On the Banks of the River Lex
[Fiction, sci-fi] Death walks the streets of New York and ponders the Big Questions:
“Death liked to walk across bridges. For this reason he had claimed a home for himself relatively far from the center of town. This was in a big ugly gray stone of a building that had once been a factory, and then had been colonized by artists, and then by trend-obsessed young professionals. Now it was ruled by cats. Death passed perhaps a dozen of them on his way down the stairs, including one mother briskly carrying a mouse and trailed by two gangling adolescents. As usual they ignored his presence, merely slinking out of the way as he passed. On the rare occasions when one would deign to look at him, he nodded in polite greeting. Sometimes they even nodded back.
“He had attempted, once, to entice a kitten to live with him. This was something he knew humans had done. But he kept forgetting to bring food, and because he did not sleep, the kitten was unable to cuddle with him at night. After a few days the kitten had left in a huff. He still saw its descendants around the building, and felt lingering regret.
“The Williamsburg Bridge had not yet begun to warp and sag like the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. Death suspected there was some logical reason for this — perhaps the Williamsburg had been renovated more recently, or built more sturdily in the first place. But in his heart, Death believed that he helped to keep the bridge intact. By walking across it, he gave the bridge purpose. For all things created by humankind, purpose was the quintessence of existence.
“So Death walked into town every day.”
The Luckiest Village in the World
What happened when the village of Sodeto won the largest lottery in the history of Spain:
“Ana, the Romanian, picks up the ringing phone. ‘Mommy,’ says her daughter, ‘apparently the Gordo was won in Grañén,’ and Ana says, ‘Is this a joke?’ She looks out the window and sees her friend Lolita in her pajamas, running to the mayor’s house, and she sticks her head out, and Lolita screams, ‘WE WON THE GORDO!’
“‘How much?’ asks Ana reflexively, and her friend says a number in pesetas, and Ana yells, ‘Tell me so I can understand!’
“‘One hundred thousand euros per ticket,’ she shouts.
“And Ana, in shock, races down to the bar. She remembers putting her ticket under the cash register, and where is it, and…
“There it is!
“Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out.”
The Thin Red Line
Inside the debate over what the U.S. should do about Syria:
“He walked back to his desk and sat down. ‘The Syria I have just drawn for you—I call it the Sinkhole,’ he said. ‘I think there is an appreciation, even at the highest levels, of how this is getting steadily worse. This is the discomfort you see with the President, and it’s not just the President. It’s everybody.’ No matter how well intentioned the advocates of military intervention are, he suggested, getting involved in a situation as complex and dynamic as the Syrian civil war could be a foolish risk. The cost of saving lives may simply be too high. ‘Whereas we had a crisis in Iraq that was contained—it was very awful for us and the Iraqis—this time it will be harder to contain,’ he said. ‘Four million refugees going into Lebanon and Jordan is not the kind of problem we had going into Iraq.'”
Longreads Guest Pick: Pravesh Bhardwaj on Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’
Today’s guest pick comes from frequent Longreads contributor Pravesh Bhardwaj, who recommends Alice Munro’s short story, published in The New Yorker in 1999.
Housebreaking
[Fiction, National Magazine Awards finalist] A lapsed Christian Scientist meets a woman escaping her past:
“Seamus lived in Wheaton, Maryland, in the last house on a quiet street that dead-ended at a county park. He’d bought the entire property, including a rental unit out back, at a decent price. This was after the housing market crashed but before people knew how bad it would get—back when he was still a practicing Christian Scientist, still had a job and a girlfriend he’d assumed he would marry. Now, two years later, he was single, faithless, and unemployed. The money his mother had loaned him for a down payment was starting to look more like a gift, as were the checks she’d been sending for the last year to help him cover the mortgage. His life was in disrepair, but for the first time in months he wasn’t thinking about any of that: he was sitting out back on a warm spring day with a woman. Her name was Charity, and she was a stranger.”
Truth and Consequences
The Supreme Court is considering whether or not it is unconstitutional for police to gather DNA from from individuals who are arrested—even if the DNA evidence results in crime-solving:
“Once the government has someone’s DNA, Shanmugam argues in his briefs, Big Brother has possession of that person’s genetic blueprint. Allowing the government to collect and keep DNA raises privacy concerns, he writes, because it contains ‘information that can be used to make predictions about a host of physical and behavioral characteristics, ranging from the subject’s age, ethnicity, and intelligence to the subject’s propensity for violence and addiction.’
“Shanmugam acknowledges that laws prohibit unauthorized disclosures of DNA, but he points out that Maryland’s law allows sharing DNA for ‘research’ purposes. And he notes that state attorney general Gansler ’embraced’ the notion that the government would eventually have everyone’s DNA, because Gansler testified before the legislature that someday ‘everybody’s DNA’ would be in some sort of a database, ‘like with our Social Security numbers.’
“Shanmugam wrote in his brief: ‘Some Fourth Amendment incursions may come dressed in sheep’s clothing. This wolf comes as a wolf.'”
My Top 5 #Longreads on the Business of Film, Music and Books
Longreads’ Mark Armstrong on Steven Soderbergh’s “State of the Cinema” and four other recommended stories about the movie, music and publishing industries.
My Father, the Good Nazi
A man struggles to accept his father’s criminal past:
“The more I pushed, the more Horst insisted on varnished truth. Wächter was a father. He saved Jews. He had responsibilities to others. He followed orders and an oath (to Hitler). He had to provide for the family. He was an idealist. He was honourable. He believed the system could be improved. In a court these arguments would be hopeless. Yet Horst maintained that Wächter was ‘very much against the criminal system’ even if hard put to offer any convincing examples.”
Unforgiven, Unforgotten
Phil Busse stole McCain lawn signs in Minnesota during the 2008 presidential campaign. The prank made him infamous:
“Within hours, I received several hundred angry emails and phone calls, including three death threats. A man in Michigan yelled at me over the phone, calling me ‘sick’ and ‘demented,’ and informing me that he was going to go steal ten times as many Obama signs in retaliation. A man from Texas, who described himself as ‘a 29-year-old, 250-pound Republican,’ called me ‘little Phillip’ and offered to whoop my ass. A man in California told me to go play a long game of ‘go hide and fuck yourself,’ and warned that he was planning to exercise his Second Amendment right. Another man from Springfield, Oregon, left a voicemail message calling me ‘despicable’ and informing me that he would hunt me down if I returned to Oregon. Clearly, whatever message I had intended about visceral participation in politics was completely eclipsed by the messenger. In hindsight, this would be the third principle of public spectacle—and one that I was long overdue to have learned.”
A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes
The story of Sadakichi Hartmann, a Japan-born poet who had befriended everyone from Walt Whitman to Ezra Pound and John Barrymore—and who once attempted to stage the first-ever “perfume concert” in New York:
“But no one had ever heard of a perfume concert. It was an invention so faddish the newspapers had inked themselves in excitement and still managed indifference by the second column. ‘All lovers of good smells are expected to patronize the concert,’ one hopeful feature began. However, ‘It may be that after a time the olfactory nerve of the New York gatherings will become jaded, and will require smells of more and more pungency.’ It was suggested Mr. Hartmann take a trip to Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.”
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