Search Results for: cruise

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Peter Eisler, Linda So, Jason Szep, Grant Smith, Ned Parker, Jaed Coffin, Sarah Gilman, Katy Kelleher, and Irris Makler.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. Dying Inside

Peter Eisler, Linda So, Jason Szep, Grant Smith, Ned Parker | Reuters | October 16, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,936 words)

Nearly 5,000 inmates have died in U.S. jails without getting their day in court. Reuters investigates the fatalities in America’s biggest jails.

2. The COVID Cruise Ship and the Maine Fishing Town

Jaed Coffin | Down East | October 1, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,964 words)

“Eastport tried for years to lure mega cruise ships. Then, amid a global pandemic, it got one, along with a skeleton crew of coronavirus exiles.”

3. The Island That Humans Can’t Conquer

Sarah Gilman | Hakai Magazine | October 6, 2020 | 10 minutes (2,600 words)

“A faraway island in Alaska has had its share of visitors, but none can remain for long on its shores.”

4. Russet, the Color of Peasants, Fox Fur, and Penance

Katy Kelleher | The Paris Review | October 20, 2020 | 7 minutes (1,923 words)

“But russet means more than red-like, red-adjacent. It also means rustic, homely, rough. It also evokes mottled, textured, coarse. The word describes a quality of being that can affect people as well as vegetables.”

5. The Kindness of Strangers

Irris Makler | Griffith Review | July 26, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,278 words)

“Many women arrived here with only the clothes on their backs and the recipes inside their heads. Cooking again, having a kitchen in which to cook, was a sign of rebuilding; cooking the dishes they knew from home was a comfort and a pleasure, and a way to retain some European identity. You anchored your new family in the tastes of your old home.”

The Promised Land

Trans activist Karla Avelar poses for a portrait in San Salvador, El Salvador in 2018. (Danielle Villasana)

Alice Driver | Longreads | July 2020 | 16 minutes (3,906 words)

“Me with two suitcases, without knowing anything, so far away, not speaking the language, oh no, it was a total odyssey.” — Karla Avelar

* * *

Home was 16 by 26 feet. When Karla, 41, lay on her single bed at night, she could stretch out her left arm and grab her mother Flor’s* hand. She and her mother, who was 64, hadn’t lived together for 32 years: Now they practiced French together and her mother, who never learned to write, carefully traced the letters of the French alphabet in cursive well into the night. Neither of them had finished elementary school; Flor, born in rural El Salvador, was forced to leave school after first grade to work and help support her family and Karla was forced out of school in eighth grade due to bullying from teachers and students who told her she had to dress like a man in order to attend class, who once tried to hold her down and cut her hair and who frequently beat her up. Home was the name she had chosen for herself — Karla Avelar — one that was first legally recognized when she was 41 and requesting asylum in Switzerland. When the weight of memories of her previous life haunted Karla, she went outside to search for a place to cry alone.

When I first met Karla in San Salvador, El Salvador in July 2017, her home was a place I couldn’t safely visit. Karla, a renowned LGBTQ activist, had been nominated for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights, which would come with a large cash prize if she won. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha in Karla’s neighborhood, part of an international gang known as the MS-13, had become aware of the news and had threatened to kill her if she won and didn’t hand the money over to them. She had even been forced to change houses due to the threats, but she still felt her neighborhood wasn’t safe for me to visit, so we met at the offices of COMCAVIS TRANS, an NGO that was the culmination of her life’s work as an activist. Like so many trans women in El Salvador, she had survived more violence than most of us could imagine — rapes, assassination attempts, being unjustly imprisoned — and after being released from prison, she founded COMCAVIS TRANS as the first openly HIV positive trans woman in the country. I interviewed Karla for a story about the reasons why trans woman flee El Salvador, neither of us knowing that Karla would eventually become the story.

On October 6, 2017, roughly a month-and-a-half after we bid each other farewell in San Salvador, Karla and her mother flew to Switzerland to attend the awards ceremony for Martin Ennals Award nominees. When they arrived in Switzerland, Flor broke down and told Karla that members of the MS-13 gang had come to her house, beat her up and forced her to watch a video in which they were torturing a man, telling her that they would do the same thing to Karla. Before leaving, they told Flor that they would rape her in front of Karla and then kill her if Karla didn’t hand over the prize money. And then they asked her to confirm the date that Karla would return to El Salvador after her trip to Switzerland.

