My Father, The Parasite

A writer debates his dad about the legacy of Baby Boomers: Do they deserve blame for our current economic situation?

“You could call this anecdote Exhibit A in my father’s defense of the boomers, which he offered over coffee on the first day of our weeklong dispute. It boils down to a claim that he didn’t exactly inherit a great deal, either. Tom Tankersley’s argument breaks into two categories. First, he deflects blame for all of the bad stuff of the past several decades to previous generations and myopic politicians. Second, he builds a case that the boomers did far more good than harm.

“The Greatest Generation, his parents’ cohort, paid a lot less into Social Security and Medicare than it took out of it, he says. (This is true.) It did nothing to reduce pollution, conserve natural resources, or halt the nation’s growing and dangerous addiction to fossil fuels. ‘Previous generations did not have a Clean Air Act or a Clean Water Act,’ he says. His enacted both. (Also true.)

“Point, parasite.”

Published: Oct 7, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,230 words)

A Violent Prone, Poor People Zone

Inside the life of Somali refugees in Nairobi, Kenya:

“The heartland of that exodus is the vast refugee camp complex centered around Dadaab town in Kenya’s North Eastern Province—at 450,000 people and growing at the rate of over 1,000 people a day, the camp is Kenya’s third largest city, and the biggest refugee camp in the world. But many thousands of Somalis choose not to go to the camp and head straight to Nairobi to the neighborhood of Eastleigh, which Kenyans have nicknamed ‘Little Mogadishu.’ That’s where I was headed as I walked to the corner to catch a matatu, a dirt cheap minivan so crowded I had to hang out the doors. Eastleigh, Dadaab—over the past two years, they’ve been cardinal points on the compass of what K’naan, a Somali rapper, calls ‘a violent prone, poor people zone.’

“But that’s only one part of the story: as Andy Needham, a deeply informed, canny, and humane Irish Aid press officer working with the UN, put it: ‘Journalists come to the camps because the story’s right in front of them. It makes for good photographs like, you can take one look and see the problems for yourself. But refugees in the city—and let’s be clear here, there are thousands of them, most of them undocumented, hard to trace, hard to reach out to—that’s a story that goes almost untold.’ And I could see what Andy meant: in Nairobi, there were no camps, no food distribution centers, and so the refugees disappeared into the city—for if you went to Nairobi rather than Dadaab, you had to make it on your own. There wasn’t a lot of obvious drama that would appeal to Western media, no ‘suffering chic’ to spice up your story.”

Author: Tom Sleigh
Source: VQR
Published: Oct 7, 2012
Length: 55 minutes (13,887 words)

First Serial: Marvel Comics, The Untold Story

An excerpt from Howe’s new book on how internal arguments, drugs, failed feminism, and the exploitation of minority characters in comic books and the freelance writers and artists who drew them, changed Marvel Comics during the late ’60s and early ’70s:

“‘I was just as crazy as everybody else post-Watergate, post-Vietnam,’ said Starlin, whose hobbies included motorcycles, chess, and lysergic acid diethylamide–25. ‘Each one of those stories was me taking that stuff that had gone before and trying to put my personal slant on it. Mar-Vell was a warrior who decided he was going to become a god, and that’s where his trip was.’ In the pages of Captain Marvel, existence itself might be altered several times in the course of an issue. ‘There is a moment of change, then reality becomes a thing of the past!’ howls the evil ruler Thanos, before everything morphs into funhouse-mirror images. His sworn enemy Drax responds: ‘My mind and my soul are one — my soul — an immortal intangible, nothing and everything! That which cannot die cannot be enslaved, for only with fear is servitude rendered!’ On the following page, Drax’s shifting realities are represented by thirty-five panels of warped faces, skulls, eyes, stars, and lizards. Captain Marvel had practically become a black-light poster with dialogue. Its sales kept increasing. Soon Starlin was opening his fan mail and finding complimentary joints sent by grateful, mind-blown readers.”

Author: Sean Howe
Source: Grantland
Published: Oct 3, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,747 words)

Factory Girls

The making of the boy and girl groups that are leading the international K-pop explosion:

“Lee founded S.M. in 1989. His first success was a Korean singer and hip-hop dancer named Hyun Jin-young, whose album came out in 1990. But, just as Jin-young was on the verge of stardom, he was arrested for drugs. Russell writes that Lee was ‘devastated’ by this misfortune, and that the experience taught him the value of complete control over his artists: ‘He could not go through the endless promoting and developing a new artist only to have it crash and burn around him.’

“In effect, Lee combined his ambitions as a music impresario with his training as an engineer to create the blueprint for what became the K-pop idol assembly line. His stars would be made, not born, according to a sophisticated system of artistic development that would make the star factory that Berry Gordy created at Motown look like a mom-and-pop operation. Lee called his system ‘cultural technology.’ In a 2011 address at Stanford Business School, he explained, ‘I coined this term about fourteen years ago, when S.M. decided to launch its artists and cultural content throughout Asia. The age of information technology had dominated most of the nineties, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next.’ He went on, ‘S.M. Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology.'”

Source: New Yorker
Published: Oct 3, 2012
Length: 29 minutes (7,351 words)

The Solitude of Invention

Paul Auster opens up about his life and work:

“Academics theorize endlessly about Auster and his literary motivations, labeling him everything from a New York Jewish hunger artist to a clever semiotician whose every decision — down to the color of the notebook his protagonists choose to write in — is fraught with symbolism. Auster dismisses most of this as academic overanalyzing, usually with a hidden agenda.

