Longreads

doree:

Guy Lawson, “The Stoner Arms Dealers,” Rolling Stone

Jessica Hopper, “Wild Flag: An Eight-Part Examination,” Nashville Scene

S.J. Culver, “On Expectations (And a Writer’s Lack of Shame),” The Awl

Ben Kafka, “Pushing Paper,” Lapham’s Quarterly

Nitsuh Abebe, “SXSW Diary: Pitchfork’s…

I had a courtside seat for that game in Indianapolis, on the Princeton bench. I was a sophomore, small — too small, and slow — forward on that 1996 team. The only action I saw was the pregame layup lines. But countless times over the past 15 years, my former teammates and I have all had conversations, even with people we’ve just met, along these lines:

“Oh yeah, you played basketball at Princeton? Were you in that team that beat UCLA?”

“Yes.”

“Man, I remember that game, I was at my frat house at Scranton going wild.” Or “I was at a sports bar in Baltimore,” or “I was in my den, screaming at the television.” People — and, believe me, not just Princeton or UCLA alums — know precisely where they were, what they were doing and what they were drinking (often alcohol) during that game.

By Sean Gregory, Time

The most instructive dish, however, was one of the failures, a slow-and-low chicken, cooked for several hours and served when its internal temperature had hit 149 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem was that, with all its juices still inside, it tasted far too chickeny. If you oven-roast chicken the regular way, you get used to the drying effect of the heat, and to the fact that some juices go into the pan and are recycled as gravy. With this version, the bird was so moist that its texture was almost jellied, the flesh was a faint pink, and the chicken-explosion of flavor was overwhelming. In a sense, it was too good. My roast-chicken-obsessed children threw down their cutlery in protest after a single mouthful.

By John Lanchester, The New Yorker

David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli had picked the perfect moment to get into the arms business. To fight simultaneous wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration had decided to outsource virtually every facet of America’s military operations, from building and staffing Army bases to hiring mercenaries to provide security for diplomats abroad. After Bush took office, private military contracts soared from $145 billion in 2001 to $390 billion in 2008. Federal contracting rules were routinely ignored or skirted, and military-industrial giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin cashed in as war profiteering went from war crime to business model. Why shouldn’t a couple of inexperienced newcomers like Packouz and Diveroli get in on the action? After all, the two friends were after the same thing as everyone else in the arms business — lots and lots and lots of money.

By Guy Lawson, Rolling Stone

The work has changed remarkably little over the course of the past century, except in its increasing scarcity. Ninety percent of American lookout towers have been decommissioned, and only around five hundred of us remain, mostly in the West. Nonetheless, when the last lookout tower is retired, our stories will live on. Jack Kerouac worked a summer on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades, in 1956, an experience he mined for parts of two novels, The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. He secured the job through a recommendation by his friend the poet Gary Snyder, who worked summers on two different lookouts in the same national forest and wrote several fine poems about that world, “up there above the clouds memorizing various peaks and watersheds.” During the ’60s and ’70s, that old raconteur Edward Abbey worked at various postings, from Glacier National Park to the Grand Canyon. He wrote two essays on the subject and made a fire lookout the main character in his novel Black Sun, the book he claimed he loved most among all his works. And Norman Maclean, in his great book A River Runs Through It, wrote a lightly fictionalized story about his one summer as a lookout on the Selway Forest in northern Idaho, over the Bitterroot Divide from his home in Missoula.

By Philip Connors, Lapham’s Quarterly

On the Cannibal Café’s forums were men looking for men, men looking for women (the ideal: short, buxom, thin redheads) and women looking for men—very few posts, if any, were for women looking for women. There were people who wanted to be eaten and people who wanted to do the eating. There were stories, artwork and users seeking advice on the best to way to cook someone. “I am ready!” announced that the poster was prepared for slaughter. Entire threads were devoted to “human meat for sale fresh frozen.” Email addresses were freely exchanged, with posters using handles like “Pigslut” and “Masochist Mr. Waye.”

By Josh Kurp, The Awl 

A month ago, he’d been working at Parris Island, South Carolina, capping a distinguished career during which he’d won more than 95 percent of his cases. He’d recently bought a big house with a huge kitchen and a fountain out back for his wife and two boys-and had begun to turn his attention to finding a civilian job. And then an e-mail pinged his in-box. Copied to a couple of hundred Marine lawyers, it called for applications to help with the military commissions trials at Guantánamo. Montalvo responded impulsively, stirred by the call to duty. Within a couple of hours, he received word. His retirement had been pulled: He was going to Washington, D.C.

The timing was terrible. The real estate market was imploding, the house couldn’t be sold, and Montalvo was forced to leave his family for an indeterminate amount of time. Still, there was worse to come. When he found out he’d been placed on the defense side-when he realized that he’d actually be defending the terrorists-he was stricken. The phone started ringing, colonels he knew on the line repeating the same mantra: “This isn’t going to be good for your career, Major.” Then the call with his parents. On September 11, Montalvo’s uncle Tony had responded with his Harlem fire company to Ground Zero, and Montalvo’s parents believed it was black lung that killed him not long after.

