Search Results for: Rookie

A Beginner’s Guide to Fly Fishing With Your Father

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Illustration by Steven Weinberg

Heather Radke | Longreads | June 2018 | 6,282 words (25 minutes)

In front of the cash register at the fishing shop in Grayling, Michigan, between the Trout Unlimited maps of the river and the hats that say size matters, there is a small shelf lined with business cards. Each of the stacks of cards, save one, are for fishing guides, men who will take you to the good spots on the river and teach you how to cast a fly rod. The final stack of cards is for a local urologist.

I am here with my dad, trying to finally learn to fish. We have driven three hours up the middle of the state from Lansing to Grayling, one struggling city to another. Camp Grayling, just outside of town, is the training ground for the Michigan National Guard. There is only one expressway that far north in Michigan, and as we approached Grayling on the two-lane highway that runs to the Upper Peninsula, tanks and camo Humvees slowed us down, too big to pass.

Michigan is a state of struggling towns, places that depend on a trickle of tourism, small farms, or a single industry. There was a time when the promise of the unions and the auto industry was this: You can make enough money working on the line to have a house in town, a car in the driveway, and a cottage on the lake. It feels ludicrous now to think that a blue-collar job could propel you so far into the middle class, particularly as we drove through the desiccated remains of the failure of that once-true promise. Grayling was the kind of place where you might have built the cottage. Now the tanks, the Family Dollar, and the boarded-up bow-and-arrow factory hint at the presence of another Michigan cliché — the Michigan Militia, a right-wing paramilitary group that was once rumored to be affiliated with the Oklahoma City bombing.

As we turn off the main road into the gravel parking lot, the fishing shop stands before us in contrast to much of the rest of town. Fly-fishing is a gentleman’s sport. It is literary and beautiful, historic and manly. Elegant in the simplicity of its mechanism, it suggests stewardship and stalwartness. This shop does not sell florescent orange camouflage vests or mechanized crossbows. It sells fishing baskets and slouchy hats, signs that say catch and release, volumes of poetry from local authors, millions of tiny hooks and feathers meant to be ordered neatly into small boxes, collected and organized taxonomically for ready response to myriad conditions. Read more…

June 15, 2018
Categories: Essays & Criticism, Story, Unapologetic Women, Writing
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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A visiting room in the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado
A visiting room in the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. (Photo by Stephen J. Dubner / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Chris Outcalt, Corie Brown, Daniel Immerwahr, Toniann Fernandez, and Karen Abbott.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

May 4, 2018
Categories: Nonfiction, Top 5
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The Mexican Mafia and the Conspiracy Behind the Tati Torrez Prison Murder

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Federal Prison in Florence, Colorado. (AP Photo/Pueblo Chieftain, Chris McLean)

A rookie FBI agent spent a decade investigating the conspiracy around the murder of Manuel “Tati” Torrez, a high-ranking member of the notorious Mexican Mafia gang, la Eme. At The Atavist, Chris Outcalt reports on Torrez as “one of the graying old guard” of the gang at ADX Florence. Despite the fact that the federal maximum security prison was specially designed to keep its population of extremely violent inmates in “near total isolation,” Torrez was brutally murdered in the prison yard while the cameras were rolling. But who did it and why?

What came next was uncharted territory: an investigation of the first homicide in a place specifically designed to prevent violence of any kind. Instead of a shank or some other crude weapon, the killer had used fists and feet to pummel a fellow prisoner to a pulp. He’d committed murder in broad daylight, with cameras everywhere, yet avoided being caught in the act. Who had done it? And, more importantly, why?

Not yet 48 hours into his inaugural FBI assignment, Jon learned that he’d be investigating the first murder at the ADX, which had badly shaken the facility’s staff. A colleague explained that, as far as he could tell, the killing had everything to do with the Mexican Mafia.

“What’s that?” Jon asked. “Like a street gang?”

