The Problem with War Reporting
“In reality, war isn’t much foggier than peace.” Why “war reporting” often fails to shed proper light on what’s really happening:
“It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term ‘war reporter’, though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho overtones, it gives the misleading impression that war can be adequately described by focusing on military combat. But irregular or guerrilla wars are always intensely political, and none more so than the strange stop-go conflicts that followed from 9/11. This doesn’t mean that what happened on the battlefield was insignificant, but that it requires interpretation.”
The Time Jason Zengerle and a Gorilla Stalked Michael Moore for Might Magazine
Thanks to our Longreads Members’ support, we tracked down a vintage story from Dave Eggers’s Might Magazine. It’s from Jason Zengerle, a staff writer for Politico and former contributing editor for New York magazine and GQ who’s been featured on Longreads often in the past.
Fruit of Labor
A look at the Pearson family peach farm in Georgia, and the labor issues the farm faces every season when it needs workers:
“The man’s Spanish is limited, but it doesn’t matter. Many of these men were here last summer, and the summer before, and the summer before. A few have made the thirty-six-hour bus ride from Mexico every year for a decade. All of them are part of the federal H-2A agricultural guest worker program. One hundred men on a six-and-a-half-month work visa, hand-picked through interviews and background checks, a costly bureaucratic headache for the farm owners to ensure their crops are picked.”
‘You’re in Trouble. Am I Right?’: My Unsentimental Education
A story of love, LSD and higher education. Monroe is the author of five books, most recently the memoir, On the Outskirts of Normal. This is from her sixth book, in progress.
The Elvis Impersonator, the Karate Instructor, a Fridge Full of Severed Heads, and the Plot 2 Kill the President
The strange story behind the Mississippi man who sent ricin laced letters to a local judge, a senator, and President Obama:
“After a long and pointless back-and-forth, they put their cards on the table. A Homeland Security agent asks Curtis point-blank, ‘”Are you familiar with ricin?”
“‘And I say, “I don’t like rice. I don’t really eat rice. If y’all look in my house, you won’t find any rice.”
“‘He’s like, “Ricin, Mr. Curtis, ricin. Like anthrax.”
“‘I say, “I’ve never heard of that in my life, sir.”
“‘He says, “You’re a liar.”‘
“At the end of a seven-hour grilling, the agents are beginning to suspect that they’ve picked up the wrong man. ‘Finally, they know they aren’t getting anywhere, and they ask me, “Do you have any enemies? Do you know of anyone who wants to harm you?” I say, “Yeah, Everett Dutschke.”‘”
Do You Know Where Your Children Are?
What happens to frozen embryos that aren’t used during the in vitro fertilization process? Ford reflects on his and his wife’s experience having twins and questions about how to handle the remaining frozen embryos:
“The first option we considered with our remaining embryos was to do nothing. Just leave them on ice and make a decision later. They can stay frozen for a long time—in 2005 a child was born from an embryo frozen 13 years earlier—though our clinic recommends waiting no more than seven years. We asked, ‘What happens if we don’t pay?’ The doctor shrugged. ‘Would you destroy them?’ The doctor shook her head. In my experience fertility doctors shrug a lot. There’s a lot of guesswork. Of course they keep billing you.”
Reading List: The Political Mistress
From Monica to the D.C. Madam, some all-time favorite stories on politics, sex and power.
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox’s last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. “WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK” ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away.
Fragile
A tragic accident and a family’s struggle to process what led to the night’s events:
Often, in the hours after midnight, Bill thinks about everything that has happened, about his daughter and the accident. There have been so many moments for the Grohs to process: the time Jill said she was considering coming home to Arizona and Bill encouraged his daughter to stay at her job in Denver; that night at the Westin when Jill and her friends wandered into the night and her parents couldn’t protect her; Jill deciding on the hospitality profession and being sent to Colorado; a car breaking down on that particular stretch of highway at that particular moment on that particular night; Shafner taking their case; the Court of Appeals judge retiring when he did. The moments are easily divided into two categories: before and after the accident. ‘It’s really like our lives have two parts,’ Bill says. ‘Everything is so different.’
The Doctor Who Made a Revolution
How Sara Josephine Baker revolutionized medical care through her work in the New York City Health Department in the early 20th Century. She chronicled her experiences in a memoir, Fighting for Life:
“In her first year at the Bureau of Child Hygiene, Baker sent nurses to the most deadly ward on the Lower East Side. They were to visit every new mother within a day of delivery, encouraging exclusive breast-feeding, fresh air, and regular bathing, and discouraging hazardous practices such as feeding the baby beer or allowing him to play in the gutter. This advice was entirely conventional, but the results were extraordinary: that summer, 1,200 fewer children died in that district compared to the previous year; elsewhere in the city the death rate remained high. The home-visiting program was soon implemented citywide, and in 1910, a network of ‘milk stations’ staffed by nurses and doctors began offering regular baby examinations and safe formula for older children and the infants of women who couldn’t breast-feed. In just three years, the infant death rate in New York City fell by 40 percent, and in December 1911, The New York Times hailed the city as the healthiest in the world.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.