Longreads Pick
How filmmaker David Ayer’s early years in South Central Los Angeles has given him a distinct understanding of the LAPD:
“‘I was feral,’ he recalls, ‘uncontrollable, did my own thing. Brushes with the law and all that stuff.’ He punctuates this with a gruff laugh. ‘It was a disaster.’ Most everyone who knew Ayer was predicting a future in prison for him. ‘It was just the expectation that a lot of people had of me. Because I was not a good kid, and the consequences were getting more serious.’ When he was 14, his mother sent him to live with cousins who were among the first urban homesteaders to move into a West Adams Craftsman, in the shadow of the 10 freeway. ‘The irony is, I was just a bush-league juvenile delinquent,’ Ayer says. ‘And I end up in fucking South Central. Now I’m around the professionals. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I quickly grew accustomed, though. You can get used to anything.'”
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Published: Sep 24, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,725 words)
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Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia:
Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included her being compromised outside of a hospital, lasting years on end.
‘I can’t kill you,’ I answered steadily. ‘I have a husband and two stepsons and a mortgage. Someone will find out, and then I’ll have to go to prison.’
She sighed, exasperated.
‘I know this issue has always been important to you,’ I said. ‘So if you feel strongly about it, I understand that. You can end your own life. There are plenty of places that can help you do that.’
She was monumentally offended. ‘Committing suicide is against the Jewish religion!’ she declared.
I was dumbfounded. ‘So is committing murder! Did you ever think of that?’
Apparently not.
“How My Mother Disappeared.” — Alex Witchel, New York Times Magazine
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Longreads Pick
Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia:
“Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included her being compromised outside of a hospital, lasting years on end.
“‘I can’t kill you,’ I answered steadily. ‘I have a husband and two stepsons and a mortgage. Someone will find out, and then I’ll have to go to prison.’
“She sighed, exasperated.
“‘I know this issue has always been important to you,’ I said. ‘So if you feel strongly about it, I understand that. You can end your own life. There are plenty of places that can help you do that.’
“She was monumentally offended. ‘Committing suicide is against the Jewish religion!’ she declared.
“I was dumbfounded. ‘So is committing murder! Did you ever think of that?’
“Apparently not.”
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Published: Sep 7, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,614 words)
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[Not singe-page] The rap superstar discusses his career and how he’s remained relevant:
In the years since his masterpiece ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ the rapper has often been accused of running on empty, too distant now from what once made him real. In ‘Decoded,’ he answers existentially: ‘How distant is the story of your own life ever going to be?’ In the lyrics, practically:
Life stories told through rap/Niggas actin’ like I sold you crack/Like I told you sell drugs, no, Hov’ did that/So hopefully you won’t have to go through that. But can’t a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite? Out hustlin’, same clothes for days/I’ll never change, I’m too stuck in my ways. Can’t he still rep his block? For Jay-Z, pride in the block has been essential and he recognized rap’s role in taking ‘that embarrassment off of you. The first time people were saying: I come from here — and it’s O.K.’ He quotes Mobb Deep: ‘No matter how much money I get, I’m staying in the projects!’ But here, too, he sees change: ‘Before, if you didn’t have that authenticity, your career could be over. Vanilla Ice said he got stabbed or something, they found out he was lying, he was finished.’ I suggested to him that many readers of this newspaper would find it bizarre that the reputation of the rapper Rick Ross was damaged when it was revealed a few years ago that he was, at one time, a prison guard. ‘But again,’ Jay says, ‘I think hip-hop has moved away from that place of everything has to be authentic. Kids are growing up very differently now.’
“The House that Hova Built.” — Zadie Smith, New York Times
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Longreads Pick
[Not singe-page] The rap superstar discusses his career and how he’s remained relevant:
“In the years since his masterpiece ‘Reasonable Doubt,’ the rapper has often been accused of running on empty, too distant now from what once made him real. In ‘Decoded,’ he answers existentially: ‘How distant is the story of your own life ever going to be?’ In the lyrics, practically:
“Life stories told through rap/Niggas actin’ like I sold you crack/Like I told you sell drugs, no, Hov’ did that/So hopefully you won’t have to go through that. But can’t a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite? Out hustlin’, same clothes for days/I’ll never change, I’m too stuck in my ways. Can’t he still rep his block? For Jay-Z, pride in the block has been essential and he recognized rap’s role in taking ‘that embarrassment off of you. The first time people were saying: I come from here — and it’s O.K.’ He quotes Mobb Deep: ‘No matter how much money I get, I’m staying in the projects!’ But here, too, he sees change: ‘Before, if you didn’t have that authenticity, your career could be over. Vanilla Ice said he got stabbed or something, they found out he was lying, he was finished.’ I suggested to him that many readers of this newspaper would find it bizarre that the reputation of the rapper Rick Ross was damaged when it was revealed a few years ago that he was, at one time, a prison guard. ‘But again,’ Jay says, ‘I think hip-hop has moved away from that place of everything has to be authentic. Kids are growing up very differently now.'”
