Longreads Best of 2013: Best Listicle By Another Name

Robert Cottrell is editor of The Browser.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 10, 2013

Where It Hurts: Steve McQueen on Why ’12 Years a Slave’ Isn’t Just About Slavery

Dan P. Lee on the director and Oscar contender:

I’d seen 12 Years the night before, at the huge cineplex in downtown L.A. My friend sobbed quietly through a good portion of it. At least one black couple left midway. As we walked out of the ­theater, no one seemed to be speaking; breaking the ice, one stranger next to me said, “Well, that was intense,” which made us all laugh anxiously. As we stared at the Figueroa clips, I told McQueen how much I admired the film, and how it made me think about nihilism. He was having none of this. We made our way quickly to the courtyard outside the museum, where a lively conversation ensued.

He stammered and stuttered, organizing his thoughts. “The world is perverse,” he conceded; it is “chaotic.” Still: “Within that, one is always trying to find that calm, that focus. That’s why we have societies. It drives some sort of structure within that sort of environment.” Slavery was not proof of senselessness. It was about “money and power obviously, and within that you get human suffering.” But goodness overwhelms. “The only reason I’m here talking to you,” he said, “is because my family held on to that love, even if it sounds corny.”

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: Dec 10, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,274 words)

His Name Was Justice

Remembering a Anthony Colin, who made his high school a safer place for gay kids:

Colin finally had enough. Spurred by the murder of Matthew Shepard a year earlier, he decided to form a Gay-Straight Alliance club on campus, so he and anyone else at El Modena would have a place, even for a little while, that was free from hostility. Similar GSA groups were beginning to pop up on high-school campuses all around the country at the time—including one at Fountain Valley High, which this year celebrated its 20th anniversary—so, Colin thought, why not one at ElMo?

Jessie Colin thought it was a fantastic idea.

But there couldn’t have been a worse place to try to get one started.

Author: Rich Kane
Source: OC Weekly
Published: Dec 5, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,846 words)

Invisible Child: Dasani’s Homeless Life

An incredible story about the system failing our children—through the eyes of one of New York’s 22,000 homeless children:

Dasani’s own neighborhood, Fort Greene, is now one of gentrification’s gems. Her family lives in the Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run shelter for the homeless. It is a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers.

It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.

Published: Dec 9, 2013
Length: 88 minutes (22,000 words)

Rock-a-bye, Ute

The writer recalls an Easter weekend with her family after recovering from a stroke. A meditation on home, family, history, and recovery:

The brain strike didn’t kill my faith; my respect for God was not dependent upon good times and smooth sailing. Maybe the oxygen deprivation damaged my ability to deeply believe in anything, or maybe it increased my capacity for believing a little bit in everything, so that God and Jesus now share space on my hard drive with Yahweh or Allah; with Buddha or Mohammad or Krishna, or with the Love, the Light, the Universe. But I no longer have room in my brain for the Devil or his equals; the only real monsters now are old age, poverty, sickness and death—what else is there to fear?

Someone changes the music in the house; now it’s “Smile.” Leaving the cowboys behind for Nat King Cole. Someone is in bad shape today. Or maybe it’s only a prelude to the dance tunes that follow this track on a playlist I’m pretty sure we’ve heard a few times this weekend. I make a mental note: watch for the tapping feet, listen for the fidgety fingertips on the tabletops, and find the one who needs to dance today. I scratch the clipper-shy terrier behind his half-ear, enter the house unnoticed, and shut the door on the Sleeping Ute.

Source: Ploughshares
Published: Dec 8, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,926 words)

Reading List: Teenage Girls As Role Models

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from NPR, Rookie, and The Millions.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 8, 2013

Reverse-Engineering a Genius

How did Johannes Vermeer manage to create such photo-realistic paintings in the 17th Century—and did he get help? A Texas tech company founder named Tim Jenison decided to try to find out if Vermeer could have used a camera-like contraption to create his art, by recreating one of the paintings himself:

Jenison decided to construct a version of a device that Vermeer himself could have built and used. And since he had no training or experience as an artist whatsoever, he figured he was the ideal beta user of whatever he rigged up.

He was in no rush. His R&D period lasted five years. He went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. “Looking at their Vermeers,” he says, “I had an epiphany”—the first of several. “The photographic tone is what jumped out at me. Why was Vermeer so realistic? Because he got the values right,” meaning the color values. “Vermeer got it right in ways that the eye couldn’t see. It looked to me like Vermeer was painting in a way that was impossible. I jumped into studying art.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 8, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,762 words)

There’s a Reason They Call Them ‘Crazy Ants’

A species of ant is discovered in Texas, and their giant swarms have wreaked havoc on those who discover them on their land and inside their homes:

Soon ants were spiraling up the tongues of my sneakers, onto my sock. I tried to shake them off, but nothing I did disturbed them. Before long, I was sweeping them off my own calves. I kept instinctively taking a step back from some distressing concentration of ants, only to remember that I was standing in the center of an exponentially larger concentration of ants. There was nowhere to go. The ants were horrifying — as in, they inspired horror. Eventually, I scribbled in my notebook: “Holy [expletive] I can’t concentrate on what anyone’s saying. Ants all over me. Phantom itches. Scratching hands, ankles, now my left eye.” Then I got in my car and left.

Published: Dec 7, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,567 words)

Good to the Last Drop

What’s the connection between caffeine, the finish line, and marathon deaths? An investigation of how much caffeine is too much for runners, and the explosion of caffeine-related products handed out at races:

Starting three years ago, the International Marathon Medical Directors Association (IMMDA) has warned runners to ingest no more than 200 mg of caffeine before and during a race, based on research that has shown that during exercise, caffeine affects the heart in ways that can send someone into cardiac arrest. “Every incident is disturbing,” says Dr. Lewis G. Maharam, chairman of the board of governors for the IMMDA and medical director of the Leukemia Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training. There was no single incident that led the group to put out the warning in 2010, but it stemmed from a “constant conversation on how to be safer.”

So far this year, four cardiac-related causalities have fit the pattern: Alain Rettig, 45, in the TCS Amsterdam Marathon, 1 km from the finish line; Ricki Savage, 27, in the Dublin Marathon at the finish line; Jake Zeman, 35, in the Rock ’n’ Roll Savannah Marathon, feet from the finish line; and Kyle Chase Johnson, 23, in the Pittsburgh Half Marathon, less than a mile from the finish line.

Source: The Magazine
Published: Dec 7, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,430 words)

The Death Dealer

Self-help guru James Arthur Ray became famous after Oprah featured him on her show. He later led three people to their deaths in a sweat lodge while trying to help them reach “a higher level of consciousness.” After less than two years of jail time, he’s back:

One longtime Ray follower received severe burns after falling into the rocks used to heat the lodge. Another began screaming repeatedly, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” and calling out the names of his two children. Ray seated by the exit closest to the only source of oxygen, remained calm. One witness heard him mutter, “Buddy, you need to pull it together,” before jubilantly saying “It’s a good day to die!” — apparently referencing his claim that followers would be “reborn” during the event. One participant testified that even as she passed out, her thoughts echoed James Arthur Ray: “It’s a good day to die.”

Source: The Verge
Published: Dec 4, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,307 words)