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The Peacemaker: A New Story by Eva Holland and Pacific Standard
Posted by 
Mark Armstrong
Mark Armstrong 
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share early access to a new story by journalist Eva Holland, to be published next week by Pacific Standard.
“The Peacemaker” tells the story of Schaeffer Cox, the 30-year-old activist and founder of the Alaska Peacemakers Militia who was sentenced last year to 26 years in prison for conspiring to kill government officials.
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Editor’s Roundtable: Manufactured to Go Viral (Podcast)
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Longreads
Longreads Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
On our July 26, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Editor-in-Chief Mike Dang, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.
This week, the editors discuss stories in Pacific Standard, The Paris Review, and Topic.
Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.
3:37 “Losing The News.” (Brent Cunningham, July 23, 2019, Pacific Standard)
13:05 “The Crane Wife.” (CJ Hauser, July 16, 2019, The Paris Review)
23:59 “The Teens Who Play Dead to Save Lives.” (Andy Wright, July 2019, Topic)
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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.
Editor’s Roundtable: All Things Being Unequal (Podcast)
Posted by Longreads
Longreads The demonstration tunnel approximately 420 meters underground at Onkalo, a spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland. (Antti Yrjonen/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
On our June 28, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Essays Editor Sari Botton, and Culture Columnist Soraya Roberts share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.
This week, the editors discuss stories in The Cut, Columbia Review of Journalism, The New York Times, Longreads, and Pacific Standard.
Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.
0:46 Hideous Men (E. Jean Carroll, June 21, 2019, The Cut)
Times Public Editor: Ignoring a scoop that’s not your own. (Gabriel Snyder, June 24, 2019, Columbia Journalism Review)
Our Top Editor Revisits How We Handled E. Jean Carroll’s Allegations Against Trump. (Lara Takenaga, June 24, 2019, The New York Times)
“You’ve seen it through a bunch of women who come forward, where people almost police the way they come forward, and how they should be reflecting on their own experience.” Soraya Roberts
The team discusses The Cut’s excerpt of E. Jean Carroll’s new memoir What Do We Need Men For? and the way the media handled coverage of this story. The excerpt revealed some of the instances of sexual assault Carroll experienced in her life, including an allegation that Donald Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
The editors discuss why the New York Times initially buried the story, and how not breaking the story appears to have impacted its coverage. They also question whether where a story is published — in this case, a women’s website — impacts how seriously that story is taken.
11:55 If I Made $4 a Word, This Article Would be Worth $10,000. (Soraya Roberts, June 2019, Longreads)
“All of us are part of an inequitable system. She just happens to be benefiting from it.” – Soraya Roberts
The team discusses issues of compensation, access, and privilege in journalism. Longreads culture columnist Soraya Roberts shares her reaction to systemic inequality in an industry where most seasoned, talented writers are lucky to get $0.50 per word — a small fraction of what a select few of their peers are making. The team questions why Roberts’ attack on a broken system was misinterpreted as an attack on an individual, and weighs the relative benefits of not rocking a media boat that is clearly sinking.
34:55 The Hiding Place: Inside The World’s First Long-term Storage Facility for Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste. (Robert MacFarlane, June 24, 2019, Pacific Standard)
“How can we be good ancestors?” – Catherine Cusick
In Pacific Standard, Robert MacFarlane visits a Finnish nuclear waste site and explores the difficulty of communicating its danger to future generations in today’s languages or symbology.
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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.
Where Were You the First Time You Realized the Government Wasn’t Always On the Ball?
Posted by 
Michelle Weber
Michelle Weber Crews of convicts clean up oil-soaked straw on the beach in Santa Barbara, Calif. (AP Photo/Wally Fong, FILE)
Pacific Standard writer Kate Wheeling and editor Max Ufberg wrangled a comprehensive, meticulous, and fascinating oral history of the 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, that galvanized environmental activism, ultimately leading to the creation of a slew of federal environmental regulations and agencies. The whole read is great—Wheeling and Ufberg pulled in everyone from local activists to oil company lawyers to journalists—but one section on cleanup tactics stands out as both interesting and quaint.
Bottoms: The way they cleaned it up was they brought in straw. Bales and bales of straw.
Hazard: They didn’t have the oil response teams that they have now. We were totally unprepared for it. You know, what were we going to do?
Relis: I thought these oil companies and the federal government had sort of a game plan, but this was a joke. They were throwing straw down on the beach to lap up the oil with pitchforks and hiring people off the street! I mean, this was funky.
Bottoms: And they’d throw the straw out into the harbor too, and they’d take pitchforks and get convicts down there in little barges and lift the straw out of the ocean and drive the straw up the coast to a dump.
Relis: That was kind of eye-opening — that big companies and big government can be so incompetent.
It’s true, kids! Barely more than 40 years ago, government and corporations were assumed to be generally competent and responsible. The times, how they change.
How A Simple Mistake Can Put You on the Street: Why Grandpa is Homeless
Posted by 
Krista Stevens
Krista Stevens Photo by Doug Waldron (CC BY-SA 2.0)
At Pacific Standard, Rachel Nuwer reports on the aging homeless population of California and how something seemingly innocuous — like forgetting to renew your driver’s license on time — can instigate a downward spiral into poverty and homelessness that skyrocketing rent and street-inflicted trauma can extend, sometimes indefinitely.
