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#DeleteFacebook? It’s Not So Easy

(AP Photos)

Earlier this year I wrote about the lack of nuance on our social media feeds and why so many people were trying to step away from it.

And, taking my own good advice, I attempted to spend less time on my accounts. I used an app called Feedly to follow my favorite writers and publications via RSS instead of on Twitter or Tumblr. I limited checking my social media feeds to a few times a day and told myself that I would post links to my own writing, share links to my friends’ work, and only scan my feeds for relevant professional news — no getting caught up in arguments and threads, and definitely no replying.

The “don’t @ me” trend is, of course, a symptom of the changing nature of social media; there are plenty of call-outs and pile-ons, but trying to open a real conversation with someone who isn’t a close friend or family member has started to feel rude. Social media isn’t really about connecting with new people anymore — a Facebook friend request means “I want to watch what you’re doing” more than it means “I want to interact with you.” (It is, in many ways, antisocial.)

Then we learned that we weren’t the only ones who were closely paying attention to our social media accounts. Read more…

California Governor Jerry Brown Is Retiring

AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

Jerry Brown is a pessimist. He’s in charge of a state with a higher GDP than most countries. He doesn’t believe in legacies. Yet he enacted an unprecedented labor rights law for farmworkers, accrued a $5 billion dollar surplus, and made the state a leader in climate change planning. Previously critiqued for being disorganized, he has become a deal-maker in his old age and learned to prioritize his efforts. He has served as California’s governor for 15 years, and he will soon step down. For The California Sunday Magazine, Andy Kroll profiles California’s hardworking public servant during his final days in office, and he surveys his life’s work (note: not a legacy). He’s trying to start two more controversial projects: twin water tunnels in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, and a high-speed rail connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Brown was playing a part many Californians had never seen — the statesman — and there was something poignant about it. Here was a man who had sought the presidency three times and failed, and now he was on a global stage speaking for more than half of the country who were horrified about where Trump was taking the nation and the world. Did people watch him and wonder, What if? Did he wonder it himself? “He has that suppressed gene for a bigger pond which eluded him,” Orville Schell, an early biographer of Brown, says. “Now he’s finding a way to get into it.”

Brown’s trip often felt like the final world tour of an aging rock star. He flew by private jet. Fans met him in every city. Even an E.U. representative from the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party, who had publicly excoriated Brown, later asked him for a photo. “The Brexit guy wants a selfie,” Brown muttered. His wife and his staff tended to his needs, toting his iPhone and ID badge, lint-rolling him before a TV appearance. Still, the trip took a toll, and by the third or fourth day, he’d come down with a cold and was irritable and tired.

At one point, I asked Brown if he enjoyed the nonstop grind of photo ops and public appearances. “No, I hate everything!” he replied. “Do you think at age 79, if I didn’t enjoy it, I’d be doing all this stuff? Why, because I’m a masochist? If you want an accurate reflection of my existential position, it’s always changing. There are certain things you have to do that aren’t as pleasant as other things you have to do, but if it’s something you want to get accomplished, you will do it. And there will be different levels of joy, from zero to 100 percent.”

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Are The Teens All Right?

Matt Deitsch and Ryan Deitsch, students from Parkland, FL's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, are pictured during a panel held to discuss changing the conversation on guns at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University's Institute for Politics in Cambridge, MA on March 20, 2018. (Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Danielle Tcholakian | Longreads | March 2018 | 14 minutes (3,629 words)

Over the past several weeks, many of us have been familiar with the voices and faces of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were murdered on February 14. The students appeared to quickly shunt away their grief, giving adults across the U.S. a schooling on effective activism, taking to Twitter and effectively employing media outlets to push for policy change so that other teenagers won’t have to experience the terror they did.

In turn, many of the adults that other adults have elected to positions of power — adults we apparently decided were such worthy and good decision-makers that we would pay their salary out of our own pockets — have shown us what very small people they are, and how terribly unqualified they are to be people in the public eye, let alone leaders.

