Re-Awakenings

A look at hypersomnolence, a condition that causes a person to sleep excessively, and the difficulty of treating a rare sleeping disorder:

“Sumner needed sleep like an addict needs a fix. ‘It was this overpowering desire in me, a physical urge,’ she says. ‘And there was always the hope that, maybe this time, I would wake up feeling better.’

“Sumner was almost 30 before finally confronting her problem. She had joined a high-profile law firm in Atlanta and, for the first time in her life, didn’t have a flexible schedule. She couldn’t nap without raising eyebrows. ‘That’s when it finally hit me,’ she says. ‘This is not how you’re supposed to feel.’

“In the fall of 2005, she sought help at the Emory Clinic Sleep Center. She learned that her problem, known as hypersomnolence, was rare but not unheard of. Over the next six years, a team of doctors there analyzed the chemicals in her brain and in the brains of 31 other hypersomniacs. They fingered one mysterious substance as the culprit.”

Published: Nov 22, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,588 words)

UFC Tries To Prove It’s Capable Of A Knockout

How two best friends rehabilitated the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise, and what’s coming next as the popularity of mixed martial arts expands globally:

“The UFC has border-hopped since 2007, first into Europe and Canada, then Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, and the Middle East. The next step is both simple and excessively difficult. Any international fan knows it: “We need a [local] hero,” says Puerto Rican journalist Angel Cordero. He runs a site called The MMA Truth that caters to a Latino audience, and he is convinced his boxing-obsessed homeland will embrace MMA–but only when Puerto Ricans can root for one of their own.

“Brazil is the UFC’s model country, a place with a tradition of martial arts and local heroes, none of them bigger than Anderson Silva, one of whose fights drew 32 million local viewers. The UFC has put on four live events in Brazil since 2011. It also went back to its American playbook–launching a Brazilian version of The Ultimate Fighter, which was a smash hit, generating the same level of social media buzz as Brazil’s 2010 presidential elections. MMA is now challenging to be the No. 2 sport in this soccer-crazy country.”

Source: Fast Company
Published: Nov 19, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,613 words)

The Truce on Drugs

A look at the future of drugs in America—from pot farms in California to drug policing in Baltimore:

“What we have begun to contemplate across the vast expense of the drug war is how that line might be redrawn, and the terms under which the cystic pockets of violence that have developed out beyond our boundaries might be welcomed back into society. America’s prior experience with alcohol prohibition can tell us something about the economics of what might happen in Colorado and Washington. But alcohol was only briefly illegal, and so when prohibition was revoked, the culture and economy of legal consumption could return, almost as if they had always been there. There is no similar memory of the neighborhood marijuana café, no history of the harmless, corporatist transit of cocaine through Central America. In its long tenure behind the line—in the United States and beyond—the drug traffic has acquired its own culture, hierarchy, and distinct habits. It has, as Adam Blackwell would say, a structure.”

Published: Nov 25, 2012
Length: 28 minutes (7,192 words)

The Works That Made the Artists

An excerpt from My Ideal Bookshelf, a book where 100 “leading cultural figures” like Judd Apatow, David Sedaris, and Stephenie Meyer discuss the books that have meant the most to them. Here’s Apatow:

“In eighth grade, I read Ladies and Gentlemen – Lenny Bruce!! [by Albert Goldman and Lawrence Schiller] I cut out the photos and made an elaborate book report for extra credit. It was gorgeous. My English teacher, Mr Board, claimed to have lost it, but I know he stole it and cherishes it to this day.

“Part of what inspired me to read more was a road trip I took with Owen Wilson in 1997. Owen was so well read – he even knew what The New Yorker was! I was embarrassed that the last book I had probably read was Stephen King’s Firestarter, when I was 13. He recommended Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, which I loved so much that I went on a reading tear for a few years. I remember Owen’s saying to me: ‘I’m jealous that you get to read it for the first time.’ I didn’t understand what he meant then, but I do now.”

Source: The Guardian
Published: Nov 24, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,965 words)

You Owe Me

On teaching writing to children at a Houston cancer center. Featured in The Best American Essays 2012:

“The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written, or how much they want to live. They die of diseases with unpronounceable names, of rhabdomyosarcoma or pilocytic astrocytoma, of cancers rarely heard of in the world at large, of cancers that are often cured once, but then turn up again somewhere else: in their lungs, their stomachs, their sinuses, their bones, their brains. While undergoing their own treatments, my students watch one friend after another lose legs, cough up blood, and enter a hospital room they never come out of again.

“The M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where I have taught poetry and prose for nearly ten years, is a world-renowned research institution. I have met the sickest children in the world there—children who have been treated already, somewhere else, and who have come for one last experimental treatment, who have one last chance at survival. In this capacity, my students often take part in studies. The treatments they receive are often groundbreaking, innovative ones that, with time, are perfected and standardized. This means their experiences, whether their disease is successfully eradicated or not, serve to build treatment protocols that eventually cure children throughout the world. But only a small percentage of the students I work with in the center’s classrooms live. Less than half, maybe less than a third, and I think less than that: I am just one of the writers in residence there. The numbers aren’t available to me.”

