Reading List: 4 for Laughing
New story picks from Emily Perper, featuring Kill Screen, Videogum and The New Yorker.
Bloodlines
How the manager of a million-dollar horse breeding facility became an informant on one of Mexico’s most feared cartels: Los Zetas.
“Key to the operation in the United States was Jose Treviño, a U.S. citizen with a clean record who had never wanted anything to do with his family’s illicit dealings, until Miguel gave him $25,000 to buy Tempting Dash. ‘You can pick your friends but you can’t pick your family,’ Jose often said.
“The FBI wanted Graham to keep working with Jose Treviño and see where it led. He reluctantly agreed to cooperate. Within months, the young horse agent with a Texas A&M ring and an Aggie bumper sticker on his truck was given a Nextel cell phone with a wiretap. The FBI would be listening to every phone conversation Graham had with his new business associates. Unwittingly, Graham, heir to a Texas horse-racing empire, had become an informant on one of the world’s most lethal crime syndicates.”
How Athletes Get Great
How much of greatness is nature vs. nurture? Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein challenges Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” rule in a new book about the science of training, The Sports Gene. A lot depends on individual biology, and there are cultural factors, too:
“Usain Bolt is a great example. He was 6’4” when he was 15 years old and blazing fast. He wanted to play soccer or cricket. What are the chances anyone lets him run track in the U.S.? To me, it’s zero. There’s no way he’s not playing basketball or football. Nowhere but Trinidad, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Jamaica would a guy that’s 6’4”, with blinding speed, be allowed to run track instead of something else. People have asked me, ‘Should we do genetic screening for the best athletes or at least some sort of measurements?’ Yes, measuring kids and trying to fit them into the right sport for their body type absolutely works. That’s why you saw Australia and Great Britain up their medal haul with their talent search programs when they had their Olympics. However, when there’s a sport that’s most popular in an area, you don’t have to do that because you already have the natural sifting program. You don’t have to go hunt for the best football players in America because they’re already going to go play football and then we select them.”
‘Still, God Helps You’
The story of William Mawwin, who was kidnapped in Sudan when he was six years old and sold into slavery. Mawwin eventually escaped, and, at 34, is going to college in the U.S.:
“In the morning I cook, bring his tea, black tea with milk, his bread. I cook the bread, too. I fold his bed. I cook his lunch, usually chicken. I do his laundry, using a bucket with water and soap. Lay his clothes in the sun to dry. Master would pray five times a day, he was really into the Quran. Then I start going to cattle camp, rotating with his youngest son, three months younger than me, the son he loved more than anything. When this son was around, I had to leave, go to cattle camp, get yelled at, beaten. One time, when I lost one of the cows, Ahmad, the fourth son, stabbed me, told me find the cow or he will kill me. After I find it, he still slaps me, beats me, gets really rough.
“For four years, I didn’t go anywhere. Master told me: Your parents did not want you, now I’m taking care of you. All this is going to be yours one day. I will find you a wife. These are your brothers. You are part of our family. This will be your special cow. So you feel motivated, work very hard. But it is psychological manipulation. Sweet talk. Mind control.”
How Much Is a Life Worth?
A profile of Ken Feinberg, who has assisted in determining how to dole out funds for the victims of 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Newtown shooting, and the BP oil spill. The story raises larger questions about when we give to victims of tragedies, and when we don’t and why:
“All of this raises fundamental questions of fairness, he says. On one hand, the 9/11 payout was an expression of political sentiment; few Americans objected. And as far as private money goes, well, that’s the marketplace in action. Donors are free to send checks in one case and not another, just like they’re free to choose between the Jerry Lewis telethon and the March of Dimes. On the other hand is the unsettling feeling that human life ends up being valued in all manner of disparate ways, based on publicity, geography, the nature of the crime, and the identities of the victims. ‘It’s horrible,’ Feinberg says. A woman who lost a spouse in the Boston bombings will receive more than $2 million. A family who lost a child at Sandy Hook Elementary will see less than $300,000. Meanwhile, the families of African-American children killed by stray bullets on the streets of Chicago, Washington, New Orleans, and elsewhere may not be able to cover the cost of the funeral.”
The Cheapening of the Comics
Even in the 1980s, the comics industry was troubled. Here is a 1989 speech by Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, on the comics that inspired him as a child, and the problem with a business that was being dominated by a very small group of syndicates and newspapers that prevented artists from retaining the ownership of their work:
“By having complete control over the comic strip, the syndicate can ruin the work. Although there has never, ever been a successor to a comic strip half as good as the original creator, passing strips down through generations like secondhand clothes has been the standard practice of the business since it began. Incredibly, syndicates still today tell young artists that they’re not good enough to draw their own strip, but they are good enough to carry on the work of some legendary strip instead. Too often, syndicates would rather have the dwindling income of a doddering dinosaur than let the strip die and risk losing the spot to a rival syndicate. Consequently, the comics pages are full of dead wood. Strips that had some relevance to the world during the depression are now being continued by baby boomers, and the results are embarrassing.”
What Happens When Four Guys Try to Cross the Atlantic…in a Rowboat
Four men make an attempt to break a world record by rowing from Senegal to Miami, Fla.:
“At the end of January, just 200 kilometres into the journey, the team is rowing in a wild nighttime sea when a rogue wave the size of a small house hoists their boat, tosses it into a valley and crashes over it. The force of the water snaps one of the oars in Kreek’s hand. Equipment flies overboard, but the moon and stars offer enough light for him and Hanssen to frantically recover as many objects as they can. Two weeks later, in daylight, another wave breaks one of Kreek’s oars. It’s their last spare. Being thrashed by the Atlantic is terrifying and Kreek slips into shock. He goes cold, crawls into the cabin and falls asleep for four hours. ‘You have to come to terms with the fact that you’re this tiny little thing that can be eaten by the ocean at any moment,’ Pukonen says.”
College Longreads Pick: ‘Raising Trey’ by Everett Cook, University of Michigan
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. This week’s pick comes from Everett Cook, who wrote this story for the University of Michigan’s The Michigan Daily.
Anatomy of a Publisher
The work and sex lives of book publishers. Gottlieb, the former editor of The New Yorker, writes about Boris Kachka’s history of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Hothouse:
“Gossip about Roger Straus’s sexual life (and everyone else’s) is a dominant feature of ‘Hothouse’—yes, FSG was hot in this way, too. Not only was Roger the Emperor of Frankfurt, but in New York, in the office, he was the Sun King—complete with deer park. The chief doe, Peggy Miller, arrived in his life around the same time Sontag did. She was an experienced executive secretary who went to work for Roger in that capacity and stayed on until the end, a major force at FSG. (‘I’m . . . grateful to Peggy Miller,’ Kachka writes, ‘the living soul of independent FSG, for giving me so much of her time.’)”
Longreads Member Pick: In Washington, D.C., Where ‘We’re All Obituaries Waiting to Happen’
This week’s Member Pick is from the new book by Mark Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and a writer who’s been featured on Longreads frequently in the past.
This Town, published by Penguin’s Blue Rider Press, is Leibovich’s insider tale of life inside the Beltway bubble of Washington, D.C., and how the social lives of political lifers, journalists and hangers-on complicate the truth about what really goes on in the capital. The prologue and first chapter, featured here for Longreads Members, take place at the funeral for NBC Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert.
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