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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Deadspin, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Financial Times, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Megan Hess.
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Deadspin, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Financial Times, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Megan Hess.
Cosmopolitan magazine is often spurned as “mindless,” but it has also grown into 64 editions worldwide, and a readership of 100 million teens and young women in more than 100 nations—including those “where any discussion of sex is taboo”:
Akisheva, the editor in Kazakhstan, told me that until recently, she received a handwritten note from Brown after the publication of each issue. ‘Our readers might not be very familiar with Helen Gurley Brown’s books and biography,’ she said, ‘but they surely are influenced by her original ideas. Because this is what Cosmo keeps telling them: You are strong, you can control your life, you can earn as much as men do and you can have sex before marriage and not be condemned by society.’
But what about the other stuff that Cosmo is telling them? One morning at Cosmic, a panel discussion included talk of some favorite Cosmo topics: sex toys (said to produce ‘the most incredible combinations of orgasms’), how to help men get erections more quickly and anal sex (‘backdoor booty’ as the magazine has called it). One panelist, a young Spanish woman, said that she teases her boyfriend with anal sex and then, jokingly, that she has to save something for marriage. The crowd roared. ‘Only at Cosmo,’ said the editor of Cosmo Australia, Bronwyn McCahon, between bites of miniature muffins and sliced melon, ‘will you be talking about anal sex at 10 a.m.’
“99 Ways to Be Naughty in Kazakhstan.” — Edith Zimmerman, New York Times Magazine
How the down-on-its-luck city ended up becoming a stronghold for the Occupy movement—and whether the radicals will stick around when gentrification takes hold:
Their small capitalist enterprise — named to evoke the famous anti-capitalist tract — represents another side of Oakland, albeit one that’s still in its infancy. Think of it as a less twee, more D.I.Y. version of artisanal Brooklyn. Oakland even has its own take on the Brooklyn Flea, known as the Art Murmur, a sprawling hipster street fair, cultural bazaar and gallery-and-pub-crawl. At the Flea, you can buy refurbished manual typewriters; at the Murmur, you can buy Sharpie-on-foam-cup drawings by a local artist.
The collision between Oakland’s growing cadre of small-business owners and the local Occupy movement has produced some memorable moments of low comedy. In November, 30-year-old Alanna Rayford, who owns a showroom for local fashion designers in a Gothic Revival building downtown, closed up shop to join the march to the port. She returned the following morning to find the windows of her store smashed and some artwork missing. One of the paintings, a gorilla smoking a blunt, had been placed on prominent display at the entrance to the Occupy encampment.
“Oakland, the Last Refuge of Radical America.” — Jonathan Mahler, New York Times Magazine
A look at the rights of same-sex parents after a mother abducts her daughter and heads to Nicaragua after a civil union dissolves:
Isabella’s tumultuous life has embodied some of America’s bitterest culture wars — a choice, as Ms. Miller said in a courtroom plea, shortly before their desperate flight, ‘between two diametrically opposed worldviews on parentage and family.’
Isabella was 7 when she and Ms. Miller jumped into a car in Virginia, leaving behind their belongings and a family of pet hamsters to die without food or water. Supporters drove them to Buffalo, where they took a taxi to Canada and boarded a flight to Mexico and then Central America.
Ms. Miller, 44, is wanted by the F.B.I. and Interpol for international parental kidnapping. In their underground existence in this impoverished tropical country, she and Isabella have been helped by evangelical groups who endorse her decision to flee rather than to expose Isabella to the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ of her other legal mother, Janet Jenkins.
What Estonia can teach us about economic recovery—and how The country’s leaders got into a fight with New York Times columnist Paul Krugnan:
On June 6, in a blog post titled ‘Estonian Rhapsody,’ Krugman took on what he called ‘the poster child for austerity defenders.’ In his post, he graphed real GDP from the height of the boom to the first quarter of this year to show that, even after a recovery, Estonia’s economy is still almost 10 percent below its peak in 2007. ‘This,’ he wrote, ‘is what passes for economic triumph?’
