Now on Newsstands: Modern Farmer
One of our favorite parts about running Longreads is getting to know all the excellent magazine, book and online publishers out there producing great storytelling. We thought it would be fun to profile them—starting today with Modern Farmer. We spoke with deputy editor Reyhan Harmanci about their inaugural issue, out now.
The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi
[Three-part series] The firsthand account of a prisoner detained in Guantánamo:
“Suddenly a commando team of three soldiers and a German shepherd broke into our interrogation room. [ ] punched me violently, which made me fall face down on the floor, and the second guy kept punching me everywhere, mainly on my face and my ribs. Both were masked from head to toe.”
“‘Motherfucker, I told you, you’re gone!’ said [ ]. His partner kept punching me without saying a word; he didn’t want to be recognized. The third man was not masked, he stayed at the door holding the dog collar, ready to release it on me.
“‘Who told you to do that? You’re hurting the detainee,’ screamed [ ], who was no less terrified than I was.”
Knights of Soft Rock
Meet The Section—session players whose work in the studio fueled some of the biggest hits of the 1970s, from James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Carole King, and more:
“To critics, Taylor, Browne, and Crosby, Stills and Nash personified everything tame about Seventies rock, and the musicians who accompanied them were inevitably guilty by association. ‘We were the “Mellow Mafia,”‘ says Kortchmar. He recalls a particularly nasty write-up of Taylor from the time: ‘We had [writer] Lester Bangs threatening to stab a bottle of Ripple into James. What the fuck is he talking about? James is doing “Fire and Rain,” “Country Road,” about Jesus and questions and deep shit.'”
Legends Never Die
A look back at the movie “Kids,” two decades later:
“The kids were a crew of about sixteen, maybe forty if the outer circle was around. The core clique was all in Kids, with roles ranging from starring to un-credited. Their surrogate parents were Rodney Smith, Eli Morgan Gesner and Adam Schatz, the then twenty-something founders of Zoo York. Previously, Rodney had founded SHUT, the first local brand to design boards that could withhold the blow of curbs, rails, and jumps to accommodate the changing face of New York skating. Zoo York’s Meatpacking District headquarters was their clubhouse, and Eli, a club promoter, was the crew’s link to New York nightlife—he developed the skating ramp inside the infamous Tunnel nightclub.”
The Rise of the Tick
The writer visits a farm in the town of Lyme, Conn. with a group of biologists to learn what’s driving the population of pathogen-laden ticks:
It’s startling to look at the graphs of tick-borne diseases over the past few decades. They’re mostly going in the wrong direction. The research on Lyme disease is fairly recent, sparked in the mid-1970s after a cluster of children around Lyme developed fever and aches. They were diagnosed with juvenile arthritis—a peculiar diagnosis for so many children in one place. Their parents searched for an explanation, and eventually Allan Steere, a doctor at Yale, figured out that they suffered from an infectious disease. The fact that they all came from a rural part of the state suggested that an insect or some other animal had delivered the infection. In 1982, Willy Burgdorfer, an entomologist with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, discovered corkscrew-shaped bacteria in black-legged ticks from Long Island. He exposed the bacteria to serum from people with Lyme disease and discovered that their antibodies swarmed around the microbes. That was a sign that these bacteria—which would later be named Borrelia burgdorferi after him—were the cause of Lyme disease.
Crash Test
A history of standardized testing in Texas, where the accountability movement began:
“Like Jihad and skateboarding and small furry animals, high-stakes testing has given rise to a new genre of YouTube video, a kind of inspirational training film meant to be viewed just before the testing season begins. Some are slickly produced, while others are clearly homemade, though they all tend to share some common tropes: students imitating rappers, teachers gamely chiming in, a dance beat pumping while kids chant ‘Rock this test!’ and other mantras. Children are shown marching into class, poring over work sheets, learning ‘strategies’ to beat the test makers, rallying in the gym, and so forth. The songs are upbeat and the kids, especially the third graders, are cute. But after watching a dozen of these clips, the relentless support-building becomes a little disturbing. You begin to feel as if you’ve fallen asleep in the first act of To Sir, With Love and awoken in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp.”
Steven Soderbergh: The State of the Cinema
The director confronts the economics of moviemaking, and whether there’s hope for independent film:
“But let’s sex this up with some more numbers. In 2003, 455 films were released. 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films, and yet, 10 years ago: Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.”
Behind the Longreads: Dan Zak on the Nun and the Nukes
We asked Washington Post reporter Dan Zak how he stumbled upon “The Prophets of Oak Ridge.” Here’s his account.
Escape
A victim of domestic violence escapes an abusive situation:
“She led the kids to the Houston bus station’s loading zone, where only ticketed passengers could sit. She’d already turned off her cell phone so he couldn’t call her. Their bus didn’t leave for hours, though, and Krystal was getting nervous. She told a police officer standing nearby they were running away. ‘Don’t worry,’ the cop said. ‘If you don’t have a ticket, you can’t get back here.’ Could he see them through the terminal windows? Could he buy a ticket and try to stop her? Though he’d menaced her countless times, she’d never been so frightened as when she stared at the bus station clock and watched the seconds creep by.”
“Finally, they boarded the bus. Krystal didn’t stop worrying until the doors closed behind the last passenger. Adara quickly fell asleep. Jay couldn’t stop smiling, a wide grin that softened his eyes and made him look more like the boy he used to be than the man he was becoming. At last, Krystal slept.”
The Prophets of Oak Ridge
Three peace activists—one of whom was an 82-year-old nun—penetrated a U.S. nuclear-weapons facility. The story of what happened to the trio, and those involved in the incident:
“When told that Sister Megan thinks he saved her life by not escalating the situation — that, in fact, he was her salvation — Kirk is speechless. His wife is not.
“‘That’s amazing that she’d make that kind of statement,’ scoffs Joann Garland. ‘She is safe — because of him — to be able to go and do what she’s doing. . . . The joke of it is they came in God’s name. God does not say to break laws. Sorry. God does not say that.'”
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