A Bishop Behind Bars

Sam Mullet, an Amish sect leader from Bergholz, Ohio, was convicted of hate crimes for his role in an odd string of beard-cutting attacks last year, and was accused of sexually preying on women and tormenting men in his community. What led up to the attacks?

“According to Mullet, the violent beard-clipping spree against outsiders began with an incident at a large Amish-run machine sale in Geauga County, Ohio. One of Mullet’s nephews, who lived at Bergholz and was part of the community, was mocked by his own parents — Mullet’s sister and brother-in-law, both defectors from Bergholz — for being, essentially, a beardless sissy.

“‘If God was with you, your beard would not have been cut,’ the father, Martin Miller, told his son, Allen Miller. ‘If God is with me, my beard will not be cut.’

“‘You said a mouthful,’ Allen said. ‘And if that ever happens, you know it’s true.’

“Mullet recalled hearing about the heated exchange when the Miller kids returned home that night. ‘We talked about it,’ he said.

“Perhaps the father’s boast was too enticing — within a matter of weeks, Allen and several of his siblings and their spouses went to the home of Martin and Barbara Miller and cut his beard and her hair. ‘God is not with you! God is not with you!’ Allen shouted at his parents after the attack.”

Source: The Daily
Published: Dec 3, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,189 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: The New Yorker’s David Grann

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 4, 2012
Length: 1 minutes (261 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Wired’s Mat Honan

Today we kick off a monthlong celebration of the best stories of the year, as chosen by our community.

First up: Wired writer Mat Honan‘s favorite stories of the year. You can keep track of all the guest picks here.

Author: Mat Honan
Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 3, 2012
Length: 4 minutes (1,244 words)

A Father’s Long Battle For His Daughters

A deported father fights for custody of his daughters:

“The girls ended up with their maternal grandmother, who was destitute and suffered from memory lapses, so social workers took them away. They joined the thousands of children nationwide who are under custody of child protection agencies after their parents have been placed in deportation proceedings or deported. An estimated 5,000 such children are in foster care, about 1,000 of them in Los Angeles County, according to juvenile court attorneys and the Applied Research Center, a nonprofit racial justice think tank.

“Many follow their deported mothers and fathers, if the parents can convince U.S. agencies that they can provide a stable life in their home countries. In such cases, social workers from Los Angeles escort the children to parents at joyous airport reunions, usually in Mexico and El Salvador.

“But sometimes parents fail. Their children either languish in foster care or they’re adopted by American couples. Some never see their biological parents again.”

Published: Dec 2, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,043 words)

4:52 on Christmas Morning

One year after a fatal fire in Stamford claims the lives of their children and her parents, a family tries to make sense of what happened:

“He tells me that seeing children can sometimes make him feel better and other times worse. The last photo ever taken of the girls—of the three of them in brightly colored winter coats, lined up with him in front of the Hudson around sunset—was taken right over there. He speaks slowly, sometimes stuttering, not always in complete sentences. He has a diluted British accent, a vestige of his childhood in England. He says he needs caffeine.

“We go to a coffee shop in the neighborhood. He orders a scone, a double cappuccino, and an iced tea. We sit in the sun. In between cigarettes, he chews Nicorette gum. He talks about the girls. He would take them to museums, parks, toy stores, dinner at the local diner, late movies, allowing them to run up in front of the screen to dance as the credits were rolling. He says he was too loose with them. Madonna had called him her fourth child; he says that she was right. He will not say anything else about her. She is struggling and trying to deal in her own way, and he does not want to hurt her.”

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: Dec 3, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,989 words)

The Long Good-Bye

On the 1962-1963 printers strike in New York City that effectively shut down the seven biggest newspapers in the city, killed four of them, and made names for writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron:

“A city without The New York Times inspired rage and scorn, ambivalence and relief. A ‘Talk of the Town’ item in The New Yorker lamented a weekend without the ‘fragrant, steamy deep-dish apple pie of the Sunday Times.’ James Reston—pillar of the Establishment, Washington bureau chief and columnist for the Times, and intimate of the Sulzberger family, to whom he directed a controversial entreaty to use non-union shops—was allowed to read his column on New York’s Channel 4 in early January 1963: ‘Striking the Times is like striking an old lady and deprives the community of all kinds of essential information. If some beautiful girl gets married this week, the television may let us see her gliding radiantly from the church. But what about all those ugly girls who get married every Sunday in the Times?’

