The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
August 31, 2012

Support Longreads
Help us keep growing. Become a Longreads Member and you'll get "The Power of a Crisis," a free chapter from New York Times writer Charles Duhigg's bestseller, The Power of Habit, sent to your inbox. Sign up for $3 per month or $30 per year.


***

Support our Longreads partners: 

Pocket: Save your favorite stories for reading on the iPhone/iPad, Android or Kindle Fire. It's free.
 

1. The Throwaways
Sarah Stillman | The New Yorker | August 28, 2012 | 33 Minutes (8,286 words)

Police are recruiting young drug offenders to become confidential informants on drug cases—with little training and tragic consequences:

"According to a confidential deposition from a friend of Hoffman’s, the police made it clear that run-of-the-mill pot busts wouldn’t be sufficient to work off her charges. Instead, the friend said, the cops were looking for large quantities of 'heroin, cocaine, crack, Ecstasy, guns.' The Florida State student told her about a young man he’d seen dealing drugs at a car-detailing shop near campus—the man, whom he knew only as Dre, might have access to Ecstasy and cocaine, and possibly more. Hoffman, it turned out, had just had her Volvo worked on by Dre at the same shop, and he had joked about the car’s pungent marijuana smell. Soon, she was wired up and dispatched to the shop, where, using her friend’s connection, she put in a request to Dre’s brother-in-law, Deneilo Bradshaw, to buy a stash of cocaine, fifteen hundred Ecstasy pills, and, as she described it, a 'small and pretty' handgun. The order was large, by any standard. She wanted the drugs for friends who would be visiting from Miami, she explained. And the gun? 'I’m a little Jewish girl,' she told Bradshaw, as police listened via a surveillance device. 'I need to be safe.'

"By early May, the deal had been arranged. She was to show up with thirteen thousand dollars, and they’d make the swap—at Bradshaw’s parents’ house, in a quiet green neighborhood on the outskirts of Tallahassee. Behind the scenes, the police worked up an Operational and Raid Plan, which involved more than a dozen local and federal agents."

More Stillman: "The Invisible Army" (2011)

2. Hot Mess
Brad Wieners | Outside | August 25, 2012 | 24 Minutes (6,209 words)

An oral history of Burning Man, which started as an effigy burning in 1986 on San Francisco's Baker Beach, and moved to the Black Rock Desert in 1990 to become one of the largest annual gatherings of inventors, artists and free spirits:

"ALAN 'REVEREND AL' RIDENOUR (head of Los Angeles Cacophony): In ’96, Burning Man was at its peak. We did the Damnation of Tinseltown and the flaming Helco tower. Burn Night felt like a scary, transformative ritual. Flash played Satan, and he came through with a gas can and doused Doris Day and John Wayne. I was on acid when I heard Flash’s booming laugh. He was Satan.

"ELIZABETH GILBERT (author of Eat, Pray, Love who wrote about Burning Man ’96 for Spin): Honestly, I was scared of it. I remember the way the camp turned from this playful thing by day—beautiful and fanciful and Narnia-like—to this menacing thing at night. Being around all that fire, people with guns, and a lot of people on drugs, I was like, 'They’ll be eating each other soon!' And in some ways they were—more sexually than anything else. I understood that Burning Man was waking something up. That awakening might lead to transcendent creativity—or it might be savage and ungovernable once it’s released."

See also: "Catch Me If You Can" (Dean King, July 2012)

Books by Brad Wieners on Amazon

3. Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone | August 30, 2012 | 30 Minutes (7,745 words)

A look at Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital:

"Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney's, told reporters during Mitt's first Senate run that Romney erred in trying to sell his business as good for everyone. 'I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator,' said Wolpow. 'That was not his or Bain's or the industry's primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors.' When it comes to private equity, American workers – not to mention their families and communities – simply don't enter into the equation.

"Take a typical Bain transaction involving an Indiana-based company called American Pad and Paper. Bain bought Ampad in 1992 for just $5 million, financing the rest of the deal with borrowed cash. Within three years, Ampad was paying $60 million in annual debt payments, plus an additional $7 million in management fees. A year later, Bain led Ampad to go public, cashed out about $50 million in stock for itself and its investors, charged the firm $2 million for arranging the IPO and pocketed another $5 million in "management" fees. Ampad wound up going bankrupt, and hundreds of workers lost their jobs, but Bain and Romney weren't crying: They'd made more than $100 million on a $5 million investment."

See also: "Feel the Loathing on the Campaign Trail" (Mark Leibovich, New York Times Magazine)

Books by Taibbi on Amazon

4. Revolt of the Rich
Mike Lofgren | The American Conservative | August 30, 2012 | 13 Minutes (3,260 words)

The wealthiest Americans are effectively seceding from this country—raising questions about the long-term goals of conservatism:

"If a morally acceptable American conservatism is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and stability are not coterminous with an uncritical worship of the Almighty Dollar, nor with obeisance to the demands of the wealthy. Conservatives need to think about the world they want: do they really desire a social Darwinist dystopia?

