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Featured Longreader: Pushcart Prize winner Elliott Holt. See her story picks from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Grantland and more on her longreads page.
Featured Longreader: Pushcart Prize winner Elliott Holt. See her story picks from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Grantland and more on her longreads page.
When she came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. By that time, I was up and looking at e‑mail, and we both quickly saw what the real problem was. In my inbox I found a message purporting to be from her, followed by a quickly proliferating stream of concerned responses from friends and acquaintances, all about the fact that she had been “mugged in Madrid.” The account had seemed sluggish earlier that morning because my wife had tried to use it at just the moment a hacker was taking it over and changing its settings—including the password, so that she couldn’t log in again.
Almost every morning, as Lyle was getting ready to take the dog for a walk along the bay, his wife would ask, “Are ye down the prom, then?” They had met and married thirty years before, in Vermont, when she was Mary Curtin and he’d thought her a happy combination of exotic and domestic. At sixty, after their life in the States, she still called herself a Galway girl; at sixty-seven, after two years of retirement in Galway, Lyle still considered a prom a high school dance, not two miles of sidewalk beside the water.
So he would say, “We’re going to walk along the bay,” and hope she’d leave it at that. When they had first come to Ireland, the exchange had had a bit of a joke to it, but he felt it now as unwelcome pressure. He had no intention of taking up Irish idioms — he’d have felt foolish saying “half-five” instead of five-thirty, “Tuesday week” instead of next Tuesday, “ye” for you. “Toilet” instead of bathroom was unthinkable. He called things by their real names — “pubs” bars, “shops” stores, “chips” French fries, and “gardai” police.
“The Man with the Lapdog.” — Beth Lordan, The Atlantic, Pen/O. Henry Prize 2000
Featured Longreader: Barbara Mack, teacher/theologian. See her story picks from The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Morning News, and more on her #longreads page.
“Yet, as a 2006 State Department report shows, U.S. officials have for years been aware of credible allegations that Raziq and his men participated in a cold-blooded massacre of civilians, the details of which have, until now, been successfully buried. And this, in turn, raises questions regarding whether U.S. officials may have knowingly violated a 1997 law that forbids assistance to foreign military units involved in human-rights violations.”
I went back to work. Just about a year later, I sent out another story. Again, I sent it to the New Yorker. This time, someone wrote on the post card rejection: “Strong writing. Thanks.” Then, in November, I received a two-sentence letter from C. Michael Curtis at Atlantic Monthly: “‘A New Year’s Resolution’ starts out promisingly, but we think it veers into improbability (emotional) and something like melodrama. You’re awfully good, however, and I hope you’ll try us again.” It’s no exaggeration to say it: This letter kept me going for years.
On this Memorial Day weekend, travel back to August 1938 to New York City’s Coney Island on a hot summer Sunday. The article profiles the narrow strip of land where Brooklyn meets the Atlantic and thousands of New Yorkers still pour out of the subway to eat hot dogs, ride roller coasters, visit bathhouses and watch freak shows. This was during the Depression, when Coney Island was struggling to survive as the “empire of the nickel.”
The rules of the game on this side of the Atlantic were formalized in 1754, when Benjamin Franklin brought back from England a copy of the 1744 Laws, cricket’s official rule book. There is anecdotal evidence that George Washington’s troops played what they called “wickets” at Valley Forge in the summer of 1778. After the Revolution, a 1786 advertisement for cricket equipment appeared in the New York Independent Journal, and newspaper reports of that time frequently mention “young gentlemen” and “men of fashion” taking up the sport. Indeed, the game came up in the debate over what to call the new nation’s head of state: John Adams noted disapprovingly—and futilely—that “there are presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs.”
A hundred and fifty years ago the Russian philosopher Petr Chaadayev wrote that “we are one of those nations that somehow are not part of mankind but exist only for the sake of teaching the world some kind of terrible lesson.” In the area of nuclear affairs the steady emission of environmental horror stories from the USSR confirms that the Soviet Union is in the process of teaching the world another in its series of terrible lessons.
Recent disclosures from the USSR demonstrate that the total insulation from public scrutiny which the Soviet nuclear industry enjoyed for so long has left a legacy of pollution and lax practices that remains exceedingly difficult to escape. Soviet officials themselves are today saying that the USSR is being transformed into a nuclear-waste dump. Even allowing for the Russian penchant for hyperbole, the latest revelations in the ever more candid Soviet press make clear that Soviet problems in the area of nuclear pollution and safety continue to be extraordinarily severe.
By Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Atlantic (1990)
(via theatlantic)
James L. Brooks on Journalism, the Oscars, and ‘Broadcast News’
We filmed it almost entirely in sequence. We even broke up the newsroom scenes just so we could shoot the picture in sequence. And that means we kept informing ourselves. That means we woke up and these things happened with people in the sequence they’re supposed to happen. So that’s “process,” as you say. But keep in mind—we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about this movie if Holly [Hunter] hadn’t walked in. I also waited six months for William Hurt to become available. He almost didn’t do the picture. And I don’t think we’d be talking about “Broadcast News” if I hadn’t waited those six months for him.
By John Meroney and Patricia Beauchamp, The Atlantic
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