Search Results for: California

We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

Exodus in the Ozarks

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Pam Mandel | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,441 words)

 

“Well, what are you doing all the way out…here? How’d you find this place?”

The question wasn’t fair. Billygail’s Cafe is only ten miles outside Branson, Missouri. Sure, it’s on a country road, and sure, it feels like you’ve found something special, but it’s listed on Trip Advisor and USA Today and showed up on an episode Man vs. Food on the Travel Channel. Use Yelp to find breakfast while you’re in Branson and you’ll get Billygail’s.

The real question was not what I was doing at Billygail’s. The answer to that was easy: I was there to muscle my way through a gorgeous 14-inch plate-obscuring sourdough pancake. The bigger question was, what was I doing in Branson?

The short answer is I was in Branson for a conference and to see a place I’d never been before. There’s little I like more than going somewhere new and finding out I’m wrong about it — and for a writer, no surer way to find a great story. My previous exposure to Branson was limited to a 1996 episode of The Simpsons. Bart, Milhouse, Nelson, and Martin take a road trip, detouring through Branson to catch a performance by Nelson’s unlikely hero, Andy Williams. I didn’t buy the Simpson’s vision wholesale. I looked at Google, too, and found plenty of references to the show scene — and to country music. I’d baked extra time in my trip to explore — and to catch at least one country music show.

“Yeah, you could do that,” said the conference organizer who helped me plan my travel. “And yeah, there’s music here, but there’s this… other thing.” She pointed me to the website for Sight and Sound, a 2000 seat theater that stages multimedia spectacles based in the Bible. The current production? Moses.

A bad West coast Jew, I know little of my inherited theology. But like many of my Jewish friends and family, I know three or four things about the story of Moses — kind of the cornerstone story of the Jewish faith. Plus, Passover — the holiday where we eat matzoh ball soup and recount how Moses led “the chosen people” out of Egypt into the Promised Land — happens to be my favorite holiday. So, while Dolly’s Stampede is the most popular attraction in Branson, and there’s plenty of wholesome country western cabaret, I couldn’t resist this opulent retelling of the history of the Jewish people.

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A Vor Never Sleeps

Garrett M. Graff | Longreads | June 2018 | 20 minutes (5,086 words)

Razhden Shulaya maintained a diverse business empire, like a Warren Buffet of crime. By age 40, from his base in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he had a cigarette smuggling operation, a drug ring, a counterfeit credit card scheme, an extortion racket, an illegal gambling establishment, and teams devoted to hacking slot machines. According to prosecutors who have been building a case against him, Shulaya’s associates provided gun-running, kidnap-for-hire, and the fencing of stolen jewelry. Plans were in place for what authorities came to call the “romance scam”: use an attractive woman to lure a target down to Atlantic City, knock him out with chloroform, and steal his money. They’d take his Rolex, too.

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Farming A Warming Planet: An Interview Nathanael Johnson

AP Photo/The Fresno Bee, Craig Kohlruss

California avocados are, for the moment, one of America’s most popular foods. Yet some experts predict that climate change could cut California’s avocado production in half by 2050. New weather patterns will also affect the state’s other tree crops, including citrus, almonds, walnuts, and pistachios. But even if rising sea levels flood many coastal cities, many Golden State farmers still plan on growing food for a living.

At Grist, food writer Nathaneal Johnson shows how California farmers are planning ahead for climate change while balancing their immediate economic concerns. Farming is a matter of long-term planning: Just because there was a drought for a nearly six years doesn’t mean farmers can remove their thirsty nut trees and plant strawberries. Fortunately, scientists are studying crop varieties to find ones that could perform well under new weather patterns. California farmers are currently experimenting with cover crops to hold water and improve soil, and testing ways to recharge aquifers before the new state law bans excessive groundwater pumping. Will this all be enough to save them, and the food we rely on? Read more…

The Prosperity Plea

Poor People's Campaign

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,395 words)

On Monday, May 14, I was among some ninety people gathered at the capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire. We sang old Civil Rights songs and held signs with slogans like “Starving a Child is Violence,” and “Systemic Racism is Immoral.” People told harrowing stories about growing up anxious over acquiring basic necessities and brushes with disaster when a child got sick and needed a parent at home. David Jadlocki, a pastor, gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon. “We will never be free, we will never be whole, we will never be happy, as long as our fullness is bought at the expense of another’s existence,” he said. “As long as there are children living in our nation who wake up each morning and go to bed each night gripped by the pains of hunger and the shame of poverty, we are not free.”

