Search Results for: Vice Magazine

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Wired, The Verge, Rolling Stone, ESPN The Magazine, VICE, fiction, plus a guest pick by Joanna Lin.

A trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, joining a UN mission to investigate the massacres there:

In the last few months, I’ve spent time in the Democratic Republic of Congo where I used an embarrassing fuck-up by one of the world’s most publicly accountable organizations as a bargaining tool to get a story. A mistake by the United Nations means I saw something I shouldn’t have*, and when I agreed to agree it never happened, they reluctantly allowed me to join a massacre investigation mission in the most damaged part of what is, if their own statistics are to be trusted, the most damaged country in the world.

I was to accompany a three-person Human Rights Team into one of the remotest parts of the Masisi district in Eastern DRC. I was expecting something like the cast of The Matrix, but what I got was a Head of Mission who wore Prada loafers, a spherical Congolese lady with a kind smile and another guy who wore a Thailand tourist T-shirt and fell asleep all the time. The UN histrionics surrounding our departure made it seem like we’d be spat out into an as yet unseen sequel of a Hollywood blockbuster, but in truth, we were middle-class happy campers on holiday.

“Sleeping Through the Slaughter.” — Jessica Hatcher, Vice

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A look at anthropologist Tanya Lurhmann, and on how it is possible for people to experience the voice of a higher being:

In the name of research, Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried and raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews and ‘tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate.’ So real, in fact, that members told her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings and getting God’s advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy.

After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research focuses on ‘theory of mind,’ how we conceptualize our minds and those of others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer can train a person to hear what they determine to be God’s voice.

“Hearing the Voice of God.” — Jill Wolfson, Stanford Magazine

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A daughter recounts the difficult experience of getting her bipolar father the help he needed to get better:

I could feel everyone getting tired. The emergency-screening service kept sending the same patient to the psychiatric hospital, only to see him again the following week. The hospital had to baby-sit for a man who refused to comply with treatment. I made dozens of phone calls and was getting nowhere. The only people who hadn’t succumbed to fatigue were my mother, though her fingers were cramped from praying so many rosaries, and the local police, who had no choice in the matter. The same roster of officers responded to each call, shepherding my father from the street to the emergency room to PESS to jail, and periodically driving past my mother’s house to make sure things were calm. I worried that before long they, too, would give up and release my father, on his own recognizance, to the street.

And then what?

I imagined him circling a drain, the pull of love and obligation dragging my mother and siblings and me behind him.

“When My Crazy Father Actually Lost His Mind.” — Jeneen Interlandi, The New York Times Magazine

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Does our body tell us when we can’t go any farther, or does our brain? A look at marathon runners and the science behind human endurance.

A classic situation in which athletes believe they have hit a true physical limit is ‘bonking’ during a marathon: you stagger to a halt, ostensibly because your body runs out of carbohydrates. When Noakes started running in the 1970s, the standard advice was to drink only water during long races. Then, in the late stages of a sixty-four-kilometre race one year, he tried a few spoonfuls of corn syrup. ‘Five minutes later, I just started running. I finished that race faster than I ever finished,’ he recalls. ‘It was like the brain released something.” The discovery led to the first external funding (‘a thousand rand in a brown paper packet,’ he says) for his nascent sports science lab, to study the effects of corn syrup on participants in South Africa’s Stellenbosch marathon.

The fact that the corn syrup worked seems to support the idea that the body is limited by its finite store of carbohydrates. But it almost worked too well, and Noakes began to question whether carbohydrates could even reach the muscles that quickly. Sure enough, recent experiments in Britain have shown that your brain picks up the presence of carbohydrates in your mouth via previously unknown sensors, anticipates that fuel is headed to your muscles, and allows you to go a bit faster — even if you trick it by spitting out the carbs rather than swallowing them to replenish your muscles.

“The Race Against Time.” — Alex Hutchinson, Walrus Magazine

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Michael Hastings, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Paul Ford, VICE, fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Matt Cardin.

Inside the boardroom battles that led to the hiring (and firing) of CEO Léo Apotheker, formerly of SAP. Meg Whitman is now in charge of finding ways to fix the legendary tech company:

A few months after she took over as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard last September, Meg Whitman held one in a series of get-to-know-you meetings with employees. To say the audience, a group of software engineers and managers, was sullen would be an understatement. As Whitman spoke, many of them glared at her. Others weren’t making eye contact with their new boss. Their heads were down, and they were tapping furiously on handheld devices.

‘Your comments are being live-blogged,’ one employee told her defiantly. Whitman challenged the man. ‘You all have taken leaking to a new art form,’ she said. ‘It’s a sign of an unhappy company. You wish HP ill.’ The tapping suddenly stopped, and as the room fell silent, the mobile devices were lowered.

“How Hewlett-Packard Lost Its Way.” — James Bandler, Doris Burke, Fortune magazine

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The writer confronts her inability to have children and explores how humans’ behavior with reproduction compares with other animals:

Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating dance. Bald eagle parents, who mate for life and share the responsibility of rearing young, will sometimes look on impassively as the stronger eaglet kills its sibling. At the end of their life cycle, after swimming thousands of miles in salt water, Pacific salmon swim up their natal, freshwater streams to spawn, while the fresh water decays their flesh. Animals will do whatever it takes to ensure reproductive success.

“The Art of Waiting.” — Belle Boggs, Orion Magazine

See also: “The Good Seed.” — Dan P. Lee, GQ

The untold story of George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard. Hagan revisits the mystery that led to the downfall of CBS’s Dan Rather—with new details on what may have really happened when Bush suddenly stopped flying in the spring of 1972:

The CBS documents that seem destined to haunt Rather are, and have always been, a red herring. The real story, assembled here for the first time in a single narrative, featuring new witnesses and never-reported details, is far more complex than what Rather and Mapes rushed onto the air in 2004. At the time, so much rancorous political gamesmanship surrounded Bush’s military history that it was impossible to report clearly (and Rather’s flawed report effectively ended further investigations). But with Bush out of office, this is no longer a problem. I’ve been reporting this story since it first broke, and today there is more cooperation and willingness to speak on the record than ever before. The picture that emerges is remarkable. Beyond the haze of elaborately revised fictions from both the political left and the political right is a bizarre account that has remained, until now, the great untold story of modern Texas politics. For 36 years, it made its way through the swamps of state government as it led up to the collision between two powerful Texans on the national stage.

“Truth or Consequences.” — Joe Hagan, Texas Monthly

See also: “Dear President Bush,” — Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic, Oct. 1, 2009

What it’s like to be one half of a couple where one partner is HIV positive, and the other is not:

We go to the mall and spend too much. We go to multiplexes and laugh at bad horror movies. We scrape by, for several months, on turkey sandwiches and canned soup and whatever meals we can eat with my parents. He offers good advice. He listens to me when I talk, which I’m not sure anyone I have ever dated or loved has ever really done. We, at times, have sex that is identical in every position and maneuver and duration as the time we had it before and yet we both, it seems, enjoy it just as much if not more. We have sex without worry.

“Odd Blood: Serodiscordancy, or, Life With an HIV-Positive Partner.” — John Fram, The Atlantic

See also: “Life After Death.” — Michael Harris, Walrus Magazine, Aug. 15, 2011