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The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side: Our Longreads Member Pick

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side

Mark Oppenheimer | The Atlantic Books | November 2013 | 88 minutes (22,700 words)

 

Longreads Members not only support this service, but they receive exclusive ebooks from the best writers and publishers in the world. Our latest Member Pick, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, is a new story by Mark Oppenheimer and The Atlantic Books, about Eido Shimano, a Zen Buddhist monk accused of sexually exploiting students.

We’re excited to feature the first chapter below, free for everyone. If you’re not a Longreads Member, join today to receive the full story and ebook, or you can also purchase the ebook at Amazon

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EIDO SHIMANO, a Zen Buddhist monk from Japan, arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 31, 1964, New Year’s Eve. He was 32 years old, and although he had just spent four years in Hawaii, part of the time as a university student, his English was poor. Besides his clothes, he brought with him only a small statue of the Buddha and a keisaku, the wooden stick a Zen teacher uses to thwack students whose posture sags during meditation. Before flying east, he had been offered temporary lodging by a couple who lived on Central Park West. Not long after he arrived—the very next day, according to some versions of the story—he began to build his sangha, his Zen community. He did this, at first, by walking the streets of New York. The followers just came.

“It was the middle of the 1960s, full of energy,” Shimano recalled when we met for lunch in 2012. “And all I did was simply walk Manhattan from top to the bottom. And in my Buddhist robe. And many people came. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ So I said, ‘I am from Japan and doing zazen practice’”—Zen meditation. It was a kind of Buddhism, he told the curious New Yorkers. Now and again, somebody asked to tag along. Yes, Shimano told them. Of course. Before long, he had a small space to host meditation sessions, and all were invited. “Little by little, every single day, I walked entire Manhattan,” Shimano told me in his still-fractured English. “And every single day I picked up two or three people who were curious. And that was the beginning of the sangha.”

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College Longreads Pick: 'The End of the Waffle House' by Jessica Contrera, Indiana University

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

You may have already read this week’s #college #longreads pick because someone posted it on Facebook or Twitter. Indiana University senior Jessica Contrera paid homage to the end of the local Waffle House with hours of reporting and 15 drafts. You hear the reporting in the details: An empty gumball machine. A stopped clock. Broken locks. You see the writing in the verbs: “On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced.”

But you didn’t read the story because it’s a quaint look at a fading icon. Your friend didn’t send it to you because it’s better than what we expect from a student. You read it, and passed it on, because it’s just about perfect.

The End of the Waffle House

Jessica Contrera | Indiana Daily Student | 8 minutes (1,897 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

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A Longreads Guest Pick: Andrew Pantazi on Michael Kruse's 'The Last Voyage of the Bounty'

Andrew Pantazi writes for his hometown newspaper, The Florida Times-Union.

From the gripping first paragraph in the first chapter of the first part of this longread, ‘In the dark, in the wet, whirling roar of Hurricane Sandy, on a ship tipping so badly the deck felt like a steep, slick roof …,’ Michael Kruse drew me into a tale of desperation and desire.

And that’s just Part 1. I didn’t want to feature a story that wasn’t fully published, but The Tampa Bay Times’ The Last Voyage of the Bounty was too good to pass up. The web design is beautiful and fairly non-distracting. Kruse churns out telling details. He slows the story when the crew has to make a decision, and then he moves the story along faster and faster and faster, as the storm gets closer and closer. Also check out the reporter’s notes where he annotates how he got all the details.

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The Making of McKinsey: A Brief History of Management Consulting in America

Duff McDonald | The Firm, Simon & Schuster | 2013 | 12 minutes (3,000 words)

 

The American Century

In 1941 Time Inc. publisher Henry Luce coined the term “American Century” in a Life magazine editorial. He was describing the country’s global economic and political dominance leading up to World War II. But Luce was also correct in the literal sense: The American Century had actually started several decades before.

The building of the railroads and coincident spread of the telegraph in the United States in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century helped create the world’s first truly “mass” markets. If an executive had ambition, his company didn’t have to serve just local customers. It could serve an entire continent and beyond, if it had the wherewithal to get the organization and logistics right.

