Search Results for: tsunami

The Ghosts of Fukushima

Longreads Pick

Five years after a massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, only a small percentage of evacuees have returned to the Japanese town of Naraha, which the government has deemed safe following an expensive cleanup effort.

Published: Jun 20, 2016
Length: 18 minutes (4,539 words)

Your Phone Was Made By Slaves: A Primer on the Secret Economy

Kevin Bales | Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World | Spiegel & Grau | January 2016 | 34 minutes (9,162 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Blood and Earth, by Kevin Bales, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

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We think of Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck as the origin of our iPhones.

It’s never a happy moment when you’re shopping for a tombstone. When death comes, it’s the loss that transcends everything else and most tombstones are purchased in a fog of grief. Death is a threshold for the relatives and friends who live on as well, changing lives in both intense and subtle ways. It’s the most dramatic and yet the most mundane event of a life, something we all do, no exceptions, no passes.

Given the predictability of death it seems strange that Germany has a tombstone shortage. It’s not because they don’t know that people are going to die; it’s more a product of the complete control the government exerts over death and funerals. Everyone who dies must be embalmed before burial, for example, and the cremated can be buried only in approved cemeteries, never scattered in gardens or the sea. Rules abound about funerals and tombstones—even the size, quality, and form of coffins and crypts are officially regulated. All this leads to a darkly humorous yet common saying: “If you feel unwell, take a vacation—you can’t afford to die in Germany.”

Granite for German tombstones used to come from the beautiful Harz Mountains, but now no one is allowed to mine there and risk spoiling this protected national park and favorite tourist destination. So, like France and many other rich countries, including the United States, Germany imports its tombstones from the developing world.

Some of the best and cheapest tombstones come from India. In 2013 India produced 35,342 million tons of granite, making it the world’s largest producer. Add to this a growing demand for granite kitchen countertops in America and Europe, and business is booming. There are more precious minerals of course, but fortunes can be made in granite. In the United States, the average cost of installing those countertops runs from $2,000 to $8,000, but the price charged by Indian exporters for polished red granite is just $5 to $15 per square meter—that comes to about $100 for all the granite your kitchen needs. The markup on tombstones is equally high. The red granite tombstones that sell for $500 to $1,000 in the United States, and more in Europe, are purchased in bulk from India for as little as $50, plus a US import duty of just 3.7 percent.

Leaving aside what this says about the high cost of dying, how can granite be so cheap? The whole point of granite, that it is hard and durable, is also the reason it is difficult to mine and process. It has to be carefully removed from quarries in large thin slabs, so you can’t just go in with dynamite and bulldozers. Careful handling means handwork, which requires people with drills and chisels, hammers and crowbars gently working the granite out of the ground. And in India, the most cost effective way to achieve that is slavery. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Matt

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Should You Keep Having Sex During a 9.0 Earthquake, and Other Pressing Questions

Photo by Maëlick

If you’ve been too scared to read this week’s New Yorker story on the apocalyptic earthquake that’s threatening to destroy the Pacific Northwest, here’s a lighter take from Dan Savage, who had a short conversation with Seattle author Sandi Doughton about her 2014 book Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest and how worried we should really be:

The New Yorker quotes a FEMA official who says that “everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” So all of us up here on Capitol Hill—we can see I–5 from here but we’re to the east of it—are going to fine, right? We don’t have anything to worry about, right?

You’ll be bruschetta—more refined, but equally toasted.

It’s true that the shaking weakens with distance from the fault, but I wouldn’t count on that tiny margin to save you. What I think the FEMA official meant is that a lot of our infrastructure in Western WA—utilities, roads, some bridges, brick buildings—will be wrecked, and access to the coast will be cut off.

I’m kind of disappointed you didn’t ask me about sex! But, sadly, I probably know more about earthquakes.

You want a bonus sex question? Let’s say two people are having sex when the full rip 9.0 megaquake hits. Should they stop and take cover? Or should they keep going because this might be the last time they ever get to have sex? Would your advice be different if they were, say, on top of Capitol Hill versus in a cabin on the beach in Seaside, OR?

On Capitol Hill, in a relatively new building with no chandelier or mirror or glass light fixture hanging over the bed, I say carry on. The motion from the quake might be a pleasing addition. In Seaside, give it up, put on your shoes and run for your life because the tsunami is coming.

