Search Results for: cruise

The Cold Rim of the World

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2015 | 13 minutes (3,199 words)

 

We docked just past midnight, the sun to the south shining through a thin layer of clouds. It was late June, and the sun hadn’t set for months in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard; it wouldn’t set again until the end of September. For the previous two weeks I’d been on board a ship sailing the perimeter of the arctic archipelago of Svalbard, as part of the artist residency The Arctic Circle, and we’d reached one of our final stops. The dock we tied the boat to was a decayed mass of wood, warped and chewed to the appearance of shredded wheat. To our left, a massive structure for loading coal onto ships. To the right, blocks of buildings without form or purpose or inhabitants. This was Pyramiden, a Soviet-era mining town that’s been abandoned for over 15 years. Read more…

Think of This as a Window: Remembering the Life and Work of Maggie Estep

Photo via YouTube

Sari Botton | Longreads | February 2015

 

A year ago this month the world lost an incredible talent. Maggie Estep, a great writer—and before that, slam poet/performance artist—died suddenly, a month shy of 51.

The loss has hit me hard, even though I had been just getting to know Maggie personally. She was someone I’d idolized from the time we were both in our twenties, she a couple of years older than I. I’d see her stomping around the East Village, where I lived, too, in a black dress with fishnets and a combat boots, utterly self-possessed and unconcerned with what you thought of her. Read more…

Long Live Grim Fandango

Scene from Grim Fandango.

Jon Irwin | Kill Screen | January 2015 | 17 minutes (4,253 words)

 

Below is a new Longreads Exclusive from Kill Screen, the videogame arts and culture magazine. Writer Jon Irwin goes inside the resurrection of the videogame classic Grim Fandango. For more from Kill Screen, subscribe.

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The Cost

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Rilla Askew | 2014 | 21 minutes (5,065 words)

 

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When my godson Trey was a toddler growing up in Brooklyn, every white woman who saw him fell in love with him. He was a beautiful child, sweet natured, affectionate, with cocoa-colored skin and a thousand-watt smile. I remember sitting with him and his mom in a pizzeria one day, watching as he played peekaboo with two white ladies at a nearby booth. “What a little doll!” the ladies cooed. “Isn’t he adorable?”

I told Marilyn I dreaded the day he would run up against some white person’s prejudice. “His feelings are going to be hurt,” I said. “He won’t know it’s about this country’s race history, he’ll think it’s about him. Because so far in his young life every white person he’s ever met has adored him.” Marilyn nodded, but her closed expression seemed to say I was talking about things I didn’t really understand. Read more…

The Rise and Fall of John DeLorean

Suzanne Snider | Tokion | June/July 2006 | 12 minutes (2,918 words)

This story by Suzanne Snider—which details the fantastical rise and fall of John DeLorean, a former titan of the American automotive industry—first appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of Tokion. Snider is the founder/director of Oral History Summer School, and she is currently completing a nonfiction book about rival communes on adjacent land. Our thanks to Snider for allowing us to feature it on Longreads.  Read more…

The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey Into His Father’s Life

Stephen Rodrick | The Magical Stranger | 2014 | 11 minutes (2,779 words)

Below is the first chapter from The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick’s memoir about his father, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick. Our thanks to Rodrick for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

When We Left the Kids in the Car

In Salon, Kim Brooks writes about a time when she left her four-year-old son in her car for five minutes while she ran an errand, and ended up in legal trouble after a bystander recorded the incident and contacted the police.

I grew up in the ’80s, and my parents left my siblings and me in the car all the time as they went about their daily business. Brooks recalls having a similar childhood. The difference between then and now could simply be this: We know better.

My friends and I sometimes play this game, the did-our-parents-really-let-us-do-that game. We recall bike ramps, model rockets, videotaping ourselves setting toys on fire. Many remember taking off on bikes alone, playing in the woods for hours without adult supervision, crawling through storm drains to follow creek beds, latchkey afternoons, monkey bars installed over slabs of concrete. My husband recalls forts built in the trunk of the station wagon on long road trips. I remember standing up in the back of my father’s LeBaron convertible while he cruised around the neighborhood, or spending an hour lying low on the seat of our station wagon, feet against the window, daydreaming or reading in crowded parking lots while my mother got groceries or ran other boring errands. One friend tells me how, from 7-Elevens, to Kroger, to various banks, schools and offices, he was left alone in the front passenger seat of a convertible Mustang for a good portion of his childhood, primarily because he was shy and wanted to not have to meet new people. For people of our generation, living a suburban childhood, the car was central to our lives, not simply a mode of transportation but in many ways, an extension of our home.

