Greenland
[Fiction] A man travels to find his father:
“Up there, not far from Greenland, north is not quite north. Rob has been reading about it. He’s learned that the Earth’s magnetic pole drifts nine kilometers a year, that it needs to be found every year by the Canadian government because it won’t stay put. Spiderlike, it roams the glacial landscape; it moves because the Earth’s magnetic field is disturbed by particles coming from the sun.
“Rob likes how dense this fact seems, even though it implies a sort of leak in the world. He doesn’t want to think about the leak but he likes that we know it’s there.
“He is a composer, he prefers closed systems, he prefers managing what’s perfect. He has always been this way.
“Rob’s father is dead.”
The Bribery Aisle: How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs to Get Its Way in Mexico
How Wal-Mart de Mexico used bribery to build a store near the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacán:
“Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000, for example, Wal-Mart built a Sam’s Club in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit. Thanks to nine bribe payments totaling $765,000, Wal-Mart built a vast refrigerated distribution center in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away.
“But there is no better example of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s methods than its conquest of Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field. In Teotihuacán, The Times found that Wal-Mart de Mexico executives approved at least four different bribe payments — more than $200,000 in all — to build just a medium-size supermarket. Without those payoffs, records and interviews show, Wal-Mart almost surely would not have been allowed to build in Mrs. Pineda’s field.”
Random Roles: Mel Brooks on How to Play Hitler
The comedy legend revisits his most famous work—and the lessons he learned:
“I would say, for me, that philosophical treatise about having black beginnings and wanting love to compensate for that, wanting audiences and wanting attention—I say, ‘Au contraire.’ Completely opposite. I want the continuation of my mother’s incredible love and attention to me. I was the baby boy. There were four boys. I was 2 years old when my father died, and my mother had to raise four boys. She must be in heaven, because in those days you washed clothes, you washed diapers. There was no income, and she had to take in home work. My Aunt Sadie brought her work that made these bathing suits and stuff, and ladies’ dresses. And my mother would sometimes do bathing-suit sashes all night. She got $5 or $6, and it was a lot. She could feed us, you know? But certainly she’d feed four boys for that day. It was amazing. But she loved me a lot. I don’t think I learned to walk until I was 5, because she always held me. [Laughs.] She’d say, ‘You can do anything, good or bad. You’re the best kid.’ So I say, ‘Au contraire.’ I think my surge forward into show business and getting audiences to love me was to continue gathering that affection and that love. It’s the opposite of a dark place. I came from a lovely, sunny place.”
The Right to Die is the Right to Live
A mother decides to give her son Wolf, a talented artist who suffers from a range of ailments, autonomy over his own life:
“The day after Wolf’s 18th birthday, I asked, ‘What do you want?’ I don’t think anyone had ever asked him this before.
“‘I want friends,’ he answered. ‘I don’t have any friends because there’s always doctors and aides. I don’t know how to have friends, but I want to try.’
“‘Do you want to fire some doctors?’
“‘Can I do that?’
“‘It’s your life.’
“He was shocked.
“Within a week he had fired two of his three therapists and his yoga instructor (who is great and had been giving him lessons for 13 years—only no one had noticed that for the past year or two, he’s hated it), and he informed his hormone-therapy doctor that he would only be coming in for blood tests every other month. He tore down the stop, wolf! sign stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet and ripped up his behavior chart and his appointment calendar. He tried to convince his psychiatrist to cut down on his mood stabilizers. (The psychiatrist said no.) I found someone to take Wolf to church. He woke up early for it, happy to have a reason to put on a collared shirt. He also started lifting weights. He says he’s ‘working on his abs.'”
Please Don’t Take My Sunshine Away
[Fiction] Two boys make friends in rural Florida:
“I don’t remember everything about meeting Maurice … probably we simply faced one another in the middle of the white coral road, hesitating to speak, staring at each other. We were the only boys for miles around. I remember wondering how he could walk on the hot, sharp coral without shoes.
“‘Don’t your feet hurt?’
“He shakes his head.
“‘Do you live around here?’
“‘Back there. Around the corner.’
“‘Hey, that’s great. I live in the new house by the woods.'”
Longreads Best of 2012: Inc. Magazine’s Burt Helm
Burt Helm is Senior Writer for Inc. Magazine. His stories, “The Forgotten Founder,” “Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?” and “Hard Lessons in Modern Lending,” were featured on Longreads in 2012.
Utopian for Beginners
A former DMV employee from Sacramento invents a new language—and a mysterious group of Ukrainians take an interest in what he’s created:
“Soon after the publication of the Russian article, Quijada began to receive a steady stream of letters from e-mail addresses ending in .ru, peppering him with arcane questions and requesting changes to the language to make its words easier to pronounce. Alexey Samons, a Russian software engineer based in Vladivostok, took on the monumental task of translating the Ithkuil Web site into Russian, and before long three Russian Web forums had sprung up to debate the merits and uses of Ithkuil.
“At first, Quijada was bewildered by the interest emanating from Russia. ‘I was a third humbled, a third flattered, and a third intrigued,’ he told me. ‘Beyond that, I just wanted to know: who are these people?'”
What You Will Do
An American on a Fulbright Fellowship in Jerusalem works through his misguided attempts to reconcile the differences between the Israelis and Palestinians. (Ploughshares’s Emerging Writer Contest Winner for Nonfiction):
“There is one more layer of security: another soldier behind very thick glass. He will also see your passport and smile. Welcome to Israel, he will say to you, and you will be happy. Once through, you will turn to your friend and say That was the worst and he will agree. You will both shake your heads and imagine what the experience must be like for people who go through this every day, like the old woman with the green headscarf and the many bags. I can’t imagine, you will say to each other, quite truthfully. This comment will seem to you magnanimous and large of spirit. This consideration will allow you to disregard your unmanageable guilt, the futile wrestling over your substantial privilege, the purposelessness of your displeasure in the middle of it all. It will feel as though you deserve to exercise this privilege maybe a bit more than the kind of Americans who might go through and not empathize with the old woman with the green headscarf and the many bags. And besides, you will reason, this state of affairs was not created by you, nor can it be changed by you alone. Your awareness of it, then, will seem particularly admirable. This, again, will help to alleviate your guilt.”
When Bram Met Walt
A look at the friendship between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman:
“When Stoker finally got his chance, Whitman did not disappoint. ‘I found him all that I had ever dreamed of, or wished for in him: large-minded, broad-viewed, tolerant to the last degree; incarnate sympathy; understanding with an insight that seemed more than human.’ They spoke as old friends and traded gossip about mutual acquaintances in Dublin. ‘Before we parted he asked me to come see him at his home in Camden whenever I could manage it. Need I say that I promised.’ Whitman found much to like about Stoker too, calling him ‘an adroit lad.’ ‘He’s like a breath of good, healthy, breezy sea air,’ he told Donaldson.”
Longreads List: Guns in America
From The Daily Beast’s David Sessions, a collection of stories on gun violence and policy in the U.S., featuring The Atlantic, Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek and Mother Jones.
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