The economic historian Alfred Chandler documented the momentous changes in what came to be known as the Second Industrial Revolution in his seminal book Scale and Scope—the title of which referred to the simultaneous revolutions in both scale (in manufacture) and scope (in distribution) in American enterprise. Those twin revolutions transformed the United States from an agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse in the span of a single generation. In 1870 the nation accounted for 23 percent of the world’s industrial production. By 1913 that proportion had jumped to 36 percent, exceeding that of Great Britain.

By 1920, when only a third of homes in the country had electricity and only one in five had a flush toilet, the country’s business establishment was embarking on a course of radical, unprecedented expansion. This brought with it a dilemma that has preoccupied business leaders ever since: how to grow big while maintaining control over the enterprise. Moving from a single-product, owner-run enterprise into a complex and large-scale national one is a difficult task. First, you have to build production facilities massive enough to achieve the desired economies of scale. Second, you have to invest in a national marketing and distribution effort to ensure that sales have a chance of matching that scaled-up production. And third, you have to hire, train, and trust people to administer your business. Those people are called managers, and in the first half of the American Century, they were in very short supply.

The benefits to successful first-movers were gigantic. In industries where only one or two companies took the plunge early, they dominated their field for a very long time to come; this group includes well-known names like Heinz, Campbell Soup, and Westinghouse. A ten-year merger mania, from 1895 through 1904, also brought the creation of a number of corporate entities the likes of which the world had never seen—1,800 companies were crunched into 157 megacorporations, including stalwarts like U.S. Steel, American Cotton, National Biscuit, American Tobacco, General Electric, and AT&T.

The key business problem identified during this transition—and one that underwrote McKinsey’s success for several decades—was that a single, central office could no longer adequately administer such far-flung empires. Power had to be ceded to the extremities. The question was how. It was a quandary that beguiled some of the great thinkers of the time, including political scientist Max Weber, who argued that a systematic approach to marshaling resources through bureaucracy was a necessary and profound improvement over pure charismatic leadership.

In his book American Business, 1920–2000: How It Worked, Harvard professor Thomas McCraw pinpointed the issue: “In the running of a company of whatever size, the hardest thing to manage is usually this: the delicate balance between the necessity for centralized control and the equally strong need for employees to have enough autonomy to make maximum contributions to the company and derive satisfaction from their work. To put it another way, the problem is exactly where within the company to lodge the power to make different kinds of decisions.”

Companies such as DuPont, General Motors, and Sears Roebuck were the first to address this problem systematically. According to Chandler, DuPont sent an emissary to four other companies experiencing similar issues—the meatpackers Armour and Wilson and Company, International Harvester, and Westinghouse Electric—to ask what they were doing. And the answers were remarkably similar: The innovators moved from the centralized system to a multidivisional structure with product and geographic breakdowns. The concept left operating division chiefs with total control over everything except funding resources. Top managers took a more universal view of the business, monitoring the divisions and allocating capital accordingly.

The most successful companies of the era, such as General Electric, Standard Oil, and U.S. Steel, all employed some variant of this model. But by and large, they had developed these ideas on their own, a process of trial and error that was costly and time consuming. They would have much preferred hiring outside experts to help them with it, if only such experts existed. This was a huge commercial opportunity that called for an entirely new kind of service.

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Stepping into the Breach

Unwittingly, the federal government did its part to create the modern consulting business. Starting in the last part of the nineteenth century, Washington made periodic regulatory efforts to curb the power of big business, including the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act and Clayton Act of 1914, and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The intended effect of these measures was to prevent corporations from colluding with one another to fix prices and otherwise manipulate the markets. The unintended effect, according to historian Christopher McKenna, was to accelerate the creation of an informal—but legal—way of sharing information among oligopolists. Who could do that? Consultants.

Regulatory efforts paid another rich benefit to the likes of McKinsey: Restricted from cutting backroom deals with each other, firms were thus obliged to actually compete, which meant they needed to make their operations more efficient. Here again, consultants were the answer.

But perhaps the circumstance that most aided the creation of the consulting industry was the entry of a new, key player into business itself. Empire builders with names like Carnegie, Duke, Ford, and Rockefeller had built huge, vertically integrated companies, but they had neither the time, the talent, nor the inclination to create and carry out management systems for those entities. These were the conquerors of capitalism, not its administrators. And yet, as Chandler pointed out, “their strategies of expansion, consolidation, and integration demanded structural changes and innovations at all levels of administration.”

