Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS app.
‘Music Is a Mirror of What We’re Going Through, Not the Cause of What We’re Going Through. It’s a Reaction, It’s Our Only Weapon, It’s Our Only Way to Protect Ourselves, It’s Our Only Way to Fit, It’s Our Only Way to Get There.’
Before rap music, New York might as well have been:
Paris
Africa
Australia
A thousand miles away from a thirteen-year-old Ice Cube
* * *
Once upon a time, the name Ice Cube was analogous to explicit lyrics, guns, women as “bitches,” South Central, and attitude. Bad attitude. Not to mention mind-blowing rap music wrapped in raw emotions. But those were Ice Cube’s teen years, before he married Kimberly Jackson, became father to four kids, and turned into a true Hollywood player. A legend long before he turned thirty, Ice Cube, together with his fellow N.W.A. members, revolutionized not only the rap/ hiphop genre, but all music, by making it OK for musicians to speak their minds and then some.
But Chapo’s greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be a water faucet outside the home of a cartel attorney in the border town of Agua Prieta was in fact a secret lever that, when twisted, activated a hydraulic system that opened a hidden trapdoor underneath a pool table inside the house. The passage ran more than 200 feet, directly beneath the fortifications along the border, and emerged inside a warehouse the cartel owned in Douglas, Ariz. Chapo pronounced it “cool.”
When this new route was complete, Chapo instructed Martínez to call the Colombians. “Tell them to send all the drugs they can,” he said. As the deliveries multiplied, Sinaloa acquired a reputation for the miraculous speed with which it could push inventory across the border. “Before the planes were arriving back in Colombia on the return, the cocaine was already in Los Angeles,” Martínez marveled.
Eventually the tunnel was discovered, so Chapo shifted tactics once again, this time by going into the chili-pepper business. He opened a cannery in Guadalajara and began producing thousands of cans stamped “Comadre Jalapeños,” stuffing them with cocaine, then vacuum-sealing them and shipping them to Mexican-owned grocery stores in California. He sent drugs in the refrigeration units of tractor-trailers, in custom-made cavities in the bodies of cars and in truckloads of fish (which inspectors at a sweltering checkpoint might not want to detain for long). He sent drugs across the border on freight trains, to cartel warehouses in Los Angeles and Chicago, where rail spurs let the cars roll directly inside to unload. He sent drugs via FedEx.
But that tunnel into Douglas remains Chapo’s masterpiece, an emblem of his creative ingenuity. Twenty years on, the cartels are still burrowing under the border — more than a hundred tunnels have been discovered in the years since Chapo’s first. They are often ventilated and air-conditioned, and some feature trolley lines stretching up to a half-mile to accommodate the tonnage in transit.
Higher education is a hot topic because it’s so familiar and so easy to criticize. Even if you haven’t gone to college, you get what it’s about. And the complaints – about tuition, about culture, about curriculum – happen on campus, too, and louder. Here are six articles that prompted discussions inside the Ivory Tower this week.
Before the 1990s hosting was usually a low-key affair. Los Angeles was the only bidder for the 1984 Olympics. It funded its games almost entirely with private money, as largely did Atlanta in 1996. Most football World Cups were played in scarcely renovated older stadiums.
But globalisation and new television channels showing sport changed that. Each new host raised the bar, with spiffy new sporting facilities. Politicians, needing to justify the rising cost, claimed that hosting would boost the economy. They invoked hordes of shopaholic visitors, the free advertising of host cities and the long-term benefits of the roads and stadiums that would be built. When Tokyo was named host of the 2020 Olympics, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, said: “I want to make the Olympics a trigger for sweeping away 15 years of deflation and economic decline.”
Yet these claims of economic bonanza are false. Most economists agree that hosting big sporting events is an economic strain, says Stefan Szymanski, economics professor at the University of Michigan, with whom I have co-authored a book.
This is largely because the things a country buys for a sports tournament – stadiums, roads to the stadiums, extensive security – are rarely the things it needs for daily life. Often the venues become white elephants the moment the tournament ends. That happened in South Africa after the World Cup of 2010, and is forecast to happen to many Brazilian stadiums after this year’s tournament. London’s Olympic stadium eventually found a tenant, West Ham United Football Club, but the state is paying most of the costs of revamping the venue.
This year we featured not only the best stories from the web, but also great chapters from new and classic books. Here’s a complete guide to every book chapter we featured this year, both for free and for Longreads Members: Read more…
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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