Read the interview

The Really Big One

Longreads Pick

Scientists predict that a devastating earthquake and tsunami could destroy cities throughout the Pacific Northwest. A look at worst-case scenarios for the Cascadia subduction zone.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jul 13, 2015
Length: 24 minutes (6,074 words)

The Boy Who Loved Transit

Photo via mtaphotos (Edited)

Jeff Tietz | Harper’s | May 2002 | 35 minutes (8,722 words)

 

This essay by Jeff Tietz first appeared in the May 2002 issue of Harper’s and was later anthologized in The Best American Crime Writing: 2003 Edition. Tietz has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Livingston Journalism Award. His work has appeared in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Writing, Best American Business Writing, and The CAFO Reader. Our thanks to Tietz for allowing us to reprint it here. For those interested in an update on Darius McCollum’s story, see this 2013 The Wall Street Journal piece (subscription req’d).

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Before leaving his girlfriend’s apartment in Crown Heights, on the morning of his nineteenth arrest for impersonating and performing the functions of New York City Transit Authority employees, Darius McCollum put on an NYCTA subway conductor’s uniform and reflector vest. Over his feet he pulled transit-issue boots with lace guards and soles designed to withstand third-rail jolts. He took transit-issue work gloves and protective goggles. He put a transit-issue hard hat on his head. In his pockets he carried NYCTA work orders and rerouting schedules and newspaper clippings describing his previous arrests: for driving subway trains and buses and various other vehicles without authorization, possessing stolen property, flagging traffic around NYCTA construction sites, forging documents. He also carried a signed letter on NYCTA letterhead:

To: All Concerned Departments

From: Thomas Calandrella Chief Track Officer

Re: Darius McCollum Effective this date of January 10, 2000, Darius McCollum is a member of a special twelve member Special Study Group; and will analyze the operations of track safety and track operations. SSG will report directly to this office and will be issued all related gear for the respected purposes of this department and will receive assistance of any relating department.

To his belt Darius clipped a flashlight and a key ring the size of a choker. From this ring six smaller rings hung like pendants. Along the curves of the small rings, 139 keys climbed symmetrical and fanlike. Each key granted access to a secure area of the train, bus, or subway system of the New York City Transit Authority. The collection was equivalent to the number of keys an employee would acquire through forty years of steady promotions. Just before he left the apartment, Darius picked up an orange emergency-response lantern.

Six weeks earlier, Darius had been paroled from the Elmira Correctional Facility, near Binghamton, New York, where he had served two years for attempted grand larceny—”attempted” because he had signed out NYCTA vehicles for surface use (extinguishing track fires, supervising maintenance projects) and then signed them back in according to procedure. Darius has never worked for the NYCTA; he has never held a steady job. He is thirty-seven and has spent a third of his adult life in prison for victim-less offenses related to transit systems. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

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Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family

Illustration by Laura McCabe

Debie Thomas | River Teeth | Summer 2013 | 17 minutes (4,194 words)

River TeethFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share an essay from Ashland, Ohio’s narrative nonfiction journal River Teeth. Longreads readers can receive a 20 percent discount off of a River Teeth subscription by going here.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Does Journalism Still Work?

The Unwinding is a powerful and important work, but even so, I can’t help but think that it has arrived very late in the day. Ask yourself: how many books have been published describing the destruction of the postwar middle-class economic order and the advent of the shiny, plutocratized new one? Well, since I myself started writing about the subject in the mid–1990s—and thus earned a place on every book publicist’s mailing list—there have been at least a thousand.

“Two things need to be said about this tsunami of sad. First, that the vast size of it, when compared to the effect that it has had—close to nothing—should perhaps call into question the utility of journalism and argument and maybe even prose itself. The gradual Appalachification of much of the United States has been a well-known phenomenon for 20 years now; it is not difficult to understand why and how it happened; and yet the ship of state sails serenely on in the same political direction as though nothing had changed. We like to remember the muckraking era because of the amazing real-world transformations journalism was able to bring; our grandchildren will remember our era because of the big futile naught accomplished by our prose.”

Thomas Frank, in Public Books, on George Packer’s National Book Award-winning The Unwinding and whether, as good as it is, people have tuned out. Read more on the recession in the Longreads Archive.

(h/t The Browser)

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