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This Land Should Be Your Land: A National Parks Reading List

(Yellowstone National Park / Flickr)

When President Obama walked out of the Oval Office earlier this year, he left behind more land protected under federal law than any of his predecessors. President Trump appears intent on challenging that legacy, recently ordering a sweeping review of national monuments with an aim to “balance” the protection of these lands. (The Bureau of Land Management also recently added banners to its website to evoke the wondrous vistas of coal mining and oil drilling.)

It’s not yet clear whether Trump will actually try to revoke Obama-era designations—or whether he’d succeed if he does—but the land protected under federal law has been a mix of majesty and mystery ever since Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act designating the nation’s first national park. Writers have used their craft to ask fascinating questions and expose the weird underbellies of national parks, monuments, and federal lands since long before Trump ever expressed an antipathy toward them.

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The Boom Boom Song

All illustrations by Kate Gavino

Richard Gilbert | Longreads | May 2017 | 13 minutes (3,798 words)

1.

My granddaughter, Kathy, sprinted down the upstairs hallway of her house, wailing for her mother. But her mother, my 30-year-old daughter, wasn’t home. She and her husband had left Kathy with me while they went to buy a larger car—Baby Number Two was due soon. I’d been on duty about three hours when Kathy realized her parents were really gone, and dashed for their bedroom. She was wearing only a red shirt, having shed her diaper and her britches somewhere. I hadn’t been able to get shoes on her in the first place. I ambled behind her down the dim hall, wondering how I’d deal with this crisis.

I’d already learned not to tell Kathy “no,” except in injurious situations, so I don’t recall doing anything to set her off. But on top of the Terrible Twos, she’s in a mommy phase. And she’ll only nap at day care, so she’s always exhausted on weekends at home. Her parents, Claire and David, had warned me that they had to drive all the way to northern Virginia for the best deal. Their getting back to this southwestern tail of the state meant I’d agreed to tend Kathy, alone, for over 12 hours. Read more…

The Man Behind the Punishing Barkley Marathons

a man in an orange knit hat lights a cigarette
Barkley creator Gary Cantrell lighting the cigarette that signals the start of the race. (Photo by Michael Hodge via Flickr, CC BY 2.0).

At the Bitter Southerner Sara Estes profiles the man behind her state’s strangest sporting event: Lazarus Lake, also known as Gary Cantrell, the creator of the punishing Barkley Marathons. Estes’ piece is a fascinating profile of both the man, the land — “trees like steel bars, thickets like razor wire” —and the community where the Barkley takes place.

When I arrive at Hardee’s, the sun still hasn’t risen, and the air is chilled and dew-damp. Inside, a group of white-haired men — retired, church-going, grandpa types — are seated around a large table in the middle of the restaurant. They’ve been eating breakfast here, every morning, at this very table, since the dawn of fucking time. They can remember all the various phases of branding and décor Hardee’s has cycled through over the decades; they can recount what year the restaurant got new booths, new light fixtures, new flooring. They know the Barkley well, and can always tell its arrival by all the strange new people who flood into the small town around April Fool’s Day, the day on which Laz purposefully chose to host the race, or as near to it as possible.

When Laz arrives, he orders sausage and eggs and joins the men at their roost. Media crews from France and New York are slowly trickling in. They look like aliens from a distant land with their hi-tech AV equipment and tight-fitting athletic wear. Laz ignores them. His particular brand of grungy, mountain-man fame is generally underwhelming to locals, yet ceaselessly exhilarating to clean-cut city dwellers near and far.

“In France, I’m a star,” he tells me. “In America, I’m thought of more as a homeless person.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

44 Magnum. (AP Photo/Kai-Uwe Knoth)

This week we’re sharing stories by Jason Fagone, Betty Ann Adam, Christian H. Cooper, Clarissa Wei, and Robert Kolker.

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The Best Longreads From Trump’s First 100 Days

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Michelle Legro | Longreads | April 2017 | 7 minutes (1,773 words)

 

Day 100 is a Saturday, which is good because Donald Trump should probably get some rest. Saturdays are usually fairly easy for the president—he took the first one off right after his own inauguration—a day he can kick back and enjoy some quality time with a piece of chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago.

The Trump Administration introduced the American people to a new kind of time, one that moves with a glacial tick of the clock, but with the drama of a high school lunch period. To look back on the early days—yes, that was three months ago—is to find reporters breathlessly navigating the events of a single day in a flurry of tweets, with little time for a proper write-up before the next dramatic turn of events. We found ourselves asking what the fuck just happened today? as it became harder and harder to remember what happened an hour ago, let alone a day. However, it quickly became clear that journalists were digging in for the long fight. And while the best reporting has often been short, spry, and effective in these first crucial days, these were some of the longreads that stood out.

