A reporter spends a winter in Cuba and takes a look at life in a post-Fidel era, which is changing gradually for some, but not fast enough for others who are still looking to escape to the U.S.:
‘Viva Cuba Libre,’ Eduardo muttered, mimicking a revolutionary exhortation we’d seen emblazoned high on an outdoor wall. Long live free Cuba. ‘Free from both of them,’ he said. ‘That’s when there might be real change.’
If there is in fact a Cuba under serious transformation—and you can find Cubans all over the country engaging now in their own versions of this same debate—Eduardo is a crucial component of it, although not for the reasons you might think. “Dissident” is the right label for a subset of politically vocal Cubans, notably the bloggers whose critical online missives have gained big followings outside the country, but Eduardo is no sort of dissident. He’s not fleeing persecution by the state. He’s just young, energetic, and frustrated, a description that applies to a great many of his countrymen. Ever since he was a teenager in high school, Eduardo told me, it had been evident to him that adulthood in revolutionary Cuba offered exactly nothing by way of personal advancement and material comfort to anybody except the peces gordos. The big fish. (Well, literally translated, the fat fish—the tap-on-the-shoulder parties.) Nothing works here, Eduardo would cry, pounding the steering wheel of whatever car he’d hustled on loan for the day: The economic model is broken, state employees survive on their tiny salaries only by stealing from the jobsite, the national news outlets are an embarrassment of self-censored boosterism, the government makes people crazy by circulating two national currencies at once.
‘I love my country,’ Eduardo kept saying. ‘But there is no future for me here.’
“Cuba’s New Now.” — Cynthia Gorney, National Geographic
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A reporter spends a winter in Cuba and takes a look at life in a post-Fidel era, which is changing gradually for some, but not fast enough for others who are still looking to escape to the U.S.:
“‘Viva Cuba Libre,’ Eduardo muttered, mimicking a revolutionary exhortation we’d seen emblazoned high on an outdoor wall. Long live free Cuba. ‘Free from both of them,’ he said. ‘That’s when there might be real change.’
“If there is in fact a Cuba under serious transformation—and you can find Cubans all over the country engaging now in their own versions of this same debate—Eduardo is a crucial component of it, although not for the reasons you might think. “Dissident” is the right label for a subset of politically vocal Cubans, notably the bloggers whose critical online missives have gained big followings outside the country, but Eduardo is no sort of dissident. He’s not fleeing persecution by the state. He’s just young, energetic, and frustrated, a description that applies to a great many of his countrymen. Ever since he was a teenager in high school, Eduardo told me, it had been evident to him that adulthood in revolutionary Cuba offered exactly nothing by way of personal advancement and material comfort to anybody except the peces gordos. The big fish. (Well, literally translated, the fat fish—the tap-on-the-shoulder parties.) Nothing works here, Eduardo would cry, pounding the steering wheel of whatever car he’d hustled on loan for the day: The economic model is broken, state employees survive on their tiny salaries only by stealing from the jobsite, the national news outlets are an embarrassment of self-censored boosterism, the government makes people crazy by circulating two national currencies at once.
“‘I love my country,’ Eduardo kept saying. ‘But there is no future for me here.'”
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Published: Oct 25, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,772 words)
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A man with $90,000 in debt makes some hard decisions about his life—starting with a trip to Kosovo for an IT job:
Of course, all I understood at the time was JOB INTERVIEW and VIENNA. Prior to my application, I had never heard of the OSCE, and I knew next to nothing about Kosovo. My IT skills were rudimentary and my management experience nonexistent. I was mystified why I got a call. I was so completely unqualified for this job, I might have treated this like a mini-vacation but for one significant fact: the salary. The job paid $85,000 a year, tax-free (due to the glorious Foreign Earned Income Exclusion). This was an incomprehensible amount of money. It would fix everything. The pressure to do well in this interview, just for this one small chance at a dream life and the magical solution to all of my problems, was intense.
I flew to Vienna two weeks later and interviewed the next morning in a small yellow room. It was 10 a.m.—4 a.m. EST. There was a panel, chaired by my would-be boss, a taciturn Austrian man. I was dressed in a garish blue Hugo Boss sport coat that I picked up at Century 21 a week earlier. I was over caffeinated, jet lagged, and clammy. I made nervous self-deprecating jokes, which translated poorly between our cultures. It was a disaster from start to finish. I left the interview thinking, ‘Thanks for the free trip to Vienna.’ I spent the rest of the day squandering my remaining per diem on beer and meat, refusing to think about what might have been. The next morning I flew home.
“Crushing Debt Drove Me to Kosovo — And Then to Iraq.” Anonymous, The Billfold
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A man with $90,000 in debt makes some hard decisions about his life—starting with a trip to Kosovo for an IT job:
“Of course, all I understood at the time was JOB INTERVIEW and VIENNA. Prior to my application, I had never heard of the OSCE, and I knew next to nothing about Kosovo. My IT skills were rudimentary and my management experience nonexistent. I was mystified why I got a call. I was so completely unqualified for this job, I might have treated this like a mini-vacation but for one significant fact: the salary. The job paid $85,000 a year, tax-free (due to the glorious Foreign Earned Income Exclusion). This was an incomprehensible amount of money. It would fix everything. The pressure to do well in this interview, just for this one small chance at a dream life and the magical solution to all of my problems, was intense.