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The Last Resort

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Lindsay Gellman | LongreadsMarch 2018 | 23 minutes (5,754 words)

Read the story in German

Soon after Kate Colgan’s mother, Janet, awoke from surgery in a hospital near Manchester, U.K., last summer, she made a simple request of her daughter: “Get me to Germany.”

So Kate, then 25, fitted the family sedan with a roof rack and piled it with luggage. She arranged for her mother’s voluntary discharge from the hospital, against doctors’ wishes, and eased her from a wheelchair into the car’s passenger seat. Kate’s then-fiancé Chad drove them, along with the couple’s infant daughter, some 16 hours straight to a private treatment clinic on the outskirts of Dornstetten, a quiet medieval town in southern Germany.

Janet was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer in September 2016, when she was 54 years old. British doctors with the National Health Service gave her up to a year to live and offered only palliative care with chemotherapy.

Choosing palliative care felt to Kate like giving up. She scoured the web for other options for her mother, and came across the Hallwang Private Oncology Clinic, a for-profit institution that operates outside of the strictly regulated German hospital system. The Hallwang Clinic has emerged in recent years as the highest profile of a bevy of cancer clinics to gain traction in Germany. It markets itself as a luxury spa of sorts, touting its individualized treatments, pastoral setting in southern Germany’s Black Forest, and delicately plated dining-room meals.

The clinic’s online testimonials looked promising, so the Colgans inquired about treatment. After reviewing Janet’s medical records, a Hallwang Clinic doctor told the Colgans a cocktail of experimental drugs not widely available elsewhere could mean eventual remission for Janet. But the price would be staggering — more than $120,000. The clinic does not accept insurance and typically requires an 80% deposit before treatment can begin.

A chance at remission seemed worth a try — at any cost.

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How to Run a Magazine in the Desert

AP Photo/Reed Saxon

Either you’re the kind of person who wants to start a magazine or the kind who can’t understand why anyone would start a magazine. Well, Ken Layne started the magazine Desert Oracle in Joshua Tree, California, and it’s struck a chord with readers.

At Pacific Standard, Max Genekov profiles the determined desert resident who designs, edits, and ships each issue of his independent magazine himself. Following a winding path through established media, Layne landed in this scorching, brown, 8,000-person town and decided the arid West needed its own literary outlet. Unlike many publications, Desert Oracle is funded entirely from subscriptions. Readership is brisk. The reception has been enthusiastic. Subscriptions are growing, but how does one person successfully run a small publication? Like the desert itself, Layne’s Oracle contains a peculiar magic that speaks to a particular but motley breed of people.

Of the people living in Joshua Tree, Layne imagines his work is most enjoyed by the “intentional desert residents” who came out to Joshua Tree and its environs for the same reasons of secluded beauty and personal growth that he did. This is, in fact, most people in Joshua Tree—the population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010, according to Census data—but Layne is happy to have some long-time residents of the town as subscribers and retailers. But he knew that people would be interested throughout the desert and even in the country at large. At first, Layne focused on about 10 desert towns for marketing, taking the Oracle everywhere from Sedona to Moab. He would walk into stores and interpretive centers, knowing that most wouldn’t ever work but trying to sell nevertheless. But then he would show the guide to some people and he’d “see that sparkle,” and they would entirely understand what he was going for. The Twentynine Palms Inn was one such early adopter; all guests at the hotel can find a complimentary copy in their room.

“The Desert Oracle is one of those things that is so good you want to initially keep it to yourself, but we fought the urge and ordered the publication by the case knowing that these collections of stories would resonate with our guests,” says Breanne Dusastre, the marketing director at Twentynine Palms Inn. “There isn’t anyone else out there curating and telling stories the way Ken Layne is.”

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The Baller Women of the Billiards Tour

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Despite the fact that women have been playing billiards since it became a hobby for European royals in the 15th century, they still have to endure cheap shots from men who can’t resist critiquing their game. At Topic, Megan Greenwell profiles the women ranging in age from their teens to their 70s playing in the eighth stop on the West Coast Women’s Tour for nine-ball billiards in Northern California.

