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Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun

Henry Griffin / AP

Sean Howe | Longreads | May 2019 |  15 minutes (3,853 words)

In November 2018, after the Secret Service seized the security credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, the White House Press Secretary stated the reason for the revocation was that the administration would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Within hours, attorney Ted Boutrous responded on Twitter:
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‘Little Grandpa’ and The List

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | May 2019 | 17 minutes (4,208 words)

It’s a long plane ride, so I puke in midair, grunting and coughing up the last remnants of breakfast. My mother holds the paper bag open for me, an encouraging look on her face. When I am done, she closes it up, wipes my face with a tissue from her purse, and carries the slosh to the bathroom. Down the row, a bald man in a suit looks away in disgust.

I am 10, it is May, 1988, and we are on our way to my grandfather’s funeral in Los Angeles. In the locker room at school the day before leaving, in the loudest fourth grade voice she could muster, my friend Laura announced that it was my fault that he had died. I suspect this can’t really be possible — I live in Montreal, which is in a different country, after all — but it still worries me. On the plane, lying my head across my mother’s lap, I tell her about Laura and the locker room. She glares down at me from behind the thick frames of her oversized oval glasses, then looks up and starts fiddling with the tray table. “Sweetheart,” she says. “I think it’s time for some new friends.”

My grandfather is being cremated, and I am spellbound by the word — I have learned its meaning especially for the occasion, and let it cycle through my mouth over and over again, the “eemmm” sound turning into a hum at the back of my throat. Last night, my mother explained that a lot of people didn’t like the idea of being put in a coffin and buried in the earth. Instead, she said, some preferred to be cremated, which turned out to be a fancy word for being burned into ashes. But the word seems slightly suspicious: too lovely to mean something so violent.

In bed the night before, I wondered where we’d visit Grandpa if he wasn’t lying in a cemetery next to Grandma — the two headstones side by side, their bones resting together underneath. “Cremation” made it sound like he would just disappear.

***

We arrive in L.A. in the afternoon. It is bright everywhere. Since I still feel a bit like throwing up again, the warm breeze feels good on my body. As we wait at an outdoor baggage claim, my mother yanks my long, thick hair into a tight ponytail, the tip tickling my spine. A little yellow stain, evidence of the unsettling flight, has dried on my pink-and-white striped T-shirt.

Even though she has a bad back, my mother drags our big beige bag off the carousel by herself, her red sundress riding up the back of her thighs. Once she takes hold of the handle, she yells for people to get out of the way, then drops it, the tiny wheels crashing to the cement. I stand a bit away, wishing Dad were here.

The four of us usually rent a car when we come to visit Grandpa in L.A., but since my father and older sister will arrive later in the week, we take a cab, my mother talking in a feverishly speedy tone all along the freeway. Once in the city, I roll down my window, and the familiar smell of L.A. — a cocktail of palm trees and dry grass — calms my stomach.
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After a Fashion

Vianney Le Caer / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 |  8 minutes (2,349 words)

Rufus: Models help people. They make them feel good about themselves.
Meekus: They also show them how to dress cool and wear their hair in interesting ways.
Zoolander: I guess so.

The schadenfreude was swift and it was sharp the moment the Met Gala announced this year’s theme: camp. “do you ever wake up in the middle of the night because you remembered the met ball is camp themed this year and so many celebrities are going to have to explain what they think camp is,” tweeted New Yorker fashion columnist Rachel Syme. The idea that the fashion industry, infamously out of touch, was not only bypassing urgent matters of the present to focus on the past, but that the past it chose is defined by its indefinability — Susan Sontag’s attempt, “Notes on Camp,” is a series of contradictions for a reason — was too delicious. We were all Divine, in drag, crouching next to that puli, waiting for that shit. And when Lady Gaga and Celine Dion showed up vamping their souls out, it was the perfect symbol of fashion’s near-constant missing of the mark even when it is the mark. Because camp, a lurid pink flourish on the margins of society, is at its core the opposite of what fashion has become: a sanitized institution that sets itself apart from the mess of our reality. “Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp,” wrote Sontag, “what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic.”