“‘So many of these people have a point of view, a position, and are trying to articulate this position by using me as an example. But I myself, living within myself, never try to put labels on what I do. I just follow my nose.

“‘I’m a man of contradictions, you know; I can’t say any one thing about myself. Yes,’ he says with a laugh, ‘I’m the hunger artist who likes to eat.'”

Published: Oct 5, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,381 words)

The Things They Carried: At The National Wife-Carrying Championships

A writer and his wife participate in a centuries-old Scandinavian tradition known as “Wife-Carrying,” a sport where male competitors carry a female teammate while racing through an obstacle course:

“And then my wife and I are 15 yards up the hill, and I am breathing hard, making it work. This isn’t so bad, I think. Like John Candy in Spaceballs, I say to myself, ‘I could carry two or three of these.’ Maybe a wife and a kid (that’s not allowed yet).

“‘Divot,’ Megan shouts. I adjust. I’m a quarter of the way through. I’m a Wife-Carrying natural! This is the best decision that I, no that we, have made in… and I’m pitching forward into a swampy patch of October grass. Just like that, I’d broken a vow I’d made to my father-in-law. As if to maximize the surreal quality of this day, he’d driven up to watch the competition, and now I’d dropped his daughter. Seven-second penalty.

“‘It’s a lot more physical than people give it credit for,’ Darcy Morse, the organizer of the race, warned when I signed up, and all at once I believe her. Suddenly, I feel like John Candy in Spaceballs. But I throw Megan onto my back again and come to the first obstacle, the Pommel Log. I’m over it, but I’m behind the couple we’re racing against, and starting to hear sympathy cheers. ‘You can do it,’ say some good-hearted Mainers with the sweet inflection of wincing, hopeful mommies.”

Source: The Classical
Published: Oct 4, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,790 words)

Prison Rape: Obama’s Program to Stop It

It is “a national disgrace”: The U.S. prison system, for years, failed to stop rampant sexual abuse from occurring behind bars. Inside the new program to stop it:

“The review panel’s most recent report describes the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, a maximum-security state prison in Troy, Virginia. About 1,200 women are confined there, and when the BJS surveyed them in 2009, 11.4 percent said they’d been sexually abused by other inmates in the preceding year alone; 6.0 percent said they’d been sexually abused by staff.”

“The twelve months asked about in that survey came shortly after sexual misconduct by Fluvanna’s staff had already turned into scandal. Former inmate Melissa Andrews told the review panel about Patrick Owen Gee, who was chief of security at the prison—a man, she said, who seemed to hate women. When he started working at Fluvanna, he ‘went from wing to wing in each building and told us, “you bitches think you’ve been living in Kindercare…things are going to change.”‘ Andrews also testified that the warden to whom Gee reported, Barbara Wheeler, ‘said to officers many times, that if she took anything and everything from us including our humanity maybe we would not return to prison’ Gee was convicted of sexually abusing the inmates he was supposed to protect in 2008, and sentenced to five years in prison.”

Published: Oct 4, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,463 words)

Terror in October: A Look Back at the DC Sniper Attacks

An oral history of the Beltway sniper attacks that occurred during three weeks in October 2002. Ten people were killed, three people were injured, and many people were too afraid to leave their homes:

Iran Brown, victim, now 23: ‘I remember every detail, down to what I ate for breakfast: chocolate-chip waffles. My aunt drove me to school, and it was very early because she had to go to work. I was the first to arrive.

“‘I got hit right under my left chest. I fell to the ground. A teacher came out to help me. I had my hand over the wound, but it wasn’t like in the movies with blood gushing out. I explained that I’d been shot and needed help, but it didn’t seem to register in her brain.

“‘My aunt heard the shot and reversed the car when she saw me on the ground. I got up on my own and walked to the car. Of course, I’m panicking and praying. Reality is kicking in. My aunt was a nurse, so she knew more than the average person. She rushed me to a clinic.

“‘I had been watching the news. I was aware of what was happening. I had asked our PE teacher why we were going outside if the sniper was in the area.’

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Oct 1, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,862 words)

The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador

[Not single-page] Less than a year after losing half his face to a bull, the victim of one of Spain’s worst matador gorings returns to the ring.

“There is the physical pain, which the doctors reduce with morphine, and then there is the terror. They’re telling him he might never again wear his ‘suit of lights.’ Never stand before another bull. If he can’t return to a plaza, he’ll be exiled from his life. Evicted from his own skin.

In his hospital room, as soon as he can move again, he begins to rehearse bullfighting moves with the sheets. And on October 19, less than two weeks after the accident, he gives a press conference in a wheelchair with his face uncovered.

“‘I have no rancor toward this bull or toward my profession,’ he slurs into the mike. He makes the following pledge: ‘I will return to dress as a torero.'”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 3, 2012
Length: 29 minutes (7,418 words)

The F Word

A writer confronts her daughter after she calls another girl “fat”:

“‘Excuse me,’ I said, struggling for calm, knowing I was nowhere in calm’s ZIP code. ‘What did you just say?’

“From the way her eyes widened, I knew that she knew she’d done what her sister, four-year-old Phoebe, called a Big Bad. ‘She is fat,’ Lucy mumbled into her bowl.

“‘We are going upstairs,’ I said, my voice cold, my throat tight. ‘We are going to discuss this.’ And up we went, my blithe, honey-blonde daughter, leggy as a colt in cotton shorts and a gray T-shirt with Snoopy on the front, and her size-16-on-a-good-day mom.

Source: www.allure.com
Published: Oct 3, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,240 words)