Karla relayed the threats to the members of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights who were worried that she would be assassinated if she returned to El Salvador. They encouraged her and her mother to apply for asylum in Switzerland. At the awards ceremony, Karla was recognized for her activism and awarded a monetary prize plus an additional amount to donate to the NGO of her choice. Karla and Flor didn’t have time to celebrate — they needed a few days alone to consider what it would mean to never return to the land of their birth. Karla was proud that she had lived honestly in El Salvador, not hiding her past as a sex worker, as someone who had spent time in jail and was HIV+, even when it put her at risk, but she also knew many trans women who had been murdered for their activism. Read more…

Killer Mike Takes His Allies Where He Finds Them

Rapper Killer Mike, left, and State Representative La Shawn Ford listen as Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks at a meeting with local activist and community members Monday, December 23, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

In 2018, Killer Mike sat down for an interview on NRATV, the former online broadcasting arm of the NRA. Perhaps predictably, the NRA took his quote on school walkouts and used it in a campaign against the March for Our Lives. He’s not sorry, though, and in a wide-ranging interview at GQ, Donovan X. Ramsey finds out why.

Still, the damage was done. Mike doesn’t apologize for sitting down with the NRA, however. He believes, at his core, that Black Americans should find allies wherever they can. “The greatest gift Atlanta has given me is to be able to judge people solely by the content of their character, because all my heroes and villains have always been Black,” he tells me. Mike repeats this a few times throughout the afternoon. He doesn’t say it about the NRA directly, but it speaks to how he measures allies and enemies. “You may start off with Professor X,” he says, “but Magneto got a fucking point.”

As we cruise around, I ask him if he plans on voting for Joe Biden in November. He demurs, asking me if Biden plans on signing H.R. 40, the bill that would establish a commission to study and develop proposals for reparations for Black Americans, before launching into an impassioned monologue:

“I don’t give a shit if Joe Biden the person is moved to the left. I don’t give a shit about liking you or you liking me. What I give a shit about is if your policies are going to benefit me and my community in a way that will help us get a leg up in America. That’s it. Because we deserve a leg up, and I’m not ashamed to say it.

“We fucking deserve it. My great-grandmother, who taught me how to sew a button, was taught how to sew a button because her grandmother was enslaved. The daughter of a slave taught me and encouraged me to write, read, sew buttons, take care of myself. So why the fuck am I going to accept anything? I don’t give a fuck if you kneel in kente cloth. Give a shit. What have you got for me?”

It speaks to the philosophy that undergirds all of Killer Mike’s political ideas and positions. Before anything, Mike is a Black man from the American South who is deeply skeptical of how much a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal power structure built on the evils of capitalism will do to ensure his freedom. So he’s willing to embrace methodologies and tactics from across the political spectrum to see what works.

Read the profile

Long Journey Home: The Stranded Sailboats in a Race to Beat the Hurricanes

Longreads Pick
Source: The Guardian
Published: May 12, 2020
Length: 6 minutes (1,700 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A general view shows the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship at Daikoku pier cruise terminal in Yokohama on February 24, 2020. - Despite a quarantine imposed on the Diamond Princess, more than 600 people on board tested positive for the coronavirus, with several dozen in serious condition. (Photo by Philip FONG / AFP) (Photo by PHILIP FONG / AFP via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Doug Bock Clark, Thomas Lake, Leslie Jamison, Paul Thompson, and Jude Isabella.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

1. Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess

Doug Bock Clark | GQ | April 30, 2020 | 34 minutes (8,638 words)

“At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, one ill-fated cruise ship became a symbol for the panic and confusion that would soon engulf the globe. Doug Bock Clark uncovers what two harrowing weeks trapped aboard the ‘Diamond Princess’ felt like — for unsuspecting tourists, for frightened crew members, even for the captain himself.”

2. 46 Years in Prison, and a Plan to Kill the Man Who Framed Him

Thomas Lake | CNN | April 23, 2020 | 34 minutes (8,600 words)

“Richard Phillips survived the longest wrongful prison sentence in American history by writing poetry and painting with watercolors. But on a cold day in the prison yard, he carried a knife and thought about revenge.”

3. Other Voices, Other Rooms

Leslie Jamison | New York Review of Books | April 23, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,922 words)

Leslie Jamison reviews “Private Lives Public Spaces,” an exhibition of home movies and photography at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. What makes the exhibit fascinating is the thread of desire that runs through it — that keen human need to document our present as it all-too-quickly turns into our past.

4. “Queens Get the Money”: The Story of Mobb Deep’s ‘The Infamous’ at 25

Paul Thompson | The Ringer | April 24, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,343 words)

Paul Thompson, a deft and versatile writer, delivers an engrossing and utterly entertaining profile of Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, the 25-year old album that would vault rappers Prodigy and Havoc — one a Queensbridge native, the other a NYC nomad — into the stratosphere of rap amid the Big Apple’s glory days holding the mic.

