Search Results for: The Nation

The Mysterious Case of a Nameless Hiker

Big Cypress National Preserve, Naples, Florida. (Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

He was known on the trail as “Mostly Harmless.” He started his journey in a state park north of New York City and simply went south — down to Virginia, then to northern Georgia, and finally to Florida — his route pieced together through accounts from fellow hikers and others he encountered. At Wired, Nicholas Thompson recounts the story of this friendly nameless hiker, eventually found dead in a tent at Nobles Camp in Big Cypress National Preserve on July 2018, 600 miles south of where he started.

Since the discovery of this man’s body, no one has been able to figure out who he is. But now, with advanced DNA testing technology and cutting-edge genomics from a company called Othram, the mystery may soon be solved.

She told him everything she knew. And she shared the original post, and her photo, all over Facebook. Soon there were dozens of people jumping in. They had seen the hiker too. They had journeyed with him for a few hours or a few days. They had sat at a campfire with him. There was a GoPro video in which he appeared. People remembered him talking about a sister in either Sarasota or Saratoga. They thought he had said he was from near Baton Rouge. One person remembered that he ate a lot of sticky buns; another said that he loved ketchup. But no one knew his name. When the body of Chris McCandless was found in the wilds of Alaska in the summer of 1992 without any identification, it took authorities only two weeks to figure out his identity. A friend in South Dakota, who’d known McCandless as “Alex,” heard a discussion of the story on AM radio and called the authorities. Clues followed quickly, and McCandless’ family was soon found.

Now it’s 2020, and we have the internet. Facebook knows you’re pregnant almost before you do. Amazon knows your light bulb is going to go out right before it does. Put details on Twitter about a stolen laptop and people will track down the thief in a Manhattan bar. The internet can decode family mysteries, identify long-forgotten songs, solve murders, and, as this magazine showed a decade ago, track down almost anyone who tries to shed their digital skin. This case seemed easy.

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Let Me In

Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Nkiacha Atemnkeng, a writer from Cameroon, is often invited to attend writer’s residencies in other countries. However, as he explains in The Johannesburg Review of Books, it is rare for him to actually get to go. As a young, single man, he is often, viewed as a “flight risk” by western countries, and denied entry — but not before being put through a humiliating interview at their embassy. Visas to the US have become particularly elusive under the presidency of Donald Trump — with entry to the US, even to study,  “very very tight, very tight.”

The rejections continue. Even a pastor is turned away, visaless. A woman who has brought her old, ailing father is making a scene. He has been given a visa and she has been rejected. He is quiet. She is screaming. How will he get to the US alone? He can barely walk. The consular officers are unmoved by her theatrics. She won’t leave the counter. A security guard appears. She walks away. The consular officers keep working. They don’t even examine applicants’ documents, as I heard they did in the past – they just look at the admission letter or invitation to a university graduation or wedding. Then they interview the applicant and decide upon their fate, which is mostly reject, reject, reject.

I am next, residency invitation in hand, other documents and published work neatly in a file. I have to stand in front of the seated consular officer – a slim man with geeky reading glasses – throughout my interview.

“What is the purpose of your trip to the US?”

“I’m going to attend the Art Omi international residency, sir,” I say, handing him my invitation through the space in the glass. He reads it diligently.

“So who is paying for your trip?”

“Art Omi will pay for my lodging and feeding, as it is said in the letter. I will pay for my flight.”

“What do you write?”

“Fiction and creative nonfiction. I’m a blogger, too, so I create online content.” He types all I say. I continue. “I’ve brought all my published works in print with me. Short stories in a few anthologies and my children’s chapbook.”

I am about to give him my second file of published work when he snaps through the microphone: “No, no, no, I don’t want to see any books.” He opens his right palm towards me and shakes it vigorously from right to left and left to right, in a keep-those-things-away manner.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Getty Images

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Along with the Top 5 Longreads of the week, we’re proud to bring you an “Atlas of the Cosmos” by Shannon Stirone.

If you love space and exploration and maps, you’re going to enjoy Shannon’s story. She travels to Kitt Peak observatory to meet DESI, the high-powered telescope that’s working on mapping the entirety of the cosmos, one galaxy at a time. Yes, the entire cosmos.