Into the breach stepped a new economic actor who was neither capital nor labor: the professional manager. Gradually, he replaced the robber baron as the steward of American business. Alfred P. Sloan, the legendary president of General Motors, was the first nonowner to become truly famous for his managing skills. His decentralized, multidivisional management structure gave GM the agility to outmaneuver the more plodding Ford Motor Company and snatch the industry lead. Ford may have revolutionized manufacturing, but Sloan realized that the car-buying market had become big enough to be segmented into people who bought Buicks, Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles, and Pontiacs. By the late 1920s, the car market was maturing, and people wanted choice. Sloan also gave them the ability to buy a car on credit—a groundbreaking idea at the time. Before the decade was over, GM had surpassed Ford as the market share leader, a position it didn’t relinquish until the 1980s.

Sloan and his ilk were perfect customers for McKinsey: Lacking the legitimization of actual ownership, professional managers felt great pressure to show they were using cutting-edge practices. And who better to bring those practices to their attention than consultants who were talking to everyone else? This was the beginning of a decades-long separation of ownership from control in corporate America, and the consultant was an able ally to the professional manager in this tug-of-war—an ally who wasn’t gunning for the manager’s job. Thus began the era of managerial capitalism.

For more than two centuries, economists had argued that companies operated in some sense at the mercy of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market. But the revolution in management thinking in the United States offered up an alternative idea: the “visible hand” of management, which made things happen, as opposed to merely responding to external market forces.

The academy helped move this ideology along. Before 1900, there was only one undergraduate business school in the country, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Economy, founded in 1881 with a $100,000 donation from financier Joseph Wharton. The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth followed in 1900. Over the next decade, pretty much every major institution started explicitly preparing its students for careers in management.

Although the rise of today’s industrial-farm-style MBA programs is really a postwar phenomenon, Harvard founded its Graduate School of Business Administration in 1908, with a second-year business policy course designed to give the student an integrative approach to addressing business problems, including accounting, operations, and finance. The purpose of the course, according to the school, was to give the student an ability to see those problems from the top management point of view. Much of James McKinsey’s academic writing centered on this very issue and later informed the practice of his firm.

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McKinsey’s Oeuvre

As a young academic, McKinsey was a prolific writer, if not an especially engaging one. His first four books were dry tomes on the nitty-gritty of accounting and taxes: Federal Incomes and Excess Profits Tax Laws (1918), Principles of Accounting (cowritten with A. C. Hodges, 1920), Bookkeeping and Accounting (1921), and Financial Management (1922). But with his fifth effort, he broadened his horizons significantly. Budgetary Control (1922)—the first definitive work on budgeting—turned accounting on its head, promoting it as an essential tool of managerial decision making. “Budgetary control involves the following,” McKinsey wrote. “1. The statement of the plans of all the departments of the business for a certain period of time in the form of estimates. 2. The coordination of these estimates into a well-balanced program for the business as a whole. 3. The preparation of reports showing a comparison between the actual and the estimated performance, and the revision of the original plans when these reports show that such a revision is necessary.”

It seems commonsensical, but McKinsey’s new way of looking at the use of the budgeting process sparked nothing short of a revolution. “No other mechanism of management of similar scope and complexity has ever been introduced so rapidly,” wrote one commentator just ten years later. “It is estimated that 80 percent of budgets installed in industry have been put in since 1922.”

Up to that point, budgeting was a one-way exercise: Accountants added up all of a firm’s expenses and then tossed in a sales projection almost as an afterthought. In McKinsey’s view, companies should start by developing their business plan, figure out how to achieve it, and then estimate the costs of doing so. In this new context, budgeting wasn’t just a ledger activity; it could also be used to identify excellence in performance (i.e., those who outperform their budget), to spot weaknesses (those who underperform), and to take corrective action. “[While] there are many who do not yet plan scientifically … ,” he wrote, “there are few who will deny the merits of the system.”