Please don’t do this, Montalvo’s mother told him.

By Michael Paterniti, GQ

via @longformorg, @frontlineCZCT

Kiki, who is 34, is a well-spoken, down-to-earth woman who seems pleasantly oblivious to her own exotically good looks and celebrity status by virtue of being Mike Tyson’s wife. Making a viable life with the complicated, demon-haunted man she has married requires patience. “It’s a struggle,” she says, speaking about his relapses post-rehab. “You’re always an addict and have to work at it. It’s easy for him to fall back in his own life. He surrounds himself with people who are sober and doesn’t go out to clubs. If his pattern shifts, you know something’s wrong.”

By Daphne Merkin, New York Times Magazine

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea … We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was. One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon.”

By Svetlana Alexievich, The Paris Review (2004)  

via @petersm_th

It’s only a matter of time—in fact, they’ve already started cropping up—before reality-challenged individuals begin pontificating about what God could have possibly been so hot-and-bothered about to trigger last week’s devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. (Surely, if we were to ask Westboro Baptist Church members, it must have something to do with the gays.) But from a psychological perspective, what type of mind does it take to see unexpected natural events such as the horrifying scenes still unfolding in Japan as “signs” or “omens” related to human behaviors?

By Jesse Bering, Scientific American

via @brainpicker

The writer was in despair. For a year and a half, he had been trying to write a script that he owed to a studio, and had been unable to produce anything. Finally, he started seeing a therapist. The therapist, Barry Michels, told him to close his eyes and focus on the things he was grateful for. The first time he did this, in the therapist’s office, there was a long silence. “What about your dog?” Michels asked. “O.K. I’m grateful for my dog,” the writer said after a while. “The sun?” “Fine, the sun,” the writer said. “I’m grateful for sun. Sometimes.”

Michels also told the writer to get an egg timer. Following Michels’s instructions, every day he set it for one minute, knelt in front of his computer in a posture of prayer, and begged the universe to help him write the worst sentence ever written. When the timer dinged, he would start typing. He told Michels that the exercise was stupid, pointless, and embarrassing, and it didn’t work. Michels told him to keep doing it.

A few weeks later, the writer was startled from his sleep by a voice: it sounded like a woman talking at a dinner party. He went to his computer, which was on a folding table in a corner of the room, and began to write a scene. Six weeks later, he had a hundred-and-sixty-five-page script. Six months after that, the script was shot, and when the movie came out the writer won an Academy Award.

By Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker

A hundred and fifty years ago the Russian philosopher Petr Chaadayev wrote that “we are one of those nations that somehow are not part of mankind but exist only for the sake of teaching the world some kind of terrible lesson.” In the area of nuclear affairs the steady emission of environmental horror stories from the USSR confirms that the Soviet Union is in the process of teaching the world another in its series of terrible lessons.

Recent disclosures from the USSR demonstrate that the total insulation from public scrutiny which the Soviet nuclear industry enjoyed for so long has left a legacy of pollution and lax practices that remains exceedingly difficult to escape. Soviet officials themselves are today saying that the USSR is being transformed into a nuclear-waste dump. Even allowing for the Russian penchant for hyperbole, the latest revelations in the ever more candid Soviet press make clear that Soviet problems in the area of nuclear pollution and safety continue to be extraordinarily severe.

By Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Atlantic (1990)

(via theatlantic)

By now, Indian Point 3 has collected six hundred and twenty-four tons of spent uranium, and Indian Point 2 has amassed eight hundred and eight tons. Although the fuel is of no use in generating electricity, it is still highly radioactive and produces a great deal of heat, which is why it must always be kept submerged. Two years ago, after much prodding from groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, the N.R.C. released a study looking at the risks of a spent-fuel fire. While the commission concluded that the risk of such a fire was low—the fuel would have to be left out of water for several hours—it acknowledged that the consequences “could be comparable to those for a severe reactor accident.”

By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker

Schiller has animated the place with the energy of renewed ambition, a rededication to producing serious journalism. Her strategy rests on three pillars: expand original reporting at the national and local levels; provide free access to public media content regardless of platform; and serve audiences of all backgrounds and interests. To do all that, she wants to work in partnership with NPR’s member stations as well as independent producers and some of the new nonprofit journalism units springing up around the country.

By Jill Drew, Columbia Journalism Review

He’d been doing very well in Baltimore, earning six figures as the vice president of a bank, but he tossed his job out the window when some Reaganomics-drunk investor (“an admirer,” my father called him) phoned him out of the blue to see if he wanted to direct a savings and loan out west. And for a while after we moved, he seemed to live up to the opulent vision he’d dazzled me with on my first visit. Unsatisfied with our first house in Rolling Hills, he leased us a big Mediterranean nearby for $5,000 a month, roughly $11,000 today. There was a swimming pool and a tennis court and a barn where my father put up a pen for his two hunting dogs. I didn’t know what he was doing to make so much money, but I wholeheartedly endorsed it.

