Search Results for: dad

My Tears See More Than My Eyes: My Son’s Depression and the Power of Art

Alan Shapiro | Virginia Quarterly Review| Fall 2006 | 20 minutes (4,928 words)

Alan Shapiro published two books in January 2012: Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books, and Night of the Republic, poetry, from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. This essay first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (subscribe here). Our thanks to Shapiro for allowing us to reprint it here, and for sharing an update on Nat’s life (see the postscript below).

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How Horror Stories Are Being Created in the Digital Age

‘Daddy, I had a bad dream.’

You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness — it’s 3:23. ‘Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?’

‘No, Daddy.’

The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter’s pale form in the darkness of your room. ‘Why not, sweetie?’

‘Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy’s skin sat up.’

For a moment, you feel paralysed; you can’t take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.

In Aeon, Will Wiles examines the online cultural phenomenon of posting horror stories in online forums—creating urban legends for the digital age. The story above, titled “Bad Dreams,” is an example of one of those stories. See more stories from Aeon.

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Photo: Robert S. Donovan

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What It's Like to Outrun Death: The Survival Story of a New Orleans Blues Legend

Barry Yeoman | The New New South, Creatavist | December 2013 | 52 minutes (13,100 words)

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to feature “The Gutbucket King,” a new ebook by journalist Barry Yeoman and The New New South, about the tumultuous life of blues singer Little Freddie King, who survived stabbings, alcoholism and personal tragedy. You can read a free excerpt below.

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full story and ebook, or you can purchase the story at Creatavist or Amazon.

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One

He stood at the kitchen window waiting. He had memorized everything around him: the pine walls, bare of wallpaper or even paint; the wardrobe where his widowed mother kept her churn for making buttermilk; the stove fueled by the firewood he cut each morning; the two coolers, one for dairy and the other for cakes and pies. He had branded them into his memory, these artifacts of a life that, after today, would no longer be his. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2013: Here Is What Happens After You Write a New York Times Story About Lindsay Lohan

Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie

Stephen Rodrick | New York Times Magazine | January 2013 | 31 minutes (7,752 words)

 

Stephen Rodrick (@stephenrodrick) is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, contributing editor for Men’s Journal and author of The Magical Stranger.

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The Problem with Colin Firth

Colin Firth goes all the way home to London but as soon as he gets there he realizes he forgot his Portuguese sex slave on the baggage carousel or something. So he abandons Christmas dinner with his loving family and flies back to France. The one expression of genuine love in this movie and Colin Firth peaces-out to go hump a stranger.

He shows up at Aurelia’s front door and starts yelling at her father in shitty Portuguese. He’s like, “I am here to ask your daughter for her hand in marriage,” and the dad is like, “Say what!?” because he thinks Colin Firth means his other daughter, who is fat and gross, and that would obviously makes no sense, because women who are slightly larger than some other women deserve to be alone forever unless they’re the size–6 kind of fake fat like Natalie. Then the dad offers to pay Colin Firth to take fat daughter off his hands. Colin Firth is like “Ew, no. I only want to purchase/marry HOT women I’ve never spoken to in my life.”

Once the truth gets sorted out, fat daughter says: “Father is about to sell Aurelia as a slave to this Englishman.”

FIRST SENSIBLE LINE ANYONE’S SAID FOR THIS ENTIRE MOVIE.

-A new holiday tradition is to read Lindy West on Love Actually, in Jezebel. Happy holidays from Longreads.

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Long Way Home

Longreads Pick

Rosanne Cash on life in Tennessee and memories of her father, Johnny Cash:

My second Tennessee began in 1967, when I was twelve years old. My parents had just separated the previous winter, and that first summer my mom let my sisters and me go to Tennessee to spend several weeks with my dad. He had just bought the big house on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, about twenty miles from Nashville.

Dad was just emerging from the depths of his drug addiction, but he was clean and sober, if gaunt and a little shaky. He and June were not married yet, but she and her daughters, Rosie and Carlene, were around a lot and we befriended our soon-to-be stepsisters. The next several summers were glorious, each better than the one before. Dad had a little speedboat, and he taught all of us to water ski. He was the most patient teacher in the world. We jumped in the water, hooked our feet into the skis, and he gunned the engine. We fell and fell and fell. And then, eventually, we got up and he whooped and waved his arm at us as he pulled us around the lake. We did this every day for hours. Once I was sitting in the boat with him while he pulled one of my sisters up on the skis when the glove box popped open and money—bills of all denominations—flew out and away. My dad glanced at the currency as the wind carried it out of the boat, but never looked back, never said a word. That gave me an insight into my dad’s relationship with money: He let it fly and never looked back.

