Yesterday My Daughter Emigrated

A father in Spain laments the lack of a future for his daughter in their home country:

“Like many young people her age, my daughter was caught by surprise upon completion of her professional training. In the spring she returned to Spain with the intention of looking for a job here — it didn’t really matter what, as long as she could ‘do her thing.’ She got a few interviews, but the conditions that were offered to her always seemed to be abusive: a mere salary, 400 € a month, for a person with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, who speaks four languages, and who has worked abroad. Such salaries aren’t enough to eat or rent a room in the cities where they’re offered. She would have needed help from her parents — something we were willing to do. But our daughter didn’t want to keep being dependent on us — as this support would in fact subsidize the same employers that are taking advantage of our young people.

“This summer, many of her friends stopped by the house to say goodbye. Their conversations always came down to the same thing: the depression of the crisis, layoffs or fear of layoffs, companies that take advantage of the crisis to impose unfair conditions, laying off a good part of the workers so that ‘supervisors’ end up doing everyone’s part of the job, intimidated by the threat of being let go. It seems to me that they feel guilty, and maybe they are somewhat responsible — as we all are — but not for the excessive burden we’ve unloaded onto them.”

Source: HuffPost
Published: Oct 8, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,790 words)

At the Corner of Hope and Worry

A look at a struggling diner in northeastern Ohio. This is the first of five columns by Dan Barry about Elyria, Ohio, a town which is “the kind of place where Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each hope that his promise of a restored American dream will resonate”:

“‘Is she O.K.?’ a customer asks one difficult day.

“‘My mom?’ asks Kristy, the waitress.

“‘Yes,’ the customer replies.

“‘No.’

“Sometimes you can see why, as Donna hunches into the desk space she has carved from the back-room clutter and works through the mound of mail. ‘I’m looking for shut-off notices,’ she says, half-joking.”

Author: Dan Barry
Published: Oct 13, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,084 words)

An Intimate Portrait Of Innovation, Risk, And Failure Through Hipstamatic’s Lens

They were the vintage photo app that came before Instagram—but failure to take advantage of social, infighting among the leadership and indecision about their product caused the company to miss its opportunity:

“Fast Company reached out to a slew of top-tier VCs but was unable to find one who had met with or even looked at the company. Two of the VCs surmised the startup would have a very difficult time raising money after the Instagram acquisition. ‘Another billion-dollar photo-sharing exit is hard to imagine. The category is over and done with, and I’d be surprised if they can even raise,’ says one of the topflight VCs.

“The investor agrees that general market sentiment for social media investments is down because of Zynga’s and Facebook’s declining market caps. However, the VC disagrees with Buick’s argument that having revenue would hurt its chances to raise funding. ‘The real problem is that Hipstamatic is perceived as a copycat that desires to be Instagram, and VCs don’t want to be in a me-too deal,’ the investor says. ‘Having revenue absolutely won’t hurt; if anything, it helps, though the idea and market size matter much more.'”

Source: Fast Company
Published: Oct 11, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,142 words)

Stress: The Roots of Resilience

Scientists are trying to uncover why some people are better able to recover from trauma than others:

“After Ebaugh crawled up the rocky riverbank, a truck driver picked her up, took her to a nearby convenience store and bought her a cup of hot tea. Police, when they arrived, were sympathetic and patient. The doctor at the hospital, she says, treated her like a daughter. A close friend took her in for a time. And her family offered reassurance and emotional support. ‘For the first month, I almost had to tell people to stop coming because I was so surrounded by friends and community,’ she says.

“Studies of many kinds of trauma have shown that social support is a strong buffer against PTSD and other psychological problems. James Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has done a series of experiments in which women lie in an fMRI scanner and see ‘threat cues’ on a screen. They are told that between 4 and 10 seconds later, they may receive a small electric shock on the ankle. The cue triggers sensory arousal and activates brain regions associated with fear and anxiety, but when the women hold the hands of their husbands2 or friends3, these responses diminish.

“Social interactions are complex and involve many brain circuits and chemicals; no one knows exactly why they provide relief.”

Source: Nature
Published: Oct 10, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,472 words)

Unmasking The Biggest Troll on the Web

Meeting the man behind Violentacrez, the Reddit persona responsible for forums filled with racist and pornographic content like “Creepshots” and “Jailbait”:

“When I called Brutsch that Wednesday afternoon and told him I knew who he was, I was a little taken aback by how calm he remained during our intense but civil hour-long conversation. I had figured that a man whose hobby was saying horrible shit just to screw with people online would rise to some new horrible level when conditions on the ground actually called for it. Instead he pleaded with me in an affectless monotone not to reveal his name.

“‘My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment,’ he said. ‘I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time.'”

