The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
June 22, 2012

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1. 'I Just Want to Feel Everything': Hiding Out with Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit  
Dan P. Lee | New York magazine | June 17, 2012 | 29 Minutes (7,287 words)

A lost weekend, or several weeks, with Fiona Apple:

"A week later, my phone beeped. It was a heavily pixelated video. She was wearing glasses, looking straight at me:

"'Hi, Dan. It’s Fiona. [She moves the camera to her dog.] This is Janet. [She moves it back.] Um, are you coming out here tomorrow? Um, I, I, I don’t know—I’m baffled at this thing that I just got, this e-mail shit, I don’t know what these people—are they trying to antagonize me so that I do shit like this, so that I start fights with them? I don’t understand why there are pictures of models on a page about me. Who the fuck are they? What? What?'

"The text attached read: 'And are you western-bound? And hi there! F'

"I had no idea what she was talking about. Two days later, I landed at LAX."

More from Lee: "Paw Paw & Lady Love" (June 2011)

Read Lee's "Travis the Menace," featured in Longreads' Best of 2011 ebook

2. Consequence
Eric Fair | Ploughshares | Spring 2012 | 10 Minutes (2,653 words)

In 2007, Eric Fair wrote an article in the Washington Post describing his experience as an interrogator in Iraq. He has had trouble finding a way to move on:

"I tell my professor I am sick. I put away verb charts, participles, and lexicons, board a train for Washington, D.C., and meet with Department of Justice lawyers and Army investigators in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. I disclose everything. I provide pictures, letters, names, firsthand accounts, locations, and techniques. I talk about the hard site at Abu Ghraib, and I talk about the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I talk about what I did, what I saw, what I knew, and what I heard. I ride the train back to Princeton. I start drinking more. Sarah takes notice. I tell her to go to Hell.

"I sit for my final Greek exam in August. It is a passage from Paul’s letter to the people of Thessalonica.

You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition.

3. Why Women Still Can't Have It All
Anne-Marie Slaughter | The Atlantic | June 21, 2012 | 51 Minutes (12,949 words)

A call for women and men to have a more honest conversation about work-life balance:

"Today, however, women in power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my children and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organizations that I would not come to dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight, but that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher conference.

"After a few months of this, several female assistant professors showed up in my office quite agitated. 'You have to stop talking about your kids,' one said. 'You are not showing the gravitas that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging precisely because you are the first woman dean of the school.' I told them that I was doing it deliberately and continued my practice, but it is interesting that gravitas and parenthood don’t seem to go together."

See also: "Can Sheryl Sandberg Upend Silicon Valley's Male-Dominated Culture?" (Ken Auletta, The New Yorker, July 2011)

Books by Slaughter on Amazon

4. Cocaine Incorporated
Patrick Radden Keefe | New York Times Magazine | June 15, 2012 | 31 Minutes (7,815 words)

How Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, became a global, multibillion-dollar drug trafficking business:

"Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America’s 'insatiable demand for illegal drugs' is what drives the clandestine industry. It’s no accident that the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. 'Poor Mexico,' its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. 'So far from God and so close to the United States.'"

More Keefe: "The Snakehead" (The New Yorker, 2006)

Books by Keefe on Amazon

5. Follow the Dark Money
Andy Kroll | Mother Jones | June 21, 2012 | 31 Minutes (7,806 words)

Chronicling a four-decade fight over campaign finance, and how American politics is fueled by secret spending:

"For decades, the campaign finance wars have pitted two ideological foes against each other: one side clamoring to dam the flow while the other seeks to open the floodgates. The self-styled good-government types believe that unregulated political money inherently corrupts. A healthy democracy, they say, needs robust regulation—clear disclosure, tough limits on campaign spending and donations, and publicly financed presidential and congressional elections. The dean of this movement is 73-year-old Fred Wertheimer, the former president of the advocacy outfit Common Cause, who now runs the reform group Democracy 21.

"On the other side are conservatives and libertarians who consider laws regulating political money an assault on free markets and free speech. They want to deregulate campaign finance—knock down spending and giving limits and roll back disclosure laws. Their leaders include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr., and former FEC commissioner Brad Smith, who now chairs the Center for Competitive Politics, which fights campaign finance regulation."

See also: Mother Jones editors' longreads picks on dark money from The New Yorker, Harper's and more

Fiction Pick: Cross Off and Move On
Deborah Eisenberg | New York Review of Books | June 2012 | 43 minutes (10,512 words)

A woman remembers a difficult relationship with her mother, and the extended family that embraced her:

"But it's as if my mother knows. Because, around the time I enter high school, I always turn out to be wrong. I have gotten a spot on my skirt, or my hair is a mess, or my posture is deplorable, or—my mother says—I'm glowering. Nor do I do enough around the house, and I refuse, in general, to take responsibility.

"That's true—but when I try to be useful, I wreck things! For instance, my mother has been distressed because the curtains are dingy and she can’t afford new ones, so one Saturday, while she is working, I take them to the laundromat for a surprise, and out of the machine comes a big wad of shredded rags.

"I throw up, of course. And when my mother gets home and sees them, she turns white and then red and then white again. She makes a phone call, puts me in the car, drives me to my aunts', reaches across me to open the car door, waits until I get out, and speeds off, without going in to say hello."

(Thanks, Alexander Chee)

More Eisenberg: "Recalculating" (July 2011)

Eisenberg books on Amazon | More Longreads fiction picks

Eva Holland @evaholland Eva Holland is the senior editor of World Hum, and is based in Canada's Yukon territory. She's also an associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela.

"My favorite longread of the week is Sarah Hepola's Salon essay, 'My Relapse Years.' I'm a longtime Hepola fan, and this story about her repeated, failed attempts to quit drinking includes her usual, er, cocktail of brutal honesty, humor and insight. 'Epiphanies are cheap,' she writes. 'They mean nothing, not if you don't do anything about them.' I think there's something in here for anyone who's ever tried to break an unhealthy pattern—be it drugs, alcohol, a bad relationship—pick your poison."
 

My Relapse Years
Sarah Hepola | Salon | June 13, 2012 | 8 minutes (1,998 words)

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