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Two-And-a-Half Minutes to Midnight: Our Fear of Nukes and How We Got Here

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

 

Elizabeth King | Longreads | June 2017 | 10 minutes (2645 words)

 

Bug-out bags, self-designed evacuation plans, stockpiles in the garage. Most Americans born in or after the 1970s have probably never thought much about these items. But ever since the Doomsday Clock, which measures how close the world is to a major anthropogenic disaster, was introduced after World War II, the public has kept a nervous eye on the likelihood of nuclear wars. With the cable news cycle’s predictable turn toward semi-obsessive coverage of North Korea and President Trump’s responses to the small nation’s nuclear program, fear has become a fixture in many households. Understandably so, as the Doomsday Clock now indicates the world is the closest it has been to disaster since 1953.

The urge to protect ourselves and control our fate is natural, but there’s no need to let nuclear angst run our lives. Through thoughtful examination of our nation’s history with nuclear weapons and the anxiety they bring, we can better understand these fears and work to address them.

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Where Have All The White House Press Briefings Gone?

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The Trump administration’s combative relationship with the media is no secret, and the president’s supporters have happily rallied behind his purported distaste for the Fourth Estate — apparently not caring that, though he tweets angrily about the New York Times, his first call on issues is often to Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

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To Win in Georgia, Ignore the Data and Follow the Signs

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

A few days ago, a colleague encouraged me to check out the donation page of Jon Ossoff, the 30-year-old Democratic candidate for Georgia’s 6th district. The graphics were simple and clear, the Apple Pay checkout appeared to be smooth, the increments of pay accessible to all. It was a slick operation. “But whatever you do, DON’T sign up for the emails,” he warned. “I get, like twelve a day.” Read more…

My Father’s Adventure Was My Terror

Diana Whitney | Longreads | June 2017 | 8 minutes (2,009 words)

 

Afterward, I wondered whether my father understood there was danger at the Afghan border. He thrived on adventure, had joined the Merchant Marine at age 16 and later driven his blue Alfa Romeo across Europe and a battered VW bus through the Serengeti. He was famous for making ill-considered decisions and delighted in emerging untouched from disaster. When I was a baby in England, he’d taken my mother out in a tiny sailboat and nearly capsized in a storm off the Cornish coast.

My father brought me with him to Pakistan in 1987, when I was 13, deeming me old enough to experience the developing world. He dashed off to his World Bank meetings while I sunbathed poolside in a raspberry colored tank-suit, sipping fizzy lemonade at our gated hotel. If I raised a hand, a silent waiter brought me sweet-and-sour chicken. Deep in my teenage cocoon, I listened to Madonna on my Walkman, applied Coppertone oil SPF 2, and spoke to no one. By the third day I had a sunburn and cried myself to sleep slathered in aloe.

It feels important that I’m the only one left who knows the bomb story. My dad is dead and my mom has dementia and can’t remember or articulate the past. Now the keepers of my childhood are gone, all I have is my own chinked memory, with imaginative caulking to fill in the gaps.

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Philippe Petit Reflects on a Lifetime of Fear

Philippe Petit at the World Trade Center in 1986. (Photo by Dan Brinzac / NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images)

Fear is as much of a medium for Philippe Petit as is balance, poise, and control in his high wire act. In his death-defying walks across the Grand Canyon and between the World Trade Center towers, Petit bent fear to his will. At Lapham’s Quarterly, Petit reflects on what a lifetime of fear has meant to his art, and how he has faced fear on the wire and off.

Before my high-wire walk across the Seine to the second story of the Eiffel Tower, the seven-hundred-yard-long inclined cable looked so steep, the shadow of fear so real, I worried. Had there been an error in rigging calculations? No. I had just forgotten how high were my expectations, how mad I was to have conceived such a project. On the spot I vanquished my anxiety by imagining the best outcome: my victorious last step above a cheering crowd of 250,000.

If imagination does not work, turn to the physical side of things. Give yourself a time-limit ultimatum: start counting! Yes, choose a number—not too high—and when you hear footsteps on your porch at three am, unfreeze your trepidation by whispering to yourself, “At ten, I open the door! One, two, three, four…”

A clever tool in the arsenal to destroy fear: if a nightmare taps you on the shoulder, do not turn around immediately expecting to be scared. Pause and expect more, exaggerate. Be ready to be very afraid, to scream in terror. The more delirious your expectation, the safer you will be when you see that reality is much less horrifying than what you had envisioned. Now turn around. See? It was not that bad—and you’re already smiling.