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The Diagnosis and Surgery I Had to Fight For

Micrograph of a uterus with Adenomyosis by Nephron, via Wikimedia Commons

Sari Botton | Longreads | April 2017 | 10 minutes (2,500 words)

Illness awareness months are a mixed bag. While they provide an opportunity to call attention to maladies both familiar and little-known, the window for each is woefully limited to one-twelfth of the year. From Alzheimer’s to Zika, there are so many conditions celebrated each month — at least 10 most months, and some months, many more — that it’s easy for any one to get lost in the shuffle. Too often, the commemorations are shallow and silly, and do little in terms of actually raising awareness, or involving people in the kind of hard work necessary to change policy.

And sometimes the conditions with the lowest profiles — the ones that could really use a spotlight shone on them — don’t make it onto the governmental calendars that get the most views.

Such is the case with adenomyosis.

* * *

Never heard of adenomyosis? Allow me to take this moment during its official Awareness Month — April — to enlighten you about this painful affliction, which is similar to endometriosis, and something of a mystery to modern medicine. I know about it because it wreaked havoc on my life for 25 years before a hysterectomy at 43 — an operation I had to fight for, and almost didn’t receive — gave me the relief I needed.

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The 2017 James Beard Award Winners: A Reading List

Fluke Crudo with Cucumber, Radish & Nasturtium at the kick-off event for the James Beard Foundation’s Taste America® 10-city national tour, held Wednesday, August 3, 2016 at the James Beard House in New York City. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision for James Beard Foundation/AP Images)

The growth of food writing has evolved with the explosion of all the food-watching that accompanied programs like Top Chef and Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and we’re way past the days of Craig Claiborne or Ruth Reichl reveling about an up-and-coming chef in an out-of-the-way corner of a yet-to-be-gentrified-neighborhood somewhere.

The James Beard awards—otherwise known as the Oscars of food—were announced earlier this week, and befitting the honor’s nearly 30-year history, let’s toast sparkling rosé and caviar-topped amuse-bouches to the best food writing published in 2016 (here is the full list of winners).

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When Your Subject Is #Content: An Interview with Rachel Monroe

#vanlife has over 1.3 million tags on Instagram, and top vanlife accounts can have more than half-a-million followers. Vanlife content should feature a beautiful landscape, a vintage Volkswagen, and preferably, a woman. (Unsplash)

For the New Yorker, Rachel Monroe followed Emily King and Corey Smith as they traveled up and down the California coast with their vintage Volkswagen and 156,000 Instagram followers in search of contentment—and content—through the “vanlife” movement. While her feature looks at the highs and lows of choosing to live your life through the internet, there were a few threads that I couldn’t shake loose while reading it. It’s easy for a writer to paint a target on her subject, especially anyone who is trying so hard to achieve a certain image, (for another masterful dissection of what lies beneath the “lifestyle” brand, I’d suggest Kyle Chayka’s profile of the creators of Kinfolk for Racked), but throughout the piece, Monroe is both savvy and sympathetic to the dynamic that keeps King and Smith going, and the often-invisible labor that keeps their relationship afloat while making life and work happen seamlessly in front of a demanding audience. I spoke with Monroe recently about what it takes to report about social media celebrities.

***

Can you tell me a little about how you first encountered vanlife? 

I live in Marfa, Texas, a town that seems to be on every professional road-tripper’s itinerary. We get a lot of travelers passing through, and at some point I began to notice that some of the vehicles in town had proprietary hashtags and decals on their windows that advertised their social media accounts. At the same time, I was thinking about how to build out the back of my pick-up to be more comfortable for long-term travel. After a little research, I came across articles about #vanlife.

Like any celebrity, or wanna-be celebrity, social media influencers have an agenda. How can you tell if an influencer will also make a good subject for a piece? 

For this feature I was specifically looking for a couple—since that’s the prototypical vanlife unit—who were making money through brand partnerships and social media because I wanted to learn more about how that world worked. It was also important to me that the people I profiled have significant experience actually living full-time in their vehicle. Emily and Corey had been on the road pretty much full-time for the past four years; I knew that meant they’d have stories and experiences that went well beyond creating branded content. They were also willing to be very open about the realities of their lives with me, which was crucial to make the story work.

You mention that vanlife is a nostalgic throwback to a sixties lifestyle: “the neo-hippie fashions, the retro gender dynamics.” It seems that women are putting in more of the effort to bring in the money, providing the majority of the support for the vanlife lifestyle, both on and off the road. How did those gender dynamics reveal themselves over the course of reporting?

In terms of the specific dynamics between Emily and Corey, the couple I profile in the piece, I witnessed them in a bunch of different modes. We were living in a very confined space together for a week, a space that’s their home, workplace, and their vehicle. They live together, travel together, take care of their dog together, and run a small business together. For that to work with a minimum of drama, it seemed like there needed to be defined roles and responsibilities. And what I observed in their relationship was that Emily was always the primary breadwinner while Corey made pretty much all the executive decisions about where they’d go, how long they’d stay, what route they’d take to get there. This seemed to be a relatively common dynamic, a slight scramble of the traditional model in that the vanlife man is in charge of the domestic sphere, which in this case is also a machine.