Source: Gawker
Published: Oct 12, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,746 words)

Blind Ambition

An Iraq war veteran becomes blind during combat and learns how to live on:

“When the doctors told him the blindness was irreversible, he felt a rage and despair that made him feel like his head would explode.

“Castro began therapy a week after waking up, and he only halfheartedly endured the rehab sessions with a 6-foot-tall girl he called ‘Katie the Physical Terrorist.’ The first time she asked him to stand, he couldn’t. He could barely lift a one-pound dumbbell.

“Evelyn tried to focus him on the positives. Obliterated as his body was, his brain was OK — remarkable considering that traumatic brain injury, or TBI, has become the trademark of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and that thousands of soldiers sent to Walter Reed had to battle it. But in a way Castro wished he’d not been spared, because an intact brain meant the other thing he could actually see was exactly how much his life had been ruined. He’d ask, ‘What kind of man can I even be?'”

Source: ESPN
Published: Oct 8, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,197 words)

How to Fix America from Below

A Yale law professor argues that we’re not doing enough to empower the minority voices in America—and change should start at the local level:

“The ideas Gerken is known for first took shape, appropriately enough, as a disagreement. Several years ago, not long after she’d been hired as a young professor at Harvard, she sat in on a pair of lectures by Cass Sunstein, the influential law scholar who was then a professor at the University of Chicago. What she heard Sunstein say, in brief, was that societies in which dissenting voices are encouraged tend to be more prosperous than ones where they are not. Gerken sat in the back of the hall with a notepad and listened, writing furiously. “If you had looked back,” Gerken says, “you would have wondered, why is that junior professor sitting there scribbling like a crazy person? Is she transcribing this speech? But it was just the opposite.”

“In fact, Gerken was writing down all the ways in which she thought Sunstein was wrong. What Sunstein didn’t seem to realize, she wrote, was that in order for minority groups to have real influence in politics—in order for them to make meaningful contributions to the way society works—they had to have more than the right to make their voices heard. They had to have the power to actually do things their way.”

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Oct 7, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,636 words)

The Innocent Man, Part One

The first in a two-part series deconstructing the case against Michael Morton, who was convicted in 1987 of killing his wife but has maintained his innocence:

“Michael was breathing hard. ‘Is my son okay?’ he asked.

“‘He’s fine,’ Boutwell said. ‘He’s at the neighbors’.’

“‘How about my wife?’

“The sheriff was matter-of-fact. ‘She’s dead,’ he replied.

“Boutwell led Michael into the kitchen and introduced him to Sergeant Don Wood, the case’s lead investigator. ‘We have to ask you a few questions before we can get your son,’ Boutwell told him. Dazed, Michael took a seat at the kitchen table. He had shown no reaction to the news of Christine’s death, and as he sat across from the two lawmen, he tried to make sense of what was happening around him. Sheriff’s deputies brushed past him, opening drawers and rifling through cabinets. He could see the light of a camera flash exploding again and again in the master bedroom as a police photographer documented what Michael realized must have been the place where Christine was killed. He could hear officers entering and exiting his house, exchanging small talk. Someone dumped a bag of ice into the kitchen sink and stuck Cokes in it. Cigarette smoke hung in the air.”

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Oct 11, 2012
Length: 51 minutes (12,827 words)

Frogs

[Fiction] An aunt recalls how she met her husband. (From Mo Yan, 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.)

“‘If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some old friends got together for dinner on the night I announced my retirement, and I wound up drunk – I hadn’t drunk much, less than a bowlful, but it was cheap liquor. Xie Xiaoque, the son of the restaurant owner, Xie Baizhua, one of those sweet-potato kids of the ‘63 famine, took out a bottle of ultra-strong Wuliangye – to honour me, he said – but it was counterfeit, and my head was reeling. Everyone at the table was wobbly, barely able to stand, and Xie Xiaoque himself foamed at the mouth till his eyes rolled up into his head.’”

Author: Mo Yan
Source: Granta
Published: Oct 11, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,591 words)

Member Exclusive: How the Light Gets In

Our latest Exclusive comes from author Elissa Schappell, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and co-founder and editor at large of Tin House, which is where she published “How the Light Gets In”—a story about a life changed by seizures. (Subscribe to Longreads to receive this and other exclusives.)

“To say it is a curse would be to lie. This is what I wrote in my journal in 1993, when I was twenty-nine. The handwriting is tiny and childlike, recognizable to no one but me as the way I wrote only after suffering a temporal lobe seizure. The brain’s temporal lobes, situated over each ear, swoop back from the temples like the wings on the thunder god’s helmet, which is fitting, given the ominous auras that sometimes rumble through my brain before a seizure.

“However, they don’t always portend a terrible storm, and while ‘suffering’ accurately depicts 99 percent of my seizures, 1 percent have been transcendent.”

Source: Tin House
Published: Oct 1, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,760 words)