Published: Nov 25, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,637 words)

Tom Wolfe’s California

He’s most closely connected to New York, but his writing about California helped define what makes it special:

“It started by accident. Wolfe was working for the New York Herald Tribune, which, along with eight other local papers, shut down for 114 days during the 1962–63 newspaper strike. He had recently written about a custom car show—phoned it in, by his own admission—but he knew there was more to the story. Temporarily without an income, he pitched a story about the custom car scene to Esquire. ‘Really, I needed to make some money,’ Wolfe tells me. ‘You could draw a per diem from the newspaper writers’ guild, but it was a pittance. I was in bad shape,’ he chuckles. Esquire bit and sent the 32-year-old on his first visit to the West—to Southern California, epicenter of the subculture.

“Wolfe saw plenty on that trip, from Santa Monica to North Hollywood to Maywood, from the gardens and suburbs of mid-’60s Southern California to its dung heaps. He saw so much that he didn’t know what to make of it all. Returning to New York in despair, he told Esquire that he couldn’t write the piece. Well, they said, we already have the art laid in, so we have to do something; type up your notes and send them over. ‘Can you imagine anything more humiliating than being told, “Type up your notes, we’ll have a real writer do the piece”?’ Wolfe asks. He stayed up all night writing a 49-page memo—which Esquire printed nearly verbatim.”

Source: City Journal
Published: Nov 22, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,825 words)

Danny and the Electric Kung Pao Pastrami Test

Chef Danny Bowien’s Mission Chinese Food in New York’s Lower East Side draws locals and tourists, as well as world leaders and renowned chefs:

“We were somewhere around mapo, on the edge of the catfish, when the peppercorns began to take hold. I remember saying something like, ‘Maybe I should slow down…,’ pushing a plate of Mongolian long beans into the cluttered center of the overburdened table. And suddenly the numb rush was upon me, a long, white, buzzy tunnel. At the end of it, I could still see the women across the table talking, but I could no longer quite make out the words. On the sound system, the Stones’ “Shattered” sounded like it was being played through the blades of a helicopter. I reached for the cool-looking pinkish drink on the table and took a deep gulp, only to remember it was a michelada made of Bud Light spiked with smoked-clam juice, chile oil, and a rim of more crushed chiles and Sichuan peppercorns. I felt like a Looney Tunes character trying to quench the fire of a jalapeño with a nice draught of Tabasco. Peeling myself off the ceiling, I came down face-to-face with a leering bright-yellow forty-foot dragon. On the wall, a cavalry of luridly painted Red Chinese generals on horseback regarded me with bemused, pitying expressions.”

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 24, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,894 words)

A Sorry State: Pop Marketing & Rihanna’s ‘Unapologetic’

A pop superstar's new album, and the marketing machine behind it, raises questions about what's really being promoted:

"The lowlight of last week's playback, however, was 'Nobody's Business'. A duet between Rihanna and her ex-boyfriend—or is he?—it's a perky, light affair. 'You'll always be my boy', Rihanna sings, 'I'll always be your girl'. In the second verse, the roles reverse, and Brown repeats her words. If we're talking in banal, logical terms, Rihanna comes first; this could suggest her trying to control the situation, or own the scandal on her own terms.

"But then a lyric arrives that cast no doubt on what's going on. 'Every touch is infectious' it goes; 'let's make love in this Lexus', its rhyme echoes. Here's a reminder of flesh contacting flesh in a car, and what happened three years ago against a passenger door. A few tracks later, 'No Love Allowed' is even more pointed. 'I was flying 'til you knocked me to the floor,' Rihanna's vocal soars.

"You wonder if anyone suggested lyrics like these were a bad idea. You wonder if anyone's made sure that Rihanna is OK."

Source: The Quietus
Published: Nov 23, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,606 words)

Three Days

[Fiction] A woman visits her mother and brother at a family farm on Thanksgiving:

“Their mother has put a feather in her hair for the holiday, her ‘Indian headdress.’ She can’t stand it that her son is a pothead and sometimes she’ll get a look, as if she’s trying not to cry just thinking about it. She’s a very good actress. She stares at Clem. She is drunk. They all are. Beatrice’s mother can make her bottom jaw tremble so slightly that the movement is barely perceptible. She looks just like Clem—dark hair, red skin, and papery lips. She stares at him with her mouth wide open, waiting for him to feel guilty. Beatrice looks away. It is extremely difficult for Beatrice to think of her mother as someone with thoughts and desires, with plans and schemes, as someone who, quite possibly, keeps a Rimmed Rod vibrator in her bedside drawer, the way Beatrice does, as someone who might dream about a tremendous ice cube, the size of a sofa, melting in the middle of a hot desert, and wake up having absolutely no idea what the dream means—someone just like Beatrice.”

Source: New Yorker
Published: Jan 16, 2006
Length: 27 minutes (6,816 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: A Visit to Havana

(Subscribe to Longreads to receive this and other weekly exclusives.) This week, we're proud to feature a  Member Exclusive from Alma Guillermoprieto and The New York Review of Books. Born in Mexico City, Guillermoprieto has covered Latin America for NYRB since 1994, and she has also written for The New Yorker, The Guardian and the Washington Post. Her books include Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution and Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America, which includes the below story, "A Visit to Havana," about her return to Cuba for Pope John Paul II’s arrival in 1998.

Published: Mar 26, 1998
Length: 35 minutes (8,874 words)