Search Results for: California

The Teacher. The Basketball Coach. The Dead Rat In the Mail.

Longreads Pick
Source: Medium
Published: Jul 25, 2019
Length: 40 minutes (10,082 words)

The Young Man and the Sea Sponge

Original sketches by Stephen Hillenburg

Darryn King | Longreads | August 2018 | 13 minutes (3,214 words)

In January 2012, Eric Bettanin, an Australian Army officer, took his brother-in-law’s Jet Ski out for a spin off the coast of Victoria. About 10 minutes in, the engine failed. As night fell, he drifted away from the beach and out of sight of family and friends. He spent the night bobbing around in the Southern Ocean, battered by large waves and howling winds.

Fortunately, Bettanin was wearing a pair of bright yellow SpongeBob SquarePants board shorts. He had picked them up for five Australian dollars, thinking they would get some laughs over the Christmas holidays with the family. As temperatures dropped, he took the shorts off and wrapped them around his head.

The next morning, one of the search boats fruitlessly trying to locate Bettanin was on its way back to shore. They had all but given hope when they spotted it — a telltale speck of SpongeBob yellow on the ocean.

That’s what the internet said anyway. If the headlines that week were slightly overblown, they were in keeping with the upbeat and outlandish spirit of the Nickelodeon cartoon. “SpongeBob SquarePants saved my life.” “SpongeBob Saves.” “SpongeBob SavePants.” Read more…

Scamming Their Way to the Top of Hollow Mountan

Press Association via AP Images

For Vanity Fair, Evgenia Peretz puts five rich Southern California families under the microscope, to see how and why they paid disgusting amounts of money to Rick Singer, a slimy college counseling guru who turned a legit business into an illicit one. Many people expect the rich and famous to, as Peretz’s title puts it, “Cheat and Lie in L.A.” They expect vacuousness, materialism, and a mortal devotion to status. That is certainly the case with this Los Angeles chapter of the college admissions scandal. But you don’t expect it from people who make their livings as parenting gurus, who talk about doing good for the world and their community, or who present themselves as what Peretz calls “exemplary human beings.”

For Singer, they were the perfect targets. Any parent obsessed with curating an image of affluence, good taste, and beneficence was exactly the sort to fixate unreasonably on a degree from Georgetown or USC. In a world dictated by status symbols, having “a kid at Yale” was the Holy Grail, the ultimate proof of a life worth envying—even if their kid was only interested in plugging products on Instagram. L.A. was teeming with such showboats. Five families, presented here, each interconnected to the others, lived behind that glossy façade. They were pillars of the community at their children’s private schools. They talked about “doing good” and “giving back.” Their kids were friends with one another on social media, a tribute to their own social significance. (Those children’s first names that have not appeared elsewhere have been changed.) But their fates diverge: Two got caught; two have come away unscathed—so far—despite dubious entanglements; and one exposed it all, for a reason no more noble than to save his own skin.

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Remembering Woodstock ’94

Henry Diltz / Getty, Photo Illustration by Homestead Studio

Steve Edwards | Longreads | August 2019 | 20 minutes (3,632 words)

In hindsight, a tent would have been nice. A raincoat and boots. All I’d brought for “2 More Days of Peace and Music” at Woodstock ’94 was a sleeping bag and a backpack with a change of clothes. I remember thinking that in Indiana, the only home I’d ever known, it was hot as hell in August — how much different could the weather be in upstate New York? None of the people in my life, not friends nor family, found any fault with this logic. I was 19 with a year of college under my belt. I’d been working all summer as a camp counselor at the YMCA, nursing a broken heart. I didn’t care about the details, I just wanted to go.

From my vantage 25 years later, I’m equal parts horrified and impressed by my dumb faith in things just working out. So much has changed. Like everyone else these days, I feel self-conscious if I leave the house without my phone. Somebody now — my wife, my son, my employer — knows my whereabouts at all times.

It makes me wonder what that kid so eager to get to Woodstock would think of me. Would I seem soft to him?

Boring?

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Toni Morrison. (David Levenson/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Rachel Sugar, Kate Knibbs, Mark Arax, and Anna Wiener.

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Mountains, Transcending

Illustration by Jason Raish

Ailsa Ross | Longreads | August 2019 | 22 minutes (6,062 words)

It’s the winter of 1923 and a five-foot tall woman is shooting at brigands in Tibet. She’s surviving a blizzard by eating boot leather. She’s accepting a maggot-dancing stew from a drug-addled butcher and having a face-off with a snow leopard.

This woman is Parisian opera singer-turned-anarchist Buddhist lama Alexandra David-Néel, and she’s kicking through Tibet’s wild hills and steppes as she strides on foot across the Himalayas from Kanchow to Lhasa.

