Disaster at Xichang
An American’s eyewitness account of the 1996 rocket accident at China’s Xichang spaceport, which killed six people and injured 57:
“What Campbell witnessed over the next few days has haunted him ever since. Like most veterans of the Intelsat-708 launch, he hasn’t discussed the event in public. I got to know him while gathering material for a book on the Russian space program, and during one of our many conversations, Campbell mentioned his participation in the 1996 launch. Then he went on to tell the whole story. When I asked why he was willing to talk about it now, he answered, ‘The truth shall set you free.’
“The night of the launch, Campbell and his colleagues at the hotel boarded vans and headed to the satellite processing building. As they passed the center’s main gate, they saw a crowd gathering outside to watch the liftoff. ‘Everybody was dressed in his or her best clothes,’ he recalls. ‘It was a party atmosphere. There were many dozens, if not hundreds, of people there.’ Despite the previous accidents, it seemed to Campbell that these people must have been accustomed to gathering at this spot to watch launches.”
Sunk: The Incredible Truth About A Ship That Never Should Have Sailed
What led to the sinking of the HMS Bounty during Hurricane Sandy?
“‘We knew there was weather out there,’ says Doug Faunt, the ship’s unofficial white-haired curmudgeon. ‘But we also respected Robin’s knowledge a great deal. We had a plan, and we were ready.’
“That plan, as Walbridge explained it, was to sail due east, wait for Sandy to turn toward land, and then push the vessel into the storm’s southeast quadrant, where hurricane winds are usually weakest. Why he so quickly abandoned that idea once at sea remains a mystery.”
The Shooter
The man who killed Osama bin Laden is now out of the Navy, without health care, pension or protection for himself and his family:
“Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon’s butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.
“Then there is the ‘bolt’ bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.
“‘Personally,’ his wife told me recently, ‘I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago,’ when her husband joined ST6.”
Animal Spirits
On the evolution of human emotions:
“Emotional flexibility means that we could spread our feelings around promiscuously, extending them to our fellow humans in general and sustaining loyalties over great expanses of time. By comparison, other animals seem strictly concerned with specific threats and benefactors. We might have evolved our emotional plasticity in part because our brains keep developing for so long after our birth, and so the social environment constitutes a huge part of our mental and emotional formation. Our emotional systems had to be fluid, flexible, and general; they couldn’t just fasten on one animal or action pattern. But these stretchable emotions probably helped our social evolution as much as language and symbol manipulation ever did.”
The Old Man at Burning Man
[Not single-page] A son and his father take a trip together to Burning Man:
I return to the safety of the RV after several hours roving the playa. My father is MIA. I picture him on a gurney, succumbing to a bronchial attack. Maybe lost in a dust storm, pedaling out into the desert’s lethal infinitude. Close to dinnertime, he returns, and in the manner of some nagging spouse, I commence to chew his ass. ‘Where the hell did you go?’
He shoots me a blank and rather guilty look. ‘James and I went to the Naked Tiki Bar,’ he says.
‘You got naked?’
‘I certainly did,’ he says. ‘It was a remarkably friendly place. And I actually found it very liberating to see these enormously fat women being perfectly willing to bare everything. It was fun to see all of that voluptuality. What did you discover?’
The Damage Done
George Visger played for the San Francisco 49ers in 1980. Now, he’s diagnosed with chronic traumatic brain injury, frontal and temporal lobe disorders, generalized seizure disorder and cognitive impairment—and he’s trying to make sense of his life:
“On a postcard-perfect Southern California morning, George Visger is pissing blood. This comes as a relief. For me, mostly. But also for him. Things could be worse. He could be having a seizure. Or slipping into a coma. Which means I could be jamming a one-inch butterfly needle into a thumbnail-sized hole in the side of his skull, trying to siphon off excess spinal fluid while avoiding what Visger calls ‘the white stuff.’
“The white stuff being brain tissue.”
