Longreads Best of 2013: Open Thread
We’re kicking off the Longreads Best of 2013 series tomorrow—and we want your help.
In the comments below, share links to your favorite nonfiction and fiction stories, or your favorite books, writers and publishers of the year. We’ll keep this thread open all through December.
Reading List: Leaving the Places We’ve Lived
This week’s reading list by Emily Perper includes stories from The Rumpus, The New York Times, The Millions, and The Toast.
Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt
A multimedia report on how the global economy works, from the perspective of the people making a T-shirt for NPR:
In the case of the Planet Money T-shirt, the buyer is Jockey. The company told us that the pattern of pulling out when wages rise may be coming to an end for now, because there’s no country that’s ready to replace Bangladesh as the cheapest place in the world to make clothes.
Wages in Bangladesh are going to rise, Marion Smith, a senior vice president at Jockey, told us. “That’s good news from a humanitarian point of view.”
The Difference Between Being ‘Trusted’ and ‘Trustworthy’
Russell Brand on Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper and the dismal state of today’s news industry:
Rupert Murdoch, an animatronic al-Qaida recruitment poster, in his private letter to Sun staff, after the News of the World was briefly closed for a makeover (not through remorse, or shame, no, because they couldn’t sell advertising space and because he wanted to launch the Sun on Sunday anyway because it’s cheaper to run one title than two – some guys get all the luck) referred consistently to his pride in the Sun as “a trusted news source”. Trusted is the word he used, not trustworthy. We know the Sun is not trustworthy and so does he. He uses the word “trusted” deliberately. Hitler was trusted, it transpired he was not trustworthy. He also said of the arrested journalists, “everyone is innocent until proven guilty”. Well, yes, that is the law of our country, not however a nicety often afforded to the victims of his titles, and here I refer not only to hacking but the vituperative portrayal of weak and vulnerable members of our society, relentlessly attacked by Murdoch’s ink jackals. Immigrants, folk with non-straight sexual identities, anyone in fact living in the margins of the Sun’s cleansed utopia.
Bad Blood
A Russian dissident is murdered with radioactive poison:
The doctors treated Litvinenko with a heavy dose of antibiotics. And yet his body continued to break down. Three days after admission, he was being fed through a tube. His hair was falling out, and Marina gathered it in little bundles from his pillow and pajamas. As the medics tested Litvinenko for AIDS and hepatitis, he kept telling them: I’ve been poisoned. On November 11th, ten days after he fell ill, he gave an interview to the BBC Russian Service saying he’d suffered “a serious poisoning”, and implying that it had been carried out by an Italian associate, Mario Scaramella, his lunch companion at the sushi bar that Wednesday.
The next morning, further medical reports arrived. The doctors had run an array of tests. One was for radiation exposure: it came back negative. Instead they found something more complex — and more surprising. Some kind of exotic chemistry, some strange poison, was in his blood. Immediate attempts to identify it left them baffled.
‘A Panel of Rubber-Stampers’
The Oregonian’s investigation into how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court really works, and what Oregon senators are doing to challenge its authority:
“The statute does not give the judge the authority to turn down applications when the criteria (for eavesdropping) are met,” Turley says. “And those criteria are so low that they are always met.”
He recalls working as an intern at the NSA during the Reagan administration, when he had occasion to go inside the court.
“I was horrified by what I saw,” he says. “It was abundantly clear this was a Potemkin Village. … One can only call this a court if you abandon every substantive meaning of that term. This court has less authority than a standard municipal traffic court. There is no serious review, because there’s no substantive authority to question or reject these applications.”
The Post-GMO Economy: Our Longreads Member Pick
For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share early access to “The Post-GMO Economy,” a new story by Elizabeth Royte that will be published next week by Modern Farmer, in partnership with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and support our service. You can also now buy Longreads Gift Memberships to send this and other great stories to friends, family or colleagues.
Long Way Home
Rosanne Cash on life in Tennessee and memories of her father, Johnny Cash:
My second Tennessee began in 1967, when I was twelve years old. My parents had just separated the previous winter, and that first summer my mom let my sisters and me go to Tennessee to spend several weeks with my dad. He had just bought the big house on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, about twenty miles from Nashville.
Dad was just emerging from the depths of his drug addiction, but he was clean and sober, if gaunt and a little shaky. He and June were not married yet, but she and her daughters, Rosie and Carlene, were around a lot and we befriended our soon-to-be stepsisters. The next several summers were glorious, each better than the one before. Dad had a little speedboat, and he taught all of us to water ski. He was the most patient teacher in the world. We jumped in the water, hooked our feet into the skis, and he gunned the engine. We fell and fell and fell. And then, eventually, we got up and he whooped and waved his arm at us as he pulled us around the lake. We did this every day for hours. Once I was sitting in the boat with him while he pulled one of my sisters up on the skis when the glove box popped open and money—bills of all denominations—flew out and away. My dad glanced at the currency as the wind carried it out of the boat, but never looked back, never said a word. That gave me an insight into my dad’s relationship with money: He let it fly and never looked back.
Rumsfeld’s War
A political history of Donald Rumsfeld, from the Nixon years to a war in Iraq that he promised would be over in months:
Rumsfeld would offer the “creative” plan for the Iraq invasion that his president had requested that tearful evening in September 2001, one that envisioned a relative handful of troops—150,000, fewer than half the number the elder Bush had assembled a decade before for the much less ambitious Desert Storm—and foresaw an invasion that would begin in shock and awe and an overwhelming rush to Baghdad. As for the occupation—well, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfeld’s troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, “I don’t do quagmires.”
It did not turn out that way. Having watched from the Oval Office in 1975 the last torturous hours of the United States extracting itself from Vietnam—the helicopters fleeing the roof of the US embassy in Saigon—Rumsfeld would be condemned to thrash about in his self-made quagmire for almost four years, sinking ever deeper in the muck as nearly five thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.
Silicon Chasm
Charlotte Allen (who graduated from Stanford) examines the massive income inequality and “new feudalism” in Silicon Valley—as a sign of what’s happening across the United States:
Google is visually impressive, but this frenzy of energy and hipness hasn’t generated large numbers of jobs, much less what we think of as middle-class jobs, the kinds of unglamorous but solid employment that generates annual household incomes between $44,000 and $155,000. The state of California (according to a 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California) could boast in 1980 that some 60 percent of its families were middle-income as measured in today’s dollars, but by 2010 only 48 percent of California families fell into that category, and the income gap between the state’s highest and lowest earners had doubled. In Silicon Valley there has actually been a net job loss in tech-related industries over the past decade. According to figures collected by Joel Kotkin, the dotcom crash wiped out 70,000 jobs in the valley in a little over a single year, and since then the tech industry has added only 30,000 new ones, leaving the bay region with a net 40,000fewer jobs than existed in 2001.
You must be logged in to post a comment.