Search Results for: Guardian

Russell Brand on What It’s Like to Be an Addict

Drugs and alcohol are not my problem, reality is my problem, drugs and alcohol are my solution.

If this seems odd to you it is because you are not an alcoholic or a drug addict. You are likely one of the 90% of people who can drink and use drugs safely. I have friends who can smoke weed, swill gin, even do crack and then merrily get on with their lives. For me, this is not an option. I will relinquish all else to ride that buzz to oblivion. Even if it began as a timid glass of chardonnay on a ponce’s yacht, it would end with me necking the bottle, swimming to shore and sprinting to Bethnal Green in search of a crack house. I look to drugs and booze to fill up a hole in me; unchecked, the call of the wild is too strong. I still survey streets for signs of the subterranean escapes that used to provide my sanctuary. I still eye the shuffling subclass of junkies and dealers, invisibly gliding between doorways through the gutters. I see that dereliction can survive in opulence; the abundantly wealthy with destitution in their stare.

—Comedian and actor Russell Brand, writing in The Guardian  in 2013. His essay explores his past as a heroin addict, and how he has stayed sober for the past 10 years.

Read the story

What's in a Home? A Reading List

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

New York, London, Detroit, Indianapolis: What does it look like to make a home? To build a home? To live in an office building, with a Craiglist roommate, with your best friend, in a condemned house, without any electricity, in a bankrupt city, in one of most expensive cities in the world, with mice, with your dog, with your parents? Is home a place or a state of mind or a manifesto?

1. “Getting Uncomfortable With Being Uncomfortable.” (Chloe Caldwell, Thought Catalog, November 2013)

One of my favorite essays from Caldwell’s essay collection, Legs Get Led Astray, about what made the worst (and cheapest!) apartment in Brooklyn a home.

2. “In London, ‘Guardians’ Live in Empty Office Buildings.” (Art Patnaude, Wall Street Journal, January 2014)

To deter squatters, companies hire ‘guardians,’ from young professionals to 50somethings, to babysit buildings slated for construction or destruction. In the zany world of London real estate, the rent is a dream and the waiting list is 2,000 strong.

3. “Why I Bought A House In Detroit for $500.” (Drew Philip, Buzzfeed)

Part personal narrative, part history lesson and part something like hope-in-action, I learned more about Detroit reading this essay than any other: “We want things to flourish, but we want them to have roots.”

4. “Places I’ve Lived: Sleepwalking, Mice Herding, and Craigslist.” (Katherine Coplen, The Billfold, January 2014)

I’ve praised PIL before and The Billfold in general, and this installment is no exception. The writer sings Paul Simon in the shower. Who can resist?

***

Photo: Moyan Brenn

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

The Difference Between Being 'Trusted' and 'Trustworthy'

“Rupert Murdoch, an animatronic al-Qaida recruitment poster, in his private letter to Sun staff, after the News of the World was briefly closed for a makeover (not through remorse, or shame, no, because they couldn’t sell advertising space and because he wanted to launch the Sun on Sunday anyway because it’s cheaper to run one title than two – some guys get all the luck) referred consistently to his pride in the Sun as ‘a trusted news source.’ Trusted is the word he used, not trustworthy. We know the Sun is not trustworthy and so does he. He uses the word ‘trusted’ deliberately. Hitler was trusted, it transpired he was not trustworthy. He also said of the arrested journalists, ‘everyone is innocent until proven guilty.’ Well, yes, that is the law of our country, not however a nicety often afforded to the victims of his titles, and here I refer not only to hacking but the vituperative portrayal of weak and vulnerable members of our society, relentlessly attacked by Murdoch’s ink jackals. Immigrants, folk with non-straight sexual identities, anyone in fact living in the margins of the Sun’s cleansed utopia.”

Russell Brand, in the Guardian, on Murdoch, the Sun, and the miserable state of the news industry. Read more on the media.

***

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

What Happens When the State Separates a Mother From Her Child

“Sacha Coupet, a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago, who used to work as a guardian ad litem and as a psychologist, worries that the Adoption and Safe Families Act, by promoting ‘adoption as the normative ideal,’ has made it easier to avoid ‘dealing with the enormously complex root causes of child neglect and abuse,’ which may have little to do with parenting skills. ‘There’s this very American notion that mothers should be self-reliant, capable of taking care of their kids without any support, when that’s just not the world we live in,’ she said. She finds that child-welfare agencies often ‘rush to get to the end of the story,’ creating a middle-class fairy tale: ‘a poor kid is rescued by the state, given a new mom and dad, and the slate is wiped clean.’