Autism Inc.: The Discredited Science, Shady Treatments and Rising Profits Behind Alternative Autism Treatments
Parents of children on the autism spectrum are wading through a considerable amount of information on the Internet purporting effective treatment and “cures” for autism. A majority of the treatments have been discredited:
“Almost by accident, Laidler says he and Ann, discovered the diet they’d put their son on didn’t work. ‘He was gluten-free and we thought it was a miraculous cure for our son because he’d made pretty dramatic strides from the age of 3 to 4. We were starting to see real progress. But on a trip to Disneyland, he grabbed a waffle off the table and ate it before we could stop him. Doctors had told us that one drop [of gluten] would cause a dramatic relapse—we’d been told anecdotal stories that a speck of wheat bread would cause an autistic child to have weeks of bad behavior. And nothing happened.’
“The Laidlers had also tried chelating their son, and as physicians they had helped other families who wanted to try it. ‘Nobody ever told me it did any good. So to regain my sense of mental balance I started asking a lot of pointed questions: Have you tried chelation? What was the result? Ninety percent of people I asked said they saw no improvement.'”
Beat By Dre: The Exclusive Inside Story of How Monster Lost the World
How a maker of expensive HDMI cables bungled a deal with Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine when it agreed to produce “Beats by Dre”:
“Young Lee faced financial and familial self-destruction if he couldn’t seal the deal. So he sealed whatever he could—what he says was ‘the most complicated contract [Interscope] had ever seen.’ And he faced it by himself, with his BA, against a phalanx of corporate lawyers who wake each day to do nothing but negotiate contracts that favor interscope.”
“There can’t be two winners. Monster solidified an agreement that got Beats Electronics alive and shipping headphones, but not without gigantic forfeit: Jimmy and Dre’s side of Beats would retain permanent ownership of everything that Monster developed. Every headphone, every headband, every cup, every driver, every remote control—if there was a piece of metal or plastic associated with Beats By Dre, Noel and Kevin Lee surrendered it to Jimmy and Dre. Monster would also be entirely responsible for manufacturing the products—a hugely expensive corner of the deal—as well as distributing them. The heavy lifting. “I was a little intimidated by Dr. Dre,” Kevin Lee admits over a child-sized portion of chicken noodle soup. Noel sits beside him without a word.”
Caring on Stolen Time: A Nursing Home Diary
A former certified nursing assistant recalls what it was like working in an understaffed nursing home, and what happened when she and her fellow CNAs asked for better working conditions:
“A few days later I was called to Sabrina’s office, where she, another administrator, and my charge nurse played good cop, bad cop.
“‘We are trying to help you. People have thrown you under the bus by naming you. Why do you want to protect them? They don’t deserve it. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself like this. If you tell us their names, you won’t be the only one taking the blame.‘
“‘If you don’t tell me who the others are, we will fire you.’
‘Are you going to let the others off for ratting you out?’
“‘You know, you and all the other people involved are breaking federal law by doing this. You are exposing the conditions of the private lives of the residents. You are violating HIPA. This is illegal. You can be fired and jailed. You can lose your license.’
“My refusals and denials invoked only fiery glares.”
Longreads Member Exclusive: Sempre Susan (Excerpt)
For this week’s Longreads Member pick, we’re excited to share an excerpt from Sigrid Nunez’s memoir Sempre Susan, which comes recommended by Emily Gould, the proprietor of Emily Books, who writes:
“This memorable passage from Sigrid Nunez’s gemlike memoir of the year she spent under the influence of Susan Sontag begins with a description of a trip to New Orleans with Sontag, who was then at the height of her literary powers and intellectual fame. Nunez goes on to detail some of the explicit lessons Sontag taught her—about treating writing as a vocation rather than a career, about giving yourself permission to devote yourself to reading and writing even when that devotion is difficult to justify. With great subtlety, Nunez uses her intimate experience of the particulars of Sontag’s work habits and lifestyle to illuminate some of the tensions that all writers experience—tensions between the need to write without fetters and the need to make money, and between the confidence that’s necessary to accomplish anything and the insecurity that can act as a goad, or a filter.
“If you’re lucky, you might have had a great boss, teacher, leader, guru, parent or friend who encountered you at a receptive moment and shaped the direction your life would take from that moment on. If you’re unlucky, you might have had a boss, teacher, leader, guru, parent or friend who encountered you at a vulnerable moment and warped the direction your life would take from that moment on. There’s a fine line between these two varieties of experience—or maybe there is no line. Maybe to shape is always to deform. Here, Nunez treats readers to a succinct cost-benefit analysis of the pleasures and perils of acquiring a charismatic mentor. The unlucky—or is it lucky?—among us will relate.”
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