Search Results for: atlantic

Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Author

Original Parker Brothers Ouija Board elements from Dave Winer/Flickr CC, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Joy Lanzendorfer | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,948 words)

One day in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings at a Ouija board. Curran’s father had died the year before, and Hutchings was hoping to contact him. While they’d had some success with earlier sessions, Curran had grown tired of the game and had to be coaxed to play. This time, a message came over the board. It said: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come — Patience Worth my name.”

This moment was the start of a national phenomenon that would turn Curran into a celebrity. Patience Worth, the ghost who’d contacted them, said she was a Puritan who immigrated to America in the late 1600s. Through Curran, she would dictate an astounding 4 million words between 1913 and 1937, including six novels, two poetry collections, several plays, and volumes of witty repartee.

The work attracted national headlines, serious reviews, and a movie deal. Patience Worth’s poetry was published in the esteemed Braithwaite’s anthologies alongside writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1918, she was named an outstanding author by the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York. Her novel, The Sorry Tale, was a bestseller with four printings. The New York Times said her poetry was a “high level of literary quality” with “flashes of genius.” Harper’s Magazine said that the “writings attributed to Patience Worth are exceptional.” The New Republic added: “That she is sensitive, witty, keenly metaphorical in her poetry and finely graphic in her drama, no one can deny.”

Literary Digest summed up the critical interest by writing: “It is difficult not to take Patience Worth seriously.” Read more…

We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

A Vor Never Sleeps

Garrett M. Graff | Longreads | June 2018 | 20 minutes (5,086 words)

Razhden Shulaya maintained a diverse business empire, like a Warren Buffet of crime. By age 40, from his base in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he had a cigarette smuggling operation, a drug ring, a counterfeit credit card scheme, an extortion racket, an illegal gambling establishment, and teams devoted to hacking slot machines. According to prosecutors who have been building a case against him, Shulaya’s associates provided gun-running, kidnap-for-hire, and the fencing of stolen jewelry. Plans were in place for what authorities came to call the “romance scam”: use an attractive woman to lure a target down to Atlantic City, knock him out with chloroform, and steal his money. They’d take his Rolex, too.

Read more…

The Prosperity Plea

Poor People's Campaign

Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,395 words)

On Monday, May 14, I was among some ninety people gathered at the capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire. We sang old Civil Rights songs and held signs with slogans like “Starving a Child is Violence,” and “Systemic Racism is Immoral.” People told harrowing stories about growing up anxious over acquiring basic necessities and brushes with disaster when a child got sick and needed a parent at home. David Jadlocki, a pastor, gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon. “We will never be free, we will never be whole, we will never be happy, as long as our fullness is bought at the expense of another’s existence,” he said. “As long as there are children living in our nation who wake up each morning and go to bed each night gripped by the pains of hunger and the shame of poverty, we are not free.”

The crowd comprised mostly the kinds of people you would expect to find at 2 p.m. on a weekday—retirees, students, workers who could duck out early—and the civil disobedience was less dogs-and-firehoses than a polite exchange with Officer Friendly; when a group blocked a street, we were gently escorted for a brief stay in jail. None of this may have appeared particularly extreme. But the message on display was something radical, a national revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, taking place over 40 days, in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., with the slogan “a new and unsettling force.” The movement aims to challenge the way most Americans view the economy, by overthrowing the treasured, toxic American ideal of personal responsibility. There’s no personal shame in being poor, the campaign’s leaders argue, what’s shameful is maintaining a society in which poverty exists.

Read more…

‘I Was a Storm of Confetti’: Michael Pollan On Why It’s a Good Idea To Lose Your Self

Getty

Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,468 words)

On April 19, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a quarter milligram of LSD to confirm that it had caused the oddly fantastical journey he had experienced the day before. To his surprise and delight, he was not mistaken –– the drug opened up a new window of consciousness. The discovery caught the attention of other researchers, and by the 1950s, psychedelic testing was in full bloom, yielding promising results for people suffering from neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy.

