Search Results for: LA Weekly

A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash

Longreads Pick

An interview with Robin Nagle, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s Anthropologist in Residence who has spent most of her life studying trash:

“In its early days, the department didn’t really function at all. There are some photographs taken for Harper’s Weekly, before and after photos of street corners in New York in 1893 and then in 1895. And the before pictures are pretty astonishing, people were literally shin-high or knee-high in this muck that was a combination of street gunk, horse urine and manure, dead animals, food waste, and furniture crap.

“Put yourself back in the late 19th century and think about the material world that would have surrounded you in your home. When you threw something out, it wouldn’t go anywhere. It would be thrown in the street.”

Published: Jun 24, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,768 words)

How a Convicted Killer Became My Friend

Longreads Pick

The writer on his friend Tony Davis, a middle-age man who was convicted of killing a 13-year-old boy when he was 18. Adapted from Stray Bullet, a new single from The Atavist:

“I first met Tony Davis in the early 1990s, when I was a young reporter for an Oakland-based alternative weekly. The city was a hot spot in the nation’s crack epidemic, and turf warfare had sent its homicide rate soaring. I wanted to put a human face on the issue of teens killing teens, which is how I met Tony, who was two years into an 18-to-life sentence for Kevin Reed’s murder. That shooting would become the focus of my 1995 book, Drive-By.

“We kept in touch, and somewhere along the way, Tony ceased to be my subject and became my friend. Over the years, we have exchanged probably a couple hundred letters and shared countless phone calls. Inmates sometimes ask him about the white man whose picture is on his cell wall. ‘He’s like the only real best friend that I’ve had in years,’ Tony tells them.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jun 4, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,108 words)

Our friend Mike Deri Smith has launched a new site, inspired by Longreads, for finding and sharing great videos over 3 minutes— @watchlongviews and #longviews. We asked him to share a pick from this past week’s selections, and give us some backstory on the site:

“I read all day every day so when I want to switch up the pace, or when I eat lunch at my keyboard, I yearn for something great to watch. Viral videos are too unsatisfying, TV is too hit-and-miss, and full-length documentaries are too long. So I watch the growing amount of brilliant longform news video being produced with excitement. In the spirit of Longreads, I’ve called these videos #longviews. I’m now sharing the best of them @watchlongviews and through a weekly newsletter. You can share what you find with #longviews.”

Above: One of Mike’s recent picks, Secrets of The Dead—Bugging Hitler’s Soldiers (13 min.) from PBS.

Longreads Guest Pick: Digg's David Weiner

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Today’s guest pick comes from David Weiner, editorial director for Digg and a frequent contributor to the Longreads community. Here’s what he’s reading right now:

LA Review of Books

LARB really came out of nowhere for me. I was vaguely aware of them for the last year or two, but either they really started hitting their stride this past fall or I just wasn’t paying enough attention. A recent piece by Tom Dibblee, ostensibly on the history of Anheuser-Busch but really an exploration into the pitfalls of nepotism and the writer’s unabashed love for Bud Light Lime, is easily one of the best things I’ve read so far this year. It’s a bold statement, I know, but I really think the LA Review of Books is as close to the perfect literary review for this generation and these times as it gets.

Collectors Weekly

Don’t let the boring name fool you: Collectors Weekly has some of the more creative and bizarre stuff out there. The editorial arm of the site publishes one or two long reads a week, and almost all of them are worth reading from top to bottom. From an in-depth look at the return of the “Cosby sweater” (featuring an interview with the pudding-loving comedian himself) to a political history of the prosthetic limb to the tale of how an obsessive antique collector got hooked on opium, they’re constantly putting out content that scratches my itch for the weird.

Arguably, by Christopher Hitchens

Yeah, I’m that asshole reading Hitchens on the subway these days. And there’s no hiding it with the big, bright yellow cover. I was of course bummed when Hitchens died (partly because I naïvely thought he’d somehow escape his death sentence), but it’s really only after reading through this selection of his work that I realized how impactful a loss that was. The breadth of topics and his ability to make nearly any subject digestible is astounding. It’s basically like reading an opinionated Wikipedia, albeit a better and more inflammatory one.

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Would you like to be featured as a future Longreads Guest Pick? Just tell us what you’re reading.

Longreads Member Exclusive: The End of a War, the End of an Army

Longreads Pick

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This week, we're excited to share a Longreads Member Exclusive from Thomas E. Ricks, whose new book is The Generals, published by The Penguin Press. Chapter 21, "The End of a War, the End of an Army," details how the U.S. military and its leadership faltered in the final years of the Vietnam War:

“Often in warfare, it is the first year of fighting that seasons forces, which become more effective as those who survive gain skill, good leaders rise to the top, and units become more cohesive over time. Counterintuitively, as the Vietnam War progressed, the American frontline force weakened. In 1966, remembered Paul Gorman, the battalion he commanded had fourteen senior sergeants who had been in the unit for more than ten years, all of them trained by a legendary sergeant major who had landed at Normandy with the Big Red One. By contrast, he said, five years later, when he was commanding a brigade in the 101st Airborne, good sergeants who could provide the backbone of units, especially by maintaining standards and enforcing discipline, were hard to find. "I didn't have the NCOs [non-commissioned officers]. The NCOs were gone." By 1969, draftees made up 88 percent of the infantry riflemen in Vietnam. Another 10 percent was made up of first term volunteers, meaning that the fighting force was almost entirely inexperienced and often led by novice first term NCOs and officers. In one company in 1970, of two hundred men, only three—the captain, one platoon sergeant, and one squad leader—had been in the Army for more than two years. In addition, because of the rotation policy, units not only arrived green but stayed that way. "After only two months in Vietnam, I had more experience than half the men in Vietnam," recalled one sergeant. There were plenty of career soldiers in Vietnam, but they disproportionately served at higher headquarters, not in line units doing the fighting.”