Shannon’s written previously for us on space. Be sure to read “The Hunt for Planet Nine.”

The quest might seem a bit nonsensical. Why does it matter when or how the universe began? Why does it matter when or how it ends? It matters for the same reason your locations throughout your life carry context for who you are. We exist on a timeline together — we pop into existence and then one day we stop. It matters for the same reason one of the first questions you learn to ask in another language is, “where are you from?” To know where you are at any given time is a frame of reference in which to measure your life in some way and in many ways those locations, those slices of time, hold a great deal of meaning.

Read An Atlas of the Cosmos

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Hannah Dreier, Doug Bock Clark, Samanth Subramanian, Michael Hobbes, Jonathan Cohn, Kate Sheppard, Alex Kaufman, Delphine D’Amora, Chris D’Angelo, and Emily Peck, and Kris Willcox and Michelle Ruiz.
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1. What to Do About Ahav?

Hannah Dreier | The Washington Post | October 24, 2020 | 18 minutes (4,600 words)

“A mother’s fight to save a Black, mentally ill 11-year-old boy in a time of a pandemic and rising racial unrest.”

2. Arrested, Tortured, Imprisoned: The U.S. Contractors Abandoned in Kuwait

Doug Bock Clark | The New York Times Magazine | October 28, 2020 | 34 minutes (8,500 words)

“Dozens of military contractors, most of them Black, have been jailed in the emirate—some on trumped-up drug charges. Why has the American government failed to help them?”

3. Data Disappeared

Samanth Subramanian, Michael Hobbes, Jonathan Cohn, Kate Sheppard, Alex Kaufman, Delphine D’Amora, Chris D’Angelo, Emily Peck | HuffPost Highline | October 29, 2020 | 46 minutes (11,700 words)

Over nearly four years, the Trump administration has “defunded, buried, and constrained dozens of federal research and data collection projects across multiple agencies and spheres of policy: environment, agriculture, labor, health, immigration, energy, the census.” This is an accounting of the damage.

4. The Alhambra

Kris Willcox | Kenyon Review | October 28, 2020 | 14 minutes (3,639 words)

“A long time ago, I took a vacation because I thought I was irreparably broken, when, in fact, I was simply normal. Lonely, and waiting for the future. In other words, alive.”

5. AOC’s Next Four Years

Michelle Ruiz | Vanity Fair | October 28, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,611 words)

“The history-making congresswoman addresses her biggest critics, the challenges that loom no matter who wins, and what she’s taking on next.”

‘Something Extremely Bad Is Happening Here’

Longreads Pick

“Teens are dying by suicide at an alarming rate. Public health officials call it a crisis. Researchers have identified several clusters nationwide. The survivors in this Arizona community are fighting back.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Oct 20, 2020
Length: 25 minutes (6,480 words)

An Atlas of the Cosmos

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Shannon Stirone | Longreads | October 2020 | 16 minutes (4,288 words)

When I was 8, I noticed an atlas on the bookshelf in my room. I had just started amassing large art books from family museum trips but this was the first abnormally sized book in my posession — it was so oddly shaped its pages spilled over the edge of the shelf. One day I used all my strength to wiggle it down off the bookcase. I sprawled on my bedroom floor and began sifting through the long pages. It must have been from the ’50s or ’60s. It smelled old but it was clearly a book that had been cared for over the years. Its pages were a mix of pastels so dizzying and complex; in how pinks separated from light green and the skinniest blue rivers cut across the pages. Once I was old enough to read, my grandpa started ceremoniously gifting me books from his shelves.

One by one, every time I saw him, a piece of his library became mine. He had travelled all over the world and knew how much it could change a person. And whenever I’d visit him, I’d browse the books on the lower shelves and run my fingers along the spines like a car’s wheels over speedbumps, each cover sort of yellowed from years of his cigarette smoke and constant reading. Once this book and I were formally introduced, I began having regular dates with the atlas. Each day I would lay on my stomach and then sit cross-legged hunched over the pages, running my fingers down the rivers in Africa — the Nile, Limpopo, I’d take a trip to France or Chile. I would attempt to pronounce Czechoslovakia and many other long words that threw me into a joyous tizzy. Every mountain range, every body of water, every large city I would look at longingly wondering one day when I got older, how many of these mysterious places I would see with my own eyes. My wanderlust grew as I grew. There was so much to be explored, there was so much space that existed around my little home in Los Angeles. There was so much I didn’t know.