The stars who seemed to intrinsically understand camp, from Danai Gurira to Natasha Lyonne, are familiar with the fringes of Hollywood. And it was a surprise to no one when Billy Porter — who made his name in Kinky Boots — arrived like the second coming of Tutankhamun, in head-to-toe gold, carried by a coterie of beefcakes. This is the man whose name few knew three months ago, whose style alone threw him to the top of the red carpet, above the old A-listers in the likes of Chanel and Valentino. Like Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness, he is fashion precisely because he poses outside of it. Established fashion these days is a place where tradition trumps trendiness, and the biggest couturiers seem to be moving backward rather than forward. Prada, Gucci, Burberry, and Dolce & Gabbana, among others, have lately made missteps so basic it has become clear that being clueless is not the exception but the rule. “Fashion is old-fashioned,” says Van Dyk Lewis, who has worked as a designer and teaches fashion at Cornell University. “The clothes might be cool, but actually the sentiment of fashion in our moment isn’t.” Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Close-up of an ampoule that contains a medium for stem cell storage at the UK Stem Cell Bank, north London, England, May 19, 2004. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Caroline Chen, Keri Bertino, Ann Friedman, Allison Williams, and Brian Payton.

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High Expectations: LSD, T.C. Boyle’s Women, and Me

Illustration by Homestead

Christine Ro | Longreads | May 2019 | 16 minutes (4,208 words)

I’m sweaty, exhausted, and red-faced when I finally emerge from my final acid trip. My apartment is a mess of objects my friends and I have tried feeling, smelling, or otherwise experiencing: loose dry pasta, drinks of every kind, hairbrushes, blankets. My voice is hoarse from talking or shouting all night. I’ve had more emotional cycles in the past 12 hours than in the last several months combined.

What made me want to drop acid wasn’t a friend or a festival, but a book. Specifically, T.C. Boyle’s new novel Outside Looking In. The book has its problems, but one thing it gets right is the intensely social experience of LSD. Even taken alone, even as a tool for introspective reflection, it rejigs attitudes towards other people. This can be a gift, or it can be a weapon. And as a woman, I’m especially aware of the potential for the latter. Read more…

I Entered the World’s Longest, Loneliest Horse Race on a Whim, and I Won

A horse flicks its tail for temporary relief from the persistently pestering flies on the Mongolian steppe. cookedphotos / iStock / Getty

Lara Prior-Palmer | an excerpt adapted from Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race | Catapult | May 2019 | 19 minutes (5,344 words)

It was May 2013 when I was cooped up in an attic in Austria, au pairing for a family with six Ferraris. They lived in a converted hotel in the jaws of an Alpine valley.

“Lara? Larah!”

Every morning the mother shrieked my name up the endless floors. “Time to feed the baby!”

I had taken the role to practice my German, but she only spoke in English. My jobs varied from sitting with the toddler to vacuuming up the dead skin that snowed from his father’s bottom.

The family never left their house except to get in their cars, which they kept tucked up in the garage. They viewed their valley through window frames as you would a photograph. So sedentary a lifestyle in such physical surroundings made me itch. At night I hatched plans to creep up the mountain and slide down the other side into Switzerland, yet the mother looked appalled when I so much as suggested running to the church and back.

By the time she sacked me a month later, my body was rusty and yearning for usage. I returned to the silent butterflies of an England on the brink of summer, seeking an experience unlike any I’d had before. In theory, this ought not to have been difficult. The most exciting moment in my eighteen years had been collecting chickens from Dorset on the train and wrapping them up in wine crates for Christmas presents. Read more…

If You Should Find Yourself in the Dark

Illustration by Wenting Li

Debbie Weingarten | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,460 words)

If your son cries in the night, begin a slow insistent hush. With your lips, make the sound of a snake. Even before you are fully awake, place your bare feet on the floor. Say, Mama is coming, and then creep past the purple glow of the nightlight to where he is a ball in his bed.

Lay your hand on his back.

