The Surge

Health care workers are attempting to eradicate polio by penetrating remote areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan controlled by the Taliban:

Because all the Afghan polio cases in 2013 have been reported here in the eastern half of the country, these National Immunization Days have special importance in this region. As with the global campaign writ large, polio here has receded greatly over the past two decades but with serious setbacks along the way: Although cases dropped after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, an outbreak in 2011 brought 80 new cases and a general sense of emergency. And so the eradication program—which is government-run but supported financially by who and unicef —ordered a “surge” in Afghanistan. They doubled the international staff and cracked down on underperforming and corrupt officials. This year, the surge has paid a huge dividend, in that the war-torn south of the country, for a long time the greatest problem area, now appears to be free of the virus. It’s the inaccessible areas in the east, where Jalalabad is, that are now the main concern.

Source: Wired
Published: Nov 21, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,382 words)

Meet the 103,000 People Who Could Become the First Climate-Change Refugees

A visit to the island nation of Kiribati, which could be the first country to be lost from rising tides due to global warming:

Kiribati is a flyspeck of a United Nations member state, a collection of 33 islands necklaced across the central Pacific. Thirty-two of the islands are low-lying atolls; the 33rd, called Banaba, is a raised coral island that long ago was strip-mined for its seabird-guano-derived phosphates. If scientists are correct, the ocean will swallow most of Kiribati before the end of the century, and perhaps much sooner than that. Water expands as it warms, and the oceans have lately received colossal quantities of melted ice. A recent study found that the oceans are absorbing heat 15 times faster than they have at any point during the past 10,000 years. Before the rising Pacific drowns these atolls, though, it will infiltrate, and irreversibly poison, their already inadequate supply of fresh water. The apocalypse could come even sooner for Kiribati if violent storms, of the sort that recently destroyed parts of the Philippines, strike its islands.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Nov 22, 2013
Length: 28 minutes (7,040 words)

Buzzkill

Making marijuana legal is harder than it might look. Radden Keefe goes inside Washington State’s legalization efforts, and what the new laws mean for growers, sellers, consumers and police:

Officials in Washington had been expecting a peace dividend, yet Kleiman was calling for a crackdown. It was the kind of logical argument that nobody wants to hear. Not even law enforcement: to a narcotics detective, pot legalization can feel like an existential affront. As if to deepen the insult, tax revenue from the sale of legal cannabis will be devoted to substance-abuse prevention and research—not to police or prosecutors. Who, then, was going to pay for such a crackdown? Although Kleiman urged state officials to set aside funds for increased law enforcement, he can get impatient with such complaints. He likes to say, “You don’t get any of the revenue for arrestingrobbers, either.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 22, 2013

There’s a Whole New Way of Killing Cancer: Stephanie Lee Is the Test Case

Stephanie Lee, a 36-year-old Iraq War widow with two children is diagnosed with terminal colon cancer and told she has just a few years to live. A group of pioneering cancer specialists at the Icahn Institute at Mount Sinai use genetic data to figure out alternative treatments to “the standard of care” that could give her her life back:

His name was Ross Cagan. He did not work for Schadt; he worked as a professor at Sinai. But they met every week, and after Schadt called on October 1 to tell Cagan about Stephanie Lee, he listened to Cagan’s idea for her. A month earlier, Cagan had started doing something that he said “had never been done before.” He started creating “personalized flies” for cancer patients. He took the mutations that scientists like Schadt had revealed and loaded them into flies, essentially giving the flies the same cancer that the patient had. Then he treated them. “Why a fly? You can do this in a fly. You can capture the complexities of the tumor.”

