The Meaning of White
After her daughter is born with albinism, a mother looks to folklore for meaning and comfort:
“We mythologize even our routine birth stories. The most extraordinary reside in the world’s grand narratives, from ancient Greece to the foundations of Christianity. Like the detailed version of Noah’s birth, brought to public attention in the 1940s with the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. In it, the boy is born with flesh as white as snow, hair as white as wool, and unusual eyes that illuminate the room. His father, Lamech, is disturbed by his newborn son’s appearance, so different from his own. He is suspicious, too. Recently, there were rumours that angels had been cavorting about with mortal women, and this child has definite angelic qualities. He consults his father, Methuselah, who in turn seeks the counsel of his father, Enoch. What Lamech ultimately discovers is that the white hair, luminous eyes, and pale flesh are attributes of the child’s divine calling. ‘Call his name Noah,’ Enoch advises. ‘When all mankind who are on earth shall die, he shall be safe.'”
Will.
A 28-year-old man with Asperger’s syndrome survives the unforgiving southern Utah desert for more than a month on by eating plant roots and following the Escalante river before being rescued:
“Will could see himself wasting away. It was late June, and what little fat he’d had on his body had evaporated, and his skin had gone slack over his midsection. Will dropped into the river one morning and could see his hips sticking out from under his pants. His body would soon begin to eat away at his organs. After that, it could be anything: kidney failure, liver failure, heart attack.
“His walking had become labored and brought him to the point of exhaustion after less than an hour. Each time he stopped to put his head into the water, or to pull another root off a plant, it was harder to regain his momentum. He briefly considered setting some brush on fire with his lighter, perhaps a tree. But Will couldn’t bring himself to destroy even a sliver of the desert. He staggered over boulders, meekly pushed away brush and tree limbs. The hearing in his left ear faded in and out, and his shallow breaths echoed in his head.”
The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones
[Fiction, National Magazine Award finalist, 2004] A girl is sent to stay with her cousin in Israel:
“My cousin says that when I go home I should encourage my parents to keep kosher, that we should always say b’rachot before and after eating, that my mother and I should wear long skirts and long-sleeved shirts every day. She says all this will help my mother recover, the way it helped her mother recover from the divorce. I try to tell her how long it’s been since we’ve even done the normal things, like go to the movies or make a big Chinese dinner in the wok. But Esty just watches me with a distant, enlightened look in her eyes and says we have to try to do what God wants. I have been here a month, and still I haven’t told her any of the bad things I’ve done this year—sneaked cigarettes from my friends’ mothers’ packs, stole naked-lady playing cards from a street vendor on West 33rd, kissed a boy from swim team behind the bleachers after a meet. I had planned to tell her all these things, thinking she’d be impressed, but soon I understood that she wouldn’t.”
A Mother Jones Reading List: Fashion #Longreads
A collection of stories from Salon, Jane, The New Yorker, New York Times and more.
The King of Oontz Oontz Oontz
A profile of Tim Bergling, a 23-year-old Swede who has risen to fame as a DJ the club scene as Avicii:
“Another black car to another greenroom, another show: The Lights All Night festival is a blur of kids in Fun Fur and neon going, ‘Are you rolling?,’ mesmerizing one another with light-up gloves. Tim has never taken the Drug Formerly Known As Ecstasy, which is sort of odd since MDMA is to EDM what cocaine was to disco. ‘I mean, I want to take it,’ he says the next day, eating a layover hamburger on the way to Vegas. ‘But I’m sort of afraid of anything that makes you feel out of control.’ Even though the kids in Dallas are his age, it’s hard to imagine him among them crowd-surfing in a neon tankini. ‘Yeah, I kind of missed all that,’ he says. ‘Because when I was 18, I couldn’t go out, and then when I could go out…’ he trails off.
“‘He gets mobbed,’ Felix says.”
