Search Results for: Wired

My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son’s Depression and the Power of Art

Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words)

Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint it here, and for sharing an update on Nat’s life (see the postscript below).

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Longreads Best of 2013: Best Life Lessons from Lindsay Lohan in a Feature Story

Longreads Pick

Jason Fagone (@jfagone) is the author of Ingenious, a book about modern-day inventors; his stories this year appeared in Wired, Philadelphia, Grantland, Men’s Journal, and NewYorker.com.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 6, 2013

Longreads Best of 2013: Best Life Lessons from Lindsay Lohan in a Feature Story

Jason Fagone (@jfagone) is the author of Ingenious, a book about modern-day inventors; his stories this year appeared in Wired, Philadelphia, Grantland, Men’s Journal, and NewYorker.com.

Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie

Stephen Rodrick | The New York Times Magazine | January 2013 | 31 minutes (7,752 words)

Steve is a good friend, but I don’t think anyone will accuse me of stacking the deck for picking his widely praised tale of the making of Lindsay Lohan’s “The Canyons.” It’s the story from this year I remember the best—not just because it’s a textured portrait of Lohan, one that made me feel for her and actually like her, but because there are so many indelible moments. Lohan crying in her room: “It began quietly, almost a whimper, but rose to a guttural howl. It was the sobbing of a child lost in the woods.” Lohan negotiating with a pack of paparazzi to clear room for a film shot at a mall: “Lohan turned to her good side and hiked her floor-length skirt up to show a little leg. ‘O.K., five, four, three, two, one. Now you have to go.'” And of course there’s the moment when director Paul Schrader, “the son of dour Calvinists,” takes off his clothes to make a stubborn, emotional Lohan feel more comfortable taking off hers for a film scene:

Naked, he walked toward Lohan.
“Lins, I want you to be comfortable. C’mon, let’s do this.”
Lohan shrieked.
“Paul!”
[Producer Braxton] Pope heard the scream and ran up from downstairs. He turned a corner, and there was a naked Schrader. Pope let out a “whoa” and slowly backed out of the room.
But then a funny thing happened. Lohan dropped her robe.

As detailed and wackadoo as this story is, there’s also something universal about it. We are all naked Schrader, coaxing and begging our inner Lohans.

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week

animals-thrOur story picks of the week, featuring the Hollywood Reporter, New York magazine, Wired, Oxford American and the New York Review of Books, with a guest pick by Teddy Worcester.

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to each other. … By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s…. Ten years from now the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

Paul Krugman, 1998 (via New York Review of Books). Read more on the past, present and future of the Internet.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

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‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jeff Sharlet | Sweet Heaven When I Die, W. W. Norton & Company | Aug 2011 | 37 minutes (9,133 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Quebrado,” by Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and bestselling author. The story was first published in Rolling Stone in 2008 and is featured in Sharlet’s book Sweet Heaven When I Die. Thanks to Sharlet for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

The Disposable Man: A Western History of Sherpas on Everest

Longreads Pick

In the past decade, climbing Mount Everest has become a multimillion-dollar tourist attraction. Nepals’s Sherpas have been hired to do most of the dangerous work on the mountain—fixing ropes, stocking camps shuttling gear for climbers—but are paid much less than Western guides. When Sherpas die working on the mountain, they often leave behind families who receive little in terms of life insurance payments:

“Soon after, Arnot was confronted by members of Chhewang’s family who wanted to immediately launch an expensive body-recovery expedition. The urgency was over Chhewang’s spirit, which was at risk of getting lost and wandering the earth if it wasn’t set free within seven days by cremation. ‘I begged them not to go,’ said Arnot, worried that others might die trying to recover the body. They went anyway and never made it beyond Base Camp due to snow conditions. Arnot paid $19,700 herself in helicopter fees and says her sponsor Eddie Bauer wired $7,000 to cover the puja. Arnot has now committed to paying Chhewang’s family what she can—which has amounted to roughly $4,000 a year—for as long as she’s guiding, though it hasn’t entirely eased her conscience.

“‘It’s the guilt of hiring somebody to work for me who really had no choice,’ Arnot told me last October in Nepal, where I’d joined her on her second annual trek to visit Chhewang’s widow. ‘My passion created an industry that fosters people dying. It supports humans as disposable, as usable, and that is the hardest thing to come to terms with.'”