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How America Invented the White Woman Who Just Loves Fall

Longreads Pick

“For the past decade, the basic white girl who loves fall has become so solidified in the cultural imagination that she may as well be the season’s Easter Bunny.”

Source: Jezebel
Published: Oct 21, 2020
Length: 12 minutes (3,119 words)

The Power of a Judith Krantz Sex Scene

Author Judith Krantz (Photo by Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images)

Kristin Sanders | Longreads | October 2020 | 12 minutes (2,551 words)

Decades later, the paperback edition of Spring Collection still arouses me: A tall, thin woman who is clearly a model strides across the cover, wearing a glamorous white ‘90s dress, slit open to the top of her right thigh. Her white high heels are dated, but everything else from the image, which cuts off just above her nose as if to prevent her from appearing as a real woman, is timeless in the way that images of objectified women usually are: just boobs, legs, and arms. The book has the one Judith Krantz sex scene I still remember, have always remembered, between the character Maude and a girl whose name doesn’t matter, a girl who should have been me.

I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when I found my mother’s copy on our bookshelf. It was published in 1997, so I would have been 14.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

NEWTOWN, CT - MARCH 31: The exterior of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown, CT is pictured on March 31, 2019. The new school building was completed in 2016. (Photo by Nathan Klima for The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from John Woodrow Cox, Nathaniel Penn, Len Necefer, Aymann Ismail, and Michael Venutolo-Mantovani.

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1. Only One of Their Children Survived Sandy Hook. Now School Posed a New Threat: The Virus.

John Woodrow Cox | The Washington Post | October 7, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,762 words)

“After losing their 6-year-old daughter in a mass shooting, can Isaiah Marquez-Greene’s parents bear to let him return to high school during a pandemic?”

2. The Last Patrol

Nathaniel Penn | The California Sunday Magazine | September 27, 2020 | 78 minutes (19,500 words)

“In 2019, President Trump pardoned Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who was serving a 20-year sentence for ordering the murder of two Afghan civilians. To Lorance’s defenders, the act was long overdue. To members of his platoon, it was a gross miscarriage of justice.”

3. Water is Life

Len Necefer | Alpinist Magazine | October 5, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,391 words)

“As I climbed and skied over rapidly receding snowfields, the journeys felt akin to doing final rounds of visits with my elders who are sick and soon to walk on into the next world.”

4. The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd

Aymann Ismail | Slate | October 6, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,862 words)

“A teenage clerk dialed 911. How should the brothers who own CUP Foods pay for what happened next?”

5. From Tragedy to Trailblazer

Michael Venutolo-Mantovani | The Bitter Southerner | August 25, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,152 words)

“After three of her dear friends were murdered in 2015 — a case that drew national attention and triggered calls for stronger hate crime legislation — Nida Allam took to politics.”

From Tragedy to Trailblazer

Longreads Pick

“After three of her dear friends were murdered in 2015 — a case that drew national attention and triggered calls for stronger hate crime legislation — Nida Allam took to politics.”

Published: Aug 25, 2020
Length: 12 minutes (3,152 words)

Find Yourself

Photo Collage: "Find Yourself" by Stuart Horn/ Carolyn Wells

Elizabeth Isadora Gold| Longreads | September 2020 | 4,633 words (18 minutes)

It was 1981, in the Olde City section of Philadelphia. I was six. My parents were artists — my dad a cellist/composer/arranger and my mom a potter and teacher — and our tiny bathroom showed it. On one whole wall, my mom hung a poster of the San Francisco baths circa 1890, with lots of gents in one-piece suits and ladies in frilly bathing bonnets. By the toilet, on cinder block-and-board shelves, were stacks and stacks of magazines, New Yorkers, mostly. Postcards framed the mirror over the sink, fleshy vintage nudies with bobbed hair, standing in chorus lines.

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