Search Results for: most_recently_published

On Muppets & Merchandise: How Jim Henson Turned His Art into a Business

Photo by Eva Rinaldi

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…

Two Emmys and $57,000 in Debt

‘They don’t teach us about money in high school.’

Today’s video pick is Modern Comedian’s short documentary on comedian Sara Schaefer, who fell deep into debt even while she was pursuing her dream career and earning two Emmys as a writer for Jimmy Fallon. (Schaefer now co-hosts the MTV series Nikki & Sara LIVE, which has its second season premiere on July 30.)

For further reading on debt from the Longreads archive:

“Why I’m Grateful I Got Sued by American Express and What you Can Learn From My Experience” (Nathan Rabin, June 2013)

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Our Longreads Member Pick: The Skies Belong to Us (Chapter 5), by Brendan I. Koerner

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This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner‘s new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who’s been featured on Longreads in the past, explains: 
 

“On the morning of October 11, 2009, I encountered the 616-word newspaper story that would change my life. It was a New York Times report about a man named Luis Armando Peña Soltren, a former Puerto Rican nationalist who had helped hijack a Pan Am jet to Cuba in 1968. After spending the next 41 years living in Fidel Castro’s socialist ‘paradise,’ he had decided that he could no longer bear to remain apart from the wife and daughter he had left behind. So at the age of 66, Soltren had voluntarily returned to the United States. He had been arrested the moment he stepped off his plane at JFK Airport; he now faced a possible life sentence if convicted of air piracy.
           
“I was first struck by how much Soltren’s longing for his family had slowly swelled as the years flew by; it had taken him over four decades to muster the courage to risk his freedom for a chance to see his wife and daughter again. (I’ve always been drawn to tales of fugitives and exiles, who must often pay a steep psychological price in order to reinvent themselves.) But the more I thought about Soltren’s predicament, the more I was intrigued by its historical element—namely, the fact that he and two comrades had actually managed to hijack a Boeing 707 to Cuba in the first place. The New York Times piece gave the impression that such crimes were run-of-the-mill during the Vietnam Era. Given the airport security gauntlets we’re forced to endure these days, that seemed an almost unfathomable notion.
           
“Yet using a little Google-fu, I unearthed a lengthy list of dramatic skyjackings from the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time period I have romanticized ever since watching Mean Streets. There were plenty of fascinating characters who seemed to beg for deeper study, such as the Marine who fled to Rome to escape a court-martial, or the Mexican immigrant who just wanted to give a 34-minute speech about his troubles. But there was one name that tugged at my heart more than any other: Catherine Marie Kerkow.
           
“Why her? Well, for starters, she was a woman—skyjacking was almost exclusively a male pursuit. She was also high-school classmates with legendary miler Steve Prefontaine. But most important, she didn’t seem to have any obvious reason for getting involved in a spectacular hijacking—she was, by all accounts, just an aimless 20-year-old kid with no political ties, nor any history of criminality.
           
“So why did Cathy Kerkow turn her back on everything she’d ever known in order to hijack Western Airlines Flight 701? As my infinitely patient wife and kids can attest, my obsession with answering that question has now gobbled up a significant chunk of my life. The Skies Belong to Us is what I have to show for all those countless hours holed up with the keyboard, surrounded by teetering piles of marked-up documents.”

Read an excerpt here

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Longreads Member Exclusive: The Skies Belong to Us (Chapter 5), by Brendan I. Koerner

Longreads Pick

This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner‘s new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who’s been featured on Longreads in the past, explains:

Source: Crown
Published: Jun 13, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,231 words)

Our Longreads Member Pick: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis

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This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains:

I first arrived in Libya at the end of February 2011, less than ten days after the uprising began when peaceful protests were attacked by Col. Qaddafi’s forces. I spent a few months there on that trip and witnessed the beginnings of the armed conflict and the NATO intervention and, accidentally, the inside of the Libyan prison system.  In September of 2011 I returned to report on the final phases of the war and the eventual execution of Qaddafi by rebel forces.

Like nearly every journalist who covered the conflict, and over 90% of the Libyan population, I had spent all my time in Libya on the Mediterranean coast. When I returned in February 2012 for the one-year anniversary of the uprising, I was determined to see more: the vast southern deserts had always fascinated me with their promise of oil-fields, tribal peoples, camels and oases. That month an age-old friction between the Tubu and Zwaya ethnic groups broke out into open battle in Kufra, some hundred miles north of the Chadian border. Despite claiming around 100 lives, it got almost no media attention, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go south. 

