Search Results for: dad

Voices from Baghdad

Longreads Pick

A reporter returns to Iraq after 10 years and, after after speaking with old friends and colleagues, finds a city “traumatized by violence”

They spoke generously and the words lent perspective to these new, unhappy days in Iraq. The first years of democracy were expected to be hard. But this year, with the third national election in April, these men have been frustrated by their terror-torn existence. Every new blast cracks their hopes for a normal life.

“What does it mean if work is good but you have to worry about survival all the time?” said Tharwat al-Ani, the trade ministry official. “Every year, it’s been something new: car bombs or IEDs or kidnappings.

Source: Financial Times
Published: Mar 7, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,122 words)

Longreads Member Pick: Baghdad Follies, by Janet Reitman

image

This week, we’re excited to feature Janet Reitman, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. “Baghdad Follies” is Reitman’s 2004 story on what it was like to be a war correspondent in Iraq. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the war, Reitman reflects on her early fears about traveling to Baghdad:

People talk a lot about what it’s like to cover a war; no one talks about what you have tell yourself in order to actually get on the plane so you can go and cover the war. ‘Baghdad Follies’ is a story about what reporters go through in covering war, and it began, in a sense, with my growing sense of panic over having signed up to cover the war. It was about an hour before I was scheduled to leave for the airport. I’d finished packing, and began to think—which right there is a killer. My thoughts went like this: I was insane. I’d covered other conflicts, but like, little ones. Africa. Haiti. This was Iraq. I’d been dying to go to Iraq. Now, I really didn’t want to go to Iraq—let alone go to Iraq to write a story about how dangerous the war had become for U.S. reporters. Which was what this story was about. 

So I called a friend who’d covered the Iraq invasion. ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to go.’

Huh?

‘I mean, no one will blame you if you back out,’ he said. ‘It’s perfectly fine if you stay home. It’s just a story.’

This of course made me feel that now I really had to go because there were also a lot of other reporters, most of who would kill for this assignment, and what was I thinking? …  ’I think I might die,’ I told him.

‘You might,’ he said. 

We debated the likelihood of getting killed or kidnapped for a bit. We decided it was 50-50 I got kidnapped, but probably only for a short while. Ultimately, we decided the best course of action was to get on the plane, fly to London, my first layover, decide if I felt good enough to keep going to Jordan, my next layover, and then, depending on how much I was freaking out, either keep on going to Baghdad, or turn back. ‘Look at it as a process,’ he said.

Two days and an untold number of tiny airplane vodka bottles later, I arrived in Baghdad and stayed a month, during which time two other colleagues, both of who had confided their own fears about doing this job, were kidnapped, and released. I told their stories in full. Then, I went home, regrouped, and returned to Iraq. Twice.

Read an excerpt here.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Photo: Thomas Hartwell, via Wikimedia Commons

Longreads Member Exclusive: Baghdad Follies, by Janet Reitman

Longreads Pick

This week, we’re excited to feature Janet Reitman, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. “Baghdad Follies” is Reitman’s 2004 story on what it was like to be a war correspondent in Iraq. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the war, Reitman reflects on her early fears about traveling to Baghdad.

Support Longreads—and get more stories like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jan 1, 2004
Length: 21 minutes (5,354 words)

Daddy: My Father’s Last Words

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] A difficult life with a father remembered through his favorite words and phrases:

“He never once found comfortable shoes, and when he’d come home from the plant after a double overtime, the searing pain in his feet would have him whimpering like a child. Swornin’ to goodness! was his pain expression. Was it his horrible feet?

“His maniacal mother, my grandmother, Letha (we called her ‘Lethal’), taught him that ‘if it isn’t perfect, its not worth doing,’ thus paralyzing my father for life. It was she who dragged my father, aged eight, to a hotel in downtown Baton Rouge, busted into a room, and showed him his father in bed with another woman. ‘Look at your father,’ she said. Was it Lethal?

“Or are unhappy people born unhappy?

“Would he have been the way he was if he had never had children? Did I turn my father into a monster?”

Source: Esquire
Published: Jun 8, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,073 words)

The Hot-Money Cowboys of Baghdad

Longreads Pick

“My friend, Iraq is a rich, virgin country!” one of its richest men, Namir al-Akabi, told me with a startling enthusiasm when I met him earlier this year at his office in Baghdad. Akabi is the chairman of the Almco Group of Companies, a conglomerate he built from nothing in the wake of the American invasion in 2003. What makes Iraq’s economic potential so great, he explained, despite everything, is not just its abundant natural resources — it is the shattered state of Iraq itself.

Published: May 18, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,405 words)

The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac

The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac

The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac

Longreads Pick

Jef Raskin, my father, helped develop the Macintosh, and I was recently looking at some of his old documents and came across his February 16, 1981 memo detailing the genesis of the Macintosh. It was written in reaction to Steve Jobs taking over managing hardware development. Reading through it, I was struck by a number of the core principles Apple now holds that were set in play three years before the Macintosh was released. Much of this is particularly important in understanding Apple’s culture and why we have the walled-garden experience of the iPhone, iPad, and the App Store.

Author: Aza Raskin
Published: Feb 14, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,059 words)

Bruce. Dad. The Promise.

Longreads Pick

My memory, the one that echoes in my mind, is not of my time in the factory, or the work, or the people (I cannot remember their names) or the death I’d feel at the end of the day, or even the fear I had that this is all I would become. No, the memory is of that rainy day in North Carolina, my father driving, me staring out the window, both of us sitting in what would become my first car. That Pontiac did not have a 396. It struggled to go uphill.

Source: Joe Blogs
Published: Nov 10, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,058 words)

Ciudad Juarez: How We Got Here

Longreads Pick

As the violence in Mexico rages on, with murder totals recently surpassing 28,000 since the start of 2007, it’s easy for anyone watching or keeping up with the news to become desensitized.

Source: The Awl
Published: Sep 15, 2010
Length: 6 minutes (1,613 words)

Daddy Dearest

Longreads Pick

Is Kim Jong Il’s son any less insane?

Published: Jun 12, 2009
Length: 30 minutes (7,595 words)