Two subsequent books fleshed out McKinsey’s ideas: 1924’s Managerial Accounting and Business Administration. The former taught students how accounting data could be used to solve business problems. Using the data of traditional recordkeeping, he suggested the possibility for much greater control over a company’s destiny, including the establishment of standard procedures (how things should be done and to whom information should be reported), financial standards (ways to judge operating efficiency), and operating standards (including nonfinancial measures, such as quality). To today’s business student, this kind of comprehensiveness seems obvious. But at the time, the idea of planning, directing, controlling, and improving decision making by means of regular and rigorous reporting of company results was novel. The latter book contained the seeds of McKinsey’s General Survey Outline—a thirty-page system for understanding a company in its entirety, from finances to organization to competitive positioning. It became part of his consultants’ toolkit sometime in the early 1930s.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of the General Survey Outline (GSO). It served as the foundation of his approach to understanding a company and provided novice consultants with a clear road map to do so themselves. The survey also shaped consultants’ thinking: The emphasis in the GSO was more on whymanagers did things, as opposed to how they did them. Using the GSO, consultants started every engagement by thinking of the outlook for the industry of their client, the place of the client in the industry, the effectiveness of management, the state of its finances, and favorable or unfavorable factors that might affect the future of the firm. No detail was too small to take note of, whether it was a study of all firm policies—including sales,production, purchasing, financial, and personnel—or an analysis of whether the layout of equipment in a company’s plant provided for the most efficient flow of the production operations. By the time the young consultant had completed the survey for his client, he knew the company and its business cold.

“You can see McKinsey’s intellectual development,” says John Neukom, who worked at McKinsey from 1934 to the early 1970s and wrote a brief memoir of his time at the firm. “He had lost interest in the details of accounting. By the time I arrived, he had lost interest in the budgetary procedure and was now excited and interested in analyzing companies and seeing how companies worked. He was clearly diagnosing the total problems of the company.” In a 1925 speech at a conference for financial executives in New York, McKinsey offered the kind of pointed insight for which he is remembered: “Usually, I find that the executive who says he does not believe in an organization chart does not want to prepare one because he does not wish other people to know that he had not yet thought through his organization properly. For the same reason many men are opposed to budgets. They are unwilling for anyone to see how little they have thought about what they are going to do in future periods.”

Armed with that insight—and the general philosophy that management can shape a company’s destiny—he decided to set up shop and sell it.

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Bastards Require No Diplomacy

In the mid-1920s, McKinsey began doing business under the banner of James O. McKinsey and Company, Accountants and Management Engineers, the progenitor of the modern-day McKinsey & Company. Strangely for a company that prides itself on getting the details right, the actual date of its founding is unknown—a firm training manual from 1937 suggests 1924, while John Neukom’s memoir says 1925. Whichever it was, McKinsey’s timing was excellent. The economy was booming, and the need for consulting services was seemingly endless.

It is worth noting that the word “consultant” was not in the name of his firm. Rather, the term “management engineers” reflected the prevailing ethos of the time: that science held the answers to most serious questions, and even human commerce could profit from the rigors of this kind of data-driven analysis. McKinsey’s standard working pads have always been crosshatched graph paper, another nod to engineering. The fact that McKinsey himself employed no actual engineers was beside the point.

Intellectual underpinnings aside, the firm’s real-world roots were in red meat. McKinsey’s first client was Armour & Company, one of the country’s largest meatpackers. The treasurer of Armour had read Budgetary Control and wanted McKinsey to help rethink the meatpacker’s approach to budgeting and planning.

The first partner McKinsey brought on board was A. Tom Kearney, who had been director of research at Swift & Company, another Chicago meatpacker. Kearney was a warmer, more congenial complement to McKinsey’s formal and pointed demeanor. Another early partner was William Hemphill, the same treasurer of Armour who had hired McKinsey in the first place.

McKinsey continued to teach at the University of Chicago for a time, but he eventually switched full-time to the firm. One reason he seems to have juggled so many responsibilities is that he didn’t waste time with niceties at the office. In Hal Higdon’s 1970 history of consulting, The Business Healers, one associate recalled him saying: “I have to be diplomatic with our clients. But I don’t have to be diplomatic with you bastards.”(Marvin Bower later modeled his own approach to constructive criticism after McKinsey’s tough love approach.)

