Longreads Best of 2013: My Favorite New Publisher Discovery
The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted?
Jed S. Rakoff, a United States District Judge, looks into why there were no criminal charges against bank executives, despite clear findings of fraud:
In striking contrast with these past prosecutions, not a single high-level executive has been successfully prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis, and given the fact that most of the relevant criminal provisions are governed by a five-year statute of limitations, it appears likely that none will be. It may not be too soon, therefore, to ask why.
One possibility, already mentioned, is that no fraud was committed. This possibility should not be discounted. Every case is different, and I, for one, have no opinion about whether criminal fraud was committed in any given instance.
But the stated opinion of those government entities asked to examine the financial crisis overall is not that no fraud was committed. Quite the contrary. For example, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final report, uses variants of the word “fraud” no fewer than 157 times in describing what led to the crisis, concluding that there was a “systemic breakdown,” not just in accountability, but also in ethical behavior.
Please Don’t Stay Long
Excerpts from love letters between London and Łódź:
Dear Eva,
It’s no use deceiving oneself, I am very uneasy about this journey you are making. I hope this letter finds you well and safe. – I know I shall worry about you. I shall write you every day before going to bed all the days’ news. Tomorrow’s will be exciting. Give my love to everybody and be a good sensible girl, and make up your mind not to stay long. I’ll get the covers done, also see about the light in the bedroom. I must rush off. Write to me often, love as ever from your
Mark
The True Story of ‘The Poorest Rich Kids in the World’
Longreads Best of 2013 continues with a postscript by Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely, on her story about Georgia and Patterson Inman, heirs to the Duke fortune.
‘The saddest fact I’ve learned is nobody matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody.’
Jessica Hopper interviews former Chicago Sun-Times music journalist Jim DeRogatis, who first broke the story of dozens of alleged rapes committed by R. Kelly, on why more people have not paid attention to what really happened:
I was one of those people who challenged DeRogatis and was even flip about his judgment – something I quickly came to regret. DeRogatis and I have tangled – even feuded on air – over the years; yet, amid the Twitter barbs, he approached me offline and told me about how one of Kelly’s victims called him in the middle of the night after his Pitchfork review came out, to thank him for caring when no one else did. He told me of mothers crying on his shoulder, seeing the scars of a suicide attempt on a girl’s wrists, the fear in their eyes. He detailed an aftermath that the public has never had to bear witness to.
DeRogatis offered to give me access to every file and transcript he has collected in reporting this story – as he has to other reporters and journalists, none of whom has ever looked into the matter, thus relegating it to one man’s personal crusade.
I thought that last fact merited a public conversation about why.
Where Are the People?
The reporter, in Orange County, Calif., examines the gradual decline of evangelical Christianity in America:
Prominent figures in the evangelical establishment have already begun sounding alarms. In particular, the Barna Group, an evangelical market research organization, has been issuing a steady stream of books and white papers documenting the erosion of support for evangelicalism, especially among young people. Contributions from worshippers 55 and older now account for almost two-thirds of evangelical churches’ income in the United States. A mere three percent of non-Christian Americans under 30 have a positive impression of evangelical Christianity, according to David Kinnaman, the Barna Group’s president. That’s down from 25 percent of baby boomers at a similar age. At present rates of attrition, two-thirds of evangelicals in their 20s will abandon church before they turn 30. “It’s the melting of the icebergs,” Kinnaman told me. Young people’s most common complaint, he said, is that churches are too focused on sexual issues and preoccupied with their own institutional development—in other words, he explained, “Christianity no longer looks like Jesus.”
The Madness of the Planets
On the evolution of our solar system and the truth about its instability:
“Things are not as simple as they were supposed to be, with the planets staying quiet forever,” says Alessandro Morbidelli, a planetary dynamics expert at the Nice Observatory in France. “When the planets form they don’t know they have to form on good orbits to be stable for billions of years! So they are stable temporarily, but are not stable for the lifetime of the star.”
Translation: Earth was forged in chaos, lives in chaos, and may well end in chaos.
The Other Side of the Story
The writer on an illicit affair she had with a teacher at the age of 14:
The real life symbolism would have been all too clear: as Trace Lehrer exited through the front door thirty minutes after he arrived, my mother having called sooner than expected, I stood on the threshold clothed and disappointed and feeling like an idiot. I was unintentionally still as virtuous as I had been at the top of the hour.
I couldn’t understand Trace Lehrer’s behavior, or lack thereof; he was explicit in words, but not in actions. We saw each other every day and remained in contact every moment we spent apart. More confusingly, we had replaced first names with pet names in our ceaseless conversations, which had begun to focus on fantasies and plans for our future. “How many kids will we have, baby?” Trace Lehrer had asked me one night before. “Will you come on hunting trips with me and our son?”
Reading List: When We Fall In Love
This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Vulture, New York magazine, The Rumpus, and The New Inquiry.
The Manhunt for Christopher Dorner
On the trail of a disgraced ex-LAPD officer who went on a murder rampage after being fired:
The officers followed Dorner onto Interstate 15, heading north, hanging back a safe distance. They were trying to confirm it was Dorner’s truck.
Five miles along, the patrol car followed Dorner down the Magnolia Avenue offramp to the street. Dorner was waiting at the curb beside his parked truck. He opened fire with his assault rifle, riddling the patrol car with .223-caliber rounds.
The officers ducked. They tried to fire back with their handguns, futilely. Dorner was about 100 feet away, with firepower that vastly overwhelmed them. His rounds pierced the squad car’s windshield, punctured a tire, blew out the radiator. It was immobilized in seconds. One bullet grazed an officer’s head. Dorner sped away down Magnolia.
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