“A city without newspapers was a city in which civic activity was impeded, as two out-of-work Times reporters hired by the Columbia Journalism Review soon documented. Without the daily papers, the Health Department’s campaign against venereal disease was ‘seriously impaired.’ So was the fight against slumlords: ‘There’s a distinct difference,’ the city’s building commissioner said, ‘between a $500 fine and a $500 fine plus a story in the Times.’ The New York chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality discovered that, without newspaper attention, its boycott of the Sealtest Milk Company was considerably undermined. The newspaper strike, the C.J.R. study concluded, had ‘deprived the public of its watchdog.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Nov 30, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,728 words)

Bryan Saunders: Portrait Of The Artist On Crystal Meth

A writer visits the home of Bryan Saunders, an artist known for his self-portraits created under the influence of a variety of drugs:

“We turn to the next one. ‘Whoa,’ I say. This one could not be less Xanax-like. The drawing is spindly and paranoid, and the page is patterned with real-life bullet holes. They pepper Bryan’s stomach and neck. I ask Bryan how they got there and he explains that he used a gun borrowed from a friend. He propped up the page from the sketchbook and repeatedly shot it. ‘I remember bouncing into the walls like a fly going bong, bong, bong,’ he says. The drug that elicited this reaction was called Geodon.

“‘Geodon?’ I say.

“Bryan Googles it. ‘It’s for symptoms of schizophrenia,’ he reads, ‘so it’s an anti-psychotic agent, I guess.’

“‘Did you get it from somebody with schizophrenia?’ I ask.

“‘No, I got it from a doctor,’ Bryan says. And this is when Bryan tells me the other way he acquires many of his drugs. He sometimes visits psychiatrists, tells them about the art project, and asks them for ‘samples of some pain pill or sedative I’ve never tried. I say, ‘Can you write me a prescription for just one so I can do my drawing?’ And I take my book with me and show them my art project. And they always give me some crazy, crazy anti-psychotic pill instead.'”

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: The Guardian
Published: Nov 30, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,942 words)

Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ at 30

[Not single-page] How the album bridged a racial divide on MTV and radio in the early 1980s:

“Despite the obvious quality of the Jackson videos, MTV initially resisted playing them, claiming it was a rock station and Jackson didn’t fit the format. There is to this day some disagreement as to what led the channel to change its policy and add ‘Billie Jean.’ At the time, a story was widely circulated that CBS chief Walter Yetnikoff resorted to threatening to pull all of his label’s videos off the channel if MTV didn’t play ‘Billie Jean,’ but this claim has been refuted over the years by original MTV honchos Bob Pittman and Les Garland. They concede that the channel initially assumed it would not play the video, as its thumping beat and urban production did not fit the channel’s ‘rock’ image. They contend however that in mid-February, after seeing the clip–which was possibly the best that had ever come across their desks–they began to re-think things. Coupled with the fact that even without MTV, the song had just leaped in one week from No. 23 to No. 6 on the Hot 100, the MTV execs concluded they should give it a shot.”

Source: Billboard
Published: Nov 30, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,240 words)

Afghan Women Caught Between Modernity, Tradition

A teen girl who’s being forced into marriage attempts suicide:

“Just before she leapt from her roof into the streets of Kabul, Farima thought of the wedding that would never happen and the man she would never marry. Her fiance would be pleased to see her die, she later recalled thinking. It would offer relief to them both.

“Farima, 17, had resisted her engagement to Zabiullah since it was ordained by her grandfather when she was 9. In post-Taliban Kabul, where she walked to school and dreamed of becoming a doctor, she still clawed against a fate dictated by ritual.

“After 11 years of Western intervention in Afghanistan, a woman’s right to study and work had long since been codified by the U.S.-backed government. Modernity had crept into Afghanistan’s capital, Farima thought, but not far enough to save her from a forced marriage to a man she despised.”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Nov 28, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,117 words)

The Bookstore Strikes Back

Author Ann Patchett on opening an independent bookstore in Nashville, Tenn. at a time when brick and mortar bookstores are considered dead:

“I was starting to understand the role that the interviews would play in that success. In my 30s, I had paid my rent by writing for fashion magazines. I found Elle to be the most baffling, because its editors insisted on identifying trends. Since most fashion magazines ‘closed’ (industry jargon for the point at which the pages are shipped to the printing plant) three months before they hit newsstands, the identification of trends, especially from Nashville, required an act of near-clairvoyance. Finally, I realized what everyone in fashion already knew: a trend is whatever you call a trend. This spring in Paris, fashionistas will wear fishbowls on their heads. In my hotel room in Australia, this insight came back to me more as a vision than a memory. ‘The small independent bookstore is coming back,’ I told reporters in Bangladesh and Berlin. ‘It’s part of a trend.’

“My act was on the road, and with every performance, I tweaked the script, hammering out the details as I proclaimed them to strangers: All things happen in a cycle, I explained—the little bookstore had succeeded and grown into a bigger bookstore. Seeing the potential for profit, the superstore chains rose up and crushed the independents, then Amazon rose up and crushed the superstore chains. Now that we could order any book at any hour without having to leave the screen in front of us, we realized what we had lost: the community center, the human interaction, the recommendation of a smart reader rather than a computer algorithm telling us what other shoppers had purchased. I promised whoever was listening that from those very ashes, the small independent bookstore would rise again.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Nov 29, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,590 words)