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My Father’s Weakness for Beer Never Lessened His Strengths

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Pauline Campos | Longreads | June 2017 | 9 minutes (2,131 words)

 

By the time I was eight, I knew how to pour the contents of a beer can into a travel mug without foam. I used to joke that this is why I later became a kickass bartender and waitress in my college days, a side-benefit of being the daughter of an alcoholic.

My father was a high-functioning alcoholic. He never missed a day of work due to drinking, and gave it up every Lenten season as easily and selflessly as Jesus himself had given his body and his blood for the sins of every Catholic.

No one ever questioned why he kept going back to it, if he obviously had the willpower to stay dry for 40 days and 40 nights. It would only have been considered staying “dry” if he were officially an alcoholic trying to not drink, and that was not something he or anyone around him ever acknowledged. When he was alive, those words were never spoken. No one was in denial, I don’t think. They knew he was an alcoholic, but they didn’t see it as quite a problem, and he did his best not to make it one. They probably figured, why try to fix what wasn’t exactly broken?

My father was larger than life to me, even after I hit my adult height of 5’6’’ and we stood eye to eye. He was stocky and strong; he was built like a bulldog and walked with the cocky self-assurance that is the birthright of every Latino male. I’ve been told I walk like him, and when I hear these words, comparing my stride and carriage to that of my father’s, I beam with a ridiculous level of pride. His astrological sign was the lion, the Leo; king of the jungle and his world, just like his father, just like the man I married, though I’d sworn I would marry someone who didn’t remind me so much of my father. Although I married another Leo, my husband is a man who rarely drinks. Still, I’ve never judged my father for his drinking. My dad was the strongest man I have ever known; the craving for beer was just his achilles heel. Every superhero has a weakness.

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Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate for a Nation Divided

(AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

The Library of Congress announced on Wednesday that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith will be the nation’s 22nd poet laureate, commencing her one-year term in the fall.

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David Brown’s Quiet Resilience

(Photo by Stewart F. House/Getty Images)

David Gambacorta | Longreads | June 2017 | 15 minutes (3,755 words)

David Brown was a few months into his tenure as the head of the Dallas Police Department when his cell phone started to hum on a Sunday morning.

He’d been on the job long enough to know the drill: At any given moment, a phone call could be the harbinger of an administrative headache, a tactical crisis, or some gut-wrenching tragedy. But he resisted the reflexive urge to answer.

Brown was standing in a pew at the Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship Church. A low-slung building with a sharply pitched roof, the church and its weekly service was his temporary refuge from a chaotic world. He actually considered turning away from his faith once, when he was a younger man and inconsolable over the murder of a former partner, a blow that nearly drove him to quit the police force altogether.

But Brown came to understand loss, the way it coursed through and connected everyone around him like an unseen river. Such lessons had been present in his life from an early age. Brown was born at Parkland Memorial Hospital in 1960, three years before a team of trauma doctors there tried in vain to revive President John F. Kennedy after an assassin’s bullet had exploded through his skull. The very place that had given Brown life became synonymous with the death of a country’s tenuous sense of innocence.

He checked his phone when he left the Sunday service. It was hot outside; the temperature would touch 100 degrees that day. A voice message from the chief of a small-town police department 16 miles outside of Dallas was waiting. It was about Brown’s 27-year-old son, D.J., who suffered from adult-onset bipolar disorder.

D.J.’s behavior had turned erratic that morning, prompting his girlfriend to call 911. But everything was fine now, the chief calmly assured Brown. He tried to get in touch with D.J., but thought better of rushing to him; maybe his son just needed some time to cool down. A few hours later, Brown’s phone started rattling again. This time, it was a no-nonsense detective who took his breath away with just a few words: D.J. was dead.

He’d shot and killed an innocent passerby and a local police officer, the detective explained, and then engaged in a shootout with other cops. D.J. was cut down by police gunfire. The news hit Brown like a sledgehammer to the spine.