But as counter-cultural experimentation progressed and the drugs were taken out of the lab and into the wild –– think of Tim Leary, dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by Nixon, and his controversial LSD experiments –– there was a backlash. According to the writer Michael Pollan, society “turned on a dime” against psychedelics. “You’d have to go back to the Inquisition and Galileo for a time when scientific inquiry was stigmatized quite the way this was,” he tells me. “And it’s a measure of how powerful that backlash was and how threatened powerful interests felt about what psychedelics were doing to society.” Read more…

Stacey Abrams’ Historic Win in Georgia: A Reading List

ATLANTA, GA - MAY 22: Georgia Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams takes the stage to declare victory in the primary during an election night event on May 22, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. If elected, Abrams would become the first African American female governor in the nation. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, former state representative Stacey Abrams won the Democratic nomination for Governor of Georgia, becoming the first black woman gubernatorial nominee of a major political party in U.S. history. She defeated her opponent handily, beating Stacey Evans with a three-to-one margin with a platform calling for Medicaid expansion, criminal justice reform, gun safety measures, affordable childcare, and universal pre-K.

Abrams faces a tough general election in November. Only four African-American politicians have served as governor in the U.S. ever, with none in the Deep South since Reconstruction. A run-off election will be held in July to determine the Republican nominee, and of the candidates likely to oppose Abrams, both support looser gun laws, tax cuts for high earners, and defunding sanctuary cities as part of a “crackdown on illegal immigration.” Abrams hopes to win by building a multi-racial coalition of progressives (including new voters) that taps into Georgia’s shifting demographics.

Abrams is part of a national wave of women running for office in record numbers, as well as a galvanizing energy among progressives partly inspired by opposition to President Trump. Her candidacy has drawn national attention; should Abrams win, one of the most populous red states could be in play for progressives seeking national office for the first time in decades. It could also signal a significant shift in values and priorities for the Deep South.

For a deeper dive, here are a few pieces that smartly contextualize Abrams’ victory, as well as what’s at stake in the fall.

On Stacey Abrams and the Georgia Primary

“Stacey Abrams Wins Democratic Primary for Governor, Making History.” (Jonathan Martin & Alexander Burns, New York Times, May 2018)

Martin and Burns consider the history-making moment of Abrams’ primary win and why the candidate has drawn support from Democrats at the federal level. The reporters also note other primary successes among progressive Democrats Tuesday night, especially women candidates like Amy McGrath of Kentucky.

“Stacey Abrams Makes History in the Georgia Primary.” (Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, May 2018)

Bethea talks to a cross section of conservative and progressive Georgia political insiders about Abrams’ chances in the general election.

“America Has Never Had a Black Woman Governor. Stacey Abrams Has Something to Say About That.” (Jamilah King, Mother Jones, April 2018)

Reporter Jamilah King profiles Abrams, capturing the candidate’s appeal to black women voters and her push to assemble a “rainbow coalition.”

On Change in the South

“Reverse Migration Might Turn Georgia Blue.” (Alana Semuels, Atlantic, May 2018)

Young, unmarried blacks and single women are moving to the South, especially Atlanta and its suburbs, in large numbers. Searching for lower housing prices and better quality of life, transplants tend to be more progressive than other residents. They could be instrumental in helping Abrams achieve victory.

“Racism is Everywhere, So Why Not Move South?” (Reniqua Allen, New York Times, July 2017)

Allen takes a closer look at why black millennials like her are flocking to southern cities.

“Slavery’s Southern Legacy.” (Sophia Nguyen, Harvard Magazine, May 2018)

Nguyen reports on a new book (by researchers Avidit Acharya and Matthew Blackwell), which claims that political attitudes in the South, especially on issues of race, can be predicted by how deeply individual counties relied on slavery prior to the Civil War.

 “’Please God, Don’t Let Me Get Stopped’: Around Atlanta, No Sanctuary for Immigrants.” (Vivian Yee, New York Times, November 2017)

According to Yee, “the regional ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) office in Atlanta made nearly 80 percent more arrests in the first half of this year than it did in the same period last year, the largest increase of any field office in the country.” The Republican contenders in Stacey Abrams’ race have run strident anti-immigration campaigns.