We—my Ukrainian colleague Vadim Naninets (whose photographs were in the piece), our driver and I—set out before the break of dawn to make the 620-mile drive south from Benghazi. Fully stocked with bread, cheese, dates, and many cigarettes and bottles of water for the trip, the only real concern we had was bandits on the road. Since fighting in the city had ended, and it was fully ‘liberated,’ under the control of anti-Qaddafi rebels, we didn’t worry about politics in town. That was our first mistake…

On arrival we were immediately taken to the military council headquarters, where the questioning started off fairly innocuously (‘where are you from,’ ‘what are you doing here?’). Within an hour or two we were being questioned separately, our answers transcribed. Local newspapers wrote of our detention, prompting anxious Facebook discussions and phone calls from the temporary consulate in Benghazi. Ten hours later we were released into the custody of the National Army, the Benghazi-based outfit which had come south to quell the battles. 

I quickly understood that in the Sahelian region of Libya—where lighter-skinned Zwaya and darker-skinned Tubu live together—the revolution had a very different meaning from the straight politics of the coast. Pro- and anti-Qaddafi factions were largely based on ethnicity and the history of relations between each ethnic group and the onetime Leader.

The ride home was much swifter and livelier than the ride down: National Army gave us a night-time lift in a C-130. In flagrant violation of any extant aviation law, we rode in the cockpit (I took a turn in the pilot’s seat), each of the ten or so men in the flight crew chain-smoking and explaining what all the dials were for, and pointing to distant red flares burning in the darkness which marked locations of oil fields. 

I was struck yet again by the unimaginable vastness of the deserts, and the sense that we can never fully know what goes on there.

Read an excerpt here

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Longreads Member Exclusive: Letter from Kufra, by Clare Morgana Gillis

Longreads Pick

This week’s Member Pick is “Letter from Kufra,” a story by Clare Morgana Gillis, first published in the summer 2012 issue of The American Scholar. Gillis, who was featured on Longreads for her report after being captured in Libya, explains.

Published: May 29, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,733 words)

Our Longreads Member Pick: Watch Dog, by Kerri Anne Renzulli & Narratively

This week, we’re excited to share a Member Pick from Narratively, the New York-based (and Kickstarter-backed) storytelling site that launched last fall and has been featured on Longreads in the past.

“Watch Dog,” by Kerri Anne Renzulli, will be published in a two weeks, and they were kind enough to make the story available early to Longreads Members. Renzulli, a journalist and Columbia grad student, investigates the difficult task of training guide dogs for New York City—and helping develop relationships between the dogs and their future owners.

Read an excerpt here.

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

Illustration by Laura McCabe

Longreads Member Exclusive: Watch Dog, by Kerri Anne Renzulli & Narratively

Longreads Pick

This week, we’re excited to share a Member Pick from Narratively, the New York-based (and Kickstarter-backed) storytelling site that launched last fall and has been featured on Longreads in the past.

“Watch Dog,” by Kerri Anne Renzulli, will be published in a two weeks, and they were kind enough to make the story available early to Longreads Members. Renzulli, a journalist and Columbia grad student, investigates the difficult task of training guide dogs for New York City—and helping develop relationships between the dogs and their future owners.

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

Source: Narratively
Published: Apr 25, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,425 words)

An eight-year-old autistic boy disappears into a densely forested park in Virginia for five days. The frantic search to find a child who doesn’t understand he’s in danger:

Because of his autism, Robert probably didn’t know that he was lost. If he heard people coming through the woods, he might well have taken cover from them, thinking it was a game of hide-and-seek. Or he might not have wanted to be found by a stranger, even one calling out his name. This made efforts to locate him extremely difficult, and it’s how Robert managed to elude what would soon become one of the largest search-and-rescue operations in Virginia history.

When he disappeared that day, Robert began an unlikely adventure that placed him at the center of the newest concern in the search-and-rescue (SAR) world: lost autistic children. Why autistic kids have the tendency to run off is not known, but the urge is strong in half of all children diagnosed with the disorder.

“Catch Me If You Can.” — Dean King, Outside magazine

See more stories about autism

In Atlanta, a drug dealer is asked to become a confidential informant for cops in a narcotics unit. He ends up turning them in when the officers try to cover up a botched drug bust that ends up killing an innocent woman:

You made a buy today for us,’ Smith explained. ‘Two $25 baggies of crack.’

‘I did?’ White asked. It took him a moment to register. ‘O.K. Who did I buy it from?’

‘Dude named Sam.’ Smith described the imaginary seller, told how Sam had taken his money then walked White to the back of the house and handed him the drugs as Smith and a fellow officer, Arthur Tesler, watched from a car across the street.

‘O.K.,’ White said. ‘Where?’

Smith said: ‘933 Neal Street. I’ll call you later.’

Now in the living room, the TV reporter was saying how a 92-year-old woman had died in the incident, and people were suggesting that the police had shot her. Two and two came together in White’s mind. They did it, he suddenly knew. They messed up. They killed that old lady. Now his heart pounded as the implications became clear. And they want me to cover for them.

“A Snitch’s Dilemma.” — Ted Conover, New York Times Magazine

More #longreads about drugs