It was June 20, 2010. Father’s Day.

The grief could have broken a lesser man, could have swallowed him whole. But Brown clung to his faith, and he somehow endured. What he didn’t know then was that more sorrow was waiting for him down the road, the kind that would draw the world’s attention to Dallas like it was 1963 all over again. And Brown, a quiet, contemplative man who never imagined he’d be a police chief, would emerge from all of the darkness as the embodiment of grace—and the unlikely face of law enforcement in America. Read more…

Pulse Nightclub Was My Home

Photo by Chris O'Meara/AP Images

Edgar Gomez | Longreads | June 2017 | 34 minutes (8,473 words)

It was Christmas Day in Orlando, just over six months after the Pulse Nightclub shooting, and my brother, Marco, and I drove through eerie, empty streets looking for anywhere open to eat. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed for the holiday, but still the city celebrated. Flashing neon lights framed a deli window where a mechanical display Santa waved us by with automated merriness. A swarm of inflatable reindeer grazed outside a “New York style” Chinese restaurant. Palm trees dressed as candy canes wrapped with red and white tinsel lined the sides of the road ahead. We were back in town to spend the holiday with our mother, who unexpectedly had to take off to Mexico the night before for a funeral, leaving Marco and me alone and scrambling to make conversation. He’d driven up from Miami. I’d flown in from California. We opted to listen to music instead. Marco steered with his knees, scrolling through playlists on his phone with one hand and smoking a cigarette with his other. He landed on a country song I’d never heard of before. I leaned out my window, away from his smoke, breathing in the spectacle of Christmas in Florida.

This was not my home anymore. I had moved to California in September, just two months earlier, but already the streets outside looked alien, every other light pole crowned with a flimsy-looking evergreen. Elves in swimming trunks were piled in sale bins outside of The Dollar General. I noticed that Marco’s seatbelt was unbuckled. If he were a friend, I would have lectured him about the dangers of driving recklessly, but because he was Marco, I left it alone. At 27, he was only three years older than me, though it was a wide enough age gap that any attempt to talk to each other was clumsy and forced.

When I asked him if he thought I dyed my hair too dark since he last saw me, he asked, “What’s the difference?” I was blond before. My new hair was black. He offered me a cigarette by tapping the carton on his thigh and flicking the lid open under my nose. I shook my head no and went back to staring out of the window, satisfied that we had at least tried to talk. I suggested Anthony’s Pizza, the place downtown with the newly minted mural featuring a flock of 49 doves of assorted colors representing the Pulse victims. No, he said.

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We Need to Talk About Uber: A Timeline of the Company’s Growing List of Problems

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (Photo by Wang K'aichicn/VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

In a piece for the Financial Times titled “Fire Travis Kalanick,” Kadhim Shubber wrote of the founder of Uber: “One day we will look back at what will hopefully be the smouldering wreckage of Kalanick’s career and ask how a person so lacking in basic human and corporate ethics was allowed to run a company for so long.”

Founded in 2009, Uber was able to portray itself as an underdog “disruptor” into 2012, galvanizing support to beat back city lawmakers in Boston and Washington, D.C. who sought to impose regulations.

But then their practice of surge pricing during crises came under fire when ride prices doubled in New York City after Hurricane Sandy devastated the metropolis in 2012. When surge pricing reached nearly eight times the fare during a snowstorm in 2013, riders got angry.

At first, few reporters took to criticizing the company. When they did, Uber’s public relations machine responded by trashing those reporters in other outlets. When reports of assaults and misconduct by Uber drivers started to roll in, the company responded by claiming they were not responsible for the incidents because the drivers are “independent contractors.”

And since 2013, the missteps and scandals have only continued to pile up. Here is a not comprehensive timeline of all of the trouble Uber has gotten into to date:

January 2014: Pando reported that an Uber driver suspended after assaulting a passenger in San Francisco had a criminal record, including a felony conviction involving prison time. Uber has no explanation for why the driver cleared the background checks that California mandated they run. That same month, outlets nationwide report on the company getting hit with its first wrongful death suit stemming from a driver killing a 6-year-old girl in a San Francisco crash on New Year’s Eve. That driver also had a criminal record that included a conviction for reckless driving. Read more…