Source: Oxford American
Published: Nov 25, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,580 words)

Rumsfeld’s War

Longreads Pick

A political history of Donald Rumsfeld, from the Nixon years to a war in Iraq that he promised would be over in months:

Rumsfeld would offer the “creative” plan for the Iraq invasion that his president had requested that tearful evening in September 2001, one that envisioned a relative handful of troops—150,000, fewer than half the number the elder Bush had assembled a decade before for the much less ambitious Desert Storm—and foresaw an invasion that would begin in shock and awe and an overwhelming rush to Baghdad. As for the occupation—well, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfeld’s troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, “I don’t do quagmires.”

It did not turn out that way. Having watched from the Oval Office in 1975 the last torturous hours of the United States extracting itself from Vietnam—the helicopters fleeing the roof of the US embassy in Saigon—Rumsfeld would be condemned to thrash about in his self-made quagmire for almost four years, sinking ever deeper in the muck as nearly five thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.

Published: Nov 27, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,011 words)

What Happens When the State Separates a Mother From Her Child

“Sacha Coupet, a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago, who used to work as a guardian ad litem and as a psychologist, worries that the Adoption and Safe Families Act, by promoting ‘adoption as the normative ideal,’ has made it easier to avoid ‘dealing with the enormously complex root causes of child neglect and abuse,’ which may have little to do with parenting skills. ‘There’s this very American notion that mothers should be self-reliant, capable of taking care of their kids without any support, when that’s just not the world we live in,’ she said. She finds that child-welfare agencies often ‘rush to get to the end of the story,’ creating a middle-class fairy tale: ‘a poor kid is rescued by the state, given a new mom and dad, and the slate is wiped clean.’

“Martin Guggenheim, a professor at New York University of Law, who represented children in court for more than a decade, believes that before long we will look back at the policy of ‘banishing children from their birth families’ as a tragic social experiment.”

Rachel Aviv, in The New Yorker (subscription required), on the case of Niveen Ismail, who was deemed to be an unfit mother for her son Adam. Read more on child welfare.

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Photo: gustfischer, Flickr

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The Things They Buried

Longreads Pick

Domingo Martinez, a 2013 National Book Award finalist, recalls Sunday luncheons with his family in South Texas eating pit-roasted barbacoa:

As soon as I was old enough, which in rural Brownsville was around fourteen, it was my job to get up before anyone else those mornings and drive to the barbacoa place for our ration. I was expected to have the food on the table before the rest of the family woke up. Dad would leave $20 on the dining room table the night before, and I would find my favorite mixtape and then zoom off about seven-thirty or so in my sister’s Volkswagen Rabbit. I looked forward to those Sunday mornings—the simple rush of freedom as I pulled away, that transcendental sense of liberation when you lock into fourth gear and hit 55 on a dirt road, as some ageless punk rock blares from the speakers. It should give you a sense of how malnourished the rest of my life was that this was magical to me, this drive to some nearby colonia where Dad knew someone who was making backyard barbacoa in a burst of free enterprise that may or may not have been legal, churning out tortillas in their garage on a tortilla-making machine (I don’t know what those are called). I took my job very seriously, though I didn’t really understand why. I just wanted to take the car out for a spin.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Nov 24, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,385 words)

The Future of Personal Data, Democracy, and Opting Out of Fitness Trackers

“People who say that tracking their fitness or location is merely an affirmative choice from which they can opt out have little knowledge of how institutions think. Once there are enough early adopters who self-track—and most of them are likely to gain something from it—those who refuse will no longer be seen as just quirky individuals exercising their autonomy. No, they will be considered deviants with something to hide. Their insurance will be more expensive. If we never lose sight of this fact, our decision to self-track won’t be as easy to reduce to pure economic self-­interest; at some point, moral considerations might kick in. Do I really want to share my data and get a coupon I do not need if it means that someone else who is already working three jobs may ultimately have to pay more? Such moral concerns are rendered moot if we delegate decision-making to ‘electronic butlers.’”

Evgeny Morozov, in MIT Technology Review, on the future of big data, privacy and what it means for democracy. Read more from Tech Review.

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Photo: gauravonomics, Flickr

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