A day after Cagan spoke with Schadt, Stephanie became the fifth person in the world to have a fly built in her image—or, rather, in the image of her cancer. In an ideal world, Cagan would have created as complex a creature as possible, burdening the fly with at least ten mutations. He gave Stephanie’s fly three, because “Stephanie is on the shorter course. We’re making the fly as complex as possible given her time.” By October 11, however, Cagan already had “one possible drug suggestion for her”—or one possible combination of drugs, since he always tests at least two at a time. “In this center, the FDA will not allow us to put a novel drug in patient. To get a novel drug into a patient, we have to do a novel combination of [known] drugs. We have to use novel drug combinations that people have never seen before.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Nov 20, 2013
Length: 60 minutes (15,090 words)

A Stiller Ground

Our recent Longreads Member Pick, now free online: Gordon Grice’s devastating essay about the loss of a child:

That was my daily routine. Sometimes the woman I loved would come with me. I envied her. She seemed to know how to grieve. To let herself feel things, to take time. She wrote letters to our stillborn daughter. She ordered photographs from the hospital and put them in a scrapbook. She talked. Most of these activities were strange to me, though I clumsily tried to emulate her for the sake of my mental health. I wanted to have my private scene at the cemetery, unwitnessed, and be cured for good, or at least for a little while.

Source: This Land Press
Published: Nov 21, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,264 words)

The Black Car Company That People Love to Hate: Our Member Pick

Longreads Members support this service and receive exclusive stories from the best publishers and writers in the world. Join us to receive our latest Member Pick—it’s a new story from journalist Nancy Scola, published in Next City’s Forefront magazine, about the rise of Uber.

For more from Next City, you can check out their site or subscribe here. For a limited time, Next City is offering the Longreads community a 20 percent discount on a one-year subscription. Enter the offer code: LONGREADS (case sensitive) for your discount at nextcity.org/subscribe.

Source: Next City
Published: Nov 21, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,561 words)

‘Boxing’s not so well kept secret is that, financially, most fighters can never stop’

On the past, present and future of Manny Pacquiao, who was knocked out in December and now is returning to the ring. And despite earning more than $200 million, Pacquiao doesn’t have much of it left:

In the Times article, Michael Koncz, singled out Pacquiao’s Achilles’ heel: “The downfall of Pacquiao, if there is one, will be his kindness and generosity. At some point, I fear that’s going to catch up to him.” Beyond Pacquiao’s generosity, he reportedly squandered millions from gambling. That doesn’t even account for his fleet of cars and extensive property holdings, including houses, condos, apartments and such an intense desire to give his money away to the poor he had to hire people simply charged with the responsibility to apologize and prevent him from throwing money at all the open hands spread out before him.

Source: SB Nation
Published: Nov 21, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,254 words)

Boy Next Door

The writer on growing up with news reports of a serial rapist and killer who eluded capture for years before finally getting arrested, and how it impacted her own experience with sexual assault:

According to media reports, after Bernardo’s arrest a police officer assigned to prepare the official transcript of the footage of French’s and Mahaffy’s torture collapsed, weeping, and couldn’t continue. I had a similar reaction while reading it. The smallest details haunted me: during one prolonged assault, Bernardo took a break to rent a movie and grab a pizza, and another time Homolka cooked a chicken dinner for the couple and their victim.

The real terror was that it felt so ordinary and suburban, that the vilest acts occurred in the spaces we thought were safe. I was struck by the same sense of banality, looking at the home where Bernardo grew up.

Evil was not foreign to our idyllic community. It had been with us all along.

Source: Walrus Magazine
Published: Nov 18, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,047 words)

The Pain of Rural Poverty: Our College Pick

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 20, 2013

The Nashville Sound: The Story of a Doomed Minor League Baseball Stadium

Akers revisits his hometown ballpark, Herschel Greer Stadium, where the Triple-A Nashville Sounds have played since the 1970s. The team is lobbying for a new park, just like other cities around the country:

This leaves Tammen, who will give a speech at this year’s winter meetings about “how to make the best of an old ballpark,” in limbo—patching leaks and fixing seats, but holding off on major renovations in hopes that a new stadium is on its way. As it turns out, limbo is an excellent, or at least fascinating, place for a ballpark. Greer Stadium’s concourses are cramped, damp, and lit by eerie fluorescents; concessions are limited to burgers, hot dogs, and—most nights—peanuts. There are no amenities but cold beer, green grass, and cheap tickets. Its problems are plain enough, but Greer Stadium is one of the finest minor league parks in the country, precisely because it is good for absolutely nothing at all but watching baseball.

Author: W.M. Akers
Source: The Classical
Published: Nov 20, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,707 words)