I was also struck by the number of men-only conversations I witnessed within the vanlife community about engine configuration, repairs, et cetera. Obviously there are plenty of women who know how to work on vehicles, but in the vanlife universe they definitely seemed to be in the minority. There was something about the overall dynamic—the women are photographed while the men bond over their shared, specialized mechanical knowledge—that seemed old-fashioned and kind of depressing to me.

And of course there are fewer solo women travelers than couples or solo male travelers. Vanessa Veselka wrote about this really well in her essay about female road narratives. It’s also one of the factors why vanlife is so white: Part of the “freedom” that the vanlifers are always talking about, the freedom of traveling alone and carefree through rural remote areas, is certainly more accessible to some people than others.

Did you start to encounter more people involved in vanlife after the article came out? 

While I was reporting, I felt like vanlife was everywhere. I learned about a friend’s cousin who gets paid to travel around the world making branded content. And I started to be hyper-aware of the vans passing through Marfa, particularly the ones with hashtags plastered on the side. But this happens every time I get fixated on a story—I start to see signs of it everywhere—and I never know if that’s the world validating my interest or just me being a little obsessed.

It’s easy for a writer to skewer a subject for not living the life they attempt to project. How did you find compassion for your subjects?

I saw Emily and Corey as people who are in many ways living out their ideals, while also in some ways not. Like all of us! That’s one thing that troubles me about influencer marketing: It encourages you to think that only certain aspects of your personality are worth showing the world, the most marketable aspects, I suppose. But I’m always much more fascinated by the parts that don’t fit as neatly.

Did you get a sense there’s an endgame for vanlifers? What’s the ultimate destination?

Vanlife definitely seems to be both a generational trend and an expanding business. Corey and Emily say they can’t imagine staying put full-time, but they also occasionally fantasized about buying some land in New England near their parents and building a tiny house by the river to live in at least part of the year.

I think that full-time traveling is tough, and expensive, as a forever-dream, but the idea of incorporating longer stints of rootlessness, even if there is a home base to come back to, is something that appeals to both professional vanlifers and people who are watching the trend from afar. That’s something I hear from a lot of people—it’s maybe even my own ideal—to have a life that somehow combines a solid home base with occasional extended stints of exploration.

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What Bullets Do to Bodies

Longreads Pick

What exactly does a bullet do to flesh as it careens through the body? Jason Fagone profiles Philadelphia trauma surgeon Dr. Amy Goldberg, a woman on the front lines of gun violence as she attempts to repair the broken bodies that arrive daily at Temple University Hospital.

Source: HuffPost
Published: Apr 26, 2017
Length: 31 minutes (7,799 words)

Steve Bannon’s Hollywood Ending

(AFP Photo / Pool / Saul Loeb)

What kind of movie plays on the flickering screen in Steve Bannon’s mind as he sits each day by the right hand of the president? Is it one similar to Forrest Gump, where a few lucky moves always land Bannon in the room where deals are made, ready to scrape a few percentage points from the bottom line? Or is he a hero like Leonardo DiCaprio’s con man in Catch Me If You Can, trying on different hats—Goldman Sachs executive, Hollywood wunderkind, champion of Biosphere 2, conservative heavyweight—and slipping away just a things come crashing down. Or perhaps he’d rather see himself as DiCaprio’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street, slamming down the phone on idiots who wont make a deal, burning bridges if he can’t get what he want, always with the goal of making gobs of money in the end.

It was always hard to believe Steve Bannon found a certain kind of success in Hollywood—a success that wasn’t measured by the kind of art he produced, but the third or fourth tier deals he managed to push through, often with Hollywood hardly knowing he was even there. Connie Bruck chronicles this strange time in her New Yorker profile “How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon” (the subhead could have simply read, they don’t), as Bannon developed his good-versus-evil worldview and love for Leni Riefenstahl into a vision for a new kind of conservative media mogul.

People in Hollywood were bewildered by Bannon’s story of himself as a major dealmaker. “I never heard of him, prior to Trumpism,” Barry Diller told me. “And no one I know knew him in his so-called Hollywood period.” Another longtime entertainment executive said, “The barriers in Hollywood are simple. First, you have to have talent. And, second, you have to know how to get along with people. It’s a small club.”

Many who did have dealings with Bannon were unwilling to be interviewed. Others would not speak for attribution, saying that they feared what he might do with the instruments of government—one spoke of a possible I.R.S. audit. He worked hard to join the Hollywood establishment, and several people who knew him said that they were startled by his conversion to what one called “conservative political jihad.” Another said, “All the years I knew him, he just wanted to make a buck.” […]

“What I’ve tried to do is weaponize film. I want these films to be incredibly provocative. I want to present our point of view. I’m not interested in saying ‘on the one hand and the other.’ I’m conservative. I believe in the Tea Party movement. I believe in the populist rebellion.” Bannon added, “I make films of the highest artistic quality.”

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