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Age Appropriate

igorr1 / Getty, James Woodson / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jen Doll | Longreads | September 2018 | 20 minutes (4941 words)

In the summer of 2017, when I was 41 years old, I temporarily lost my parents. This is both less and more dramatic than it sounds. On August 1st, the start of the Long Island beach house rental I’d arranged for the month, I got into a car with my mom and dad, who’d helpfully flown up from Florida to join me for the initial stage of this retreat after I realized I hadn’t driven since I was a teenager, and I wasn’t going to start trying again on the Long Island Expressway.

After we loaded the rental car and I dutifully fastened my seatbelt in the backseat, assuming the position of so many family road trips past, I realized I hadn’t mailed my maintenance for my Brooklyn apartment. “Hang on — I’ll be right back!” I yelled, grabbing the envelope with the check in it and dashing across the street toward a mailbox. My dad waited at the side of the road, but then came a surge of traffic, and then a cop, and he had to drive on. “Noooooooo!” I yelled, chasing after the rental car (what kind was it anyway? I had no idea!) in the heat, knowing even as I did my perfunctory sad jog that there was no way I’d catch up.

I had no phone, no purse, no keys, no way to communicate with them other than to send mental signals: I will be right here waiting for you, a Richard Marx song on repeat. When you lose someone, stay put!, I remembered, a lesson imparted at various times during my childhood. So I waited. And waited. Finally, I saw the rental car heading back in my direction. No need to know the make or model when Mom was leaning out of the passenger side window, waving in the wind, shouting my name at the top of her lungs. They’d found me.

It was not the most auspicious beginning to our trip, and I felt relief and embarrassment in equal measures. I was, by all accounts, an adult. Yet I was never really a grown-up, particularly not when my parents were around.
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A Thereness Beneath the Thereness: A Jonathan Gold Reading List

Jonathan Gold poses for a portrait during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)

For the past four decades, Jonathan Gold tirelessly catalogued the ebb and flow of cuisine in Los Angeles, and in the process, became known as the “food writing poet” of the city. That poet, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this past month, died last week at the age of 57. In his New York Times obituary Ruth Reichl, who published Gold in Gourmet magazine, said of the writer-critic,

Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely. He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.

According to David Chang, no one knew more about Korean cuisine than Gold, and the critic, whose career began as a music journalist, became the foremost expert on the various regions of the world. Some opine his speciality was Mexican and Central American cooking, having eaten at every pupuseria, taco stand, and restaurant along the 15.5 mile stretch of Pico Boulevard. But really, Gold’s expertise wasn’t limited by borders. Read more…

The Good Guys Aren’t Always the Good Guys

Sadly, this issue is not a new one. Here, survivors of sexual violence, women’s rights advocates, students, jail reform advocates, transgender and gender non-conforming advocates, abolitionist organizers, and other community members and leaders rally on the steps of City Hall in New York on July 26, 2016 to call attention to the crisis of rape on Rikers Island. (Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press)

At the women’s jail on Rikers Island, nicknamed “Rosie’s,” the lines separating criminals from victims from protectors are fungible: as John H. Tucker points out in his New York Magazine investigation into rape at Rikers, “about 50 of the 800 women housed at Rosie’s at any one time are being sexually victimized by staff,” leaving the women to try and look out for one another as best they can.

Any sex between an inmate and a guard, including so-called willing contact, is classified as victimization under federal rules, and under New York State law, it’s statutory rape. Darcell Marshall — who is for the first time telling her story, after anonymously suing the city and the guard she says assaulted her — had both consensual and nonconsensual experiences in the jail. Which in some ways isn’t a surprise: She arrived at Rikers having already spent years being sexually abused and bartering her body to get by. In the words of Dori Lewis, a supervising attorney for the Prisoner’s Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, she was among the many Rosie’s inmates who “suffer an extraordinarily high incidence of trauma before entering jail” only to get locked up “and once again be subject to men taking advantage of their positions of power.”

This is precisely how Darcell Marshall’s abuse at the hands of Corrections Officer Santiago started: a woman who’d spent her teen years being pimped out, and an officer who knew that full well, and knew he had leverage.

“Your hair is so long and pretty. Your skin is smooth like chocolate — I love chocolate.” He told her he liked her lips. Then he said, “I’d like to see how they look wrapped around my dick,” according to Marshall’s deposition.

She was startled. Is he serious? Is this a setup by the prosecutor?

“What can you do for me?” she asked coyly, noting she needed commissary money for soap and deodorant.

“I’ll let you know,” Santiago replied.

Even if she were somehow being framed, Marshall wasn’t going to pass up the chance to get some things she needed. She’d gotten the standard-issue kit — a toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap with lye, which “burns your private parts up,” as one former Rosie’s inmate described it — but she had to depend on her commissary account for anything else. (That can include sanitary pads or tampons, access to which is controlled by guards who’ve reportedly rationed the supplies as a form of intimidation or punishment.) Inmates who don’t have friends or relatives to fund their commissary accounts, never mind to visit them, “have to hustle,” Marshall says, “like you’re on the street.”

Later that week, with most of the jail sound asleep, Marshall awoke to the pop of her cell door. Standing there was Santiago.

“You ready?” she remembers him saying. “I got the money.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

David Pollack / Corbis via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Ben Blum, Reeves Wiedeman, Mizuho Aoki, Amy Wright, and Sarah Scoles.

