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A Velvet Fist

Longreads Pick

Profile of Srdja Popovic, who was a member of Otpor (Resistance), the nonviolent group that helped topple Serbia’s dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000. He’s since formed an NGO called Canvas, which advises rebels in 40 countries on how to use the tools of nonviolent struggle:

“The trainers, all former participants in protests, deliver the curriculum, usually in English. The trainees analyse and evaluate their country’s situation, after being coached in the theory of nonviolent struggle and the three principles for its success: unity, planning and nonviolent discipline. They study the role of consent and obedience, and ‘pillars of society’ (military, police, judiciary, bureaucracy), and how to lure ordinary people away from them and towards the nonviolent movement. Next come strategy and tactics, especially ‘low-risk tactics’, such as co-ordinated banging of metal pans at set times across a city—actions in which all can join, and which keep people in the movement even under harsh oppression.”

Published: Apr 26, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,540 words)

[Not single-page] John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement: 

Sex with employees and marijuana in the mail is garden-variety stuff, hardly scandalous in many contexts—but the site brought to light other, more outlandish features of Friend’s secret world. Specifically, it said that he had established a Wiccan coven with six women, some of whom were Anusara teachers and a few of whom were married, as a way to raise ‘sexual/sensual energy in a positive and sacred way.’ As proof, there was a letter that Friend had written to the coven, in which he apologized for attracting a former member ‘into my life, into our lives, by vibrating in my mind-body with a frequency of deception and lack of integrity.’ This woman hadn’t left quietly, Friend wrote: Her ‘vampire novel imagination conjured JF … as the next Aleister Crowley or Pierre Arnold Bernard! The Texas Tantric guru is the Big Bad Wolf in magick cloaks taking innocent girls from their faithful husbands and wrecking families to drink the juice of innocent Little Red Ridinghoods—Wow!’

“Karma Crash.” — Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York magazine

See also: “Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph High School Basketball Scandal.” — Michael J. Mooney, GQ, June 30, 2011

They helped overthrow Qaddafi, and now “women want what is due to them”:

Until the war broke out, women generally were forced to keep a low profile. Married women who pursued careers were frowned upon. And Qaddafi’s own predatory nature kept the ambitions of some in check. Amel Jerary had aspired to a political career during the Qaddafi years. But the risks, she says, were too great. “I just could not get involved in the government, because of the sexual corruption. The higher up you got, the more exposed you were to [Qaddafi], and the greater the fear.” According to Asma Gargoum, who worked as director of foreign sales for a ceramic tile company near Misrata before the war, “If Qaddafi and his people saw a woman he liked, they might kidnap her, so we tried to stay in the shadows.”

“Women: The Libyan Rebellion’s Secret Weapon.” — Joshua Hammer, Smithsonian

See also: “What I Lost in Libya.” — Clare Morgana Gillis, The Atlantic, Dec. 1, 2011

Women: The Libyan Rebellion’s Secret Weapon

Longreads Pick

They helped overthrow Qaddafi, and now “women want what is due to them” :

“Until the war broke out, women generally were forced to keep a low profile. Married women who pursued careers were frowned upon. And Qaddafi’s own predatory nature kept the ambitions of some in check. Amel Jerary had aspired to a political career during the Qaddafi years. But the risks, she says, were too great. ‘I just could not get involved in the government, because of the sexual corruption. The higher up you got, the more exposed you were to [Qaddafi], and the greater the fear.’ According to Asma Gargoum, who worked as director of foreign sales for a ceramic tile company near Misrata before the war, ‘If Qaddafi and his people saw a woman he liked, they might kidnap her, so we tried to stay in the shadows.'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Mar 21, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,212 words)

10 Great Reads About the Senses

10 Great Reads About the Senses

[Not single-page] From the 2012 James Beard Award nominations: A profile of Sam Mogannam, who transformed his tiny family grocery store, San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Market, into one the most influential stores in the country: 

When Mogannam was 15 years old, the market was owned by his father and uncle. The Mission district hadn’t yet been discovered by a generation of tattooed 25-year-olds happy to stand in line for a $3 latte. Just up the street, Mission Dolores Park was popular with unemployed men who spent their days drinking fortified wine, some of which they bought at Bi-Rite. Though he was not yet old enough to drink, in 1983 Mogannam asked his father if he could remerchandise the wine department. He got rid of the Night Train Express, MD 20/20, and Ripple, and on the advice of the store’s wine reps brought in their strongest sellers—Sebastiani, Robert Mondavi, and Beaulieu Vineyard. The drunks found someplace else to shop, and Bi-Rite’s wine sales soared.

“Cornering the Market.” — Emily Kaiser Thelin, San Francisco Magazine

See also: “The Great Grocery Smackdown.” — Corby Kummer, The Atlantic, March 1, 2010

Cornering the Market

Longreads Pick

From the 2012 James Beard Award nominations: A profile of Sam Mogannam, who transformed his tiny family grocery store, San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Market, into one the most influential stores in the country:

“When Mogannam was 15 years old, the market was owned by his father and uncle. The Mission district hadn’t yet been discovered by a generation of tattooed 25-year-olds happy to stand in line for a $3 latte. Just up the street, Mission Dolores Park was popular with unemployed men who spent their days drinking fortified wine, some of which they bought at Bi-Rite. Though he was not yet old enough to drink, in 1983 Mogannam asked his father if he could remerchandise the wine department. He got rid of the Night Train Express, MD 20/20, and Ripple, and on the advice of the store’s wine reps brought in their strongest sellers—Sebastiani, Robert Mondavi, and Beaulieu Vineyard. The drunks found someplace else to shop, and Bi-Rite’s wine sales soared.”

Published: Oct 20, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,397 words)

How the former baseball star went from unlikely business success to financial ruin—and now sentenced to three years in prison:

Even after his financial and legal troubles came to public light, Dykstra refused to give up the trappings of the gilded life. He continued to fly on private planes, and the charges that landed him in prison—many details of which have not been previously reported—stemmed from his apparently insatiable appetite for flashy cars, some of which he obtained using falsified financial documents. “He had to have all of these trappings to prove to himself he was as good as he thought he was,” L.A. County Deputy DA Alex Karkanen told SI after Monday’s sentencing.

In the unreleased documentary, filmed after his bankruptcy filing, the former Met and Phillie explains the importance of a private plane to his contentedness. “I said, O.K., I know I’ll be happy when I buy my own Gulfstream,” says Dykstra, reflecting on the plane he purchased in 2007. “But I got down to the end of the nose, I looked back and I said, O.K., happy, come on, come on. So it’s not about the Gulfstream. But it is about the Gulfstream. Meaning it just wasn’t as good a Gulfstream as I wanted.”

“How Lenny Dykstra Got Nailed.” — David Epstein, Sports Illustrated

See also: “Going…Going…Gone.” — Gabriel Sherman, GQ, April 1, 2009

Photo: Danny Moloshok, Reuters files

Brendan I. Koerner's All-Time Favorite #Longreads

Brendan I. Koerner’s All-Time Favorite #Longreads

A 2010 profile on the big media dreams of Andrew Breitbart, who died early Thursday morning at age 43:

Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism. “He’s a Marxist,” Breitbart says of Obama. “His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view.”

“The Rage Machine.” — Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, May 24, 2010