Her Husband Had Taken Their Young Daughter To Iran. She Was Determined To Get The Child Back.
A case of international parental kidnapping, and a mother’s fight to get her daughter back:
“To make the plan work, Homaune had to take on a new persona in conversations with her ex-husband. She tried to be calm, helpful and understanding, and mailed him just enough cash, medicine and clothes to keep him interested in a more lucrative rendezvous. She stopped haranguing and screaming, even when her husband threatened to send her daughter home in a ‘box’ or to sell her on the black market, statements he would later admit he made.
“After the most intense calls, Homaune sobbed or threw up. But she refused to stop calling Iran; a key part of the plan involved being in constant contact, wearing him down, taking his demands seriously and convincing him that they were still friends, no matter what.”
In Conversation: Robert Silvers
The founding editor of the New York Review of Books looks back on 50 years:
Danner: “I’m holding here the first issue, which declares, in a statement on the second page: ‘This issue … does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones. Neither time nor space, however, have been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation, or to call attention to a fraud.’ This is the only editorial statement that you’ve ever made.”
Silvers: “That’s it! And that’s still what we try to do. We shouldn’t pretend to be comprehensive. There’s no point in reviewing a book if you can’t find someone whose mind you particularly respect. And even so, we have to turn down every month or so a piece we’d asked for. But I left one thing out of that editorial statement: the freedom of those people to reply at length, to make their case.”
Second Coming
A profile of California Gov. Jerry Brown, who just turned 75 and is ready to address the state’s problems:
“Unemployment in California is still higher than the national average and the state has billions of dollars of unfunded pension liabilities. He says there are some public workers in the state who can retire at 50 ‘and I think they’re going to live until they’re 100. So we have to pay for them for 50 years and they only work for 30 … how’s that going to work?’ He has other projects – ‘big ideas’, such as changing the distribution of new tax money to schools to help children who may not speak English as a first language, and developing a bullet train in the face of considerable opposition and a rising price tag. ‘You can’t be a great country without a big idea and without being able to have faith that the people who come after you will continue,’ he says, emphatically. ‘Otherwise it’s just shifting sands.'”
The Strange Case of the Super Mario Bros. Movie
How does a would-be blockbuster become a disastrous flop? A look at the decisions, large and small, that doomed Super Mario Bros. in the early 1990s:
“You can learn a lot about the way the movie industry works in a given moment by looking at its successes (whether accidental or engineered), but often you can learn even more by looking at its failures — the long-in-development projects that never make it to the screen, the labors of love gone wrong, the should’ve-been blockbusters that fail to land — particularly those that caught Hollywood by surprise, miscalculations that everyone involved has attempted to sweep under the rug. By digging up some of these misbegotten artifacts and examining them both within the context of their eras and in the cold light of the present, we’ll try to understand how seemingly inexplicable disasters happen.”
Why Aren’t Video Game Actors Treated Like Stars?
The voice actors behind billion-dollar games are paid hourly rates, and have seen video game voice acting budgets eaten up by Hollywood stars:
“‘With very few exceptions, allocating a major portion of a budget to a big name is a magnificently terrible waste of money,’ Blum says. ‘A name on a game is something executives use to impress each other, and I find it difficult to believe that those huge dollars can ever be recouped or even justified.
“‘I recently walked off a game because they expected me to record over 20 vocally stressful characters in one session for scale because they had blown their budget on a few “A-listers.”‘”
The Thinking Molecules of Titan
[Fiction] A previously unpublished sci-fi story by the writer and film critic, who died on April 4 at age 70:
“‘This is a vague idea,’ said Regan. ‘I’m still working on it. Titan evolves molecules that group in such a way that they, oh, get together, like, and don’t actually communicate, like, but prowl around in non-self-conscious collective-information patterns. That’s what we’re hearing, now that we’re closer to the source.’
“‘There’s only one way this is going,’ Alex said. ‘A lunar intelligence.’
“‘Intelligence is not required,’ Regan said. ‘All that’s needed are patterns that move more easily than other patterns. Patterns that lend themselves to pattern-originators. The way of least resistance. We don’t like sulfur, but it’s yummy for the deep-sea plumes.'”
The End and Don King
The fading spotlight of one of the biggest icons in boxing history:
“If King wants to reflect on the past during this, the evening of his career, he only has to look around his offices at Don King Productions, where he has surrounded himself not only with memorabilia, but also with the same people who helped him rise to the top. Dana Jamison, King’s vice-president of operations, has worked with King for 27 years. His personal photographer has been around for two decades. Of all the people I met associated with Don King, only Tavoris Cloud was under the age of 40. King’s productions feel even older and more out of date. While waiting for him to show up back at the headquarters of Don King Productions, I squeezed into a long-since-abandoned cubicle, careful not to disturb an ancient Brother typewriter and a stack of press releases and legal documents from the late ’90s. In the lobby, there was an old movie theater popcorn machine stamped with Don King’s emblem. One of his employees told me that in the ’90s, that machine had pumped the smell of fresh popcorn into the vents of the building. He couldn’t remember the last time it had been turned on. Out back in a warehouse behind the offices, more than 20,000 square feet of King’s possessions — mostly ornate furniture and towering bronze statues of lions — gathered dust along with seven of King’s cars. Earlier this month, Jessica Lussenhop of the Riverfront Times published an excellent article about King’s ongoing legal battle with St. Louis boxer Ryan Coyne, a conflict that started in November 2012. If you go to donking.com today, you will find a story titled ‘Undefeated National Champion Boxer Ryan Coyne Meets Cardinals Three-Time MVP Albert Pujols.'”
The Story Of A Failed Startup And A Founder Driven To Suicide
How financial and personal pressure took a toll on an entrepreneur:
“Before the fundraising, Sherman would push himself and others to raise as much money as possible for their businesses. After the financing closed, he began referring to venture capital as a ‘fraud’ and a ‘sham.’
“Employees could tell something was off when Sherman announced the financing to the team.
“‘He said, “This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. And I hope to not have to raise more money for a very long time,”‘ a source recalls.
“Another source also recalled Sherman saying something alarming about this last round:
“‘He said, “I had no business raising that last round of financing. I hadn’t made our metrics or our terms—not anything near it. But I got it done.”‘”
Longreads Is Joining Forces with The Atlantic
We have some big news to share today: Longreads is teaming up with The Atlantic, in a partnership that will allow us to expand our site and membership model—and continue to serve this community of readers, writers and publishers.
The Mistress and the Narcotraficante
A story adapted from The Fight to Save Juarez, which presents a range of viewpoints in Mexico’s drug war. Here, the viewpoint is from a drug trafficker’s mistress:
“Hernán and Elena lived lives of combustible desperation within the middle rungs of the Juárez cartel. Elena’s restless instincts and combative nature played off of Hernán’s macho disposition in ways that created an unanticipated, and perhaps unacknowledged, balance between them. Life in the cartel was full of people like Hernán and Elena, people who had grown up with nothing in Juárez’ desolate neighborhoods. Every time that Elena had unpacked, washed, and re-packed Hernán’s shipments of cocaine she made more than assembly plant workers earn in a month. There was little that she wished for beyond what she had. Her life already exceeded what most people from her background could have hoped for.”
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