Search Results for: religion

What Life Was Like for an Executioner’s Family in the 16th Century

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad.

Joel F. Harrington | The Faithful Executioner, Farrar, Straus and Giroux | March 2013 | 15 minutes (3,723 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book The Faithful Executioners, by Joel F. Harrington, which was recently featured as a Longreads Member Pick. Thanks to our Longreads Members for making these stories possible—sign up to join Longreads to contribute to our story fund. 

Read more from Harrington on how the book came together. Read more…

The NYPD Division of Un-American Activities

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Enemies Within, a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman on the NYPD’s secret spying unit:

“Police collected the phone numbers and e-mail addresses from the website. One was for Agnes Johnson, a longtime activist based in the Bronx. ‘We were women and mothers who said, “We’re going to hold our money in our pocketbooks,” ’ Johnson recalled years later. ‘That’s all we called for.’

“Confirmation that the activities of the Demographics Unit went far beyond what federal agencies were permitted to do was provided by the FBI itself. Once, Sanchez tried to peddle the Demographics reports to the FBI. But when Bureau lawyers in New York learned about the reports, they refused. The Demographics detectives, the FBI concluded, were effectively acting as undercover officers, targeting businesses without cause and collecting information related to politics and religion. Accepting the NYPD’s reports would violate FBI rules.”

Published: Aug 25, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,701 words)

Jahar’s World

Longreads Pick

An investigation into Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s troubled past:

“Yet he ‘never raised any red flags,’ says one of his history teachers, who, like many, requested anonymity, given the sensitivity of the case. Her class, a perennial favorite among Rindge students, fosters heated debates about contemporary political issues like globalization and the crises in the Middle East, but Jahar, she says, never gave her any sense of his personal politics, ‘even when he was asked to weigh in.’ Alyssa, who loved the class, agrees: ‘One of the questions we looked at was ‘What is terrorism? How do we define it culturally as Americans? What is the motivation for it – can we ever justify it?’ And I can say that Jahar never expressed to us that he was pro-terrorism at all, ever.’

“Except for once.

“‘He kind of did, one time to me, express that he thought acts of terrorism were justified,’ says Will. It was around their jun­ior year; the boys had been eating at a neighborhood joint called Izzy’s and talking about religion. With certain friends – Will and Sam among them – Jahar opened up about Islam, confiding his hatred of people whose ‘ignorance’ equated Islam with terrorism, defending it as a religion of peace and describing jihad as a personal struggle, nothing more. This time, says Will, ‘I remember telling him I thought certain aspects of religion were harmful, and I brought up the 9/11 attacks.’

“At which point Jahar, Will says, told him he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jul 17, 2013
Length: 45 minutes (11,415 words)

Reading List: 6 Great Sci-Fi Stories About Robots

Ray Bradbury. Photo by Alan Light, via Wikimedia Commons

Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She recently shared six stories for the science-fiction newbie, and a reading list for Fantasy Newbies.

These stories offer a little breadth, a little curiosity, and a little levity to the idea of artificial life. Read more…

Longreads Member Pick: Baghdad Follies, by Janet Reitman

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This week, we’re excited to feature Janet Reitman, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. “Baghdad Follies” is Reitman’s 2004 story on what it was like to be a war correspondent in Iraq. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the war, Reitman reflects on her early fears about traveling to Baghdad:

People talk a lot about what it’s like to cover a war; no one talks about what you have tell yourself in order to actually get on the plane so you can go and cover the war. ‘Baghdad Follies’ is a story about what reporters go through in covering war, and it began, in a sense, with my growing sense of panic over having signed up to cover the war. It was about an hour before I was scheduled to leave for the airport. I’d finished packing, and began to think—which right there is a killer. My thoughts went like this: I was insane. I’d covered other conflicts, but like, little ones. Africa. Haiti. This was Iraq. I’d been dying to go to Iraq. Now, I really didn’t want to go to Iraq—let alone go to Iraq to write a story about how dangerous the war had become for U.S. reporters. Which was what this story was about. 

So I called a friend who’d covered the Iraq invasion. ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to go.’

Huh?

‘I mean, no one will blame you if you back out,’ he said. ‘It’s perfectly fine if you stay home. It’s just a story.’

This of course made me feel that now I really had to go because there were also a lot of other reporters, most of who would kill for this assignment, and what was I thinking? …  ’I think I might die,’ I told him.

‘You might,’ he said. 

We debated the likelihood of getting killed or kidnapped for a bit. We decided it was 50-50 I got kidnapped, but probably only for a short while. Ultimately, we decided the best course of action was to get on the plane, fly to London, my first layover, decide if I felt good enough to keep going to Jordan, my next layover, and then, depending on how much I was freaking out, either keep on going to Baghdad, or turn back. ‘Look at it as a process,’ he said.

Two days and an untold number of tiny airplane vodka bottles later, I arrived in Baghdad and stayed a month, during which time two other colleagues, both of who had confided their own fears about doing this job, were kidnapped, and released. I told their stories in full. Then, I went home, regrouped, and returned to Iraq. Twice.

Read an excerpt here.

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

Photo: Thomas Hartwell, via Wikimedia Commons

Longreads Member Exclusive: Baghdad Follies, by Janet Reitman

Longreads Pick

This week, we’re excited to feature Janet Reitman, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the author of Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. “Baghdad Follies” is Reitman’s 2004 story on what it was like to be a war correspondent in Iraq. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the war, Reitman reflects on her early fears about traveling to Baghdad.