“No, it’s not a street gang,” his colleague replied. “It’s the mother of all street gangs. It’s like the Navy SEALs.”

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May 2, 2018
Categories: Crime, Editor's Pick, Featured, Nonfiction, Quotes
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Goodness, How Delicious, Eating Goober Peas

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A bowl of boiled peanuts
A bowl of boiled peanuts (AP Photo / Dave Martin)

Boiled goober peas and an ice-cold Nehi — or peanuts and a soda, to those of us not from the American South — are a beloved snack below the Mason-Dixon. In The Bitter Southerner, James Beard-award winning writer Shane Mitchell offers a history of and paean to this most versatile and nutritional of ground nuts and to the region where it’s grown, correcting a few peanut myths along the way.

George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter. That’s one of those conflated facts taught in grade school, much like everyone still believing the earth was flat in the 15th century when Columbus discovered America. Actual first honors go to a Canadian, Marcellus Gilmore Edson, who was issued U.S. Patent No. 306727 for his “flavoring paste” to be used in the manufacture of “peanut-candy” on October 21, 1894. (Pre-Columbian Aztecs also pounded peanuts into a paste, so nothing is really new in the New World.) But Carver’s botanical research at the Tuskegee Institute contributed greatly to peanut butter’s rise in popularity. In 1916, he published a bulletin titled “How to Grow the Peanut & 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption,” which included his recipes for soup, cookies, fudge, and mock chicken. He also recommended peanuts for shampoo, mayonnaise, paint, massage oil, and flour. The Carvoline cosmetics company of Birmingham manufactured peanut hair pomade with his endorsement.

But wait! The humble peanut is even more multi-functional than that.

It is unlikely Carver would have imagined the use devised more recently by 12 inmates at Walker County Jail in Jasper, Alabama, on a Sunday evening last July. They saved peanut butter from their sandwiches and molded it like clay to alter a number above a door leading outside, then tricked a rookie guard into opening it. (The employee thought he was letting them back into the cells.) The prisoners ditched their orange jumpsuits, flung blankets over the razor wire fence, and busted out. Most didn’t get far—two were captured at the Flying J truck stop in town. At a news conference the next day, county Sheriff James E. Underwood said:

“Changing some numbers on the door with peanut butter — that may sound crazy, but these people are crazy like a fox.”

When I reached Jasper Mayor Paul Liollio for comment, he wrote back: “This wasn’t Jasper’s finest hour.”

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May 2, 2018
Categories: Editor's Pick, Food, History, Quotes
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Murder at the Alcatraz of the Rockies

Longreads Pick

How a rookie FBI agent spent a decade investigating the conspiracy surrounding the murder of Manuel (Tati) Torrez, a high-ranking member of the notorious Mexican Mafia gang, la Eme.

Author: Chris Outcalt
Source: The Atavist
Published: May 1, 2018
Length: 43 minutes (10,922 words)

The Great Online School Scam

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Photo: Getty Images.

Noliwe Rooks | Excerpt from Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education | The New Press | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,064 words)

* * *

DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular offshoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.” The jointly authored research was sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can, all groups that lobby state and federal agencies to loosen regulations to allow more robust charter-school growth. As one of the report’s backers said, “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too—we just want them to be a lot better.” Such an upswing in quality seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. They are yet another trickle in the stream of apartheid forms of public education flowing down from the wealthy and politically well connected to communities that are poor, of color, or both.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, poor students from rural areas as well as those in underfunded urban schools that primarily educate students who are Black and Latino today face a new response to the question of how to solve the riddle of race, poverty, and educational underachievement. Increasingly, despite little supporting evidence, a growing number of states and local school districts no longer believe that the solution is merely about infrastructure, class size, funding, or hiring more teachers. In states with high levels of poverty and “hard to educate” Black and Latino students, virtual schools are on the rise. Such schools are not growing nearly as fast in school districts that are white and relatively wealthy, nor are they the educational strategy of choice in most private schools. As much a business strategy as one promoting learning, virtual education allows businesses to profit from racial inequality and poverty. Sadly, this particular cure to what ails our education system more often than not exacerbates the problems. Read more…

February 20, 2018
Categories: Books, Current Events, education, Nonfiction, Story
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A Shot at Glory

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Illustration by J.O. Applegate.

