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    Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

    Since so many people enjoyed the LA Times series on the Irvine PTA drama over in World, I thought maybe we could get a thread going where we link to articles that we've enjoyed.

    The Sunday Review section in the NYT had two things I really enjoyed. One, written by an ER doctor, is very harrowing and is difficult to read but is very good.

    You put on your coat and you go into the bathroom. You look in the mirror and you say it. You use the mother’s name and you use her child’s name. You may not adjust this part in any way.

    I will show you: If it were my mother you would say, “Mrs. Rosenberg. I have terrible, terrible news. Naomi died today.” You say it out loud until you can say it clearly and loudly. How loudly? Loudly enough. If it takes you fewer than five tries you are rushing it and you will not do it right. You take your time.

    After the bathroom you do nothing before you go to her. You don’t make a phone call, you do not talk to the medical student, you do not put in an order. You never make her wait. She is his mother.
    The other is a story by the Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua, about back-to-school shopping in an unfamiliar country and is much lighter.

    “Daddy, what language do you talk with Mommy?” My little boy has been speaking to me exclusively in English since shortly after we came to America from Israel.

    “Arabi,” I answered him, in Arabic, as I always do: I don’t want him to forget his language and his Palestinian roots.

    “So Daddy, you and Mommy are Arabis?”

    “That’s right, sweetie. Me and Mommy talk Arabi.”

    “So, Daddy,” he continued, “that means you and Mommy ‘haaave the meats!’ ”

    “What?” I was baffled.

    “He thinks you’re saying Arby’s,” my older son explained. Then he set matters straight for his little brother: “Mom and Dad are Arabs, not a sandwich place.”
    Finally, Ariel Levy in the New Yorker is always great. She has a story on ayahuasca and how it has become a trendy thing to do in parts of the US, and her own experiences at a ceremony in Brooklyn.

    #2
    Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

    It might have been discussed on world, but I thought this piece in The Guardian by Rutger Bregman on the future course of the left was a very worthwhile read.

    Comment


      #3
      Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

      I think I like the tone of that article more than I like the actual prescriptions.

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        #4
        Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

        Agreed.

        Reminds me of some of the left-wing Christian stuff I read - "Let's imagine a new world and believe it can happen rather than just complaining about what's wrong and plugging holes."

        Easier said than done, of course. But most things are. Except maybe imagining an imaginary menagerie manager managing an imaginary menagerie. Not hard to do. Hard to say.

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          #5
          Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

          Cool. I'll add to this thread as I come across interesting long-form pieces. At one point, I knew a good site for year end review stuff that listed excellent literary journalism pieces, but I can't remember that site. My search led me to two others, though (if anyone wants to revisit 2010 and 2015):

          The Atlantic's list from 2010

          Longreads 2015 crime reporting

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            #6
            Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

            Likely the definitive piece on the Theranos debacle.

            Pictorial dictionaries of the early 21st Century will illustrate "hubris" with a picture of Ms. Holmes in her black turtleneck.

            I currently subscribe to three different weekly emails that recommend recent longform pieces.

            Longform (which also a very good app and a poodcast that I consider invaluable for anyone who writes for a living).

            Longreads

            and The Sunday Long Read by Don Van Natta (ESPN's great investigative reporter) and Jacob Feldman (now at SI).

            For more academic pieces, I nearly always find something of interest on [url=http://daily.jstor.org/]JSTOR Daily[/], which also has a weekly digest email.

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              #7
              Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

              Popular Resistance includes a long form interview with Todd Pierce, who is described as "a retired Army major who had grown up in rural Minnesota and worked for years in farming and construction before becoming a computer technician for the army and later a military lawyer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, ultimately serving as a defense lawyer for two Guantanamo detainees".

              Pierce is quoted as saying, "Everything that we have done since 9/11 is wrong. We are embarking on a totalitarian foreign policy that is a hallmark of how Hannah Arendt defines fascism… The false claims about radical Islam show how little we understand about ourselves or the Middle East."

              It's supposed to be a two-part interview, but the second one doesn't seem to have come out yet -- Part 1 is here.

              Comment


                #8
                Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                The Disastrous $45 Million Fall of a High-End Wine Scammer

                Premier Cru’s “pre-arrival” cases were deeply discounted. When too many failed to arrive, a multi-decade wine Ponzi-scheme fell apart.

                https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-premier-cru-john-fox/

                Comment


                  #9
                  Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                  Did France cause the Great Depression? (free to download) is a very interesting and provocative read (it was France not the USA that caused the Great Depression) for anyone interested in the economic and political history of the time.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                    "From July 3, 1945, to January 3, 1946, the Allies incarcerated ten German nuclear physicists at the English country estate of Farm Hall, their goal being to obtain information about the German nuclear research project by way of surreptitiously taped conversations. The transcript here [link straight to pdf] includes the scientists’ reactions to reports that America had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima."