‘It was like an attack on Estonian people,’ says Palmik, in an office above his plant, surrounded by blueprints for his new production line. ‘These times have been very difficult. People have kept together. And this Krugman took all these facts that he wanted.’
“Krugmenistan vs. Estonia.” — Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek
Greg Ousley murdered his parents when he was 14, and is now serving a 60-year sentence. A look at the debate over how we should punish minors for committing violent crimes:
Today there are well more than 2,500 juveniles serving time in adult prisons in the United States — enough, in Indiana’s case, to fill a dedicated Y.I.A. (Youth Incarcerated as Adults) wing at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. The United States is the only Western nation to routinely convict minors as adults, and the practice has set off a growing disquiet even in conservative legal circles. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, and just last month it similarly banned mandatory sentencing of life without parole in juvenile homicide cases.
But in this controversy, Greg Ousley is an unlikely representative for sentencing reform. He is not a 16-year-old doing 20 years for his third drug felony or a 13-year-old who found his father’s loaded handgun and shot a playmate. What he is, or was, is a teenage boy who planned and carried out a crime so unthinkable that to most people it is not just a moral transgression but almost a biological one.
What Estonia can teach us about economic recovery—and how the country’s leaders got into a fight with New York Times columnist Paul Krugnan:
“On June 6, in a blog post titled ‘Estonian Rhapsody,’ Krugman took on what he called ‘the poster child for austerity defenders.’ In his post, he graphed real GDP from the height of the boom to the first quarter of this year to show that, even after a recovery, Estonia’s economy is still almost 10 percent below its peak in 2007. ‘This,’ he wrote, ‘is what passes for economic triumph?’
“‘It was like an attack on Estonian people,’ says Palmik, in an office above his plant, surrounded by blueprints for his new production line. ‘These times have been very difficult. People have kept together. And this Krugman took all these facts that he wanted.'”
On the role of nannies in a child’s upbringing, and the complications (emotional and financial) and joy that come with it:
Seeing Michele Asselin’s portraits, I remember the heightened sensitivity of my first months as a parent. The pictures are beautiful and idealized. The women look at the children with love. No one looks frustrated. No one looks bored. No child is having a meltdown. They conjure the dome of tender air that encloses a mother, whose body is coursing with hormones, and a newborn.
But these moments of private contentment, with the serenity and depth borrowed from the portraiture legacy of the Madonna and child, do not depict mothers with their infants. The women holding the children are nannies. Part of what’s striking about the pictures is that they position front and center a person who is often left on the editing-room floor when a family’s memories are being assembled. Nannies have told me that their employers crop them out of photographs of their children. On the wall of a West Los Angeles home, I noticed a blown-up photo of a baby in a pretty white dress, held by a pair of hands of a darker color. In her photos, Asselin captures a radiance between caregivers and children, often of different races.
“Love, Money and Other People’s Children.” — Mona Simpson, New York Times Magazine
After a Leukemia doctor and researcher develops the disease himself, he finds an effective treatment when his colleagues sequence his cancer genome:
Dr. Wartman’s doctors realized then that their last best hope for saving him was to use all the genetic know-how and technology at their disposal.
After their month of frantic work to beat cancer’s relentless clock, the group, led by Richard Wilson and Elaine Mardis, directors of the university’s genome institute, had the data. It was Aug. 31.
The cancer’s DNA had, as expected, many mutations, but there was nothing to be done about them. There were no drugs to attack them.
But the other analysis, of the cancer’s RNA, was different. There was something there, something unexpected.
“Genetic Gamble: New Approaches to Fighting Cancer.” — A three-part series by The New York Times on the new frontier of cancer treatment.
• Part One: “In Treatment for Leukemia, Glimpses of the Future”
• Part Two: “A New Treatment’s Tantalizing Promise Brings Heartbreaking Ups and Downs”
• Part Three: “A Life-Death Predictor Adds to a Cancer’s Strain”
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