Alexandra’s starlit memoir recounting her adventure is no Thoreauvian nature journal. This is a tale that demands to be read in a cool bed while the night paws at the windows — or in my case, by the fire while my dad watches Come Dine With Me repeats on a black January afternoon.

I started reading My Journey to Lhasa because I love adventure stories. And while I’ve never pushed myself to extremes, still I felt a kinship with Alexandra. “Ever since I was five years old,” she wrote, “I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown.” She didn’t dream of towns or parades, but a solitary spot where she could “sit alone, with no one near.” As a child, her nannies often found her crouched behind bushes or hidden up trees in Paris gardens.

Quiet spaces — I’d needed those since I was a teenager.

I was most in search of a quiet space while teaching in Seoul in 2012. I was twenty-four and tired — of living in that crunching city of 26 million, of being in a job I was no good at, of lying awake in the self-hating 2 a.m. dark with a burnt throat from smoking cigarettes on the kindergarten rooftop. I wanted to feel clean again, like a child who’d spent the day by the sea. Read more…

In the Country of Women

Catapult

Susan Straight | In the Country of Women | Catapult | August 2019 | 38 minutes (7,573 words)

 

To my daughters:

They never tell us about the odysseys of women. They never say about a woman: “Her passage was worthy of Homer . . . her voyage a mythic quest for new lands.” Women don’t get the Heroine’s Journey.

Men are accorded the road and the sea and the asphalt. The monsters and battles and the murders. Men get The Iliad and The Odyssey. They get Joseph Campbell. They get The Thousand Faces of the Hero. They get “the epic novel,” “the great American story,” and Ken Burns documentaries.

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Gone

Longreads Pick

Journalist Mark Arax sifts through the aftermath of California’s deadliest wildfire to expose the governmental negligence, forest mismanagement, unregulated urban growth, and PG&E’s corruption, that put thousands of people in the path of the blaze.

Author: Mark Arax
Published: Jul 31, 2019
Length: 46 minutes (11,658 words)

Towards Chinatown

Illustration by Olivia Waller

Melissa Hung | Longreads | August 2019 | 13 minutes (3,316 words)

Two days after I learn that my mother has cancer, after my sister tearfully tells me over the phone, “This might be mom’s last Christmas,” I go to San Francisco Chinatown.

I didn’t grow up in a Chinatown. It is not my home. Yet when I think of my mother in Texas, I feel pulled towards Chinatown’s tightly packed stores and no-frills restaurants.

So, leaving an appointment on a December afternoon, I board a bus heading east. The bus is an electric one, powered by cables strung above that guide it down a one-way street through a quiet residential neighborhood. Tidy three-story buildings line the route, their bay windows jutting out. When the bus crests over a hill, I catch a glimpse of San Francisco Bay between skyscrapers in the distance, a little over a mile away. The water shimmers like a mirage even though it is real.

Then, we rumble downhill and we’re in Chinatown. The bay windows are gone. Instead, laundry hangs out to dry on fire escapes and from clotheslines threaded across open windows. Children walk down streets holding the hands of their mothers. Older women dressed in purple and pink puffy jackets, sun hats, and sensible shoes tow hand trucks with bags strapped onto them. Elderly men in gray jackets and baseball caps wait at bus stops. Everyone seems to be carrying something: a backpack, a tote bag or two, a purse worn cross-body, a pink plastic bag in the crook of an elbow.

I step off the bus and walk to the Chinatown YMCA for a swim. Most of the pools I frequent are harshly chlorinated. Open your mouth while submerged in them, or worse, accidentally swallow the water, and you realize immediately your mistake. But here the pool is saltwater, soothing on the skin. As I swim freestyle down the middle lane, joy rises through my body like a buoy. This surprises me — that after two days of feeling terrified about losing my mother, I am capable of joy. I swim for 35 minutes, then listen in on the chatter of aunties in the locker room as I change. Technically, I am eavesdropping, but I don’t think of it that way. They are talking loudly enough for everyone to hear, the way my Po Po used to talk.

In Chinatown, I manage in my clumsy Cantonese. I speak the language and I don’t. My pronunciation is decent, but my vocabulary is stunted. Some words come easily. Others I grasp for. They exist just beyond my reach the way the details of a dream tease the waking mind.

With my hair still damp, I walk around the corner to a bakery with a yellow awning to buy a cha siu bao. I favor the baked ones with a glazed crisp exterior over the fluffy white steamed ones.

“Yāt go cha siu bao,” I say to the woman in an apron behind the counter. One pork bun.

“Baked,” I add.

I know the word for baked in Cantonese. Guhk. I’ll remember it later, but in the moment of the transaction, I can’t retrieve it quickly enough.
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“We Have Fire Everywhere”

Longreads Pick

For eight hours last fall, Paradise, California, became a zone at the limits of the American imagination—and a preview of the American future.

Published: Jul 31, 2019
Length: 43 minutes (10,800 words)