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                      #11
                      Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                      This is a fascinating story if you are interested in photography. It's about a seemingly ordinary woman who chased down famous photographers around the world and convinced them to photograph her.

                      http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-opposite-of-a-muse?mbid=social_facebook_aud_dev_kwjunsub-the-opposite-of-a-muse&kwp_0=234405&kwp_4=892749&kwp_1=435177

                      The Long Read (mentioned by UA above) has a sign up for a weekly email that lists a bunch of articles from the previous week. It's worth signing up for that.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                        I don't know if this is or isn't the best thread for this post, but Aaoron Cometubs has been doing a fanzine called Cometbus for a couple decades now if I'm not mistake. Issue 56 is about booksellers in NYC, with a focus on street vendors, shop owners, and their quest to find books to sell. I'm about halfway through since I have been alternating between reading this and listening to podcasts during my commutes this week. The issue will be easy to find in the US. I don't know what distribution is like elsewhere:

                        https://www.google.com/#q=Cometbus+%2356:+A+Bestiary+of+Booksellers

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                          #13
                          Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                          That sounds pretty interesting.

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                            #14
                            Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                            @danielmak - I enjoyed the Opposite Of A Muse photography piece there, thanks for posting.

                            Not really a longform article, per se, but Amos Chapple's On Siberia's Ice Highway is a stunning selection of photos with brief bits of text which together tell the story of a truck driver taking supplies north out of Yakutsk to a small community in Russia's arctic. It's on the Radio Free Europe site, here.

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                              #15
                              Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                              That was cool. Like Ice Road Truckers, without all the contrived aggression and soap opera.

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                                #16
                                Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                                Damn, that's intense. Not something I would ever want to do.

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                                  #17
                                  Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                                  James Meek Diary from the LRB a while back. What he describes is extraordinary

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                                    Board game fans, of which I know there are a few on OTF, might be interested in Popular Resistance's recent piece The Secret History Of Leftist Board Games, here. It includes coverage of Monopoly precursor The Landlord Game, Suffragetto ("in the game the suffragettes have a home base of Albert Hall [which was a popular location for their rallies], while the police start around the House of Commons. The goal is to capture the other team’s base") and a 1978 game, Class Struggle, devised by a professor of politics at New York University.

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                                      Interview with Gabriel Kuhn, an Austrian anarchist who now lives in Sweden and writes on "anarchism, history of the left, and sports" on libcom.org, here.

                                      Comment


                                        #20
                                        Non-books/articles/essays care & share thread

                                        If you subscribe to the Long Read Sunday email list, there are three interesting articles listed this week (that's all I had time to read but I'm sure there are more):

                                        A piece about the mid 80s-mid 90s literary "brat pack" (fitting for the books forum)
                                        http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a18422/literary-brat-pack-donna-tartt-jay-mcinerney/?mc_cid=db95f71735&mc_eid=59f3d23ab9

                                        A piece about natural sounds records and the quirky guy who put out the first LPs
                                        http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/natural-selection/

                                        A piece about the runaway teens featured in Soul Asylum's "Runaway Train" video
                                        https://melmagazine.com/the-children-of-runaway-train-19ee8f6aabf8#.22xv5qovm

                                        Comment


                                          #21
                                          Here's an LRB article about how reports of a mildly malevolent Hindi-speaking mongoose plaguing a family on the Isle of Man were a news sensation in 1930s Britain.

                                          Here's the start of the article:

                                          ‘He does not feed like a mongoose,’ James Irving said of the talking mongoose that had taken up residence – or so it was said – in his remote Isle of Man farmhouse in the early 1930s. Irving told psychic investigators that his family had tried the mongoose – who went by the name of ‘Gef’ – on bread and milk, only to have their food rejected. Slowly and patiently, the Irvings found a repertoire of things that Gef would consent to eat. Before they went to bed at night, they would set out tidbits of bananas and oranges, chocolate and biscuits, sausage and bacon – ‘he always leaves the fat part.’ In the morning, the mongoose chatted to them through the wainscotting in his clear high-pitched voice about which of the items he had eaten.

                                          For several years in the 1930s the case of this Manx mongoose – who was said to speak in a range of foreign languages including ‘Hindustani’, as well as singing, whistling, coughing ‘in a human manner’, swearing, dancing and attending political meetings – was discussed across Britain.
                                          Last edited by Haddock; 21-07-2017, 08:48.

                                          Comment


                                            #22
                                            Guardian article about the life of a left-wing cricket historian who sawed off his own leg. Not as bonkersly gripping as the LRB mongoose article above but very enjoyable in its own right.

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                                              #23
                                              Each Sunday's Long Read E-mail features a link to a "classic read." Today's classic is Nick Tosches "Confessions of an Opium-Seeker" (2000) written for Vanity Fair. It's a really good piece. The beginning is a little slow and doesn't seem to have a direct link to the focus of the piece but the beginning makes a lot more sense once the story unfolds.

                                              Comment


                                                #24
                                                An interesting mystery couched in a story about hiking down the eastern part of the US.

                                                NOTE: I posted this before finishing the article, so I'm editing to note that the ending is ridiculous; there really is no ending. I don't know why they would publish this without an ending, but I leave the post here because the build up is really interesting.

                                                https://www.wired.com/story/nameless...ernet-mystery/
                                                Last edited by danielmak; 08-11-2020, 18:25.

                                                Comment


                                                  #25
                                                  Intriguing piece, that

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