The crowd comprised mostly the kinds of people you would expect to find at 2 p.m. on a weekday—retirees, students, workers who could duck out early—and the civil disobedience was less dogs-and-firehoses than a polite exchange with Officer Friendly; when a group blocked a street, we were gently escorted for a brief stay in jail. None of this may have appeared particularly extreme. But the message on display was something radical, a national revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, taking place over 40 days, in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., with the slogan “a new and unsettling force.” The movement aims to challenge the way most Americans view the economy, by overthrowing the treasured, toxic American ideal of personal responsibility. There’s no personal shame in being poor, the campaign’s leaders argue, what’s shameful is maintaining a society in which poverty exists.

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Farming a Warming Planet

AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi

California produces the bulk of America’s nuts, avocados, and citrus. Unfortunately, as the climate changes, no one’s sure how long those crops can grow. At Grist, Nathanael Johnson paints an unsettling portrait of California farmers struggling to balance their immediate need for annual income with the changing climate’s ability to support their trees in the future. California’s weather is increasingly erratic and it’s already confusing crops, ripening some fruits out of season and frying others in the sun. But as an experienced University of California extension agent put it: climate is only one of farmers’ many concerns.

“If you decide what to plant based on climate, but then can’t make the lease payment, that’s not sustainable,” Jarvis-Shean said.

If you are worried about water running out in 15 years, you might think it’s a good idea to cut down half the state’s almond groves — but if those almond trees are still putting money in your pockets, that wouldn’t make sense until the killer drought hits. That’s the crux of the matter for Sayer, and other farmers I interviewed. They’re concerned about the changing climate, but they always come up with ingenious plans to adapt to bad weather. It’s much harder for them to adapt to an overdrawn bank account.

Sayer grows mostly lemons right now, but they’re not long for this world. “You can see these lemon trees are getting a little rangy looking,” Sayer said, gesturing toward a leafless branch. “This is going to be their last harvest, then they’ve got a date with the chipper.”

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Drunk History

Longreads Pick

From an elderly artist living inside a rock club to a foodie who headbutted a winery employee and insulted California chefs before a brawl, Willamette Week gathered 10 of Portland’s best bar stories for your reading and drinking pleasure.

Source: Willamette Week
Published: May 22, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,426 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

The Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas
The Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas where prisoners from death row are executed. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Pamela Colloff, Amanda Fortini, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Ira Glass, and Linda Holmes.

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Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose

AP Photo / CSA-Printstock, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Elisa Albert | How This Night Is Different | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,706 words)

October 2004

Dear Philip,

You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: no one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.

You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.

But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find “Leaving A Doll’s House” in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had to finally order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs and it took her almost a year of post-workshop drinking to slyly confess, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association to you. (Otherwise you’ll be happy to know she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half-seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)

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A City in Upheaval: The Story of a Single Block in West Oakland’s Ghost Town Neighborhood

Image by Hossam el-Hamalawy (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The entire west side of Oakland, California, is undergoing dramatic change, and the Ghost Town neighborhood of resident Annette Miller, who was born in her house on 30th Street over 50 years ago, is right in the thick of it. Rents and house prices have soared, while nearly 43 percent of its neighborhood’s residents remain below the poverty line. And while the white population has more than doubled, the black population has dropped from 50 to 39 percent.

Over the years, Miller has fought an eviction notice and a stream of realtors interested in buying her home. But more recently, with properties on the block selling for over $800K and an industrial building soon to become live-work spaces for artists, she feels like many things are out of her control.

At San Francisco Magazine, Gabriel Thompson tells the stories of Miller — and the neighborhood’s old-timers and newcomers — as they witness the changes sweeping the block.

From this perch, Miller has watched as the block—and the entire west side of Oakland—has changed over the decades. She can disentangle its history like an evolutionary biologist. During the Great Recession, houses were bought and lost to banks at some of the highest foreclosure rates in the entire Bay Area. Then those houses were scooped up by real estate men who paced the sidewalks and rarely smiled. Buildings were emptied out, murals painted over. Fences went up. Rent went up—by 71.5 percent over the last five years. Way back in 2001, SFGate called the neighborhood “deliciously attractive” because its “poverty and misfortune preserved a rare sort of purity and beauty,” as if it were a forbidden, primitive fruit. Later, the real estate men would try to take a bite out of Miller, too.

Miller was born in this house, some 52 years ago. “The average person lives in a house for what, three years?” she asks. “I try to tell my kids, living in the same house for so long, it should mean something.” As the pace of change has accelerated, Miller has become the default historian of the block, a keeper of its stories and secrets, an advocate for the old-timers and a bridge to the new arrivals. “It’s not hard at all to remember,” she says of all the missing people and families who once made a life on 30th Street. “When you’ve lived here your whole life, you don’t forget.”

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