5. The Wonderful, Transcendent Life of an Odd-Nosed Monkey

Jude Isabella | Hakai Magazine | April 22, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,500 words)

“The island of Borneo is the only home of the proboscis monkey, an endangered primate that is surprisingly resilient.”

‘Hand to hand to hand’: How Coronavirus Spread Aboard the Diamond Princess

This picture taken on February 24, 2020 shows crew members aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship at the Daikoku Pier Cruise Terminal in Yokohama port. - Hundreds of crew members aboard a coronavirus-riddled cruise ship in Japan began disembarking on February 27, the government said. (Photo by Kazuhiro NOGI / AFP) (Photo by KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images)

At one point Carnival Cruise Line’s Diamond Princess would have a greater number of Coronavirus cases than anywhere in the world outside China. For GQ, Doug Bock Clark reports on how the delayed, woefully inadequate response from Carnival’s management, the Japanese government, as well as the ship’s captain and crew helped the virus to spread.

And Japanese officials eventually acknowledged the quarantine was flawed.

They had no idea about the danger. Not as they crowded around the famous champagne waterfall. Hundreds of delighted cruise passengers watched as golden bubbly, poured atop a pyramid of 300 glasses, filled the stemware below. Then the drinks were passed out. Hand to hand to hand. Guests clinked coupes and posed for photos, making the evening feel momentous. It was their fourth night aboard the Diamond Princess—a floating city of a ship that had been churning south from Yokohama, Japan—and they were all still unaware of how much their journey would transform them, and even the world.

For a week more, the Diamond Princess cruised on. The Amigos took a memorable kayak excursion in Vietnam, among the karst monoliths of Ha Long Bay. They enjoyed street food in Taiwan. But while there, panicky headlines and more temperature guns made the virus impossible to ignore. Still, they considered themselves safe, unaware that an 80-year-old passenger—a man who had coughed through the first half of the cruise before disembarking in Hong Kong—had been admitted to a hospital, where it was discovered that he was infected with the coronavirus.

For government officials and corporate leaders, the question of whether it was fair—or even safe—to quarantine the passengers but not the crew was obscured by the priority to keep the ship operational. And so the poor took care of the rich, and the citizens of less powerful nations served those from more powerful nations, and the Diamond Princess remained a miniaturized version of the global order—because what other way could things go?

Before bidding goodbye to the ship, Arma had stood alone on the glass-walled bridge. The normally stoic captain was emotional. He had been with the boat since it was built and had guided it safely through every storm, until this one. He felt like he understood what he called her “beautiful soul.”

One last time, he switched on the P.A., in order to speak to the ship itself. It wasn’t her fault, he told her. He promised that they would see each other again, and he wished her a good night, his words echoing in the vacant galleries and cabins. They had done their best, he and his ship—and like all good captains, he was the last person to leave. As he strode off the gangway in his crisp uniform, he was the very image of debonair fortitude. Except his true expression was hidden behind a protective mask.

Read the story

Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess

Longreads Pick

“At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, one ill-fated cruise ship became a symbol for the panic and confusion that would soon engulf the globe. Doug Bock Clark uncovers what two harrowing weeks trapped aboard the ‘Diamond Princess’ felt like—for unsuspecting tourists, for frightened crew members, even for the captain himself.”

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 30, 2020
Length: 34 minutes (8,638 words)

O! Small-Bany! Part 4: Fall

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | April 2020 | 22 minutes (5,474 words)

The first time I get rear-ended is at a stoplight on the corner of Central and North Lake, around 4pm. One minute I’m on my way to school pickup, the next minute I’m disoriented and sobbing. The at-fault is a 19-year-old dude in a Jeep full of friends. He is nonplussed. He asks, without affect, whether I am okay.

“No!” I scream. “What the fuck?”

My car is badly damaged. I can’t stop sobbing. No airbags deployed. I am worried the dude will get back into his car and flee, so I photograph his license plate in haste, and call the cops. I cannot for the life of me stop crying. My rage and fear and shock and sadness are a tangle. The Jeep doesn’t have a scratch on it. It’s raining. The dude and his friends huddle under a shop awning, laughing.

The cop tells me to calm down: “It’s not that big a deal, ma’am.”

Later, when I call the cop oversight office to suggest that this particular cop go fuck himself, the oversight officer will watch the body cam footage and promise to speak to the cop in question about sensitivity in traumatic situations.

For some reason, I refuse an ambulance. (“Some reason”, ha: I am more terrified of institutional health care than I am of getting back into a smashed up car and driving away with whiplash and a concussion.)

I spend days in bed, in the dark, alternating heat and ice. A haze of phone calls from insurance agents, a hailstorm of Advil, rivers of CBD hot freeze.

