Michael Hastings’ Dangerous Mind
On the life and death of a haunted journalist. The tragic death of Michael Hastings also gave birth to a number of conspiracy theories:
“Hastings never identified himself in his writing as someone suffering from PTSD. The closest he came to such an admission was in May, when he retweeted an article about using pot to treat PTSD. In fact, according to the coroner’s report, that is exactly what he was doing.
“Still, PTSD was not something he discussed even with his close friends. Matt Farwell, a freelance writer and Army veteran, worked with Hastings on two stories for Rolling Stone. The second involved a CIA station chief with PTSD, but even then Hastings did not open up on the subject, Farwell says.
“The death of Hastings’ fiancée clearly had a traumatic effect on him. When asked a few years later on C-SPAN what it was like writing the memoir, he answered, ‘I wrote it in — I was so screwed up when I wrote that book.'”
The Last Days of Stealhead Joe
The life and death of a fly-fishing guide. Ian Frazier went fishing with Joseph Adam Randolph, aka “Stealhead Joe,” two months before he took his own life:
“Alex Gonsiewski, a highly regarded young guide on the river, who works for John Hazel, said that Joe taught him most of what he knows. When Gonsiewski took his first try at running rapids that have drowned people, Joe was in the bow of the driftboat helping him through. ‘It’s tough to be the kind of person who lives for extreme things, like Joe was,’ Gonsiewski said. ‘His eyes always looked sad. He loved this river more than anywhere. And better than anybody, he could dial you in on how to fish it. He showed me the river, and now every place on the river makes me think of him. He was an ordinary, everyday guy who was also amazing. I miss him every day.'”
College Longreads Pick: ‘Newtown Youth Sports: A New Normal’ by Isabelle Khurshudyan, University of South Carolina
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick comes from Isabelle Khurshudyan, a student from the University of South Carolina who wrote this story as an intern for ESPN.
The Dark Night Returns for Neil Gaiman
On the book trail with author Neil Gaiman:
“Gaiman owes a lot to his fans. Once shrugged off as merely goth kids who liked comics, they’re now as diverse as the characters in his stories.
“Gaiman spends a lot of time on Twitter forging relationships, albeit fleeting ones, with his nearly 1.9 million fans. He also regularly posts on his blog, answers questions on his Tumblr, and updates Facebook.
“‘I just tweeted at him,’ longtime fan Tania Richter says, showing off a photo from CONvergence of Gaiman’s poster with googly eyes pasted on. ‘I’m hoping this’ll get a retweet.'”
Reading List: The Producers
Matt Graves is the curator behind Buried Treasures, a new Flipboard feed (and Twitter account) dedicated to the best music storytelling on the web. Here are six of his picks on the topic of music producers, the often-overlooked architects of the music we hear and love.
The Big Father Essay
An attempt to make sense of a parent’s life and death:
“Me at the top of the stairs listening. My father’s voice would change from playful to angry suddenly, and my mother’s voice would refuse to change. When he started to shout, I’d walk downstairs as noisily as I could, and I’d yell at them both to stop. That was my job apparently. If it hadn’t been for me, they might have gone their separate ways long before they did.
“When he himself was a child and tied to the front porch, having to listen to his father beat his mother, a thing I only heard from my mother, just before I began this piece. I never hid the shotgun, but I should have at least tried. When one of them mentioned that gun after midnight, I would make my body appear before them, so they would remember something other than anger. Because I was the product of their creative power, my body was a sign, a threshold, another urge. It was hard to be there nonetheless.”
The Unspeakable Gift
A woman with Turner syndrome decides to participate in a study at the National Institutes of Health:
“I arrived at the NIH Clinical Center alone, early, and unprepared. The nurse responsible for checking me in wasn’t even on duty yet. I had packed my suitcase as if for a four-day business conference, not a hospital stay—slacks, blouses, and pumps rather than T-shirts, sweats, and tennis shoes. That was probably a function of my denial as well as my ‘don’t leave home without lipstick’ impulse. I’d never spent a night in a hospital, never had an MRI or CT scan.
“People generally don’t go to NIH when they have a garden-variety illness. NIH takes the sickest of the sick and offers hope. Old and young gather there. The common denominator is illness—the kind so serious that it generates platitudes and whispers. To be a patient at NIH feels like being a contestant on a reality show in which all the cameras are turned on you—or being a lottery winner when the prize is assuming a large debt at a huge interest rate.”
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As a bonus, read Steedly’s blog post about how her essay, which she worked on in a writing class in 2007, ended up being published in the Washingtonian.
The Best Civil Rights Stories
As the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington approaches next week (August 28), Longreads has teamed up with Al Jazeera America’s “America Tonight”to collect the best civil rights stories.
We want your help: Share your favorite stories below in the comments, and we’ll spotlight some of your picks next week. They can be historical texts, stories from the archives, or newer reporting and essays.
Inside the Life of the Man Known as the ‘Spark Ranger’
The life and death of Roy Sullivan, a park ranger for Shenandoah National Park who was struck by lightning seven times:
“A gentle rain fell on April 16, 1972. The Spark Ranger was in a small guardhouse atop Loft Mountain, registering carloads of visitors who were arriving at the campground. Not so much as a coo of thunder riffled the air. Then … KABOOM! Lightning annihilated a fuse box inside the guardhouse. ‘The fire was bouncing around inside the station, and when my ears stopped ringing, I heard something sizzling,’ Sullivan told a Washington Post reporter who contacted him a week later. ‘It was my hair on fire.'”
Murder by Craigslist
A killer enlists the help of a high school student to target unemployed, middle-aged men by luring them with a job listing on Craigslist:
“Jeff Schockling was sitting in his mother’s living room, watching Jeopardy, when he heard the doorbell. That alone was strange, as he’d later explain on the witness stand, because out there in the boondocks, visitors generally just walked in the front door. Besides, he hadn’t heard a car drive up. Schockling sent his 9-year-old nephew to see who it was, he testified, and the kid came back yelling, ‘There’s a guy at the door! He’s been shot and he’s bleeding right through!’ Schockling assumed his nephew was playing a prank, but when he went to the door, there was the stranger, holding his right arm across his body, his sleeve and pant leg soaked with blood. The guy was pale and fidgety and wouldn’t sit down at the picnic table outside. But he asked Schockling to call 911.
“Sheriff Stephen Hannum of Noble County arrived after about 15 minutes. He would later describe Davis as remarkably coherent for a man who had been shot and was bleeding heavily. But what Davis was saying made no sense. He claimed that he’d come to the area for a job watching over a 688-acre cattle ranch, and that the man who’d offered him the job had shot him.”
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