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

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jan 1, 2004
Length: 21 minutes (5,354 words)

Mary Gaitskill Recommends Saul Bellow

recommendedreading:


Vol. 8, No. 3

EDITOR’S NOTE

Years ago I had a conversation with a friend comparing John Updike and Saul Bellow. At the time I liked Updike a little better, but she said something on Bellow’s side that nearly changed my mind on the spot. “Updike sees,” she said. “He sees the world and he knows what he is looking at. Bellow looks and he doesn’t always know. Bellow is stunned by the world.” By that she meant that Bellow’s vision is deeper.

I’m not sure that she was right (I’m not sure, for one thing, that Updike is always so knowing), but I’m still thinking about what she said. This blunt and exquisite little beauty, “Something To Remember Me By,” is a small example and counter-example of what she was talking about. The narrator is a worldly old man with a sophisticated eye and a wise-ass sense of humor describing an incident from his boyhood. But for all his wise-assedness, he remains amazed by the force and plenitude of physical life: pocket lint, soiled snowbanks, a tile wall with gaps “stuffed with dirt,” the “salt, acid, dark, sweet odors” of strange pussy. Then there’s social life: the order of family and religion, the chaos of morality, crime, goofiness, love, deception and holy books, some of which hide money, others of which cost 5 cents and come apart in your hands. As his scornful older brother says, this boy “doesn’t understand fuck-all,” and through this boy’s eyes, who would?

The story takes place in depression-era Chicago and it is told almost like a fairy tale: the boy, whose mother is slowly dying, goes on the “journey” of his day at school and work. At its very start he kisses his bed-ridden mother; though he lives in a city, he then encounters hunters, steps over the blood they’ve spilt and enters a park (or wood). Later he enters a strange home to deliver flowers; in the dining room he sees a young girl lying in a coffin. Her frowning mother gestures with her fists. He sees “baked ham with sliced bread” on the drainboard, a “jar of French’s mustard and wooden tongue depressors to spread it;” there’s a dead body, but it’s these daily things that make him say “I saw and I saw and I saw.” Under this mortal enchantment the boy then goes to see his uncle and instead meets another girl, also supine, but naked and very much alive. The boy forgets his mother and is falsely seduced. He is humbled, does service, is punished. There is mercy and knowledge.

Actually punishment comes last, but mercy and knowledge have more power—which would say that my friend was wrong, that Bellow does look and know. Except that the knowledge of the story, which comes from the world of objects and cheap books, plus people who make fun, speechify, cheat and punch hell out of the kid—this knowledge is peculiar; blunt, yet hard to read, right in your face, but off the color spectrum.

“That was when the measured, reassuring, sleep-inducing turntable of days became a whirlpool, a vortex darkening towards the bottom.”

“I myself know the power of nonpathos, in these low, devious days.”

The boy turned old man thinks both these thoughts close on each other; his knowing and his amazed unknowing come together and fall apart again.

Mary Gaitskill

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Courage and Survival

Longreads Pick

The Legends of the Fall author and poet on aging:

“Obviously I need courage to deal with my current dysfunctional body. And religion? The bible says that the kingdom of God is within you. If so, I haven’t noticed it lately. I’m not making light of devotion or a mother praying to bring her baby back to life after it’s been cut out of the stomach of an anaconda in Venezuela. Human suffering has to be the largest of all question marks. You must beware of hope, a radically dangerous emotion. Hope can roll over and crush you. I went to a dozen doctors last winter in Tucson for shingles relief and each time I had a wide-eyed Midwestern hope and faith that was promptly smeared. Hope is a bourgeois Tinker Bell toy that can transform into a guard dog of the most vicious nature. You raise your expectations then are gutted like a deer. However, if you need to say a little prayer, go ahead and moisten your lips for the deaf gods, although it’s like fly fishing in a sewer: ‘Raise your chin, o son of man, your doom is around the next corner on the left.'”

Source: Brick
Published: Nov 26, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,391 words)

Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia:

Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included her being compromised outside of a hospital, lasting years on end.

‘I can’t kill you,’ I answered steadily. ‘I have a husband and two stepsons and a mortgage. Someone will find out, and then I’ll have to go to prison.’

She sighed, exasperated.

‘I know this issue has always been important to you,’ I said. ‘So if you feel strongly about it, I understand that. You can end your own life. There are plenty of places that can help you do that.’

She was monumentally offended. ‘Committing suicide is against the Jewish religion!’ she declared.

I was dumbfounded. ‘So is committing murder! Did you ever think of that?’

Apparently not.

“How My Mother Disappeared.” — Alex Witchel, New York Times Magazine

More Witchel

How My Mother Disappeared

Longreads Pick

Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia:

“Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included her being compromised outside of a hospital, lasting years on end.

“‘I can’t kill you,’ I answered steadily. ‘I have a husband and two stepsons and a mortgage. Someone will find out, and then I’ll have to go to prison.’

“She sighed, exasperated.

“‘I know this issue has always been important to you,’ I said. ‘So if you feel strongly about it, I understand that. You can end your own life. There are plenty of places that can help you do that.’

“She was monumentally offended. ‘Committing suicide is against the Jewish religion!’ she declared.

“I was dumbfounded. ‘So is committing murder! Did you ever think of that?’

“Apparently not.”

Published: Sep 7, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,614 words)