Eleanor Callado—who cofounded the West Coast Women’s Tour with her twin sister Emilyn in the early 2000s, and is now an internationally ranked pro on the WPBA circuit—was introduced to the game by her father, as an eight-year-old growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Eight hours in to the first day of play, I get a firsthand glimpse at the annoyances that come with being a woman in the often-macho pool world. Only half of the tables in the room are being used for the tournament at this point, but Mata and several other eliminated players aren’t tired yet, so they’re playing friendly matches on the rest. A handful of men are milling around, irritated that there’s still no space for them. I am watching Callado dominate a match when a middle-aged man sidles up next to me and begins critiquing her form. “That was a very amateurish mistake,” he scoffs when she misses a bank shot.

I’m not the one he’s criticizing, and I’ve known Callado for all of a day, but I find myself fuming. “She’s an internationally ranked pro!” I snap. He’s taken aback, stammering something about how she’s not that highly ranked this year. After she reports her 8–2 win, I run up to tell Callado about the conversation as she purchases a celebratory beer. But, surprisingly, she’s not half as annoyed as I am; she rolls her eyes, but she’s laughing, too. She’ll go on to win the tournament fairly easily, but her real focus is on a pro event in Michigan a couple of weeks later. This is just for fun, and one ignorant guy isn’t going to stop her from having a good time. “That’s sort of the point of all this,” she says, gesturing around the room at the event she founded more than a decade ago. “I mean, how cool is it that you get all these women in a male-dominated sport and just get to pretend the men don’t exist for a weekend?”

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Bernadette Peters Is Not a Child

Bernadette Peters at microphone
Walter McBride/Getty Images

Even Bernadette Peters, as talented and beloved and powerful as ever, has been underestimated for decades as eternally cute and impossibly naïve.

In honor of Peters’ 70th birthday, Victoria Myers — editor of The Interval, a website dedicated to promoting gender parity in theatre — celebrates Peters’ unparalleled career in Hollywood and on Broadway by lovingly recreating her extraordinary life story in one definitive profile.

In early 2005, when Peters was 57 years old, Linda Stasi, writing in The New York Post about a Happy Days reunion show, opened with the following: “With the possible exception of Bernadette Peters, not everyone stays young and cute forever.” It’s a pithy line, and one that encapsulated the box Peters had been put in for her entire adult life, even while being considered the premier interpreter of the work of contemporary musical theatre’s most sophisticated, most lauded, most game-changing composer.

Stephen Holden, in The New York Times, wrote of the Carnegie Hall concert, “The chemistry between the voice of the wise child and the lyrics of Broadway’s ultimate sophisticate filled the hall with a profoundly bittersweet feeling of lessons learned on roads long traveled.” She had worked hard at her job for over three decades and had fought for her accomplishments, and at 46, it all congealed around the same language that had been used to describe her since she was 18.

It didn’t occur to me to ever label her as innocent or childlike or cute — even at thirteen I knew that calling an adult woman any of those things was degrading — as that simply wasn’t what I heard or saw.

Re-watching her 1976 performance now I see no marks of childishness. For all of the number’s absurdity, it is not without sophistication. The stillness, the lack of self-consciousness, the way she never seems to ask anyone for approval. To me, then and now, this is the opposite of being a waif. I revisited a number of her older performances and practically all of them are free of those characteristics.

And maybe this is something Bernadette Peters learned early: how people put women in a box and want them to stay there, and act the way that type of woman is supposed to act and look the way that type of woman is supposed to look and say the things that type of woman is supposed to say. And people have never liked it when women break out of those boxes and break the rules that have been set up for them, because it forces people to change the stories they’ve been telling not only about those individual women, but the stories they tell about themselves.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Raining money on blue background
Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jason Fagone, Joe Zadeh, Victoria Myers, Andrew Dickson, and Steve Almond.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Bernadette Peters: Young and Cute, Forever and Never

Longreads Pick

Even Bernadette Peters, as talented and beloved and powerful as ever, has been underestimated for decades as both eternally cute and impossibly naïve. In honor of Peters’ 70th birthday, Victoria Myers — editor of The Interval, a website dedicated to promoting gender parity in theatre — celebrates Peters’ unparalleled career in Hollywood and on Broadway by lovingly recreating her extraordinary life story in one definitive profile.