“When the South Was the Most Progressive Region in America.” (Blain Roberts & Ethan J. Kytle, Atlantic, January 2018)

Roberts and Kytle, both historians, discuss how the post-Civil War’s South created multi-racial democracies based on state constitutions that were more progressive than many in the North. Reconstruction era activists and politicians, the authors contend, “[provide] a blueprint for a liberal resurgence that may already be under way in the 21st century South.”

On National Trends

“Red State, Blue City.” (David A. Graham, Atlantic, March 2017)

Graham posits that U.S. politics are growing increasingly polarized along a rural/urban divide.

“A Progressive Electoral Wave is Sweeping the Country.” (John Nichols, The Nation, June 2017)

Nichols details the importance of down-ballot victories, across the country, that signal a rising tide of resistance to the policies of President Trump.

Who Sank El Faro? An Interview With Rachel Slade

Bob Self/The Florida Times-Union via AP

Joshunda Sanders | Longreads | May 2018 | 14 minutes (3,119 words)

El Faro rolled farther into the wind, exhausted by the fight, until her deck edge dipped into the brine. Superheated Caribbean waters beckoned her in. The ship’s floors turned to the sky and became walls, her walls became ceilings. She was going gently into the eternal night of the deep ocean.

Two people remained on the bridge as she sank.

“Captain,” Frank Hamm pleaded. “Captain. Captain.”

Davidson braced himself on the high side of the bridge, looking down what was now the steep ramp of the floor. At the end of it, the heavy seaman was pinned to the corner by gravity and fear. He couldn’t climb up to the starboard side of the bridge to get out. The angle of the floor was too steep.

“Come on, Frank,” Davidson said. “We gotta move. You gotta get up. You gotta snap out of it. And we gotta get out.”

— from Into The Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and The Sinking of El Faro

Rachel Slade has never lived more than five miles from the Atlantic — she lives in Massachusetts and Maine — and her admiration for the ocean ripples through Into the Raging Sea. The poetic gaze of a boat-lover, sailor, rower and coxswain is apparent on every page.

Slade’s book is a comprehensive account of what led to the mysterious October 2015 sinking of the shipping vessel El Faro. While on an oft-charted path delivering goods from Jacksonville, Florida, to Puerto Rico, El Faro sailed directly into Hurricane Joaquin. It was the deadliest American maritime event in more than three decades.

More than the story of how a ship was overcome by a storm, Into The Raging Sea is an allegory for what it means to be a part of the nation’s largely invisible working and middle class. Mariners are literally set adrift and set apart from the rest of us for many weeks and months at a time, out of view and, apparently, out of the reach of the rules and regulations that should protect them. Read more…

Can the Jaguars’ Unique Biology Help It Survive On Our Over-Populated Planet?

Leonardo Mercon / VWPics via AP Images

In Peru’s Candamo Valley, one of South America’s most remote pieces of rainforest, wild jaguars still prowl the forest. Sometimes you see them, often times you don’t. For The Atlantic, journalist Nadia Drake narrates her startling, close encounter with the Americas’ largest wild cat, and she examines the traits that might equip the jaguar to survive the world’s true top predator: people. What she finds is a powerful stealthy predator who, instead of hunting humans, tries to avoid confrontation with us and find ways to live on the margins ─ possibly because it knows another able competitor when it sees one.

No one knew how long the jaguar had been watching us. We’d pulled our canoe up to the spot in the late afternoon, then macheted a clearing in a flat patch of jungle uphill from the river. Then we’d cooked dinner under the observant gaze of several monkeys, and afterward, one of our crew had headed to the baño. Along the way, he had noticed the twin orbs glowing in the beam of his headlamp.

“The light was not too strong, her pupils were still very wide,” reported Davíd Attila Molnár, a filmmaker. “I saw two sparkling eyes that were dangerously far away from one another.”