You can get rear-ended anywhere. It wasn’t Albany’s fault, per se. But it’s so easy to blame Albany. Fucking Albany! This was God’s way of telling me I’ve done my time in this hopeless shithole of a city, right? Or maybe this was God’s way of punishing me for never utilizing public buses. Or maybe this was God’s way of shaming me for having my kid in private school. The thinks you think when you’re stuck in bed, in the dark, without distraction, for days on end! Meditation is a billion times harder than crossfit, and constructions about “God” are tough epigenetic habits to break.
Read more…

The Criminalization of the American Midwife

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Jennifer Block  |  March 2020  |  32 minutes (8,025 words)

Elizabeth Catlin had just stepped out of the shower when she heard banging on the door. It was around 10 a.m. on a chilly November Wednesday in Penn Yan, New York, about an hour southeast of Rochester. She asked her youngest child, Keziah, age 9, to answer while she threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. “There’s a man at the door,” Keziah told her mom.

“He said, ‘I’d like to question you,” Caitlin tells me. A woman also stood near the steps leading up to her front door; neither were in uniform. “I said, ‘About what?’” The man flashed a badge, but she wasn’t sure who he was. “He said, ‘About you pretending to be a midwife.’”

Catlin, a home-birth midwife, was open about her increasingly busy practice. She’d send birth announcements for her Mennonite clientele to the local paper. When she was pulled over for speeding, she’d tell the cop she was on her way to a birth. “I’ve babysat half of the state troopers,” she says.

It was 30 degrees. Catlin, 53, was barefoot. Her hair was wet. “Can I get my coat?” she asked. No. Boots? She wasn’t allowed to go back inside. Her older daughter shoved an old pair of boots, two sizes too big, through the doorway; Catlin stepped into them and followed the officer and woman to the car. At the state trooper barracks, she sat on a bench with one arm chained to the wall. There were fingerprints, mug shots, a state-issue uniform, lock-up. At 7:30 p.m. she was finally arraigned in a hearing room next to the jail, her wrists and ankles in chains, on the charge of practicing midwifery without a license. Local news quoted a joint investigation by state police and the Office of Professional Discipline that Catlin had been “posing as a midwife” and “exploiting pregnant women within the Mennonite community, in and around the Penn Yan area.”

Catlin’s apparent connection with a local OB-GYN practice, through which she had opened a lab account, would prompt a second arrest in December, the Friday before Christmas, and more felony charges: identity theft, falsifying business records, and second-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument. That time, she spent the night in jail watching the Hallmark Channel. When she walked into the hearing room at 8:00 a.m., again in chains, she was met by dozens of women in grey-and-blue dresses and white bonnets. The judge set bail at $15,000 (the state had asked for $30,000). Her supporters had it: Word of her arrest had quickly passed through the tech-free community, and in 12 hours they had collected nearly $8,000 for bail; Catlin’s mother made up the difference. She was free to go, but not free to be a midwife.

Several years back, a respected senior midwife faced felony charges in Indiana, and the county prosecutor allowed that although a baby she’d recently delivered had not survived, she had done nothing medically wrong — but she needed state approval for her work. The case, the New York Times wrote, “was not unlike one against a trucker caught driving without a license.” As prosecutor R. Kent Apsley told the paper, “He may be doing an awfully fine job of driving his truck. But the state requires him to go through training, have his license and be subject to review.”

But what if the state won’t recognize the training or grant a license? 

Catlin is a skilled, respected, credentialed midwife. She serves a rural, underserved, uninsured population. She’s everything the state would want in a care provider. But owing to a decades-old political fight over who can be licensed as a midwife, she’s breaking the law.  Read more…

The World’s Tallest Dwarf

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | November 2019 | 10 minutes (2,750 words)

 
What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.
 
The question at the core of the antihero show has always been what it would take to turn the bad guy — the mobster, the drug kingpin, the Russian spy, the mad and murderous queen — into the hero of the story. And the answer is that our willingness to root for a bad person who does bad things, sometimes to good people, is dependent on a carefully constructed context. Successful antiheroes have all been portrayed in a certain way: as special — particularly skilled at something or somehow different than those around them — and as three-dimensional human beings with unmet desires. They are usually surrounded by even more unsavory antagonists and are invariably trying to survive within an oppressive system they can’t fully understand. Our empathy for them comes in large part from seeing their pain and the forces that oppress them even when they don’t, perhaps especially when they don’t. But our ability to relate to them also hinges on the possibility of redemption, if not its actualization. We see ourselves, however dimly, in antiheroes. Their potential for change is our own. We can stand to watch them do terrible things because we harbor hope that they, and we, can change.    Read more…