The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
June 8, 2012

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1. America's Last Prisoner of War
Michael Hastings | Rolling Stone | June 8, 2012 | 33 Minutes (8,300 words)

In 2009, Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl was captured in Afghanistan after deciding to walk off his base. A look at why he left, and the complications surrounding his rescue:

"Within an hour, two F-18s were circling overhead. Afghan forces passed along intelligence that a U.S. soldier had been captured by the Taliban. By that evening, two F-15s – call sign DUDE-21 – had joined the search. A few minutes later, according­ to files obtained by WikiLeaks, a radio transmission intercepted by U.S. forces stated that the Taliban had captured­ three civilians and one U.S. soldier. The battalion leading the manhunt entered and searched three compounds in the area, but found nothing significant to report.

"The next morning, more than 24 hours after Bowe had vanished, U.S. intelligence intercepted a conversation between two Taliban fighters:

"'I SWEAR THAT I HAVE NOT HEARD ANYTHING YET. WHAT HAPPENED. IS THAT TRUE THAT THEY CAPTURED AN AMERICAN GUY?'

"'YES THEY DID. HE IS ALIVE. THERE IS NO WHERE HE CAN GO (LOL)' 'IS HE STILL ALIVE?'

"'YES HE IS ALIVE. BUT I DONT HAVE THE WHOLE STORY. DONT KNOW IF THEY WERE FIGHTING. ALL I KNOW IF THEY WERE FIGHTING. ALL I KNOW THAT THEY CAPTURE HIM ALIVE AND THEY ARE WITH HIM RIGHT NOW.'"

More Hastings: "The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret" (April 2012)

Books by Hastings on Amazon

2. Prep-School Predators
Amos Kamil | New York Times Magazine | June 6, 2012 | 36 Minutes (9,177 words)

The secret history of sexual abuse inside New York's Horace Mann School:

"Speaking calmly and staring into the flames, he told us that when he was in eighth grade, Wright sexually assaulted him. 'And not just me,' he added. 'There were others.' First Wright befriended him, he said. Then he molested him. Then he pretended nothing happened.

"No one knew what to say, at least at first. But then slowly, the rest of us started telling stories, too. One of the guys talked about a teacher who took him on a field trip, and then invited him into his bed in the hotel room they were sharing. (My friend fled, walking in the rain for hours until the coast seemed clear.) Another told a story about a teacher who got him drunk and naked; that time, no one fled. We talked about the steakhouse dinner, which was a far cry from abuse, but an example of how easy it can be for boundaries to blur and how hard it can be, in the moment, for students to get their bearings. Finally, we all went to sleep."

More from the Times Magazine: "Ina May Gaskin and the Battle for at-Home Births" (Samantha M. Shapiro, May 2012)

3. 10 Timeframes
Paul Ford | Contents | June 8, 2012 | 11 Minutes (2,765 words)

The past, present and future of how we perceive time, and which units actually matter:

"The time you spend is not your own. You are, as a class of human beings, responsible for more pure raw time, broken into more units, than almost anyone else. You spent two years learning, focusing, exploring, but that was your time; now you are about to spend whole decades, whole centuries, of cumulative moments, of other people’s time. People using your systems, playing with your toys, fiddling with your abstractions. And I want you to ask yourself when you make things, when you prototype interactions, am I thinking about my own clock, or the user's? Am I going to help someone make order in his or her life, or am I going to send that person to a commune in Vermont?"

More Ford: "Nanolaw with Daughter" (May 2011)

4. The Secret Life of Transgender Rocker Tom Gabel
Josh Eells | Rolling Stone | June 4, 2012 | 22 Minutes (5,709 words)

The lead singer of Against Me!, married with a child, is now Laura Jane Grace. She speaks out about gender dysphoria, which left her uncomfortable in a male body for as long as she can remember:

"In retrospect, the lyrics are almost shockingly direct: If I could have chosen I would have been born a woman / My mother once told me she would have named me Laura / I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her / One day I'd find an honest man to make my husband

"Gabel says he thought he was 'completely outing himself' with a lyric like that. He expected to be confronted – a part of him even craved it. But if anyone suspected anything, no one brought it up. 'When we did that song, I was like, "What is that about?"' says Butch Vig, who produced Against Me!'s last two albums. 'He just kind of laughed it off. He said, "I was stoned and dreaming about what life can be."'"

More Eells: "Jack White Is the Coolest, Weirdest, Savviest Rock Star of Our Time" (New York Times Magazine, April 2012)

5. The Twitch
Ryan Knighton | Vice | June 5, 2012 | 29 Minutes (7,405 words)

A blind journalist and his brother go to a rattlesnake roundup in central West Texas:

"We finally bolted for the nearest exit, heading past the coliseum’s fountain. Its gushing water, almost like a sizzle, was loud enough that it touched every corner of the room, though it failed to cool us to any degree. Then, about ten yards away, my ear distinguished the first edges of its rattling.

"'Is that—?' was all I could muster.

"It was. A plywood pen, chest-high, teeming with diamondbacks. The Snake Pit. Mykol had come closer for a look, not knowing I’d misheard it as a fountain. We pushed toward its wall of noise.

"The sound had a startling physics. It had mass. A tangible weight and effect on the air. I was immediately reminded that, at its essence, noise is vibration. To listen is actually to receive our most subtle form of touch. How easily we forget that."

More Vice: "Paintballing with Hezbollah" (March 2012)

Books by Knighton on Amazon

Fiction Pick: Naima
Hisham Matar | The New Yorker | January 24, 2011 | 30 Minutes (7,646 words)

[2012 Pen/O. Henry Winner] A son recalls an exiled life with his father, mother, and a maid:

"At the Magda Marina, he spent his time sunbathing and reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis, one a biography of our late king, with his portrait on the cover. Whenever Father acquired a new book on our country—the country my parents had fled, the country I had never seen, yet continued to think of as my own—he would immediately finger the index pages.

"'Baba, who are you looking for?' I once asked.

"He shook his head and said, 'No one.'

"But later I, too, searched the indexes. It felt like pure imitation. It was not until I encountered my father’s name—Kamal Pasha el-Alfi—that I realized what I was looking for."

See also: "North of" (Marie-Helene Bertino, Electric Literature)

Books by Hisham Matar on Amazon |  More Longreads fiction picks

Matt Cardin @matt_cardin Matt is a writer covering religion, horror, creativity, consciousness, and culture, and the author of Dark Awakenings. He blogs at The Teeming Brain.

"My favorite longread of the week is 'A Psychotronic Childhood,' by Colson Whitehead, in The New Yorker. Whitehead and I grew up right in the same era (the 1970s and '80s), and his description of a childhood spent roaming the lurid matrix of cable TV's alternate universe and the gothic stacks of the video rental age, when you could stumble across life-changing fare like The Devil's Rain and Dawn of the Dead and Videodrome with no way to contextualize and thus defang it by running to IMDB or Wikipedia, gives me shivers of recognition. Then there's his truly moving account of being philosophically and artistically educated by these kinds of films — some of them high-quality but most of them residing somewhere below gutter-level — since they liberated his creativity by teaching him that it's perfectly okay, and in fact spiritually invaluable if you're an artist or writer, 'to fully inhabit one's delusions, to give in to every kooky aspect of one's freakishness.' Words to live by, truly."
 

A Psychotronic Childhood
Colson Whitehead | The New Yorker | June 4, 2012 | 21 minutes (5,186 words)

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