Source: Outside
Published: Jul 10, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,575 words)

Our Longreads Member Pick: The Skies Belong to Us (Chapter 5), by Brendan I. Koerner

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This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner‘s new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who’s been featured on Longreads in the past, explains: 
 

“On the morning of October 11, 2009, I encountered the 616-word newspaper story that would change my life. It was a New York Times report about a man named Luis Armando Peña Soltren, a former Puerto Rican nationalist who had helped hijack a Pan Am jet to Cuba in 1968. After spending the next 41 years living in Fidel Castro’s socialist ‘paradise,’ he had decided that he could no longer bear to remain apart from the wife and daughter he had left behind. So at the age of 66, Soltren had voluntarily returned to the United States. He had been arrested the moment he stepped off his plane at JFK Airport; he now faced a possible life sentence if convicted of air piracy.
           
“I was first struck by how much Soltren’s longing for his family had slowly swelled as the years flew by; it had taken him over four decades to muster the courage to risk his freedom for a chance to see his wife and daughter again. (I’ve always been drawn to tales of fugitives and exiles, who must often pay a steep psychological price in order to reinvent themselves.) But the more I thought about Soltren’s predicament, the more I was intrigued by its historical element—namely, the fact that he and two comrades had actually managed to hijack a Boeing 707 to Cuba in the first place. The New York Times piece gave the impression that such crimes were run-of-the-mill during the Vietnam Era. Given the airport security gauntlets we’re forced to endure these days, that seemed an almost unfathomable notion.
           
“Yet using a little Google-fu, I unearthed a lengthy list of dramatic skyjackings from the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time period I have romanticized ever since watching Mean Streets. There were plenty of fascinating characters who seemed to beg for deeper study, such as the Marine who fled to Rome to escape a court-martial, or the Mexican immigrant who just wanted to give a 34-minute speech about his troubles. But there was one name that tugged at my heart more than any other: Catherine Marie Kerkow.
           
“Why her? Well, for starters, she was a woman—skyjacking was almost exclusively a male pursuit. She was also high-school classmates with legendary miler Steve Prefontaine. But most important, she didn’t seem to have any obvious reason for getting involved in a spectacular hijacking—she was, by all accounts, just an aimless 20-year-old kid with no political ties, nor any history of criminality.
           
“So why did Cathy Kerkow turn her back on everything she’d ever known in order to hijack Western Airlines Flight 701? As my infinitely patient wife and kids can attest, my obsession with answering that question has now gobbled up a significant chunk of my life. The Skies Belong to Us is what I have to show for all those countless hours holed up with the keyboard, surrounded by teetering piles of marked-up documents.”

Read an excerpt here

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Longreads Member Exclusive: The Skies Belong to Us (Chapter 5), by Brendan I. Koerner

Longreads Pick

This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner‘s new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who’s been featured on Longreads in the past, explains:

Source: Crown
Published: Jun 13, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,231 words)

Celebrating Four Years of Longreads

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Longreads just celebrated its fourth birthday, and it’s been a thrill to watch this community grow since we introduced this service and Twitter hashtag in 2009. Thank you to everyone who participates, whether it’s as a reader, a publisher, a writer—or all three. And thanks to the Longreads Members who have made it possible for us to keep going. 

To celebrate four years, here’s a rundown of some of our most frequent #longreads contributors, and some of their recent recommendations: 

#1 – @matthiasrascher


#2 – @hriefs


#3 – @roamin


#4 – @jalees_rehman


#5 – @LAReviewofBooks


#6 – @TheAtlantic


#7 – @nxthompson


#8 – @faraway67 


#9 – @PocketHits


#10 – @legalnomads


#11 – @brainpicker


#12 – @LineHolm1 


#13 – @Guardian


#14 – @stonedchimera


#15 – @MosesHawk


#16 – @James_daSilva


#17 – @chrbutler


#18 – @eugenephoto

#19 – @jaredbkeller


#20 – @morgank


#21 – @dougcoulson


#22 – @LaForgeNYT


#23 – @stephen_abbott

#24 – @venkatananth

#25 – @weegee