McKinsey was blunt, but he was also a quick and agile thinker. He once diagnosed a client’s problems just by looking at the company’s letterhead. A Midwestern maker of air conditioners had stationery that announced “Industrial Air Conditioning Installations—Coast to Coast from Canada to Mexico.” In an era before salespeople traveled by airline, McKinsey observed that travel expenses were probably eating up the majority of the company’s profits and that employees should confine themselves to a radius of five hundred miles around Chicago. He was right.

Even the Depression couldn’t stop the growth of the firm. By 1930, McKinsey’s professional staff totaled fifteen. In 1931 he drafted the General Survey Outline, and the next year he opened a New York outpost in the offices of a defunct investment house at 52 Wall Street—six offices with a reception area. The New York–based consultants busied themselves working not only for local industrial companies but also for investment banks like Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In 1934, the Chicago office moved to the forty-first floor of the new Field Building on 135 South LaSalle. By the mid-1930s, McKinsey’s partners were charging $100 a day for their services—a giant figure, though nothing compared with the founder himself, who was billing five times that, the highest rate for a consultant in the country.

From The Firm by Duff McDonald. Copyright © 2013 by Duff McDonald. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Announcing the Longreads Member Drive: Help Us Reach 5,000 Members

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My name is Mark Armstrong, and four and a half years ago, I created Longreads.

What started as an afternoon project has now grown into something much bigger—a global community of readers, sharing what they love, across both nonfiction and fiction. Along the way we’ve built Longreads into a trusted service that recommends the best stories on the web, and tracks down stories never before published online.

Our service is self-funded, built by four people (and many contributors) who have worked nights and weekends to create something we believe in.

Now we need your help to keep this service running. We want to make good on our vision to build Longreads into a truly global hub for readers, writers and publishers.

Today, we’re announcing the Longreads Member Drive: A new way for you to support this service and give the entire #Longreads community a stake in our future.

You can sign up for as little as $3 a month or $30 a year or make a donation via PayPal.

Our goal is to reach 5,000 Longreads Members—right now we’re at just over 1,000 paid members, so if you are thinking about joining, now is the time to show your support.

We can get to our financial goal faster if you contribute more, and Top Contributors to Longreads will also get special recognition for their support.

Here’s what your Longreads Membership pays for:

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Our business model relies on both memberships and advertising, but the bulk of our support needs to come from you, the community.

Your support is critical for our survival.

It would be an honor for us to continue to keep this service running and keep building. Join us.

Mark Armstrong

Founder, Longreads

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Photo by Dorothy Brown; Special thanks to Walden Pond Books in Oakland.

College Longreads Pick: 'One Year Later: Christian Aguilar Remembered as Bravo Case Continues' by Chris Alcantara, University of Florida

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Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

The “tick-tock” story is a favorite format among journalists and readers alike. The tick-tock reconstructs a particular event, drawing on a variety of sources to give the reader behind-the-scenes look at a familiar story. Tick-tocks can have the feel of a good pulp novel, as characters emerge and tension builds. One year after a University of Florida student’s murder and another young man’s arrest, The Alligator’s Chris Alcantara attempts to piece together what happened between Christian Aguilar and Pedro Bravo last September, and what happened to their families in the meantime. Though the writing comes off at times as too staccato, the reporting reveals emotional details about the crime and its ripple effects.

One Year Later: Christian Aguilar Remembered as Bravo Case Continues

Chris Alcantara | University of Florida | 10 minutes (2,505 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

The Short Life of Robert Earl Hughes, Who Weighed Half a Ton By His Late Twenties

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Jane R. LeBlanc is a freelance journalist who writes for the Dallas Observer where she covers the local comedy scene and anything strange and interesting. She has written for Denton Live, Mayborn magazine, Spirit magazine and the Denton Record-Chronicle. She has a humor blog, Everyone Hates You, where she pontificates about everyday life. You can find her online.

Inspired by a single black and white photograph from the mid-20th century, Robert Kurson explores the short life of Robert Earl Hughes, a young man born in 1926 with a youthful face, a steel-trap mind and a disposition that drew people in. He was also a Guinness World Record holder weighing more than half a ton by his late 20s. Staring at the photograph for much of the day, one thought repeated in Kurson’s head — ‘I knew the heavy man was lonely.’