“I flew to Vienna two weeks later and interviewed the next morning in a small yellow room. It was 10 a.m.—4 a.m. EST. There was a panel, chaired by my would-be boss, a taciturn Austrian man. I was dressed in a garish blue Hugo Boss sport coat that I picked up at Century 21 a week earlier. I was over caffeinated, jet lagged, and clammy. I made nervous self-deprecating jokes, which translated poorly between our cultures. It was a disaster from start to finish. I left the interview thinking, ‘Thanks for the free trip to Vienna.’ I spent the rest of the day squandering my remaining per diem on beer and meat, refusing to think about what might have been. The next morning I flew home.”
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Published: Sep 11, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,208 words)
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Four advice columnists, Dear Sugar’s Cheryl Strayed, Salon’s Cary Tennis, Slate’s Emily Yoffe, and The Globe and Mail’s Lynn Coady, discuss what it’s like to give advice to people online:
Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in a lot of people’s lives that they keep writing in about in variations?
Cheryl: Yes, a ton. There are a lot of people with broken hearts. And they’ll never get over so and so leaving them.
Emily: Yeah, I never run those because the answer is the same and it’s very boring. It’s just, ‘Move forward.’ The guy I thought I’d kill myself over when I was 27 I can’t remember the name of now. There are some big general categories. One is cubicle land. The horrors of the farters, the breathers, the hummers, the eaters. I can only do a limited number of ‘My husband looks at porn.’
“My Boss Has Body Odour and I Have Sex with My Twin.” — Britt Harvey, Hazlitt Magazine
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Four advice columnists, Dear Sugar’s Cheryl Strayed, Salon’s Cary Tennis, Slate’s Emily Yoffe, and The Globe and Mail’s Lynn Coady, discuss what it’s like to give advice to people online:
“Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in a lot of people’s lives that they keep writing in about in variations?
“Cheryl: Yes, a ton. There are a lot of people with broken hearts. And they’ll never get over so and so leaving them.
“Emily: Yeah, I never run those because the answer is the same and it’s very boring. It’s just, ‘Move forward.’ The guy I thought I’d kill myself over when I was 27 I can’t remember the name of now. There are some big general categories. One is cubicle land. The horrors of the farters, the breathers, the hummers, the eaters. I can only do a limited number of ‘My husband looks at porn.'”
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Published: Aug 23, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,260 words)
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A writer digs through his personal library of quitting-smoking books as he attempts to quit smoking:
Step 3: Go to the Strand. Buy a book you already own—Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime. (Your old copy—a gift from one of the girls next door senior year, the same ‘friend’ who another time gave you a carton of duty-free Dunhill Reds—has been in storage recently because your den has become a nursery.) It was published in 1993 by, very perfectly, the university press at Duke: A school endowed by tobacco fortune sponsored an excellent silk-cut riff on the cultural logic of coffin nails. Its title toys with Kant’s idea of ‘negative pleasure’: ‘Cigarettes are bad. That is why they are good—not good, not beautiful, but sublime.’
Klein, a scholar of French by trade, sinuously riffs on Sartre and Baudelaire, on Bizet’s Carmen andRick’s Café, by way of delivering a cultural critique with a practical purpose: ‘Writing this book in praise of cigarettes was the strategy I devised for stopping smoking, which I have—definitively; it is therefore both an ode and an elegy to cigarettes.’
Linger for a while over the idea of the elegy. Where a conventional smoking-cessation preacher tells the reader he has nothing to lose but his chains, Klein acknowledges that to quit is to experience a loss, and takes his time mourning a dying idea of fun.
“The Kickers.” — Troy Patterson, Slate
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The story of Will and Erwynn, the first gay couple to marry on a military base:
At church, Will and Erwynn lead me to a windowless back-room chapel that has been converted from a gym. This is the Sojourn service, a more informal worship than the one taking place in the main hall. They worry that other members of the church might not be comfortable with their presence in the regular service. The morning begins with a band playing Christian soft rock. There are no Bibles here, only thin handouts. Pastor Rick Court’s sermon, leavened with jokes and audience interaction, focuses on loving God and loving your neighbor as the most important lessons of Christianity. ‘You can see why we like this place,’ Erwynn whispers to me. ‘This is exactly what we are trying to teach our kids.’ But when I tell them I’d like to interview Pastor Rick, they pause. ‘Well,’ says Will, ‘I guess that means we’ll have to come out to him.’
The day before the wedding, I meet up with Pastor Rick at the Red Lion Diner in South Jersey. He was ordained by the conservative Evangelical Church Alliance. He has lived in this area all of his life. Will and Erwynn are the first congregants he’s had whom he knew were gay, but he has heard that there are others at Hope. ‘I sensed that they were a gay couple right away,’ he chuckles, ‘although they think that they hide it pretty well.’
“The Wedding.” — Katherine Goldstein, Slate
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How authorities broke up an extortion ring in the 1960s that targeted gay men:
Impersonating corrupt vice-squad detectives, members of this ring, known in police parlance as bulls, had used young, often underage men known as chickens to successfully blackmail closeted pillars of the establishment, among them a navy admiral, two generals, a U.S. congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor, a prep school headmaster, and several well-known actors, singers, and television personalities. The ring had operated for almost a decade, had victimized thousands, and had taken in at least $2 million. When he announced in 1966 that the ring had been broken up, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan said the victims had all been shaken down ‘on the threat that their homosexual proclivities would be exposed unless they paid for silence.’
Though now almost forgotten, the case of ‘the Chickens and the Bulls’ as the NYPD called it (or ‘Operation Homex,’ to the FBI), still stands as the most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history. And while the Stonewall riot in June 1969 is considered by many to be the pivotal moment in gay civil rights, this case represents an important crux too, marking the first time that the law enforcement establishment actually worked on behalf of victimized gay men, instead of locking them up or shrugging.
“The Chickens and the Bulls.” — William McGowan, Slate
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