"The objective of the predatory super-rich and their political handmaidens is to discredit and destroy the traditional nation state and auction its resources to themselves. Those super-rich, in turn, aim to create a 'tollbooth' economy, whereby more and more of our highways, bridges, libraries, parks, and beaches are possessed by private oligarchs who will extract a toll from the rest of us. Was this the vision of the Founders? Was this why they believed governments were instituted among men—that the very sinews of the state should be possessed by the wealthy in the same manner that kingdoms of the Old World were the personal property of the monarch?"

See also: "Marx at 193" (John Lanchester, London Review of Books)

Books by Lofgren on Amazon

5. Teenage Dreams
Emily Landau | Walrus Magazine | August 27, 2012 | 8 Minutes (2,225 words)

Remembering the teen series Degrassi, 25 years later:

"Degrassi’s grassroots approach to social class served as a near-invisible narrative strategy, but it anticipated the show’s most memorable legacy: its unflinching, plain-spoken treatment of pregnancy, suicide, interracial dating (a big deal in 1987), and HIV/AIDS. What’s more, Degrassi didn’t treat its characters with benevolence. Spike’s pregnancy at age fourteen — the result of a clumsy first-time sexual encounter with Shane, a baby-faced ninth-grader — didn’t end with a convenient miscarriage. Her character spent the remainder of the series as a struggling single parent. Later that season, Shane experimented with LSD, fell off a bridge, and suffered permanent brain damage. Wheels, one of the most popular characters, lost his parents to a drunk driver, and later experienced a breakdown that culminated in a drunk driving incident that killed a child, blinded his friend Lucy, and landed him in prison. In the early years of HIV/AIDS, Dwayne contracted the virus after having unprotected sex with his girlfriend (a thoughtful plot choice in an era when many thought of it as a 'gay disease'). In a 1999 cast reunion on the CBC talk show Jonovision, actor Darrin Brown, who played Dwayne, was asked where his character would be now. 'Dwayne would probably be dead,' he replied."

More Walrus: "The Race Against Time" (June 2012)

Fiction Pick: Onward
Emma Donoghue | The Atlantic | August 26, 2012 | 17 Minutes (4,385 words)

A close-knit family's struggles in Dickens-era England:

"Caroline always prepares Fred’s breakfast herself. Her young brother’s looking sallow around the eyes. 'We saved you the last of the kippers,' she says, in a tone airy enough to give the impression that she and Pet had their fill of kippers before he came down this morning.

"Mouth full, Fred sings to his niece in his surprising bass.

"His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.

"Pet giggles at the face he’s pulling. Caroline slides her last triangle of toast the child’s way. Pet’s worn that striped frock since spring. Is she undersized, for two years old? But then, girls are generally smaller. Are the children Caroline sees thronging the parks so twig-like, under their elaborate coats? 'Where did you pick that one up?' she asks Fred.

"'A fellow at the office.'

"'Again, again,' insists Pet: her new word this week.

"Caroline catches herself watching the clock."

See also: "A Rich Man" (Edward P. Jones, The New Yorker, 2003, via Alexander Chee)

Books by Donoghue on Amazon | More Longreads fiction picks

Emily Douglas @EmilySDouglas Emily is a senior editor at The Nation.

"Andrew Solomon's 'The Legitimate Children of Rape,' on NewYorker.com, ricocheted around Twitter on Thursday, but it's a must-read if you haven't yet. The title, obviously, alludes to the fact that very real pregnancies and children do, in fact, result from rape, counter to Missouri Congressman Todd Akin's senseless, not to mention cruel, assertion. Solomon brings us the agonizing dilemmas faced by women pregnant as a result of assault (some feel pressured into having abortion and experience that as a second violation; others carry pregnancy to term and struggle desperately to bond with their children). And he forces us to confront how foundational a trope rape is in our common history and mythology: 'Zeus so took Europa and Leda; Dionysus raped Aura; Poseidon, Aethra; Apollo, Euadne. It is noteworthy that every one of these rapes produces children.'

"If I could suggest a second #longreads to pair with this one, it would be this piece from TheNation.com by Lissa Harris (full disclosure: I edited), on her experience as a rape survivor. As Lissa writes, 'Akin's theory of rape is monstrous. But it's not his, really. It's ours.'"
 

The Legitimate Children of Rape
Andrew Solomon | The New Yorker | August 29, 2012 | 10 minutes (2,505 words)

Got a favorite Longread? Share it on Twitter (#longreads) or email it: mark@longreads.com

Thanks for your support. Meet the Longreads team, become a member, or learn more about Longreads' services for brands.