In ‘Heavy,’ which appeared in Chicago Magazine in 2001, Kurson not only tells Hughes’ story, but that of his own father, a man he worshiped as a young boy and whose weight caused a young Kurson to worry that a ‘person could get lonely being fat in America.’ Through interviews with Hughes’ friends and family members, Kurson lifts Hughes from the pages of yellowed newspaper clippings and into the living, breathing world once more. He finds that ‘it is in the crevices of their memories, where details drop almost accidentally, that their recollections resonate.’ The author’s own memories take us into the mind of a son who was acutely observant of the world that surrounded him and his father. Kurson offers a revealing look into the lives of these two men, who are connected despite the separation of time and circumstances, and takes us into the hearts of those who loved them most.

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5 Stories on What Happens to Whistleblowers After They Speak Out

Above: Mark Felt

Julia Wick is a native Angeleno who writes about literature, Los Angeles, and cities. She is currently finishing an Urban Planning degree at USC.

With Chelsea Manning sentenced to 35 years in prison and Edward Snowden’s future still uncertain, it seems a pertinent time to look at what becomes of our whistleblowers after the initial flurry of publicity fades. On the public stage and popular culture, whistleblowers are both celebrated and reviled, categorized as snitches and traitors, and heroes and martyrs. They are almost always seen as symbols, but they are also often people whose lives are shattered. The U.S. has had some version of whistleblower protection laws on the books since 1778, but whistleblowers themselves have still often faced reprisal, have been left jobless and hounded, personally attacked and professionally discredited. Here are the stories of six famous whistleblowers, and their lives long after the press has picked up and left town.

1. “Anatomy of a Whistleblower,” by Laurie Abraham (Mother Jones, 2004)

Jesselyn Radack is a “Lifetime TV writer’s dream”—the mother of two young children and pregnant with her third who had privately struggled with MS since college. She was a government lawyer with the Justice Department’s ethics unit when a colleague asked her to look over the FBI’s interrogation of the John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. She spoke up about the impropriety of Lindh’s being questioned without a lawyer present, and quickly became emblematic of the Ashcroft-era treatment of whistleblowers, her life turned upside-down. And then she did the most unlikely thing of all—became an activist for whistleblowers across the nation. She is currently the National Security & Human Rights Director of the Government Accountability Project.

2. “Serpico on Serpico,” by Corey Kilgannon (New York Times, January 2010)

The cinematic version of Frank Serpico’s life—Serpico, starring Al Pacino in the title role—begins with Serpico being shot in the face during an attempted drug bust and ends with closing credits saying he is “now living somewhere in Switzerland.” Kilgannon’s profile of the honest cop who exposed NYPD corruption picks up four decades later, long after Serpico’s lost years in Europe. Bearded, bitter, and in his early seventies, this Serpico lives a monastic life along the Hudson, just a few hours north of his former city. Perhaps the most poignant scene involves a rewatching of the famous film, which Serpico has never seen in its entirety, on the reporter’s laptop in a small town public library, where “the real Mr. Serpico stared out the window, unable to watch—too painful, he said.”

3. “The Whistle-Blower,” by Pamela Colloff (Texas Monthly, April 2003)

Pamela Colloff’s character-driven profile of Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins is a reminder of why fans of longform journalism love Texas Monthly. This is a deftly drawn and richly layered narrative of what life is like for a whistleblower who, despite being nationally-lauded, still finds herself rejected by the high-rolling Houston society set to which she once belonged.

4. “I’m the Guy They Called Deep Throat,” by John D. O’Connor (Vanity Fair July 2005)

No collection of whistleblower stories would be complete without a mention of Mark Felt, née Deep Throat, the source who leaked the details of Watergate to the Washington Post. Felt, who was ultimately responsible for the downfall of an American president, could easily be considered the ur-whistleblower of the last century. Written nearly three decades after the fact, O’Connor’s story finally exposed Felt’s identity.

5. “The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an Enemy of the State?” by Jane Mayer (New Yorker, May 23, 2011)

Long before Snowden made headlines, Thomas Drake had grave doubts about the NSA’s use of domestic surveillance. Drake, then a senior executive at the NSA, to The Baltimore Sun and was ultimately indicted under the Espionage Act. Mayer uses Drake’s story as a lens to explore the larger issues of warrantless surveillance in post–9/11 America, and though the piece itself is more than two years old and dealing with a case that has now been dropped, it is still relevant, perhaps unsettlingly so.


Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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5 Great Stories on the Lives of Poets

Sylvia Plath. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

“If I knew where poems came from, I’d go there.” —Michael Longley

Below are some of my favorite #longreads that fall under the umbrella of “the lives of the poets.” Each is paired with a favorite poem by the poet in question. Quite a few of these stories are personal, not just about the poet, but about the authors of the pieces themselves. Which is unsurprising, especially because, as Billy Collins put it in a 2001 Globe and Mail piece: “You don’t read poetry to find out about the poet, you read poetry to find out about yourself.”

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1. ‘River of Berman,’ by Thomas Beller (Tablet Magazine, Dec. 13, 2012)

David Berman is perhaps best known for his work with the indie-rock band Silver Jews, but his poetry is a thing to behold, as accessible as it is awesome (in the true sense of the word). Beller’s piece, a “tribute to the free-associating genius of the Silver Jews,” delves not just into the beauty of Berman’s free-association, but also his Judaism, his place in the New York literary scene of the 1990s, and his public pain.

Poem: “Self Portrait at 28” by David Berman

2. ‘The Long Goodbye,’ by Ben Ehrenreich (Poetry Magazine, Jan. 2008)

The details of poet Frank Stanford’s life are as labyrinth-like as his most famous work, an epic poem titled, “The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You.” His life was in many ways a series of contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a backwoods outsider who maintained correspondence with poets ranging from Thomas Lux to Allen Ginsberg; and posthumously, he is both little-known and a cult figure in American letters. In seeking to unravel the man behind the myth, Ehrenreich heads deep into the lost roads of Arkansas: the result is a haunting and vivid portrait of both Stanford’s life and his own quest.

Poem: “The Truth” by Frank Stanford

3. ‘Zen Master: Gary Snyder and the Art of Life,’ by Dana Goodyear (New Yorker, Oct. 20, 2008)

Dana Goodyear’s profile of Gary Snyder provides a rich rendering of the Beat poet, Buddhist, and California mountain man.

Poem: “Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin” by Gary Snyder

4. ‘On Sylvia Plath,’ by Elizabeth Hardwick (New York Review of Books, Aug. 12, 1971)

It is likely that if you have made it this far down the list you already know a fair amount about Sylvia Plath, but what makes this piece interesting is Elizabeth Hardwick’s take on her, and her lovely, clear-eyed prose. Hardwick, who co-founded the New York Review of Books, was herself no stranger to the lives of poets, having spent 23 years married to Robert Lowell. It is also—maybe—of interest that the same girls who fall mercilessly hard for Plath at 16 and 21 and often discover Hardwick with a similar fervor a few years down the road (myself included).

Poem: “Cut” by Sylvia Plath

5. ‘Robert Lowell’s Lightness,’ by Diantha Parker (Poetry Magazine, Nov. 2010)

Widely considered one of the most important 20th century American poets, Lowell’s biographer called him “the poet-historian of our time.” Parker’s piece examines a much more personal history, that of Lowell’s relationship with her father, painter Frank Parker.

Poem: “History” by Robert Lowell

Longreads Guest Pick: Shannon Proudfoot on 'The King Of The Ferret Leggers'

Shannon Proudfoot is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine. Previously, she was a national writer with Postmedia News.

“It might not constitute a genre, exactly, but my favorite sort of journalism dives into obscure subcultures with their own rules, etiquette, heroes and hacks. This story is one of my all-time favorites of that type. The main character is unforgettable, perfectly drawn with a few brilliant details and vernacular dialogue. And the writing just crackles—clever, cheeky and nimble, but never getting in the way. Read this snippet and just try not to smirk: ‘Reg pulled the now quite embittered-looking ferret out of his mouth and stuffed it and another ferret into his pants. He cinched his belt tight, clenched his fists at his sides, and gazed up into the gray Yorkshire firmament in what I guessed could only be a gesture of prayer.’ It would have been easy to go for the cheap laugh at the expense of the odd in a story like this, but Donald Katz’s obvious affection for his subject pushes this into a sublime little realm for me.”

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