Something More Wrong: Inside the Women’s Ward of a Psychiatric Hospital
Our recent Longreads Member Pick by Katy B. Olson and The Big Roundtable is now free online. Plus: Read our backstory on how Olson came to tell these patients’ stories.
Can Diamond Dallas Page Save Wrestling’s Walking Dead?
Former WWF wrestler Diamond Dallas Page is now a fitness guru who is helping other former wrestlers like Jake “The Snake” Roberts with their substance abuse addictions. Page’s home in Smyrna, Ga. has been dubbed by these wrestlers as the “Accountability Crib”:
“Page has a knack for bringing people under his influence. Linda is actually Brittany’s biological mother, but she allowed Page to legally adopt both of her daughters in the mid-’90s, and she and Page have since raised the girls as friends. Linda now works for Page, and eagerly adheres to the dieting (no gluten, no genetically modified foods) and exercise (DDP Yoga) regimens that he has laid out for her. Andrew first met Page at a WrestleCon in New Jersey, where he made it clear that he was looking for work. He has been living with and working for Page ever since, and he claims to have never felt this healthy or this good about himself before. Ted befriended Page in a gym 10 years ago and was featured in an early iteration of Page’s yoga DVD and book. The two have stayed in touch all these years, and Ted credits Page’s workout regimen for his sharp mind and his Jack LaLanne-esque physique. The house is full of these kinds of stories, in fact.
“‘He enjoys helping people, and it’s valid,’ Scott Hall tells me. ‘He gets high off helping people.'”
The Secret Service Agent Who Collared Cybercrooks by Selling Them Fake IDs
Secret Service agent Mike Adams used the identity of a grifter named Justin Todd Moss to sell criminals fake IDs and build a case against them. The story behind the Secret Service’s long con:
“From the Secret Service’s standpoint, selling fake IDs – ‘novelties,’ in the parlance of the underground – would have held a number of advantages. Unlike intangible commodities like credit card numbers or passwords, fake IDs must be shipped physically, which gives the agency an address to check out for every customer. And, being photo IDs, the customer had to provide their photos. It’s a rare law enforcement operation that lets the cops collect mug shots before they’ve made a single arrest.
“‘It’s a great idea,’ says E. J. Hilbert, a former FBI cybercrime agent who worked undercover in the Carder Planet days. Feds routinely get close to carders by selling ‘stolen’ credit card numbers that are actually provided by card issuers, then tracked. Shipping counterfeit driver’s licenses, he says, has the same advantages.
“‘In fact, it’s even better,’ says Hilbert, now a managing director at Kroll Cyber. ‘You have one name and one ID that you can put in the system and flag. … I tried to get approval for this myself, and they wouldn’t do it.'”
The Monsanto Menace Takes Over
“Monsanto’s specialty is killing stuff.” A brief, outraged history of how the biotech giant took control of the world’s food supply, from pesticides to genetically modified crops. The promise was that GM crops would mean cheaper food around the world, but patents allowed the company to muscle out competitors, fend of regulators and steer the public away from questions about the environmental consequences:
“The first crack appeared in 1970, when Congress empowered the USDA to grant exclusive marketing rights to novel strains, with two exceptions: Farmers could replant the seeds if they chose, and patented varieties had to be provided to researchers.
“But that wasn’t enough. Corporations wanted more control, and they got it with a dramatic, landmark Supreme Court decision in 1980, which allowed the patenting of living organisms. The decision was intended to increase research and innovation. But it had the opposite effect, encouraging market concentration.”
Nothing Like Being Scared
At the height of her fame, “The Lottery” writer Shirley Jackson’s life was falling apart. Victoria Best chronicles the author’s personal pain as she finished her 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle:
“For some time, Jackson had been battling serious health issues: she was morbidly obese, suffering from asthma, arthritis and the side effects of a cocktail of amphetamines and tranquillisers. In the three years it had taken her to write We Have Always Lived in the Castle – three times longer than any of her other books and yet this was her shortest – everything had worsened. She began to be troubled by attacks of colitis that left her sick and faint. The anxiety that they could occur at any time kept her ever closer to home, and she was aware, with her sharply-honed sense of humour, that the book was mining too close to her own fears. ‘I have written myself into the house,’ she declared in a letter to a friend, and in one to her parents, describing how well her work was going: ‘there’s nothing like being scared to go outside to keep you writing.’”