Published: Nov 28, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,533 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: A Visit to Havana

Longreads Pick

(Subscribe to Longreads to receive this and other weekly exclusives.) This week, we're proud to feature a  Member Exclusive from Alma Guillermoprieto and The New York Review of Books. Born in Mexico City, Guillermoprieto has covered Latin America for NYRB since 1994, and she has also written for The New Yorker, The Guardian and the Washington Post. Her books include Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution and Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America, which includes the below story, "A Visit to Havana," about her return to Cuba for Pope John Paul II’s arrival in 1998.

Published: Mar 26, 1998
Length: 35 minutes (8,874 words)

Longreads Member Exclusive: The Creature Beyond the Mountains

Longreads Pick

(Subscribe to Longreads to receive this and other weekly exclusives.) A look at the giant sturgeon in the Pacific Northwest—one, named Herman, weighs nearly 500 pounds—and about our relationship with them. Doyle is editor of Portland Magazine and writes frequently for Orion‘s print edition and blog. His piece won the John Burroughs Award and was listed as “Notable” by both Best Science and Nature Writing 2012 and Best American Essays 2012.

“There are fish in the rivers of Cascadia that are bigger and heavier than the biggest bears. To haul these fish out of the Columbia River, men once used horses and oxen. These creatures are so enormous and so protected by bony armor that no one picks on them, so they grow to be more than a hundred years old, maybe two hundred years old; no one knows. Sometimes in winter they gather in immense roiling balls in the river, maybe for heat, maybe for town meetings, maybe for wild sex; no one knows. A ball of more than sixty thousand of them recently rolled up against the bottom of a dam in the Columbia, causing a nervous United States Army Corps of Engineers to send a small submarine down to check on the dam. They eat fish, clams, rocks, fishing reels, shoes, snails, beer bottles, lamprey, eggs, insects, fishing lures, cannonballs, cats, ducks, crabs, basketballs, squirrels, and many younger members of their species; essentially they eat whatever they want. People have fished for them using whole chickens as bait, with hooks the size of your hand.”

Source: Orion Magazine
Published: Jan 1, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,250 words)

Researchers are studying the residents of the island of Ikaria to figure out why so many of them live well into their 90s and beyond:

Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the Ikaria Study, which includes a survey of the diet of 673 Ikarians. She found that her subjects consumed about six times as many beans a day as Americans, ate fish twice a week and meat five times a month, drank on average two to three cups of coffee a day and took in about a quarter as much refined sugar — the elderly did not like soda. She also discovered they were consuming high levels of olive oil along with two to four glasses of wine a day.

Chrysohoou also suspected that Ikarians’ sleep and sex habits might have something to do with their long life. She cited a 2008 paper by the University of Athens Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health that studied more than 23,000 Greek adults. The researchers followed subjects for an average of six years, measuring their diets, physical activity and how much they napped. They found that occasional napping was associated with a 12 percent reduction in the risk of coronary heart disease, but that regular napping — at least three days weekly — was associated with a 37 percent reduction. She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100 that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly, and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with ‘good duration’ and ‘achievement.’

“The Island Where People Forget to Die.” — Dan Buettner, New York Times Magazine

Andres’ Story

Longreads Pick

A man terminally ill with cancer and his friendship with a hospice worker:

“Andres was in his brother’s living room on the Northside last August as he told his story. A small group of family and friends was his audience. No one flinched as he covered the tougher parts – everyone there knew the story. When he finished, though, he turned toward an empty spot in the room and said something that made the room go silent.

“‘There’s just one thing I can’t understand,’ he said. ‘They can fix all these people. But they can’t fix me.’

“Kelly Racine broke the silence. She is a psychosocial specialist with Community Hospice who was on one of her weekly visits to see Andres. Hearing him talk about things that can’t be explained, she asked him what he had decided to do despite the incurable disease. His eyebrows lifted.

“‘Make people laugh,’ he said.

“‘And what is your word?’ she said.

“‘Survive,’ he said, and his mood brightened a little.”

Published: Sep 29, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,775 words)

My So-Called Ex-Gay Life

Longreads Pick

One man’s personal account of going through “ex-gay” therapy as a teen—and how the movements associated with such practices have fallen apart:

“After our initial meeting, I spoke with Nicolosi weekly by phone for more than three years, from the time I was 14 until I graduated high school. Like a rabbi instructing his student in understanding the Torah, Nicolosi encouraged me to interpret my daily life through the lens of his theories. I read in one of Nicolosi’s books, Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, that he tries to position himself as a supportive father figure, typifying the sort of relationship that he believes his patients never had with their own father. I indeed came to see him this way.

“We mostly talked about how my damaged masculine identity manifested itself in my attractions to other boys. Nicolosi would ask me about my crushes at school and what I liked about them. Whether the trait was someone’s build, good looks, popularity, or confidence, these conversations always ended with a redirect: Did I wish I had these traits? What might it feel like to be hugged by one of these guys? Did I want them to like and accept me?”

Published: Apr 12, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,652 words)