Source: The Interval
Published: Feb 27, 2018
Length: 26 minutes (6,700 words)

Guantánamo, Forever

Guantanamo guards keep watch over detainees inside a common area at Camp 6 high-security detention facility at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

Amos Barshad | The Marshall Project & Longreads | February 2018 | 16 minutes (4,100 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

The message came in on a spring day via the undisclosed U.S. government facility that approves all correspondence out of the military prison in Guantánamo Bay. It was a request for representation from Haroon Gul, a detainee, to Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, an attorney. Gul had never had a lawyer. He was one of the last men in Guantánamo without one.

Now, in 2016, his request was urgent. After nearly a decade of nothing, he was being given the chance to explain himself. It would happen through the Periodic Review Board, an administrative body that considers whether Guantánamo prisoners who have not been charged should be transferred home or to another country. A board representative wrote Sullivan-Bennis an email explaining that Gul, also identified as detainee number ISN 3148, “has requested in writing that you assist him with … proceedings before the PRB, at no cost to the Government.” When the email arrived, Gul’s first hearing was weeks away.

Guantánamo lawyers are famously overworked. At the time, Sullivan-Bennis was juggling five other clients. She and her coworkers at the human rights organization Reprieve asked themselves: How can we possibly handle another one? “And then everyone was like, ‘Let’s just try,’” Sullivan-Bennis recalled. “Because otherwise he’ll be alone.’”

She typed Gul a brief note saying that she’d take his case and that she’d come see him soon. She asked if he wanted anything from Guantánamo’s all-purpose department store, the Navy Exchange.

“Dear Honorable Miss Shelby Sullivan Bennis,” he wrote back in sloping, cursive handwriting, “I have no words to express my feeling of gratitude, appreciation and Thanks for your timly legal and moral help in my PRB hearing. I was in a helpless and hopeless state of my mind in my legal affairs you gave me emotional psycholgcal help.”

A few weeks later, they met for the first time in a windowless cement cellblock on prison grounds. Gul sat across a plastic-top table from Sullivan-Bennis in a loose-fitting, tan-colored T-shirt, with his ankle shackled to a metal ring secured to the floor. He’d been detained in Guantánamo since 2007, shortly after Afghan National Directorate of Security forces burst with guns into the rural guesthouse where he was staying outside Jalalabad and threw a bag over his head.

For the first time, he told his story to a lawyer. He was in his early 30s, like her. He had a wife, Halimah, and a 10-year-old daughter, Maryam, living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Gul himself grew up in a Pakistani camp after violence forced his family to flee his home in Afghanistan. Despite harsh camp conditions, he’d earned an economics degree at Hayatabad Science University. He spoke four languages, including Pashto and Dari. While at Guantánamo he’d learned a fifth, English.

And like nearly every other detainee held at Guantánamo since 9/11, Gul had never been charged with a crime. The U.S. government was justifying his detainment under the law of war. In a secret government dossier on Gul released by Wikileaks, Gul (also known as Haroon al-Afghani) is described as “high risk” and of “high intelligence value.” The dossier alleges that he was an explosives expert and a high-ranking military strategist who had executed attacks on the Northern Alliance on behalf of Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG, a party affiliated with al Qaeda in the 2000s. U.S. intel also indicates that, in 2001, Gul attempted to help Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.

Gul was too polite to put it this way, but he was effectively saying that it was all, all of it, bullshit. His affiliation with HIG was the same as that of millions of other Afghans: The group ran the refugee camps he needed to survive. He said he supported his family by selling small goods, like used books and jars of honey. He said the reason he was in that guesthouse that night was because he was on the road, selling, trying to scrape together some money. He said the Afghans had grabbed the wrong person.

The government’s allegations were built on secret interrogations and unidentified sources named things like IZ-10026. Sullivan-Bennis came to believe that Gul was innocent. It had happened before: An alleged al Qaeda agent named Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri was detained for 13 years before his release; during his PRB hearing, the government admitted it may have had the wrong man. Read more…