When 772 Pitches Isn’t Enough
Via Travelreads: Chris Jones on the unique culture of Japanese baseball and 16-year-old pitching phenom Tomohiro Anraku, seen as “a real-life Sidd Finch, his story so impossible that he’s been spoken about only in whispers or exclamations”:
“There has been talk in America that Anraku’s arm had been destroyed weeks earlier, in April, stripped of its powers at Koshien — a high school tournament that happens twice a year in Japan, in spring and in summer. Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa and one of the West’s principal translators of Japanese culture, has a hard time capturing the meaning of Koshien, first held in 1915. ‘It’s like the Super Bowl and the World Series rolled into one,’ he says. ‘It’s the closest thing Japan has to a national festival.’ In the spring, 32 teams from across the country arrive at Koshien, the name of a beautiful stadium near Kobe but also the de facto title of the tournament that’s played there. (In the summer, 49 teams participate, one from each of Japan’s 47 diverse prefectures, plus an additional team from Tokyo and Hokkaido.) They meet in a frantic series of single-elimination games until a champion emerges. At any one time, 60% of Japan’s TV sets will be tuned in to the drama. More than 45,000 fans will be packed into the stadium, and if the games are especially good, many of those fans will be weeping.
“‘It’s not just baseball,’ says Masato Yoshii, who pitched in two Koshiens long before he joined the New York Mets. ‘It’s something else. It’s something more.'”
The Sad State of America’s Aging Nuns
The population of nuns in the United States has dwindled to less than 60,000, and just 12% of them are under the age of 60. With convents closing down, sisters are left to fend for themselves: The Catholic Church covers retirement funds for priests, “the sisters have no such safety net. When their orders run out of money, that’s it.”
“‘Why would you want to be a nun if the archdiocese is going to treat you like they do?’ Ann Frey at the Wartburg said. ‘Their whole lives they’ve been obedient and done what they were asked to do, and now nobody is helping them?'”
“Neil Burke, a 24-year-old who spends a lot of time with the sisters at the nursing home, feels the same indignation. He could be volunteering with priests, but he doesn’t like them much. ‘If they need anything, they ask and just get it,’ he said. Instead, he’s compiling an oral history of the sisters at the Wartburg that will hopefully be completed by 2016. He can list the ways women are mistreated by the church off the top of his head: ‘They can’t give homilies, celebrate mass, consecrate the host, or become priests.'”
Our Longreads Member Pick: The Prophet, by Luke Dittrich and Esquire
For this week’s Member Pick, we’re excited to share “The Prophet,” the much-talked-about new story from Luke Dittrich and Esquire magazine investigating the claims made by Dr. Eben Alexander in the best-selling book Proof of Heaven, about Alexander’s own near-death experience.
Dittrich, a contributing editor at Esquire since 2008, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past and his work has appeared in anthologies including The Best American Crime Writing, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and his article about a group of strangers who sheltered together during a devastating tornado won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. He is currently writing a book for Random House about his neurosurgeon grandfather’s most famous patient, Henry Molaison, an amnesiac from whom medical science learned most of what it knows about how memory works.
Microaggression and Management
A short essay/instructional guide on how managers can use “microaggressions” against their team “to reinforce destructive power dynamics, justify inequality in the workplace, submerge conflict, construct false superiority/entitlement and maintain control over employees”:
“Commonly, there is a huge inequality in the accountability that employees have to managers vs. the accountability managers have to employees. There is a similar gulf in the relative degree of visibility that transacts between the parties. These gaps in visibility and accountability create an uneven ground for interaction — constructing a context that is simultaneously parental, patronizing, surveilling and discomforting.”
To Steal a Mockingbird?
According to a lawsuit, Harper Lee’s agent Samuel Pinkus duped the To Kill a Mockingbird author to assign him the copyright to her only book. An investigation into Lee’s fight to regain the book’s copyright, which continues to earn millions of dollars in royalties:
“His first move was to obtain the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird, which he did on May 5, 2007, ‘as part of a scheme to secure to himself an irrevocable interest in the income stream from Harper Lee’s copyright and to avoid his legal obligations to M&O under the arbitration decision,’ Lee’s lawsuit contends. ‘Pinkus knew that Harper Lee was an elderly woman with physical infirmities that made it difficult for her to read and see. He also knew that Harper Lee and her sister (and lawyer) relied on and trusted him. Pinkus abused that trust and took advantage of Harper Lee’s physical condition and years of trust built at M&O to engineer the assignment of her copyright in a document that did not even ensure her a contractual right to income.’
“Once Lee signed over her copyright to Pinkus, whether with or without her knowledge, he had the authority to do with her book whatever he pleased. ‘Once the copyright is assigned, you stop being an agent and become the principal,’ Eric Brown, a publishing-law attorney, told me. ‘This applies to all media. As the owner of the copyright in the book, you can make whatever deals you want. You are now Harper Lee.'”
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