Search Results for: dad

Uncommon Ancestry: Your Dad is My Dad?

Photo by JaredZammit (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Hazlitt, Alison Motluk writes on how fertility doctors impregnating their own clients is more common than you might think and on how the law around tracking sperm donors and donations is impotent against the problem.

Kat Palmer learned in grade nine biology that two blue-eyed parents can’t have a brown-eyed child. She thought that was curious, because she had brown eyes and both her parents had blue. But when she joked about it at home, she got a shock: her mother told her she’d been conceived at a fertility clinic, using sperm from an anonymous donor. The man she knew and loved as her dad was not her biological father.

Palmer knew she sort of looked like him, but she felt she looked like a lot of the Jewish men she knew, including her dad. The cousin helped her draft an email to Barwin, in which she used both genetics and genealogy to raise the possibility that he might be her biological father. She expected the doctor to ignore her, but he emailed back within the hour, with a phone number.

When she called him, about a week later, he was apologetic and baffled. He just couldn’t fathom how this had happened, he told her. The only thing he could think of was that he’d bought a new sperm counting machine that same year, and perhaps he had contaminated it when he was testing it with his own semen.

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Searching for Sugar Daddy

Longreads Pick

A very blunt and humorous examination of the sugar daddy/baby dynamic.

Source: GQ
Published: Aug 27, 2015
Length: 17 minutes (4,429 words)

A Single Dad Takes a Fatherhood Development Class

The last student to arrive for fatherhood class was the only one holding a baby, and a dozen men looked up from their desks to stare. Paul Gayle, 19, had a pink diaper bag hanging off a shoulder decorated with tattoos of marijuana leaves, and a crying 7-month-old in his arms. “Come on, girl, chill out,” Paul said, carrying the baby to a seat in the corner. He offered her a rattle, and she swatted it away. He gave her a bottle, and she only cried louder. Finally, he reached into the diaper bag and took out a pacifier for her and a shot of Goody’s Headache Relief for himself.

“Sorry for the noise, y’all,” he said. “We’re both a little mad at the world today.”

“No problem,” the teacher said. “I’m up here talking about being a dad, and you’re doing it.”

“I’m trying,” Paul said. “But damn.”

— Paul wants his baby girl to have the world, and he’s participating in the President’s 16-part fatherhood course to get there. But his girlfriend won’t return his calls, he can’t hold down a job and he lives in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Eli Saslow has the story at the Washington Post.

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Signs of Change on the Streets of Baghdad

Indeed, for a city that only last summer feared it would be overrun by jihadis, Baghdad feels uncannily lacking in trauma. Perhaps Iraqis have learned how to live with their fears, but ISIS feels more threatening in European capitals than it does in Baghdad. Too complacently, Iraqis talk about ISIS in the past tense, as if its defeat was a foregone conclusion. Young men drive through the streets, playing a pop song mocking ISIS’s “feminine” fighters at full volume on their car stereos. Cafés spill onto sidewalks, their tables filled with families late into the night. Hip eateries have opened around Baghdad University where dressed-up girls go to smoke water pipes. Closed by Saddam Hussein’s faith campaign in the early 1990s, the bars that tentatively reopened in 2010 are now jammed. Bartenders cheer the greater margin of freedom they have gained since Sunni and Shia militias turned their guns on each other instead of on their customers.

In the New York Review of Books, Nicolas Pelham examines two very different worlds—while ISIS destroys antiquities in northern Iraq, Baghdad sees signs of reconstruction in the south.

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Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War

Longreads Pick

In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.

Source: Unnamed Press
Published: Apr 3, 2015
Length: 25 minutes (6,311 words)

Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War

Saad Hossain | Escape from Baghdad! | Unnamed Press | March 2015 | 23 minutes (6,311 words)

 

Below are the opening chapters of the novel Escape from Baghdad!, by Saad Hossain, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

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A NOTE ON THE GLOSSARY AT THE END

There is a glossary of mostly factual terms and names at the end of the text (“factual” being a relative idea open to loose interpretation (“loose interpretation” meaning we’re aiming for a 50% chance of something on the page tallying with someone else’s verified opinion.)) So, if you find yourself wondering: Who’s Moqtada Al-Sadr again? Or what does JAM stand for? Or, bless you, IED? Just refer to the helpful, mostly factual glossary. Read more…

My Dad the Pornographer

Longreads Pick

Andrew Jefferson Offutt V published more than 400 pornographic novels using 17 different pseudonyms. After he died, his son Chris sorted through his belongings and learned more about his father’s private life.

Published: Feb 5, 2015
Length: 19 minutes (4,991 words)

What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Taught Me About Being a Stay-at-Home Dad

Longreads Pick

Ryan Park decides, after his clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to spend a year at home with his daughter before pursuing a corporate job. What he learned about the state of stay-at-home dads in America.

Author: Ryan Park
Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jan 10, 2015
Length: 21 minutes (5,375 words)

The Memories of Dad We All Want to Have

When I was 3, my parents tried to plop me into a ski resort day care so the three of them could explore the mountain, but apparently I refused to sit around rearranging blocks with those other babies. My mom tried unsuccessfully to position me between her legs and launch me onto my own skis, pulling me up again and again as I plunked my butt onto the snow instead of attempting a turn. After an exhausting hour, she escaped with my brother while my dad and I languished on the bunny hill, trying to advance me past the snowplow. Dad would ski backwards in front of me, holding my tiny skis into a V-shape, until, finally, I managed to put my skis side by side and pivot on the snow. When my dad tells this story, he throws his arms in the air and launches into my tiny kid voice: “Daddy! I can ski!”

A few years later, I was accompanying him on black diamond runs with moguls as tall as me. When goggled adults riding high above us on the chairlift pointed at me in awe (or else at my father in disgust), I got a rush that sustained me until the bottom of the hill, where my dad would remove my mittens and breathe warmth into them before fitting them back on my pink hands. I didn’t know to feel lucky to be a little girl with a father who took her along on all of his adventures. I just liked that I could keep up with my dad.

Amanda Hess, in Slate, on adventures with her dad.

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More dads in the Longreads Archive

Photo: Amanda Hess

Helping Dad Die: A Daughter’s Story

Longreads Pick

In the U.K., Britons with terminal illnesses or incurable diseases have nowhere to go if they want help to die. A daughter’s personal story about finding a way to ease her father’s suffering and the right-to-die debate:

Had my father lived in, say, Utrecht rather than the West Country, he could simply have turned to his GP for help. Both doctor-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia have been available since 1981 for Dutch people with a terminal illness or suffering severely from an incurable disease, and account for about 3 per cent of deaths in the Netherlands.

Other European countries have followed the Dutch lead: doctor-assisted suicide is available for the terminally ill and people with conditions like my father’s in Luxembourg and Switzerland, as is voluntary euthanasia in Belgium. And in the US, four states (Washington, Montana, Oregon and Vermont) offer doctor-assisted suicide to the terminally ill. Yet only one country is willing to help terminally ill, severely disabled or elderly and seriously ill foreigners – and, with the assistance of one of the three organisations non-nationals can access, more than 250 Britons have now died there. My father was right: he would have to go to Switzerland.

Source: Financial Times
Published: Mar 14, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,640 words)