The interview ends after 25 minutes, but then her grandmother asks one final question: Where did the story that she told on the witness stand come from?
“I just made it up,” she says.
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