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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Slate.com, GQ, Tampa Bay Times, The New Republic, Mother Jones, fiction from The Paris Review, plus a guest pick from Sarah Pynoo.
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Slate.com, GQ, Tampa Bay Times, The New Republic, Mother Jones, fiction from The Paris Review, plus a guest pick from Sarah Pynoo.
A personal history of joining, and leaving, the Mormon Church:
When I meet with the first two landlords in Beverly Hills, they’ve already seen my credit files and don’t seem to want to know much more about me other than why I’m standing on their property. At my third stop, I speak into an intercom and wait in suspense for an electronic gate either to slide open, meaning yes, or fail to budge, meaning time to hunker down, kick the opiates, and pay my bills.
‘Great to meet you, Walt. I’m Bobby Keller. You want a Sprite or something? You look all hot. My sister, Kim, who you talked to on the phone, is at a church thing with our other housemates, but I can show you the place we hope you’ll rent.’
You can scoff at their oddities, skip out of your mission, run off to college, and wander for 30 years through barrooms and bedrooms and court rooms and all-night pharmacies, but they never quite forget you, I learned that day. How had Bobby discovered my secret? My Wikipedia page, written by some stranger. It was loaded with mistakes (it said I was still married, a detail that may have given Bobby pause when Amanda stayed over the next night—not that he said a single word), but the fact that got me a lease without a credit check and rescued my new romance was accurate: My first book, a collection of short stories that opened with a tale of masturbation and ended with one about a drunken missionary, had won a little-known literary prize from a broad-minded Mormon cultural group.
“Confessions of an Ex-Mormon.” — Walter Kirn, The New Republic
One man’s quest to reshape the online porn industry through the “.xxx” top-level domain:
The resistance to Lawley, whatever its merits, has the ring of desperation. ICM arrived at a moment of crisis for commercial porn. After enabling several boom years, the Internet has brought many smut marketers to their knees. Rampant freebies on “tube” sites have reduced global porn revenue by 50 percent since 2007, to less than $10 billion, including about $5 billion generated in the U.S. Those are rough guesses by Diane Duke, executive director of the industry’s trade group, the coyly named Free Speech Coalition. Speaking privately, some porn executives say the coalition’s revenue estimates are optimistic. In a field dominated by privately held companies, no provable statistics exist.
Setting aside moral judgments and potential social harms—we’ll get to those—it’s remarkable that Lawley is making any money at all. Especially since he had to fight for seven years, spending millions of his own dollars, to get permission for .xxx from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit regulatory body. His persistence in the face of hostile lobbying by competitors, religious conservatives, and the U.S. government suggests that if the stubborn British entrepreneur claims to have a money-spinning solution for the Great Porn Depression, he should not be underestimated.
“The New Republic of Porn.” — Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek
Profile of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and the promise and missed opportunities that have come with his leadership:
At the time, negotiations had been frozen for more than a year. Yet Fayyad boldly predicted that his program would lead to the creation of a Palestinian state by August 2011. ‘By then, if in fact we succeed, as I hope we will,’ he said, ‘it’s not going to be too difficult for people looking at us from any corner of the world … to conclude that the Palestinians do indeed have something that looks like a well-functioning state in just about every facet of activity, and the only anomalous thing at the time would be that occupation, which everybody agrees should end anyways. That’s the theory.’ As Fayyad finished his speech—saying that his people aspired ‘to live alongside you in peace, harmony, and security’—several audience members stood up to applaud. For a moment, anyway, just about everyone seemed to be rooting for Salam Fayyad.
On the unmet medical needs of transgender people:
The problem is that in the United States, most physicians don’t exactly know what treatment for the transgender patient entails. For an untrained professional, it’s a challenge to provide care to a patient with a penis who wants a vagina, or to a patient who has been tortured emotionally by being told she’s a boy when she knows she’s a girl.
General practitioners — the majority of doctors who treat patients in the United States — are equally unprepared to care for those transgender patients after they have begun to take hormones and undergone genital-reconstruction surgery. The lack of medical education on the topic, a near-total absence of research on transgender health issues and the resulting paucity of evidence-based treatment guidelines leave many at a loss.
Coming Wednesday, Feb. 29!
The New Republic and Longreads present: “Uncovering the Cover Story,” featuring Rachel Morris, Eliza Gray, Alec MacGillis, Timothy Noah, and The New Republic Editor Richard Just.
Washington, D.C., 7 p.m., Free
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, a #fiction pick, plus a guest pick from @Kaisertalk.
Photo: shinya/Flickr
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s path from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to Washington—where he and the Obama administration have been forced to retreat on many of their alternative energy plans:
On a cold morning in mid-November, Chu was hauled into a committee room on Capitol Hill. The hearing was the spectacle of the week, and the GOP lawmakers kept Chu—the only witness—in his chair for five and a half hours. “You’re a very bright man—much brighter than I am. I know you didn’t leave your brain at the door,” Virginia freshman Morgan Griffith growled. Chu’s hands shook slightly as he handled the edges of his prepared testimony.
By the time we spoke a month later, Chu seemed to have survived the experience, though not without some bitterness; the hearing, he told me, ‘was not the high point of what I wanted to do with my time.’ Still, the whole affair had cast a harsh light on a scientist turned policymaker for whom things had not gone as planned, even before the Solyndra bankruptcy. The president who brought him to Washington three years ago had promised nothing less than an environmental revolution, and Chu was supposed to be at its center, presiding over the most dramatic expansion of the clean energy industry the federal government had ever attempted. Now Chu may have no choice but to preside over its similarly dramatic retreat.
“The Experiment.” — Charles Homans, The New Republic
Previously: “Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust.” — Juliet Eilperin, Wired
Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Outside Magazine, The New Republic, Esquire, Grantland, The New York Times Magazine, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Prospect Magazine’s David Wolf.
Photo: moriza/Flickr
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