We all knew, of course, that cars were dangerous. Moving cars. Every few years there would be a terrible accident. In the fourth grade, a local mother and her three children were killed on their way to school. A few years later, three teenagers were maimed and paralyzed by a head-on collision with a tree behind our neighbor’s house. But these horror stories never penetrated the inside of our own family car, which seemed infinitely safe, cozy even.

In the months of fear and shame that followed my being charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, I continuously analyzed my own mind-set that day, trying to understand how I did something that both a bystander and a police officer considered criminally dangerous, and the best I could come up with was the theory that I’d been lulled by nostalgia into a false sense of security. So many of my childhood memories involved unsupervised time in cars in parking lots just like the one where I’d left my son. I wondered in the days after it happened if being back home, out of the city, had given me a sort of momentary amnesia. I’d forgotten that more than 25 years had passed since those unsupervised childhood hours. And a lot could change in 25 years, I thought. People were always saying how the world was a more dangerous place than it had been when I was growing up. I had no reason not to believe them. I felt guilty and ashamed. I felt I’d put my child at risk for my own momentary convenience. I knew I wasn’t a terrible mother, but I’d done something terrible, dangerous, and now I’d suffer the consequences, go to court, pay legal fees, live with a criminal record. This was how I thought about what had taken place.

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Photo: superhua

When the Internet Takes Away Our Paul Newman

Building up to 2005, [Tom] Cruise had tackled some of the most challenging dramas of any actor of his generation: Eyes Wide ShutMagnoliaVanilla Sky. Even his popcorn flicks — Minority Report,CollateralWar of the Worlds — were intriguingly dark. He’d never played it safe or shot a cash-grab. He trusted that if he chose movies he believed in, the audience would follow. And he was right.

Post-2005, we’ve lost out on the audacious films that only Hollywood’s most powerful and consistent star could have convinced studios to greenlight. Cruise was in his mid-40s prime — the same years when Newman made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting — and here he was lying low, like the kid who’d run away to London. Imagine the daring roles that he hasn’t dared to pursue. Cruise’s talent and clout were responsible for an unparalleled string of critical and commercial hits. We gave that up for a gif.

-In which LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson argues that YouTube and gossip blogs played a big part in convincing America that Tom Cruise was crazy.

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An Untamed State: The Opening Chapters from Roxane Gay's New Novel

Roxane Gay | An Untamed State | May 2014 | 11 minutes (2,742 words)

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Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is out this week, and we’re excited to present the opening chapters with the Longreads community. Our thanks to Gay and Grove Atlantic for sharing it here.

For more, read our Roxane Gay picks from the Longreads Archive. Read more…

How America’s Soldiers Fight for the Spectrum on the Battlefield

Longreads Pick

The U.S. armed forces dominates the land, air, and sea. But it also must dominate the electromagnetic spectrum by jamming and counterjamming communications to remain effective on the battlefield:

It is well known that America’s military dominates both the air and the sea. What’s less celebrated is that the US has also dominated the spectrum, a feat that is just as critical to the success of operations. Communications, navigation, battlefield logistics, precision munitions—all of these depend on complete and unfettered access to the spectrum, territory that must be vigilantly defended from enemy combatants. Having command of electromagnetic waves allows US forces to operate drones from a hemisphere away, guide cruise missiles inland from the sea, and alert patrols to danger on the road ahead. Just as important, blocking enemies from using the spectrum is critical to hindering their ability to cause mayhem, from detonating roadside bombs to organizing ambushes. As tablet computers and semiautonomous robots proliferate on battlefields in the years to come, spectrum dominance will only become more critical. Without clear and reliable access to the electromagnetic realm, many of America’s most effective weapons simply won’t work.

Source: Wired
Published: Feb 18, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,955 words)