The Blind Man Making the World’s Best Glacial Vodka
A profile of Scott Lindquist, a blind Alaskan who harvests icebergs for a living:
“Quickly, Lindquist grabs his most important tool: his son Hank’s old hockey stick, which he uses partly for good luck and partly because it works well for hooking ice. ‘Ease it back,’ he shouts at the captain, who idles the boat. Lindquist lies on his belly at the bow, extending his torso over the water, and starts pulling on the berg. The wind has just picked up, and Lindquist’s target is bobbing around like a giant candy apple dusted with powdered sugar. The boat rises and falls on the waves, the water slapping Lindquist. When he finally pulls the berg within arm’s reach, one of the crew scurries up and tries to steady the ice with the pike pole as Lindquist attempts to twist in the ice screws. But with each motion, the berg bobs away stubbornly. After more than an hour of failed attempts, Lindquist says it’s time to move to calmer waters. ‘I like hanging out in front of a glacier,’ he tells me, wiping the water from his face, ‘but sometimes you gotta go where the getting is good.'”
The Informant
[Not single-page] A man helps his friends during a killing spree in Southeast Washington D.C., leaving five young people dead. He then decides to testify against them in court:
“When they sat down a few days later, Williams launched into his standard spiel: Don’t talk on the jail phones, don’t discuss your case with anyone. ‘And I think he was hearing, ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah,’ because he turns to me and says, “Man, what can I do to make this right?” ‘
“Williams couldn’t recall working with a client whose first instinct wasn’t to minimize his exposure. But he did as asked and arranged a meeting with the prosecutors.
“A team of investigators crammed into a small conference room at police headquarters. One of the first things Nate told them was perhaps the most surprising: Malik Carter, the 14-year-old, had nothing to do with the shooting. The government’s working theory—the kid’s name was Carter, after all, and he’d run at the sight of the cops—now had an ugly hole in it. ‘Mike Brittin’s jaw was on the floor,’ Williams says.”
The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble
An accomplished physicist falls in love online—and winds up in a Buenos Aires jail, accused of drug trafficking. Was he set up by the woman he fell for?
“In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. She was gorgeous — dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. In some photos, she looked tauntingly steamy; in others, she offered a warm smile. Soon, Frampton and Milani were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton would return home from campus — he’d been a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 30 years — and his computer would buzz. ‘Are you there, honey?’ They’d chat on Yahoo Messenger for a while, and then he’d go into the other room to take care of something. A half-hour later, there was the familiar buzz. It was always Milani. ‘What are you doing now?'”
Longreads Member Exclusive: Baghdad Follies, by Janet Reitman
This week, we’re excited to feature Janet Reitman, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. “Baghdad Follies” is Reitman’s 2004 story on what it was like to be a war correspondent in Iraq. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the war, Reitman reflects on her early fears about traveling to Baghdad.
Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.
The Big Short War
A look at the billionaire hedge fund managers battling over the future of a global nutrition supplement company:
“In a recent interview on CNBC, the blunt-talking and cagey Icahn hinted there would be a concerted effort to take Ackman down a peg or two in the Herbalife battle, which ‘could be the mother of all the short squeezes,’ he said, referring to a technique that can be used by a group of traders who band together to try to clobber a short-seller.
“Chapman agrees. ‘This is like Wall Street’s version of the movie Kill Bill,’ he says. ‘Bill Ackman has been so arrogant and disrespectful to so many people, presumably on the theory that he would never be in a position where these subjects of his disrespect could actually act on their deserved hatred for him But now, with JCPenney [which is down 20 percent from Ackman’s 2010 investment] and Herbalife going against Ackman, his ‘stock’ has moved down, allowing once again, a decade later, for those holding their Kill Bill puts [i.e., options they have been waiting to cash in] to exercise them against him.'”