“Martin Guggenheim, a professor at New York University of Law, who represented children in court for more than a decade, believes that before long we will look back at the policy of ‘banishing children from their birth families’ as a tragic social experiment.”

Rachel Aviv, in The New Yorker (subscription required), on the case of Niveen Ismail, who was deemed to be an unfit mother for her son Adam. Read more on child welfare.

***

Photo: gustfischer, Flickr

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

“I did have an interesting (unattributable, of course) briefing from someone very senior in one West Coast mega-corporation who conceded that neither he nor the CEO of his company had security clearance to know what arrangements his own organization had reached with the US government. ‘So, it’s like a company within a company?’ I asked. He waved his hand dismissively: ‘I know the guy, I trust him.’”

“Do MPs and congressmen have any more sophisticated idea of what technology is now capable of? Could they, as supposed regulators, also decipher such documents? A couple of weeks ago I asked the question of another very senior member of the British cabinet who had followed the Snowden stories only hazily and whose main experience of intelligence seemed to date back to the 1970s. ‘The trouble with MPs,’ he admitted, ‘is most of us don’t really understand the Internet.’”

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, in New York Review of Books, on who we trust and what we know when it comes to technology and spying. Read more on spying.

***

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

The Snowden Leaks and the Public

Longreads Pick

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on what we’ve learned so far about the Edward Snowden leaks, our privacy, and the way our government, press and commercial Internet companies have handled it. In many cases, it can come down to people who aren’t quite sure what’s going on trusting the people who do know:

But I did have an interesting (unattributable, of course) briefing from someone very senior in one West Coast mega-corporation who conceded that neither he nor the CEO of his company had security clearance to know what arrangements his own organization had reached with the US government. “So, it’s like a company within a company?” I asked. He waved his hand dismissively: “I know the guy, I trust him.”

Published: Oct 30, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,084 words)

When the Ruins Were New

Longreads Pick

In 1862, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII fled a sex scandal and took a trip to the Middle East. At the last minute, he was joined by a photographer named Francis Bedford, who proceeded to capture some of the earliest images of the Egyptian ruins. His work is featured in the new book Cairo to Constantinople:

“The royal journey’s motive, too, may have been more complex than suggested. Ostensibly it was a private, informal expedition. It was urged by Queen Victoria for her son’s education (pretty much a lost cause, according to his guardian) and she ordered that the Prince go incognito, with no ceremonial encounters. But the itinerary seems to have been planned above all by the Prince Consort Albert, as a diplomatic initiation for the young man and to foster goodwill.”

(via @dougcoulson)

Published: Jul 6, 2013
Length: 6 minutes (1,646 words)

Celebrating Four Years of Longreads

image

Longreads just celebrated its fourth birthday, and it’s been a thrill to watch this community grow since we introduced this service and Twitter hashtag in 2009. Thank you to everyone who participates, whether it’s as a reader, a publisher, a writer—or all three. And thanks to the Longreads Members who have made it possible for us to keep going. 

To celebrate four years, here’s a rundown of some of our most frequent #longreads contributors, and some of their recent recommendations: 

#1 – @matthiasrascher


#2 – @hriefs


#3 – @roamin


#4 – @jalees_rehman


#5 – @LAReviewofBooks


#6 – @TheAtlantic


#7 – @nxthompson


#8 – @faraway67 


#9 – @PocketHits


#10 – @legalnomads


#11 – @brainpicker


#12 – @LineHolm1 


#13 – @Guardian


#14 – @stonedchimera


#15 – @MosesHawk


#16 – @James_daSilva


#17 – @chrbutler


#18 – @eugenephoto

#19 – @jaredbkeller


#20 – @morgank


#21 – @dougcoulson


#22 – @LaForgeNYT


#23 – @stephen_abbott

#24 – @venkatananth

#25 – @weegee

“Getting Stuffed: A Tale of Love and Taxidermy,” David Sedaris, The Guardian.

Our Top 5 Longreads of the Weekfeaturing New York magazine, Washington Post, The Daily (RIP), Vanity Fair, The Guardian, fiction from The New Yorker and a guest pick by Reine Gammoh.