Search Results for: Debt

Glamorous Crossing: How Pan Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s

Meredith Hindley | Longreads | February 2015 | 18 minutes (4,383 words)

 

In August 1936, Americans retreated from the summer heat into movie theaters to watch China Clipper, the newest action-adventure from Warner Brothers. The film starred Pat O’Brien as an airline executive obsessed with opening the first airplane route across the Pacific Ocean. An up-and-coming Humphrey Bogart played a grizzled pilot full of common sense and derring-do.

The real star of the film, however, was the China Clipper, a gleaming four-engine silver Martin M-130. As the Clipper makes its maiden flight in the film, the flying boat cuts a white wake into the waters off San Francisco before soaring in the air and passing over a half-constructed Golden Gate Bridge. As it crosses the Pacific, cutting through the clouds and battling a typhoon, a team of radiomen and navigators follow its course on the ground, relaying updated weather information. The plane arrives in Macao to a harbor packed with cheering spectators and beaming government officials. Read more…

How a Great American Theatrical Family Produced the 19th Century’s Most Notorious Assassin

John Wilkes Booth, Edwin Booth and Junius Booth, Jr. (from left to right) in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1864. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Nora Titone | My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy | The Free Press | October 2010 | 41 minutes (11,244 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book My Thoughts Be Bloody, by Nora Titone, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky, who writes: 

“This is the story of the celebrated Booth family in the final year before John Wilkes made a mad leap into historical memory that outdid in magnitude every accomplishment of his father and brothers. When the curtain rises on this chapter of Nora Titone’s book, both Edwin and John Wilkes have already staged performances for President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater; by the time it comes down, one of them will be readying to assassinate him there.” 

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Taking the Slow Road: An Interview with Author Katherine Heiny

Photo by Leila Barbaro

Sari Botton | Longreads | February 2015 | 14 minutes (3,683 words)

 

 

Ed. note: Katherine Heiny will be in conversation with Sari Botton at McNally Jackson in New York on Wednesday, Feb. 11 at 7 p.m.

* * *

In the fall of 1992, I found myself very much affected by “How to Give the Wrong Impression,” a short story in the September 21 issue of The New Yorker about a twentysomething psych grad student who’s trying hard to seem satisfied keeping things platonic between her and her handsome roommate.

To begin with, I had a lot in common with the protagonist, more than I’d have wanted to admit at the time. I was in my twenties, too—27 to be exact—newly divorced from the second person I’d ever so much as dated, and most importantly, I was very busy trying to seem satisfied keeping things platonic with a rakish “friend.” I didn’t just recognize that young woman, I was her at that moment in my life. Read more…

Queen Victoria’s Cramps and the History of Medicinal Marijuana in Europe

Documents espousing marijuana’s medical benefits first appeared in 2900 B.C. in China, but medicinal cannabis in Europe is indebted to one over-achieving Irishman. Born in 1809, Dr. William Brooke O’Shaughnessy invented the modern treatment for cholera, laid the first telegraph system in Asia, contributed inventions in underwater engineering, and effectively pioneered the use of medical cannabis in Europe. Inspired by the use of cannabis in Ayurvedic and Persian medicine, O’Shaughnessy conducted the first clinical trials of marijuana, treating rheumatism, hydrophobia, cholera, tetanus, and convulsions.

Influenced by O’Shaughnessy, Sir J. Russell Reynolds prescribed cannabis to relieve Queen Victoria’s menstrual cramps. “When pure and administered carefully, [cannabis] is one of the most valuable medicines we possess,” he wrote in 1890. But the widespread use of the syringe a few years later, which allowed drugs to dissolve quickly into a patient’s blood stream, ended medical marijuana’s popularity in Europe.

Following an international drugs conference in Geneva in 1928, marijuana was banned in the UK after allegations from the Egyptian delegation that the plant was as dangerous as opium and a threat to society. Hashish was already illegal in Egypt, where it was negatively associated with Sufis and the fellahin, urban and rural poor, who used it both recreationally and medicinally. “Hashish addicts,” delegate Mohammed El Guindy declared, “are useless derelicts.”

Between 1912 and 1953, multilateral drug control treaties were negotiated around the world. The United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs consolidated these in 1961. The convention classified marijuana at the same level as opiates and cocaine, Schedule I, as drugs “having strong addictive properties” and “a risk to public health.” While the UN permitted medical use, in 1969 the World Health Organization determined that “medical need for cannabis as such no longer exists.”

Sarah Souli, writing for Roads & Kingdoms about underground social clubs that dispense medicinal marijuana in Italy.

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In Vino Veritas. In Napa, Deceit.

Longreads Pick

After opening a fancy winery a California vintner finds himself deeply in debt. What happened next—falsely bottles, stolen grapes, and criminal charges—have shaken an industry “built on romance, expensive land, hard labor and a whole lot of faith.”