Sam Riches | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (3,309 words)

Peter Forsberg skates in slow, tense circles and waits for his chance at history. It’s the 1994 Olympics and the men’s gold medal hockey game has come down to a shootout. Dressed in Sweden’s vivid gold Tre Kronor, with the matching blue helmet and gloves, Forsberg is a burst of color atop the cold sheet of ice, an interruption to the routine. He has one shot to keep Sweden’s hockey hopes alive.

At the other end of the rink, as Canada’s Corey Hirsch bends forward at the knees, he momentarily drops his head. Then he reaches back with his right arm and knocks the barrel of his goalie stick against the crossbar, twice. The sound of heavy wood on hollow steel rings out and up and fills the arena.

The whistle blows. Forsberg’s skates dig in. Hirsch taps his stick against the crossbar again, confirms this is really happening, and then pushes out of his crease to meet Forsberg. The space between them shrinks.

Forsberg accelerates. He pushes past his own blue line, then over the center line, now he’s in the attack zone. He comes in wide. Hirsch angles to cut him off. Forsberg is out of position. He has no room to shoot.

But he does. He waits until the last possible second, then he reaches back, one glove on his stick, and slips a backhander past Hirsch, who watches helplessly as his momentum carries him in the opposite direction, out of the crease, out of the picture. The puck slides into the back of the net.

It is Sweden’s first Olympic hockey gold. It is their greatest hockey goal. It is a moment commemorated on a postage stamp. But not yet.

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February 15, 2018
Categories: Nonfiction, Sports, Story
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Is 2018 the Year We Step Away From Social Media?

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(Getty Images)

I checked Twitter and Tumblr before I started writing this piece, and I’ll probably check them again as soon as I’ve finished. I keep telling myself that I should stop automatically turning to social media, and I’ve taken steps to reduce the amount of time I spend on the sites — I regularly cull my feeds, for example, and I’ve removed all push notifications from my phone — but the urge to take a break from my own thoughts and see what other people are thinking about is too strong. (Are my friends posting Google Arts & Culture selfies? Is everyone discussing a specific article? Did Lin-Manuel Miranda tweet something inspiring that’ll make me feel a little better about the world?)

Plus I like to keep up with the news.

But I don’t necessarily enjoy the time I spend on social media, and I doubt you do either. I used to compare it to hanging out in a library with friends — the sort of thing where you’d look up from whatever you were studying and say “hey, check this out!” — and now it feels like stepping into a room where everyone is shouting at each other. Even when the arguments are important, they still feel unproductive and unhealthy. To quote M. C. Mah, at LitHub: “Good-faith argument on social media is probably impractical, and definitely unclickable.”

So I want to spend less time on social media in 2018 — and I’m not alone. Read more…

January 24, 2018
Categories: Blog Post, Commentary, Current Events, Nonfiction
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Judging Books By Their Covers

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad / Collage by Richard Kehl/Getty

Jason Diamond | Longreads | October 2017 | 19 minutes (4,639 words)

I had two wardrobes growing up: The first, at my father’s house, was made up of Air Jordans, Lacoste, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein. At my mother’s house I had no-name brands, sneakers that were worn until they were falling apart, and second-hand shirts and sweaters that we’d pick up at the local Goodwill. That was life living under two different roofs of divorced parents in different economic brackets. My father had everything, my mother had very little. My father took us to the mall to buy things, my mother, more often than not, to thrift stores. Malls, where everything was laid out perfectly, were places to be seen carrying shopping bags; thrift stores, meanwhile, were intimate and offered more adventure. At some point, despite kids making fun of me for my shabby clothes, I grew to like the second-hand places more; you never knew what you would find. As I got older, I still shopped at thrift stores out of financial necessity, but it was also an aesthetic choice.

