Search Results for: wedding

Unlivable Cities

Longreads Pick

A writer discusses the awful living conditions of China’s booming cities after seven years of living in the country for seven years, and visiting 21 of China’s 22 provinces:

A Beijing-based blogger who lived in Harbin in 2003 told me about leaving Blues after several drinks and flagging a taxi driver, whom he recognized. ‘The taxi driver told me, “Hi, I just came from a wedding and I’m soused. You drive.”‘ So he drove himself home through Harbin’s icy, deserted streets.

Like many Chinese cities, Harbin can be extremely challenging to the health — and not just due to the sometimes scandalously toxic food served in dim, poorly lit restaurants. Hospital bathrooms in Harbin and elsewhere often lack soap and toilet paper, ostensibly out of fear that residents will steal the items. Six months after I arrived, a benzene spill in the nearby Songhua River briefly left the city without running water. The air in Harbin was so polluted that I felt as though the coal dust had sunk into my lungs, and a fine layer of black soot seeped in through our windows overnight. But even Harbin wasn’t as filthy as Linfen, a city of 4 million people in central China’s Shanxi province that Time in 2007, on a list of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, said made “Dickensian London look as pristine as a nature park.”

Source: Foreign Policy
Published: Aug 13, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,724 words)

The story of Will and Erwynn, the first gay couple to marry on a military base:

At church, Will and Erwynn lead me to a windowless back-room chapel that has been converted from a gym. This is the Sojourn service, a more informal worship than the one taking place in the main hall. They worry that other members of the church might not be comfortable with their presence in the regular service. The morning begins with a band playing Christian soft rock. There are no Bibles here, only thin handouts. Pastor Rick Court’s sermon, leavened with jokes and audience interaction, focuses on loving God and loving your neighbor as the most important lessons of Christianity. ‘You can see why we like this place,’ Erwynn whispers to me. ‘This is exactly what we are trying to teach our kids.’ But when I tell them I’d like to interview Pastor Rick, they pause. ‘Well,’ says Will, ‘I guess that means we’ll have to come out to him.’

The day before the wedding, I meet up with Pastor Rick at the Red Lion Diner in South Jersey. He was ordained by the conservative Evangelical Church Alliance. He has lived in this area all of his life. Will and Erwynn are the first congregants he’s had whom he knew were gay, but he has heard that there are others at Hope. ‘I sensed that they were a gay couple right away,’ he chuckles, ‘although they think that they hide it pretty well.’

“The Wedding.” — Katherine Goldstein, Slate

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Life as a mob boss’s girlfriend:

By the early 1990s, Stanley began to crack under the years of control and psychological domination. She and Bulger were arguing constantly, sometimes violently, at home and in public. Once, at a wedding party, Teresa was approached by Bulger’s partner, Flemmi, who said, ‘Teresa, I know you and Jimmy are going through a rough patch, but there’s something you need to understand. That man will never let you go.’

Stanley felt trapped. She went into a deep depression. She had become financially and emotionally dependent on Bulger; she could see no way out. Then, the ‘other woman’ entered the picture.

Stanley was home alone one night when she got a call. An unfamiliar female voice said, ‘I think we need to talk.’

“Whitey Bulger’s Women.” — T.J. English, The Daily Beast

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Whitey Bulger’s Women

Longreads Pick

Life as a mob boss’s girlfriend:

“By the early 1990s, Stanley began to crack under the years of control and psychological domination. She and Bulger were arguing constantly, sometimes violently, at home and in public. Once, at a wedding party, Teresa was approached by Bulger’s partner, Flemmi, who said, ‘Teresa, I know you and Jimmy are going through a rough patch, but there’s something you need to understand. That man will never let you go.’

“Stanley felt trapped. She went into a deep depression. She had become financially and emotionally dependent on Bulger; she could see no way out. Then, the ‘other woman’ entered the picture.

“Stanley was home alone one night when she got a call. An unfamiliar female voice said, ‘I think we need to talk.'”

Source: The Daily Beast
Published: Jun 11, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,368 words)

When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation:

The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. His CIA job, she said, poisoned their five-year-old marriage.

“[He] used me and our daughter . . . to run cover for his undercover operations . . . I never felt safe, never knew who people were or why they were interested in us or why they were photographing us,” wrote the woman, who is in her 30s, in December. “As a result of [his] different assignments I never had a good support network of people I could trust or rely on to help out.” And, she claimed, her spy-husband had little interest in household chores. “[He] never so much as washed or folded a load of laundry, swept or mopped one floor, or changed one dirty diaper.”

“CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split.” — Ian Shapira, The Washington Post

More from Shapira: “How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA.” — Oct. 31, 2011

CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split

Longreads Pick

When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation:

“The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. His CIA job, she said, poisoned their five-year-old marriage.

“‘[He] used me and our daughter . . . to run cover for his undercover operations . . . I never felt safe, never knew who people were or why they were interested in us or why they were photographing us,’ wrote the woman, who is in her 30s, in December. ‘As a result of [his] different assignments I never had a good support network of people I could trust or rely on to help out.’ And, she claimed, her spy-husband had little interest in household chores. ‘[He] never so much as washed or folded a load of laundry, swept or mopped one floor, or changed one dirty diaper.'”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Mar 13, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,163 words)

Man and Wife

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A wedding in an alternate universe:

“‘That’s the good news,’ Dad said. ‘He’s gone ahead and asked for your hand. And we’ve agreed to it.’

“My mother put down the knife and finished off her champagne. I wanted no more of mine.

“‘Well, don’t be so excited,’ said Dad. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? You’re going to be a wife. You’re going to live with Mr. Middleton, and he’s going to take care of you, for the rest of your life. And, one day, when we’re very old, he’ll help out your mother and me, too.'”