Author: Vindu Goel
Published: Jan 24, 2015
Length: 14 minutes (3,700 words)

The Gothic Life and Times of Horace Walpole

Carrie Frye | Longreads | December 2014 | 16 minutes (4,064 words)

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As a child, Horace Walpole frequently heard it said of himself that surely he would die soon. Born in England in 1717, the last of his mother’s six children, he was fragile and prone to illness from birth. Two siblings before him had died in infancy, and so in the family order it went: three older children, loud, healthy and opinionated; two grave markers; and then young Horace toddling up behind—half child, half potential grave marker.

Naturally, his mother, Catherine, spoiled him. His father, Sir Robert Walpole, was the King’s prime minister. This often kept him away from home, as did a long-time mistress who acted, more than his wife did, as his hostess and companion. For her part Catherine had her own dalliances. It was that sort of marriage. The Walpoles of old had been middling country gentry—ancient name, quiet prosperity—before Robert had come along and, through a blend of shrewdness and charisma, wolf-halled his family into riches and the nobility. When Robert was young, the hope for him was that he might one day make a fine sheep-farmer; he died the first Earl of Orford, after a 20-year run as prime minister, a colossus of English history.

His son Horace worked himself into history another way. In his early 30s, he bought a box-shaped house—just an ordinary sort of house, sitting on a bit of hill in a fashionable country suburb—and decided to transform it into a Gothic castle. Room by room he went. Stained-glass window of a saint here, ancient suit of armor stowed in a wall recess there.

Then one summer, sitting in his castle’s library, he wrote a novel called The Castle of Otranto. Its setting was a medieval castle, not unlike his own mock-castle in many of its details, but grown, in the way of novels and dreams, into something grand and imposing. There the villainous Manfred schemes to block the return of the castle’s rightful heir, a young man named Theodore. Commonly pegged as the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto turns 250 this year. It’s a strange, great, terrible, campy novel, slim but with some paragraphs so long and dense that you have to slash your way through. If Gothic literature had a family tree, its twisted gnarled branches chock-full of imperiled, swooning heroines and mysterious monks, with ghosts who sit light on the branches, and Frankenstein’s monster who sits heavy, with troops of dwarves, and winking nuns, and stunted, mostly nonflammable babies, at its base would sit Horace Walpole’s Castle. (Presumably with some lightning flickering dangerously nearby.) Read more…

The Rise and Fall of John DeLorean

Suzanne Snider | Tokion | June/July 2006 | 12 minutes (2,918 words)

This story by Suzanne Snider—which details the fantastical rise and fall of John DeLorean, a former titan of the American automotive industry—first appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of Tokion. Snider is the founder/director of Oral History Summer School, and she is currently completing a nonfiction book about rival communes on adjacent land. Our thanks to Snider for allowing us to feature it on Longreads.  Read more…

Tiny Houses, RVs, and Other Places We Call Home: A Reading List

For my husband and me, 2014 has been all about downsizing: we got rid of 80 percent of our belongings, moved out of San Francisco and into my parents’ home, and are currently building a 131-square-foot tiny house on wheels. While this path to minimalism is winding, our goal remains clear: to experiment and create a home that makes sense for us. Here are four pieces exploring different approaches to space and home—from living on wheels to escaping the grid. Read more…

#Nightshift: Excerpts from an Instagram Essay

Jeff Sharlet | Longreads | September 2014 | 12 minutes (2,802 words)

1. Snapshots

Dunkin Donuts, West Lebanon, New Hampshire

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The night shift, for me, is a luxury, the freedom to indulge my insomnia by writing at a Dunkin Donuts, one of the only places up here open at midnight. But lately my insomnia doesn’t feel like such a gift. Too much to think about. So click, click, goes the camera—the phone—looking for other people’s stories. This is Mike’s: He’s 34, he’s been a night baker for a year, and tonight is his last shift. Come 6 a.m., “no more uniform.” He decided to start early. He’s going to be a painter. “What kind?” I ask. “Well, I’m painting a church…” He started that early, too. “So I’m working, like, eighty hour days.” He means weeks, but who cares? The man is tired. He doesn’t like baking. Rotten pay, rotten hours, rotten work. “You don’t think. It’s just repetition.” Painting, you pay attention. “You can’t be afraid up there.” He means the ladder, the roof. “I’m not afraid,” he says. He’s a carpenter’s helper. “I can do anything.” He says he could be a carpenter. “But it hasn’t happened.” Why bake? “Couldn’t get a job.” Work’s like that, he says, there are bad times. Everything’s like that, he says. There are bad times. “Who’s the tear for?” The tattoo by his right eye. “For my son,” he says. “Who died when he was two months old.” That’s all he’ll say about that. “This next job will be better,” he says. Read more…

The Honey Hunters

Michael Snyder | Lucky Peach | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,960 words)

Lucky PeachOur latest Longreads Exclusive comes from Michael Snyder and Lucky Peach—a trip into the Sundarbans, where groups of honey hunters risk their lives in the forests to follow the ancient practice of collecting honey.
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