Elizabeth Hyde Stevens | Make Art Make Money | September 2013 | 17 minutes (4,102 words)
In 2011, Longreads highlighted an essay called “Weekend at Kermie’s,” by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens, published by The Awl. Stevens is now back with a new Muppet-inspired Kindle Serial called “Make Art Make Money,” part how-to, part Jim Henson history. Below is the opening chapter. Our thanks to Stevens and Amazon Publishing for sharing this with the Longreads community. Read more…
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Cris Beam | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | August 2013 | 23 minutes (5,787 words)
Below is the opening chapter of To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, by Cris Beam, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick. Thanks to Cris and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sharing it with the Longreads community.
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Longreads Pick
A generation of children, many of them young girls, fought in Liberia’s civil wars. They’re now grown up and trapped between their past and creating a future for themselves:
“After handing over her AK-47 and her RPG launcher during a disarmament drive, Mary returned to what she had known before the war: life on the streets, drugs, and prostitution.
“When Schaack, a soft-spoken Liberian social worker with the evangelical humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse, approached her in late 2003, just months after the ceasefire, Mary told her: ‘Move from here that shit. The whole day you passing around and lying to people.’ But after a while, Schaack managed to persuade Mary and eight other girls to live for nine months at a Christian mission where they received counseling as well as courses in pastry making and tie dying.”
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Published: Jul 31, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,181 words)
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Sabine Heinlein | University of California Press | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,132 words)
Our latest Longreads Member Pick is a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prison, by Sabine Heinlein.
Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world. Read more…
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Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.
“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995. Read more…
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Longreads Pick
Phil Ferguson conned hundreds of investors out of millions of dollars and then disappeared. The story of one of the Indiana’s biggest fraudsters:
“The FBI knew Ferguson had money. They knew he had been in Colorado, where he landed for a time after fleeing Indiana and did business with a man named Roy Vernon Cox while using the name “Al Russell.” They narrowly missed apprehending him. Later, they received a tip that Ferguson had brazenly returned to Marion, from someone who claimed to have seen him in a drugstore.
“The rest was just guesswork. How much did Ferguson have? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?”
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Published: Jun 10, 2013
Length: 31 minutes (7,837 words)
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Longreads Pick
The writer, who has written about the notorious crack kingpin Freeway Rick for nearly two decades, profiles Ricky Ross once more as Ross attempts to legitimately hustle his way back to success:
“On the streets he once flooded with drugs, Freeway Rick is hawking weaves. A staple of the African American cosmetology industry, the weave—or ‘hair integration’ piece—inspires cultlike reverence: a beauty secret that transforms an age-old preoccupation into a declaration of fabulousness. Rick has no training in hair care, no affinity for it either, but he knows that weaves cost a fortune, more than the average customer can sanely afford. A 3.5-ounce bundle, depending on length, retails for $150 to $175, and most women need several bundles to achieve a full, versatile coif, which means $1,000 or more to have the whole thing anchored and styled. In Freeway Rick’s brain, that adds up to opportunity. ‘It could be milk, tires, fertilizer—I don’t care,’ he says. ‘They’re just products.'”
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Published: May 22, 2013
Length: 33 minutes (8,295 words)
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Longreads Pick
The inside story of Ranbaxy, a generic drug maker that committed criminal fraud by fabricating data to win FDA approvals:
“Thakur knew the drugs weren’t good. They had high impurities, degraded easily, and would be useless at best in hot, humid conditions. They would be taken by the world’s poorest patients in sub-Saharan Africa, who had almost no medical infrastructure and no recourse for complaints. The injustice made him livid.
“Ranbaxy executives didn’t care, says Kathy Spreen, and made little effort to conceal it. In a conference call with a dozen company executives, one brushed aside her fears about the quality of the AIDS medicine Ranbaxy was supplying for Africa. ‘Who cares?’ he said, according to Spreen. ‘It’s just blacks dying.'”
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Published: May 15, 2013
Length: 39 minutes (9,759 words)
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Longreads Pick
Inside the lives of homeless families who are staying at a Ramada Inn in the Colorado suburbs:
“At any given time, roughly 20 to 40 guests are staying long term. Since they pay by the week, they call themselves ‘weeklies.’ To score the cheap rates, $210 for individuals and slightly more for families, they must pay in advance. Residents sign a form that lists the activities that could get them kicked out (mostly involving drugs) and warns that they won’t get reimbursed if they leave early, no exceptions. Some families stay only for a few weeks, some for months, giving the hotel the feeling of a dormitory. A rotating cast of front-desk clerks sells candy and rations towels and washcloths. Though some of the clerks are kind and helpful, the guests think of them as enforcers, and the clerks tend to treat the weeklies less as customers than as undergraduates stealing toilet paper and sneaking in hot plates.”
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Published: Mar 27, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,360 words)
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Longreads Pick
A man who installs secret compartments in cars—which are used to conceal things like jewelry, handguns, and drugs—finds himself in legal trouble:
“On November 18, as Anaya drove his Ford F-350 through a Home Depot parking lot, he noticed a dark sedan that seemed to be shadowing him in an adjacent aisle. He thought the car might belong to friends. But when the sedan stopped in front of him, the men who got out were strangers to Anaya. They identified themselves as DEA agents and ordered him out of his truck. ‘You know why we’re here,’ one agent said to Anaya, who was bewildered to be in handcuffs for the first time in his life. ‘Your compartments.'”
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Published: Mar 19, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,264 words)
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