Source: Missouri Review
Published: Jun 1, 2007
Length: 34 minutes (8,596 words)

Ross Andersen: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Ross Andersen is freelancer living in Washington, D.C. He has recently written about technology for The Atlantic, and is now working on an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He can also be found on Twitter at @andersen.

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“The Mother of Possibility,” by Sven Birkerts, Lapham’s Quarterly

Procrastination being my favorite vice —and the impetus behind many a plunge into Longreads.com— it is perhaps not coincidental that this essay, an elegant defense of idleness, is my favorite of the year. Reading Birkerts may mean forgoing more pressing tasks, but he at least has the decency to make you feel like a visionary for doing so:

“Idleness … It is the soul’s first habitat, the original self ambushed—cross-sectioned—in its state of nature, before it has been stirred to make a plan, to direct itself toward something. We open our eyes in the morning and for an instant—more if we indulge ourselves—we are completely idle, ourselves. And then we launch toward purpose; and once we get under way, many of us have little truck with that first unmustered self, unless in occasional dreamy asides as we look away from our tasks, let the mind slip from its rails to indulge a reverie or a memory. All such thoughts to the past, to childhood, are a truancy from productivity. But there is an undeniable pull at times, as if to a truth neglected.”

“Evolve,” by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Orion

Orion, billed as America’s finest environmental magazine, is a strange place to find a moving paean to technology, but that’s exactly what Shellenberger and Nordhaus have written here: a brief, albeit sweeping, history of the relationship between man the toolmaker and his environment.

“After the project was approved, the head of World Wildlife Fund Italy said, “Today the city’s destiny rests on a pretentious, costly, and environmentally harmful technological gamble.” In truth, the grandeur that is Venice has always rested—quite literally—on a series of pretentious, costly, and environmentally harmful technological gambles. Her buildings rest upon pylons made of ancient larch and oak trees ripped from inland forests a thousand years ago. Over time, the pylons were petrified by the saltwater, infill was added, and cathedrals were constructed. Little by little, technology helped transform a town of humble fisherfolk into the city we know today.”

“Why We Shouldn’t Treat Rap as Poetry,” by Willy Staley, The Awl

Because what’s not to like about a close look at the understudied phenomenon of ghostwriting in Hip-Hop? I’d almost forgotten about this piece until this superb tweet by John Pavlus reminded me of it.

“The Next Future,” by Michael Crowley, Lapham’s Quarterly

I badgered my Google Reader clique (R.I.P.) relentlessly with this essay, a sprawling take on science fiction, prediction and futurism—first by sharing it twice, and second by commenting on both shares with selected excerpts from the piece, so that it would show up at the top of Reader’s (since departed) Comment View. One such excerpt:

“And when read now, forty years from when I first began to write it, what is immediately evident about my future is that it could have been thought up at no time except the time in which I did think it up, and has gone away as that time has gone. No matter its contents, no matter how it is imagined, any future lies not ahead in the stream of time but at an angle to it, a right angle probably. When we have moved on down the stream, that future stays anchored to where it was produced, spinning out infinitely and perpendicularly from there.”

“Windsor Knot,” by Jonathan Freedland, New York Review of Books

Sure, Christopher Hitchens’ takedown of the Royal Wedding was a more satisfyingly vicious read (“By some mystic alchemy, the breeding imperatives for a dynasty become the stuff of romance, even fairy tale.”) but it missed the complexity of Freedland’s piece, which opens with a withering run of digs at the crown, before finishing on a grace note about the Queen’s place in British culture.

“Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas,” by Zach Baron, The Daily

As the author notes, Vegas, particularly Hunter S. Thompson’s Vegas, is without peer as clichéd essay subject. Nonetheless, Baron manages a dazzling walk along the meta-tightrope he has stretched between himself and the strip’s gaudy towers. He manages to generate fresh insights about the culture of the city, while serving up a penetrating, and at times unflattering, look at the impulse behind Thompson’s original project and his own. Oh and all this before Baron goes undercover at DEFCON, an annual hacker convention at which journalists are notoriously unwelcome. 

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An American Drug Lord in Acapulco

Longreads Pick

On a warm morning in May a few years ago, Edgar Valdez, a drug lord who goes by the nickname La Barbie, woke up in one of the houses he owned in the resort city of Acapulco. In the 1950s, this beautiful beach town was the premier haunt of American celebrities: Frank Sinatra used to prowl the hotel lounges, Elizabeth Taylor had her third of eight weddings here, and John F. Kennedy honeymooned on the coast with Jacqueline. The glamour started to fade in the 1980s, but the city remained a popular vacation destination until a few years ago, when the Mexican cartels transformed Acapulco from a seaside paradise into one of the most violent flash points of the drug war. As chief enforcer for the town’s most powerful cartel, Barbie drove the celebrities away for good and made tourists nervous about straying too far into Acapulco when their cruise ships pulled into port. He felt bad about it, a little, but that is the way of the world, he thought – eat or be eaten.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Aug 26, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,507 words)

How Rajat Gupta Came Undone

Longreads Pick

The former head of McKinsey and a trusted consigliere to chief executives around the world, he was that rare businessman whose integrity was considered beyond reproach. Yet if the Securities and Exchange Commission is to be believed, just 11 days before his daughter’s wedding celebration, Gupta had done something virtually no one who knew him could have imagined. According to the SEC, it was on the evening of June 10, 2008, that Gupta, in “a flurry” of phone conversations with Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the Galleon Group of hedge funds, allegedly divulged Goldman Sachs’s still secret second-quarter earnings.

Source: Businessweek
Published: May 19, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,987 words)