The Once and Future Gov
A positive assessment of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s achievements during his second time around:
“The testimony to Brown’s acuity for all things Californian is remarkable because the California that Brown now governs has been so radically transformed over the past three decades that it bears scant resemblance to the state he once governed. While Brown has lived his entire life in politics and has been a national figure longer than any current American elected official, he has often seemed impatient with, if not downright contemptuous of, the workings of both politics and government and many of the most basic tenets of American liberalism. Yet, California today is again a state, as it has not been for decades, where the future that liberals hope will be America’s is happening first, and Jerry Brown, for all his skepticism about politics, government, and liberalism, is leading it there.”
How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’
How Disney CEO Robert Iger engineered the deal, and whether George Lucas can really retire:
“Iger understood Lucas’s concerns. ‘George said to me once that when he dies, it’s going to say “Star Wars creator George Lucas,” ’ he says. Still, Iger wanted to make sure that Lucas, who was used to controlling every aspect of Star Wars, from set design to lunchboxes, understood that Disney, not Lucasfilm, would have final say over any future movies. ‘We needed to have an understanding that if we acquire the company, despite tons of collegial conversations and collaboration, at the end of the day, we have to be the ones who sign off on whatever the plans are,’ says Alan Horn, chairman of Walt Disney Studios.
“Lucas agreed, in theory.”
God Needs a Hobby
On the road with Dan Harmon, the exiled creator of Community, now sharing his deepest confessions with a live audience:
“So Harmon gets up onstage, confesses to the crime of being Dan Harmon — bad boyfriend, high-functioning alcoholic, approval-hungry self-Googling6 mansion-owning gardener-having man-baby, petty, loathsome human — and somehow the results are cathartic and funny, and the essential truth that we are all shitty people and therefore we are all in this together is affirmed. Sometimes it’s like being at a weird college seminar run by a substitute teacher in the middle of a drunken meltdown and sometimes it’s like hanging out in Dan Harmon’s living room. Sometimes people from the audience wander onstage; sometimes when this happens (or when Jeff says something like How’s everybody doing tonight? and Harmon interrupts and tells the crowd that they don’t have to answer that with applause if they don’t want to) it feels like all the basic assumptions and rules of entertainment are up for debate. It’s almost never boring, it’s usually funny, and whenever the energy flags, Jeff Davis will cue up a hip-hop beat on his iPad and Harmon will start freestyle rapping, usually about fucking somebody’s mom, and dancing like a 3-year-old in footie pajamas who’s been allowed to stay up late to put on a show for cocktail-party guests.”
Summer of ’38
[Fiction] A Spanish woman revisits a wartime romance:
“The week after Ana had mentioned the man from the electric company, Montse saw him waiting at the front door of her building when she came home with a bag of fruit. She did know him, she realized; he was someone she often saw on the street. She must have been aware, too, that he worked for fecsa, although she couldn’t think how she knew this. She didn’t think she knew his name or anything else about him.
“Once he had introduced himself, she realized that he wanted to come up to the apartment with her. She was unsure about this. Since Paco died, she had become protective of her own space and she disliked surprises. She even asked her daughters to phone at appointed times. But there was something both eager and easygoing in this man’s manner and she knew that it would sound rude if she asked him to say whatever he had to say in the hallway of the building.”
Color Lines
DNA testing is showing how racially diverse people are, complicating how we view race:
“I imagined we’d have a vigorous discussion about how DNA turns the historical concept of race upside down. But for my son, the traditional concept of race had already been overturned, and our discussions revealed a deep generational gulf between us. As in my case, the sources and percentages of my son’s ancestry were not surprising: 72 percent European, 25 percent African, and three percent Asian. But when I mentioned how revealing DNA had been to me, Patrick just shrugged his shoulders, as if the numbers meant little to him. ‘They don’t change the way I think of myself or the way I view the world,’ he said. ‘When people ask me, “What are you?” I generally tell them that I am American. And given how diverse my background is, it’s in my way of thinking, a background that could only come about in America.'”
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