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The following morning all four awake feeling not quite right. By lunchtime they are seriously ill. They consult a book in the kitchen – a guide to wild mushrooms – and leaf through until they find a photograph. Anxiously they scan the text, and see the chilling words: deadly poisonous.

The local GP is called urgently. The four are rushed into the local Highland hospital in Elgin. Ambulances race them down to the renal unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. On the journey the man begins to convulse, his body shuddering and shaking uncontrollably. He fears he is about to die.

“Nicholas Evans: ‘Guilt is My Subject. I’ve Taken Research to an Extreme Degree’.” — Decca Aitkenhead, The Guardian

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It’s a beautiful, clear night outside on deck 4. Ahead of us are the lights of another cruise ship. A few days later – when we reach Puerto Vallarta – I spot it again. It’s called the Carnival Spirit. Forty-three people have vanished from Carnival cruises since 2000. Theirs is the worst record of all cruise companies. There have been 171 disappearances in total, across all cruise lines, since 2000. Rebecca is Disney’s first. A few days ago, Rebecca’s father emailed me: “Would like to inform you the number of people missing this year has just gone up to 17. A guy has gone missing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Carnival Conquest.” By the time I get off this ship, the figure will have gone up to 19.

When someone vanishes from a cruise ship, one of the first things that happens to their family members is they receive a call from an Arizona man named Kendall Carver. “When you become a victim, you think you’re the only person in the world,” Carver told me on the phone. “Well, the Coriams found out they aren’t alone. Almost every two weeks someone goes overboard.”

“Rebecca Coriam: Lost at Sea.” — Jon Ronson, The Guardian

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Featured Longreader: Financial news reporter Shanny Basar. See her story picks from BBC News, The Guardian, Rolling Stone and more on her #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Jeremy Kingsley, Wired UK contributor. See his story picks from The Guardian, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books and more on his #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Mandy C., a foreign relations junkie. See her story picks from The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and more on her #longreads page.

(photo by Tim Knox)

To his millions of readers, of course, Sendak will always be young, a proxy for Max in Where the Wild Things Are, who runs away from his mother’s anger into the consoling realm of his own imagination. There are monsters in there, but Max faces them down before returning to his mother for reconciliation and dinner. Sendak’s own exile took rather longer to resolve. The monsters from Wild Things were based on his own relatives. They would visit his house in Brooklyn when he was growing up (“All crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes”) and pinch his cheeks until they were red. 

“Maurice Sendak: ‘I refuse to lie to children’.” — Emma Brockes, The Guardian

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Featured Longreader: Barbara Mack, teacher/theologian. See her story picks from The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Morning News, and more on her #longreads page.

[Fiction]

One time we roadtripped across the country with Animal Brooks, and he almost got run over by a pickup truck partway through Alberta. It was me and my twenty-year-old girlfriend Vic and him, him in his cadpat jumpsuit, Vic in her flannel logger coat and her neon hair that glowed like a bush-lamp. We’d known Animal since grade school: the north-born shitkicker, like Mick Dundee. A lone ranger, or something. Then in 2002 the three of us crammed into his ‘67 Camaro to tear-ass down the Trans-Canada at eighty miles an hour. Vic and me had a couple hundred bucks and time to kill before she went back to university.

“The Dead Roads.” — D.W. Wilson, The Guardian, BBC National Short Story award winner

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It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s…Some Dude?!

Longreads Pick

Phoenix didn’t know this when he first donned the suit about a year ago, but he’s one of around 200 real-life superheroes currently patrolling America’s streets, looking for wrongs to right. There’s DC’s Guardian, in Washington, who wears a full-body stars-and-stripes outfit and wanders the troubled areas behind the Capitol building. There’s RazorHawk, from Minneapolis, who was a pro wrestler for fifteen years before joining the RLSH movement. There’s New York City’s Dark Guardian, who specializes in chasing pot dealers out of Washington Square Park by creeping up to them, shining a light in their eyes, and yelling, “This is a drug-free park!” And there are dozens and dozens more. Few, if any, are as daring as Phoenix. Most undertake basically safe community work: helping the homeless, telling kids to stay off drugs, etc. They’re regular men with jobs and families and responsibilities who somehow have enough energy at the end of the day to journey into America’s neediest neighborhoods to do what they can.

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: GQ
Published: Aug 10, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,200 words)

kimaskew: My Favorite #Longreads This Week

kimaskew:

In Search of Spiraling Time (Bookslut)

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets (Vanity Fair)

Michael Chabon: How to Salvage a “Wrecked” Novel  (The Atlantic)

David Mitchell: Earth calling Taylor (FT.com)