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Published: Sep 6, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,228 words)
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A look at Degrassi, 25 years after resonating with teens:
Degrassi ’s grassroots approach to social class served as a near-invisible narrative strategy, but it anticipated the show’s most memorable legacy: its unflinching, plain-spoken treatment of pregnancy, suicide, interracial dating (a big deal in 1987), and HIV/AIDS. What’s more, Degrassi didn’t treat its characters with benevolence. Spike’s pregnancy at age fourteen — the result of a clumsy first-time sexual encounter with Shane, a baby-faced ninth-grader — didn’t end with a convenient miscarriage. Her character spent the remainder of the series as a struggling single parent. Later that season, Shane experimented with LSD, fell off a bridge, and suffered permanent brain damage. Wheels, one of the most popular characters, lost his parents to a drunk driver, and later experienced a breakdown that culminated in a drunk driving incident that killed a child, blinded his friend Lucy, and landed him in prison. In the early years of HIV/AIDS, Dwayne contracted the virus after having unprotected sex with his girlfriend (a thoughtful plot choice in an era when many thought of it as a ‘gay disease’). In a 1999 cast reunion on the CBC talk show Jonovision, actor Darrin Brown, who played Dwayne, was asked where his character would be now. ‘Dwayne would probably be dead,’ he replied.
“Teenage Dreams.” — Emily Landau, The Walrus
More from The Walrus
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Longreads Pick
A look at Degrassi, 25 years after resonating with teens:
“Degrassi ’s grassroots approach to social class served as a near-invisible narrative strategy, but it anticipated the show’s most memorable legacy: its unflinching, plain-spoken treatment of pregnancy, suicide, interracial dating (a big deal in 1987), and HIV/AIDS. What’s more, Degrassi didn’t treat its characters with benevolence. Spike’s pregnancy at age fourteen — the result of a clumsy first-time sexual encounter with Shane, a baby-faced ninth-grader — didn’t end with a convenient miscarriage. Her character spent the remainder of the series as a struggling single parent. Later that season, Shane experimented with LSD, fell off a bridge, and suffered permanent brain damage. Wheels, one of the most popular characters, lost his parents to a drunk driver, and later experienced a breakdown that culminated in a drunk driving incident that killed a child, blinded his friend Lucy, and landed him in prison. In the early years of HIV/AIDS, Dwayne contracted the virus after having unprotected sex with his girlfriend (a thoughtful plot choice in an era when many thought of it as a ‘gay disease’). In a 1999 cast reunion on the CBC talk show Jonovision, actor Darrin Brown, who played Dwayne, was asked where his character would be now. ‘Dwayne would probably be dead,’ he replied.”
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Published: Aug 13, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,225 words)
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Longreads Pick
How a collective of women in ski masks captured the attention of the world—and now face possible prison time for their stand against Putin:
“At 9 p.m. on Thursday night, I’m at a rally of a couple of thousand anti-government protesters, hearing Pussy Riot’s name being chanted in the crowd, and I think I have a grasp of the story. It’s an astonishing tale of how three young women have brought Putin his biggest political headache yet. A story about art versus power. Of civil society versus church and state. Or as one film-maker who’s documenting it says, ‘punks versus Putin’. (He goes on to say, ‘It’s Crime and Punishment, basically, but there’s also a band in jail so it’s a bit like The Monkees. Or a really warped Beatles film.’)
“I think I have it sort-of clear, and then three hours later, I’m led into a basement in an industrial art space and the story untangles. It becomes not just astonishing but absurd. Because here are Pussy Riot: in their balaclavas and brightly coloured dresses and tights, sitting cross-legged on the floor of a tiny, hot, brightly lit rehearsal room.”
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Published: Jul 28, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,259 words)
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Longreads Pick
The life of the great English novelist, as documented in a biography by Claire Tomalin:
“The great drama—which is to say, the abiding trauma—of Dickens’s childhood was his year-long stint in a rat-infested blacking factory near the Thames, when he was twelve years old, following the arrest of John Dickens for debt in 1824 and his incarceration in the debtors’ prison at Marshalsea. Much has been written about this long-secret episode in Dickens’s life, including, most recently, Michael Allen’s heavily documented Charles Dickens and the Blacking Factory (2011), a work of some three hundred pages of interest primarily to Dickens scholars, but very likely impenetrable to Dickens readers in its concentration upon historical minutiae only tenuously related to Dickens and his novels. Another recent book, Ruth Richardson’s Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor (2012), gives a more intimately evoked view of Dickens’s childhood and the New Poor Law of 1834 by which workhouses became ‘a sort of prison system to punish (the poor).’
“For the child Dickens, the shock of this change of fortune was all the more in that his seemingly loving parents so readily agreed to the enslavement of their bright young son:
“‘No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.'”
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Published: Jul 31, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,891 words)
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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.
“Greg Ousley Is Sorry for Killing His Parents. Is That Enough?” — Scott Anderson, New York Times Magazine
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