Molnár quickly retreated. But the jaguar stayed near her tree, even after all nine of us showed up for a look. She occasionally yawned, displaying an impressive mouthful of teeth. Eventually, she curled up in the leaves like a house cat on a window seat and went to sleep, her sporadically twitching ears visible through the brush.

Read the story

A Chance to Rewrite History: The Women Fighters of the Tamil Tigers

Illustration by Cornelia Li

Kim Wall | Mansi Choksi | Longreads | May 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)

Kim Wall and Mansi Choksi met at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2012. Mansi returned to India after graduation and Kim soon followed; it was the start of a writing partnership that took the pair on reporting trips to Africa and Sri Lanka.

“We went on our first reporting trip together to write about an emerging Chinatown in Kampala in 2015,” says Mansi. “And then the next year, I moved to New York, where she was living, so we would spend our afternoons working together.”

Mansi and Kim traveled to Sri Lanka in 2016. Mansi recalls Kim’s dedication to telling the story of the women who fought with the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka’s brutal, 25-year civil war.

“Kim genuinely fell in love with the women we were writing about,” says Mansi. “You can hear it in her voice, in the tapes of our interviews.”

Not long after Mansi and Kim filed this story, Kim Wall was murdered while on another reporting assignment. The story of the Tamil Tiger women became the last piece she wrote. We have been humbled to work with Mansi over the past several months to give this story a home at Longreads.

To honor Kim’s memory, the Kim Wall Memorial Fund was created to “fund a female reporter to cover subculture, broadly defined, and what Kim liked to call ‘the undercurrents of rebellion.'”

–Krista Stevens, Editor

* * *

Velu Chandra Kala was 17 when she charged into her school principal’s office with a bag of milk toffees. She was small and jumpy, with dimpled cheeks and a woolly fringe. The principal took a toffee, briefly looking up from his desk, and assumed it was her birthday. Next, she was in science class, surrounded by howling classmates. They were hugging her, weeping into her palms, begging her not to leave. The cookery teacher took a toffee, and teared up. Next, the vice principal. Afterward she left the toffees in her mother’s kitchen, by the stove. She was on her way to join an armed conflict.

* * *

Read more…

Endurance: It’s All in Your Head, Apparently

Scott Jurek applies lotion to his feet before running McAffee's Knob trail -- part of the Appalachian Trail in Catawba, Va. on Thursday, June 11, 2015. Jurek is on day 16 of his attempt to complete the 2,168.1 mile trail in 42 days. The current record is 46 days held by Jennifer Pharr Davis. Starting at Springer Mountain, Ga., Jurek has ran roughly 700 miles to date. (John Roark/The Roanoke Times via AP)

At The Atlantic, Paul Bisceglio surveys three new books that consider the brain’s role in extreme endurance sports and how a large part of high performance is in how the brain negotiates with an exhausted body.

Of all the things that could have broken Scott Jurek on a 2,189-mile run, it was a small tree root that crushed his spirit. He was 38 days into an attempt to beat the speed record for completing the full length of the Appalachian Trail, the mountainous hiking path that snakes along America’s East Coast, from northern Georgia to the top of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Jurek, one of the greatest ultramarathoners of all times, was in trouble. After battling through a succession of leg injuries, then slogging through Vermont’s wettest June in centuries, he had to make up ground over a particularly merciless stretch of the trail, New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Delirious from just two hours of sleep following 26 straight hours of hiking, he was stumbling along the trail when he encountered the root in his path.

“As I saw it coming, I didn’t know what to do,” Jurek recalls in his new memoir, North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, co-written with his wife, Jenny. “Was I supposed to step around it or over it? I just couldn’t remember.” So he hit it and toppled. “I’d forgotten how to raise my legs,” he writes. “How to run like a sane person.”

After tripping over the root in New Hampshire, he picked himself up, charged forward in his delirium for another week, and defeated Davis’s time by a slim three hours: He finished in 46 days, 8 hours, and 7 minutes. Since then, two people have already beaten his record.

Read the story