A King With No Country
How the last king of Rwanda ended up living on public assistance in Virginia:
“In 1990, under Western pressure, Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu who had ruled with an iron first for nearly two decades, agreed to share power with other parties. Seeing its chance, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the militant group of Tutsi exiles in Uganda, invaded, igniting long-dormant tensions between Hutu and Tutsi.
“Kigeli refused to endorse the RPF’s violent tactics, but a Rwandan journalist who interviewed him in Kenya was arrested upon his return to Rwanda on charges of harming state security. Kenya’s then-president, Daniel Arap Moi, had close ties to Habyarimana, and Kigeli and Benzinge began to fear for their security.
“The United States wouldn’t just be safer, they thought; its freedoms of speech would allow them to broadcast Rwanda’s plight to the world. They picked up the phone and called the one American they knew: Bill Fisher.”
Naked Joe
The story of Joe Knowles, who in 1913, ventured into the Maine wilderness in nothing but a jockstrap and allegedly survived without assistance for eight weeks:
“On his own, Knowles kept hiking. It was raining. In bare feet, he slipped in the mud, but still he trudged on over the flank of Bear Mountain. Eventually, he spied a deer. ‘She looked good to me,’ he wrote, ‘and for the first time in my life I envied a deer her hide. I could not help thinking what a fine pair of chaps her hide would make and how good a strip of smoked venison would taste a little later. There before me was food and protection, food that millionaires would envy and clothing that would outwear the most costly suit the tailor could supply.’ Knowles resisted the temptation to kill the deer, deciding to live within the game laws of Maine. He was hungry, wet, and cold, and also still a bit thrilled and agitated about being out there sans jockstrap. He could not sleep. What to do? He tossed off a few pull-ups. ‘On a strong spruce limb I drew myself up and down, trying to see how many times I could touch my chin to the limb. When I got tired of this, I would run around under the trees for a while.'”
That Other School Shooting
A school shooting in Oakland—and the suspect, a Korean immigrant—leads to questions within the Korean-American community:
“’I know this shooting had something to do with han, with hwabyung,’ Chung went on. ‘I feel almost guilty saying that, knowing how hurtful those words might be to other members of the Korean community. But all my training, everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve read and my own personal experiences all point to that. This guy was suffering from something that was very Korean.'”
Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share
A man decides to divide himself into 100,000 shares and sell himself on the open market, allowing investors to decide what he should do with his life:
“Then, on August 10, 2008, Merrill asked the shareholders to decide whether he should get a vasectomy. He didn’t tell McCormick that he was going to bring them in on it. As the CEO of himself, he simply wrote a note to his shareholders explaining his position on the subject. ‘Children are a financial drain,’ Merrill wrote. ‘The time investment of raising a child is immense. The responsibility is epic. The impact on future projects would be drastic. In light of these factors, it makes sense to reduce the chances to nearly zero and have a vasectomy performed.'”
“McCormick was furious and embarrassed. ‘He made our personal life public without consulting me,’ she says. It got worse when the ballots came in. Schroeder voted yes. Josh Berezin, a grade-school friend and political consultant, voted yes. To McCormick, it wasn’t just a referendum on the vasectomy. It was also a referendum on whether Merrill’s friends thought he should have kids with her. It was, she says, ‘a judgment on me.'”
Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws
How a get-tough law in California led to life sentences for petty thieves and drug offenders—and how support for its repeal came more from Republicans than Democrats:
“Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end. As the years passed and word of great masses of nonviolent inmates serving insanely disproportionate terms began to spread in the legal community, it became clear that any attempt to repair the damage done by Three Strikes would be a painstaking, ungainly process at best. The fear of being tabbed ‘soft on crime’ left politicians and prosecutors everywhere reluctant to lift their foot off the gas pedal for even a moment, and before long the Three Strikes punishment machine evolved into something that hurtled forward at light speed, but moved backward only with great effort, fractions of a millimeter at a time.”
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