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A Vor Never Sleeps

Garrett M. Graff | Longreads | June 2018 | 20 minutes (5,086 words)

Razhden Shulaya maintained a diverse business empire, like a Warren Buffet of crime. By age 40, from his base in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he had a cigarette smuggling operation, a drug ring, a counterfeit credit card scheme, an extortion racket, an illegal gambling establishment, and teams devoted to hacking slot machines. According to prosecutors who have been building a case against him, Shulaya’s associates provided gun-running, kidnap-for-hire, and the fencing of stolen jewelry. Plans were in place for what authorities came to call the “romance scam”: use an attractive woman to lure a target down to Atlantic City, knock him out with chloroform, and steal his money. They’d take his Rolex, too.

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More than Make-Work

Jobs Guarantee
Illustration by Lily Padula

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,366 words)

In the past several weeks, a flurry of U.S. Senators have come out in support of a federal jobs guarantee. Bernie Sanders announced that his office will propose a plan; Cory Booker filed legislation for a pilot program with Jeff Merkley, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren as cosponsors. “Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work, and by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all workers,” Booker said.

The idea—that the government should provide a job for anyone who wants one—is both radical and impressively well-liked. A recent study found that 52 percent of Americans support it, compared with just 29 percent who say they’re opposed. David Shor, a senior data scientist at Civis Analytics, which conducted the research, told The Nation, “This is one of the most popular issues we’ve ever polled.”

That’s not all that surprising. Americans overwhelmingly believe that everyone who can work should work, and the obvious corollary is that everyone who wants to work should be able to find a job. In its broadest form, this premise appeals across the political spectrum, not just to liberals who want to raise wages and improve labor’s bargaining power. A Trump supporter I met while covering the 2016 New Hampshire primary, a guy deeply convinced that the country is being ruined by lazy moochers, told me, “If you can work, maybe we need to put you to work in government offices or something.” Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Uber drivers strike
(Photo by Richard Levine/Corbis via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jessica Bruder, Garrett M. Graff, Suleika Jaouad, Gulnaz Saiyed, and Daniel Riley.

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Man vs. Gig: Doug Schifter’s Last Stand

Drivers protest Uber X and Lyft in Philadelphia, PA. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

In a devastating profile in New York Magazine, Jessica Bruder tells the story of Doug Schifter, a New York City black-car driver who saw Uber’s disruption of the taxi industry decimate his income. After trying to organize drivers to seek stronger regulations — and suffering a string of health issues that ate up what savings he had — he made one last statement: he shot himself outside City Hall. Bruder’s piece is both an important look at a dysfunctional industry and a master class in profile writing.

But at the press conference about Schifter’s suicide, Mayor Bill de Blasio downplayed Schifter’s parting explanation. “Let’s face it,” he told reporters. “For someone to commit suicide, there’s an underlying mental-health challenge.” De Blasio was hardly in a position to diagnose Schifter. There was, in fact, no evidence that Schifter was mentally ill — just a long written record, published over the course of three years in Black Car News, that underscored how the upheaval in the taxi industry had left him physically impaired, financially desperate, and emotionally devastated. De Blasio himself had done little to rein in Uber, backing down on a cap he had proposed placing on app-driven services. “I heard you were going to end the cruelty to the Central Park horses,” Schifter had addressed de Blasio in one of his columns. “How about ending the government’s cruelty to us?”

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The Apology Tour

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jonny Auping | Longreads | April 2018| 12 minutes (3,043 words)

As I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror of a Mexican restaurant, I realized I didn’t want to go back to the table. I didn’t want to follow through with my plans. I splashed a bit of water on my face and tried to give myself a pep talk, but nothing helped. It was all just too painfully awkward.

I was at the restaurant to apologize to Chris, a regular of mine when I used to serve tables a few years back, who I had befriended and stayed in touch with. He didn’t know I was planning to apologize — or even what I’d done in the first place — so if I wanted to go the cowardly route, I could get away with it.

I thought about that when I’d pulled up outside of his apartment and opened the back of my SUV so that his guide dog, Westin, could hop in. I thought about it as I helped lead Chris from the parking lot to our table. I thought about it as I avoided making eye contact with myself in the bathroom mirror. How could I even explain why I was apologizing, anyway?

Let me try right now: We’ve all been in a public place, maybe a grocery store for example, and spotted someone we know before they spotted us. We didn’t feel like talking to them for whatever reason. Maybe we were in a hurry. Maybe we didn’t particularly want to talk to anyone. So we changed directions or walked down another aisle and managed to avoid the interaction altogether. It’s not a particularly nice thing to do — treating someone as if we wished they didn’t occupy the same space as us.

But how do you apologize for that? Worse yet, how do you apologize for walking right past them without saying a word? How do you apologize for using someone’s blindness to avoid interacting with them? How do you begin to fess up for doing that numerous times, months apart?

I reminded myself that this was the right thing to do, that I owed this to my friend, even if he didn’t know it. But I really didn’t want to do it. Soon, the food would be at our table. I could order another beer, tell a couple jokes, listen to his stories and have a great time catching up.

Why ruin that?
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The 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winners

From left, writers Alice Crites, Stephanie McCrummen, Amy Gardner, and Beth Reinhard embrace in the newsroom after The Washington Post wins two Pulitzer Prizes. The Post shared a Pulitzer with the New York Times for their coverage of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and contacts between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian officials and won a second Pulitzer for uncovering the decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct against Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

As expected, the New York Times and The New Yorker dominated much of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize fanfare, and while it is necessary to honor the award-winning reporting undertaken by Jodie Kantor, Meghan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow, some of the most-talked about features from this past year were also celebrated. Including, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, whose in-depth reporting on Dylann Roof for GQ won for feature writing (Ghansah also won a National Magazine Award for this story). And the staff of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which provided a brutal examination of the effects of heroin during a week-long period.

The entire list of the other Pulitzer recipients can be found here, but below is a list of some of the honored works. Read more…