When I think back on the things I found in thrift stores as a teenager, my mind flashes to the jerseys of former Chicago Bulls who played during the first-half of the team’s dynasty run in the 1990s (#54 Horace Grant, #10 B.J. Armstrong), electronics no more than a decade old that were already considered obsolete, and countless copies of Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. Like a prospector, I spent my high school years combing through Abercrombie & Fitch shirts worn by the kinds of kids I tried to avoid, strings of used Christmas lights, power suits I considered wearing as a David Byrne in Stop Making Sense Halloween costume, and other things people didn’t want or need anymore, all to find one tiny morsel of gold. Those little nuggets included an “Aloha Mr. Hand” Beastie Boys ringer T-shirt when I was 14 at a Salvation Army, an autographed picture of Tim Allen that I taped up in my locker as a joke, a sealed vinyl copy of Let it Be by The Replacements, and a Mies van der Rohe-designed Barcelona chair for $40. In my trash heap of a college apartment, I played video games and spilled beer on this pricey piece of designer furniture. I assume my roommates threw it out after I left.

I’ve always gravitated towards older things. I didn’t want to wear anything brand new from The Gap or “No Fear” shirts like my classmates did, and I liked the idea of being surrounded by items people didn’t want anymore. I preferred the old VHS players that went out when DVD players came in. Cassette tapes, old copies of National Geographic and Esquire, along with other relics, served as an education of sorts. They were things I saw as a small child but hadn’t been allowed to touch or own. I’d look at old furniture and notice hand-carved signatures in the wood, a sign that somebody had made it — it wasn’t some mass-produced lump of particle board.

Then there were the books. High school had taught me about Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin. Thrift stores gave me my first tastes of Karl Marx, Saul Bellow, Albert Camus, Mary McCarthy, and Salman Rushdie. Both invaluable curriculums, but second-hand books allowed me an opportunity to design my own for about 25 cents a lesson, or five for a dollar. The covers made me feel like I was in a dusty little art gallery: The Modernist designs of Alvin Lustig for New Directions; the iconic, handsome, orange Penguin paperbacks; the seedy, sexy characters of 1950s pulp fiction.

I mostly judged the books by their covers, but there was one in particular I became obsessed with, inside and out. Used copies of this ghostly relic from 1984 are as common in thrift stores as old Barbra Streisand records or Sega Genesis video games. It’s a book I love, which I’ve had on every bookshelf I’ve owned; a book and a cover that I think sum up so much of my taste: Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City.

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October 20, 2017
Categories: Editor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
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The Minnesota Lynx are an Ignored Basketball Dynasty

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Minnesota Lynx forward Maya Moore from left, forward Rebekkah Brunson and Renee Montgomery (21) celebrate against the Indiana Fever in the second half of Game 5 of the WNBA basketball finals, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Stacy Bengs)

In early September, the Minnesota Lynx won its 27th game of the 2017 WNBA season, a 14-point thrashing of the Washington Mystics. The win secured the Lynx the top spot in the league’s playoffs—the sixth time the team had grabbed the number one seed in the past seven years—and put the squad in the best position to win its fourth WNBA title.

Fast-forward to the finals, and the Lynx, facing the Los Angeles Sparks (a familiar bete-noire, as the western conference squad defeated the Lynx in the finals last season on a last-second shot), evened the series to one game apiece with a 70-68 win. Since Cheryl Reeve became head coach before the 2010 season, the Lynx has been the most dominant force in women’s hoops, a team that could steam roll opponents even if it was an off game.

But the most interesting about the squad, led by Maya Moore, Lindsay Whalen, and a supremely dominant Sylvia Fowles (the WNBA’s MVP who grabbed 17 rebounds in Tuesday’s night win), is that no one seems to care. Read more…

September 27, 2017
Categories: Nonfiction, Sports
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