If the covers have gone astray, or if his brother’s pinwheel feet are in his face, or if he has rolled onto the plastic toy he took to bed — fix it all. Place the covers back beneath his chin. Readjust the brother, put the toy on the shelf, kiss the forehead. Feel your way back through the darkness, over the sleeping dog.

***

Long ago, my parents were spelunkers. They would disappear into a hole in the ground, unsure of where the cave would lead, and pick their way along in the dark, their carbide lights illuminating the stalactites and stalagmites. They insist they felt excitement and possibility.

Once they brought my brother and me to a cave they remembered from college. It was supposed to be a family adventure. Together we would explore, and my parents would remember the way out.

What I recall is the surprising totality of darkness. And the terror I felt when we squeezed through the smallest of passageways. And the solidness — the unmoveableness — of the rock. If I breathed out or turned my shoulders in a certain way, I imagined I could be stuck there forever. If anything were to give, it would not be the rock; it would be my girl-sized bones.

Decades later, I still cannot relax into the dark.
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Mothers are the Backbone of the Revolution

Lizeth Dávila, 39, holds a photo of her murdered son Álvaro, 15, in her hands. All photos by Jacky Muniello.

Alice Driver | Longreads | May 2019 | 7 minutes (1957 words)

She will tell the story of her child’s murder as many times as needed. She will tell it until her voice breaks, until her eyes no longer fill with tears, until her demands for justice are met. She could be the mother of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or Alyssa Alhdeff in Parkland, Florida, or Álvaro Manuel Conrado Dávila in Managua, Nicaragua. The history of mothers as activists in the Americas is firmly rooted in the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, a group of hundreds of mothers who marched weekly in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires to protest the murder and disappearance of their children under the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983. These mothers, bound together by the private pain of witnessing a child’s murder or disappearance, turn their anguish and rage outward into public movements to demand justice, often at great risk to themselves.

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Editors Roundtable: Alma Matters, Raisin Hell, and Upstairs Cocaine (Podcast)

Raisins drying. (George Lepp / Getty Images)

On the May 3, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Fact-checker Ethan Chiel, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Head of Fact-checking Matt Giles, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The Cut, Vulture, The New York Times, Topic, and The Atavist.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


1:47 The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence
(Ezra Marcus and James D. Walsh, April 28, 2019, The Cut)

“…that is sometimes how life is. Stories are incomplete, crazy things happen to non-famous people in ways that are very difficult for us to get the full story on. Sometimes life delivers stories that are hard to tell to completion.”

New York magazine’s wild story about a man named Larry Ray, who moved in with his daughter Talia at Sarah Lawrence College, positioned himself as a mentor to her friends, and basically started a cult.

The team discusses the need for contextual disclosures of reporter-subject relationships, the pleasure of discussing magazine journalism with friends, and reporting as a finished product versus a tool for further intellectual property sales.

9:35 In Conversation: Anjelica Huston
(Andrew Goldman, May 1, 2019, Vulture)

“Sometimes I think that interviews can be sort of boring or sometimes celebrity profiles can be sort of boring but this one was great. At one point she’s asked what makes good cocaine.”

The Longreads team discusses Huston’s relationships with, and current takes on Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Jeffrey Tambor in light of the #MeToo movement and whether it’s difficult for women to be frank about the misbehaviour of men. They also muse about Huston’s relationships with Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson and her father, as well as her evocative description of the 70s. Finally, they touch on the behind-the-scenes craft of celebrity interviews and how they come together.

Huston’s two memoirs are A Story Lately Told and Watch Me: A Memoir.

16:26 The Raisin Situation (Jonah Engel Bromwich, April 27, 2019, The New York Times)

A look at Harry Overly, the CEO of Sun-Maid Raisins, and his attempts to grow the raisin industry, including getting millennials to eat raisins. The piece examines how the industry works and the relationships between growers in and around Fresno and the California Central Valley and raisin companies. Overly is the central character and hero of the story, perhaps at the expense of some other possible directions.