By Eric Puchner, GQ

There’s a problem: THE TIFFIN BOX’s menu will “lean heavily towards vegetarian.” The judges are disgusted with this naked display of idealism. One of them asks, What percentage of Americans are vegetarian? “About 15%.” Then the judges make some weird calculations, like since only 15% Americans are vegetarian, only 15% of Americans would ever eat at The Tiffin Box. This makes no sense: I’m not a vegetarian, but I’ll eat at the Tiffin Box at least twice a week! “Where’s David?” “Oh you know him; he’s down at the ol’ Tiffin Box, eating the shit out of everything.” “I didn’t know David was vegetarian.” “I KNOW, IT’S SO CRAZY THAT SOMEBODY WHO EATS CHEESEBURGERS WOULD EVER NOT WANT TO EAT A CHEESEBURGER.”

By David Rees, NYMag Grub Street

(thanks Dan)

Let’s draw a bath. Let’s set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, misty November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber duck’s closest relative is not a bird or a toy but the yellow happy face of Wal-Mart commercials. A rubber duck is in effect a happy face with a body and lips—which is what the beak of the rubber duck has become: great, lipsticky, bee-stung lips. Both the happy face and the rubber duck reduce facial expressions to a kind of pictogram. They are both emoticons. And they are, of course, the same color—the yellow of an egg yolk or the eye of a daisy, a shade darker than a yellow raincoat, a shade lighter than a taxicab.

By Donovan Hohn, Harper’s (2007)

Thirty years and four shrinks later, I’ve come to recognize these signs. I have consulted four therapists in my life, and all four have fallen asleep on me. The ritual—forms, waiting rooms, Kleenex—starts up again, only each time with my own special twist: I pay someone to explore my unconscious mind and instead they sink into theirs. So consistently did I lose wakeful contact with my shrinks that I began to suspect—honest to God—that feigning sleep was a technique for provoking patients to confront their fears of abandonment. “Once in a 40-year career,” said a friend’s shrink, an ancient and cheerful Jungian, when I asked him if he’d ever drifted off while on the clock—making me, I suppose, the Ted Williams of narcissistic monotony.

By Stephen Metcalf, New York Magazine

In the end, the most important thing now publicly known about Stuxnet is that Stuxnet is now publicly known. That knowledge is, on the simplest level, a warning: America’s own critical infrastructure is a sitting target for attacks like this. That aside, if Stuxnet really did attack Iran’s nuclear program, it could be called the first unattributable act of war. The implications of that concept are confounding. Because cyber-weapons pose an almost unsolvable problem of sourcing—who pulled the trigger?—war could evolve into something more and more like terror. Cyber-conflict makes military action more like a never-ending game of uncle, where the fingers of weaker nations are perpetually bent back. The wars would often be secret, waged by members of anonymous, elite brain trusts, none of whom would ever have to look an enemy in the eye. For people whose lives are connected to the targets, the results could be as catastrophic as a bombing raid, but would be even more disorienting. People would suffer, but would never be certain whom to blame.

By Michael Joseph Gross, Vanity Fair

From the time he was young boy, Mark Hawthorne understood the power of words. His father was a reporter for the Associated Press and his mother was a school teacher. So when Hawthorne landed his dream job and became a reporter for The New York Times, everything seemed to fall into place. Except that it all fell apart.

These days, Hawthorne uses the power of words in a different way. Mostly, it’s to say, “fuck you” or “I hate you.” For the past 25 years, Hawthorne has lived on the streets of Berkeley, where he’s developed a following and is known by the moniker “Hate Man,” or simply “Hate,” as he prefers. But Hate isn’t hateful, per se. Rather, he believes that people are most caring when they’re upfront about their disdain for each other. Only then, he says, can people trust one another.

By Kathleen Richards and Sandeep Abraham, East Bay Express

Before he addressed the crowd that had assembled in the St. Louis Hyatt Regency ballroom last November, Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly had one request. “Please don’t mention my son,” he asked the Marine Corps officer introducing him.

Four days earlier, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Kelly , 29, had stepped on a land mine while leading a platoon of Marines in southern Afghanistan. He was killed instantly.

Without once referring to his son’s death, the general delivered a passionate and at times angry speech about the military’s sacrifices and its troops’ growing sense of isolation from society.

“Their struggle is your struggle,” he told the ballroom crowd of former Marines and local business people. “If anyone thinks you can somehow thank them for their service, and not support the cause for which they fight - our country - these people are lying to themselves… . More important, they are slighting our warriors and mocking their commitment to this nation.”

By Greg Jaffe, Washington Post