Life was stable for Herb until 2013, when he “got lazy” and neglected to renew his truck-driver license. He didn’t realize the severity of his error until he applied for a new license but could not pass the written test. Although Herb quickly landed a job as a security guard at a fast-food restaurant, even working overtime didn’t provide enough for him to make ends meet. He fell behind on rent and was evicted.
Herb experienced that unfortunate reality firsthand. Last winter, his car got towed, taking his security-guard uniform and most of his remaining possessions with it. He never got the car back — he didn’t have the funds. Unable to dress for work, he stopped going, and spent the next two months on the streets. He panhandled, flashing his veteran’s ID as he asked for spare change, and was sometimes reduced to eating out of dumpsters. To survive the winter chill, he slept bundled up in several layers of pants, shirts, and blankets. Once, a cop tried to shoo him from a doorway, and Herb begged him to take him to jail instead, so he would have a warm place to sleep. The officer told him, “I’m not taking you to jail, but you can’t stay here.”
“I was really down,” Herb says. Yet he still counted himself lucky. “A lot of the people I met on the street were on meds and should have been hospitalized,” he says. “They really couldn’t take care of themselves.” But even a strong, able-bodied person like Herb will soon be broken down under those conditions. At one point he began suffering from severe chest pains, so he checked into Oakland’s Highland Hospital, where he remained for five days. “The stress got to me,” he says. “The hospital people told me, ‘Herb, just being on the streets is messing you up.’”
Sober Utopia: A Radical Rehab Experiment
Posted by Krista Stevens
Krista Stevens But now Richard was with hundreds of other people like him: chronically homeless, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and taking part in a last-ditch attempt to reboot their lives. They had come from all corners of Colorado, of their own volition, to get clean at an abandoned Army fort in the middle of nowhere.
Residents at Fort Lyon are given a surprising amount of individual freedom. During the first 30 days, you are expected to attend drug- and alcohol-education classes and work with case managers to formulate a recovery plan. The only ongoing expectation is that you attend a community meeting three mornings a week. After that, your time is yours: play basketball, go for a walk along the reservoir, sleep for 20 hours, talk to your case manager, go to classes that are offered on campus by Otero Junior College. Some people swore by the 12-step meetings. Others avoided them entirely. Every resident I spoke with — all of whom had been in some kind of addiction program previously — marveled at this radical autonomy. The standard rhythms of rehab, hustling from meeting to chore to counselor to meeting to meal to chore, were absent at Fort Lyon. This is no accident. Ginsburg explained it as an attempt to break the addict mindset: always onto the next thing, the next stimulus, the next score.
At Pacific Standard, Will McGrath reports on Fort Lyon — “a Betty Ford Center for the homeless — a radical experiment to rehabilitate some of society’s most vulnerable members.”
Exorcism and the Catholic Church
Posted by 
Julia Wick
Julia Wick Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Although there are several types of exorcism, the one most commonly imagined in popular culture is the solemn or “major” exorcism, a ritual to rid a possessed person of the demon or demons that inhabit their body—not merely a prayer for spiritual healing. Solemn exorcisms can be performed only by Catholic priests, and only then with the express permission of a bishop. Exorcism is not one of the seven Catholic sacraments, but the ritual is sacramental, meaning that the rite’s success is not dependent on the formulaic approach common to Catholic sacraments, but rather the exorcist’s faith and the authorization of a bishop.
In light of the Vatican’s concerns over heightened demonic activity around the world and the apparently urgent need for more exorcist-priests, training courses have been offered to equip the next generation of exorcists with the spiritual knowledge they need to expel demons from their non-consensual hosts. More than 170 priests and laypersons alike gathered in Rome for the most recent course, which was held at the Sacerdos Institute, an organization of priests affiliated with the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, an educational institute of the Catholic Church. The course, which costs around $330, covers numerous topics, including the theological, liturgical, and canonical aspects of exorcism, as well as its anthropological history, its potential place within the criminal justice system, plus medical and neurological issues surrounding demonic possession.
—Dan Shewan, writing for Pacific Standard about the business of exorcism. The casting out of demons has also become a lucrative cottage industry outside of the Catholic Church, with dozens of self-styled exorcists plying their trade across America, as detailed in Shewan’s piece.
‘I Was Figuring Out How to Enter Evidence into the Inquiry of My Own Death’
Posted by 
Mike Dang
Mike Dang Photo: Carl Nenzén Lovén
In Pacific Standard, Ezekiel Kweku writes about preparing to be stopped by the police and how his parents helped guide him to be “alive and black in this world”:
If stopped by the police, I thought to myself, I would set my phone to record audio and put it on the passenger seat. I would send a tweet that I was being stopped and had every intention of complying with the police officer. I would turn on Periscope and livestream the stop, crowdsourcing witnesses. I would text my family and tell them that I was not feeling angry or suicidal, that I was looking forward to seeing them soon. There would not be time to do all of these things, but maybe if I prepared in advance I could pull off one or two of them. What all of these plans had in common were that none of them were meant to secure my safety, but rather to ensure that my death looked suspicious enough to question.
I was figuring out how to enter evidence into the inquiry of my own death.
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Posted by Longreads
Longreads Photo: sarah-ji
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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