18:50 The Big Business of Spring Water (Katy Kelleher, April 2019, Topic)

The team discusses specialty water, theories of labour, value and property, and how things that are good enough for everybody, like public water, vary in their quality. They also discuss the raw water movement and reference Nellie Bowles’ New York Times piece, “Unfiltered Fervor: The Rush to get off the Water Grid.

27:33 The Heart Still Stands (Elizabeth Flock, April 2019, The Atavist)

“It’s a story about love, it’s a story about distrust, and about broken promises, which are very sort of historic, inherent to the relationship between Native Americans, indigenous people, and governments.”

On the third anniversary of Standing Rock, The Atavist shares the story of Red Fawn Fallis, an Oglala Lakota Sioux woman arrested while protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and charged with attempted murder for allegedly firing a handgun at officers who had tackled her. The gun belonged to her boyfriend at the time who turned out to be working as an FBI informant. Reporter Elizabeth Flock gives context to this relationship and the history of the FBI use of informants going back to the 1960s and 70s with the American Indian Movement.

* * *

Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

Take Two Stem Cell Injections and Don’t Call Me Until After I Cash Your $10,000 Cheque

Stem cell. Getty Images

Getting older? Feeling the aches and pains that come naturally as we age? If someone suggests that stem cells will ease your ills, ask to see some science, and maybe a valid medical license. Stem cell purveyors are popping up all over the United States in a new, “largely unregulated” industry — and they’re charging $5,000 to $10,000 for a single injection.

As Caroline Chen reports as part of a joint investigation by ProPublica and The New Yorker, “Unscientific methods, deceptive marketing, price gouging and disregard for patients’ well-being were rampant across the amniotic stem cell therapy industry.” The investigation “found disgraced doctors who were recast as salespeople, manufacturers that cloaked themselves in pseudoscience and had few scientists on staff, and clinics that offer to treat conditions like multiple sclerosis or kidney disease without specialized training.”

These clinics are multiplying in the United States. According to a tally by Leigh Turner, an associate professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota, there were 12 such clinics advertising to consumers in 2009; in 2017, there were more than 700. Unproven cellular therapies are a $2 billion global business, according to a recent paper co-authored by Massimo Dominici, the lead investigator at the cellular therapy lab at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, in Italy.

They were there to see a presentation by Dr. David Greene, who was introduced as a “retired orthopedic surgeon.” Atlas Medical Center, a local clinic that specializes in pain treatment, hosted the event. Greene, a short, trim man with his hair slicked up, ignored the stage and microphone and stood close to his audience. After warming up the crowd with a joke about his inept golf skills, Greene launched into his sales pitch. A tiny vial no larger than the palm of his hand, he told the group, contains roughly 10 million live stem cells, harvested from the placenta, amniotic fluid, umbilical cord or amnion, the membrane that surrounds the fetus in the womb. Injected into a joint or spine, or delivered intravenously into the bloodstream, Greene told his listeners, those cells could ease whatever ailed them.

On a screen behind him, Greene displayed a densely printed slide with a “small list” of conditions his stem cell product could treat: arthritis, tendinitis, psoriasis, lupus, hair loss, facial wrinkles, scarring, erectile dysfunction, heart failure, cardiomyopathy, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, emphysema, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, ALS, neuropathy, pelvic pain, diabetes, dry eye, macular degeneration, kidney failure. And that was just a sample. “I need to add a couple more slides,” Greene said with a laugh.

Soni told Longo that three more injections were required for him to feel a significant difference, but, by early May, Longo had decided not to seek further treatment, saying that his left knee hadn’t improved any more. “I don’t think the regenerative properties were happening,” Longo said.

Earlier this year, Soni’s Web site displayed the names and faces of a team of clinicians, including a cardiologist, a cosmetologist, a neurologist, and a urologist. None of them were listed on New York State’s license look-up page, and their photos were traced back to stock photo websites.

When initially asked about these specialists, Soni said, “They are all seeing patients for me” and changed the subject. After ProPublica and The New Yorker expressed doubts about the clinicians’ existence to Soni, the names and photos vanished from the website.

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