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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week October 26, 2012Longreads Member Exclusive: 'The Miracle Man' by Andrew Rice
Become a Longreads Member for just $3 a month and we'll send you full text and ebook versions of our latest exclusive stories. This week's pick: "The Miracle Man," by New York magazine contributing editor Andrew Rice, about a Ugandan pastor accused of working for the devil.
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1. Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons Shane Bauer | Mother Jones | October 18, 2012 | 34 minutes (8,518 words) The writer, a former American prisoner in Iran, goes inside America's prisons and examines the solitary confinement system. He discovers "a recipe for abuse and violation rights":
"As I read the medical literature, I remember the violent fantasies that sometimes seized my mind so fully that not even meditation—with which I luckily had a modicum of experience before I was jailed—would chase them away. Was the uncontrollable banging on my cell door, the pounding of my fists into my mattress, just a common symptom of isolation? I wonder what happens when someone with a history of violence is seized by such uncontrollable rage. A 2003 study of inmates at the Pelican Bay SHU by University of California-Santa Cruz psychology professor Craig Haney found that 88 percent of the SHU population experiences irrational anger, nearly 30 times more than the US population at large.
"Haney says there hasn't been a single study of involuntary solitary confinement that didn't show negative psychiatric symptoms after 10 days. He found that a full 41 percent of SHU inmates reported hallucinations. Twenty-seven percent have suicidal thoughts. CDCR's own data shows that, from 2007 to 2010, inmates in isolation killed themselves at eight times the rate of the general prison population.
"In the SHU, people diagnosed with mental illnesses like depression—which afflicts, according to Haney, 77 percent of SHU inmates—only see a psychologist once every 30 days. Anyone whose mental illness qualifies as 'serious' (the criterion for which is 'possible breaks with reality,' according to Pelican Bay's chief of mental health, Dr. Tim McCarthy) must be removed from the SHU. When they are, they get sent to a special psychiatric unit—where they are locked up in solitary. Some 364 prisoners are there today."
See also: "A Mountain of Trouble" (Joshua Hammer, Outside, 2010, on Bauer's arrest in Iran)
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2. Coach: A Local Legend and a Young Man's Search to Find Himself William Browning | SB Nation | October 9, 2012 | 12 minutes (3,001 words) A young man's memories of quitting the football team:
"The boy remembers walking the hallway toward his office, telling himself not to give in. He sat face-to-face with Coach, Bear Bryant's picture hanging nearby on the office wall. Are you sure you want to spend your senior year in the bleachers? Coach said. Full of teenage arrogance, the boy said he wouldn't be attending any games. He said he had watched from the sideline for two seasons and had his fill.
"Coach, always slow to speak, leaned back in his chair and warned him. He warned him that not that season, but in a decade or so, he would come to regret his decision and that once made, it could not be undone.
"The boy laughed. A grown man, said the boy, has no business thinking of games he did or did not play in high school. Coach said all right and the boy left. He never called him 'Coach' again. Not because he walked away from football, but because that summer the coach married his mother.
"And the boy hated him for that."
More from Browning: "Andres' Story" (Florida Times-Union, Sept. 2012)
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3. Inside the Mansion—and Mind—of Kim Dotcom, the Most Wanted Man on the Net Charles Graeber | Wired | October 22, 2012 | 42 minutes (10,554 words) A writer goes to New Zealand to visit Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, who is fighting criminal charges from the U.S. Department of Justice for committing copyright infringement:
"Police led Kim to the lawn, where most of the household was gathered. 'I was so worried about Mona—she was pregnant with the twins. I kept asking where she was, where the kids were.' Kim couldn’t see the kids, but he saw Ortmann. He and Batato had flown in for the birthday Kim shared with his son, Kimmo. It promised to be an epic event, complete with A-list entertainers from the US. The bouncy castle hadn’t even been blown up yet.
"The police found Batato by the back of the house with his laptop; he was still in his robe. Ortmann was in bed when the tactical team burst in. He looked freaked out and shattered. He wasn’t the sort who pretended at the gangsta stuff. He didn’t even play shooter videogames.
"Kim asked a police officer, 'What are the charges?' He imagined that, with more than 50 staff members from around the world, maybe one of them was mixed up in something.
"The answer surprised him: 'Copyright infringement.'
"As the cops led him to a police van, Kim passed Mona. She seemed frightened. 'All this for copyright?' he said to her. 'Bullshit.'"
More Wired: "In Search of the Living, Purring, Singing Heart of the Online Cat-Industrial Complex" (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Aug. 2012)
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4. The Slow Death of Public Higher Education Aaron Bady, Mike Konczal | Dissent Magazine | October 22, 2012 | 17 minutes (4,436 words) How California's public university system went from "Master Plan" to "no plan," and how it is now incentivized to favor out-of-state students over in-state students:
"When we talk about the decline of public higher education systems such as California’s, however, rising tuition is only part of the story, and maybe not the most important part. Along with pushing instructional costs onto students, for example, the state of California has made it easier for state universities to balance their budgets by accepting more out-of-state students (and thus, fewer and fewer Californian students). Out-of-state students pay much higher tuition rates, but under the Master Plan, state funding was contingent on enrolling a minimum number of in-state students. As the state has withdrawn its commitment to fully fund its universities, it has progressively detached what funding remains from these kinds of commitments. Governor Jerry Brown may have put the final nail in the coffin when, in June, he vetoed specific enrollment targets for the UC from the annual budget. Moreover, since 2007, the extra $20,000 in tuition money that out-of-state students pay has gone directly to the schools enrolling these students—rather than reverting to the UC as a whole—perversely incentivizing each campus to take on fewer California students.
"This gradual retreat from enrollment quotas only adds to a problem that has plagued the California system since its inception: too many applicants and too little space. Over the last three decades, the state has given up on increasing the total institutional capacity—the classrooms, dorms, and new campuses—that a continuously growing university-age population requires. This shortfall is not as immediately visible as red lines in planning documents, as politically explosive as enrollment targets, or as sharply felt by stretched family budgets. But the fact that the state has stopped keeping up with the demand for more higher education points to a slow but fundamental structural change underway in higher education as a whole."
See also: "Why These Kids Get a Free Ride to College" (Ted C. Fishman, New York Times Magazine, 2012)
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5. Playboy Interview: Stephen Colbert Eric Spitznagel | Playboy | October 16, 2012 | 29 minutes (7,463 words) [Not single-page] The Comedy Central star on his TV character's clash with reality, the pain of losing his father and brothers at a young age, and his fear of bears:
"PLAYBOY: How did bears become a recurring motif on the show? Was it just to have something to talk about that wasn’t topical?
"COLBERT: For the very first show, we were trying to find something that had a repeatable structure. We had this bit called 'ThreatDown,' when he talks about the number one threat to America that week. We were considering another story, something from Florida about a Burmese python that had grown to 13 feet long and swallowed an alligator and the alligator had eaten its way out of the snake. It was a really crazy story with horrible pictures. Then a bear story came up that wasn’t as flashy, but we went with it. Partly because bears are very resonant to me, because I really do have a bit of a bear problem. And it just seemed like a richer fear to us. We always said that anything my character is concerned about qualifies as news. If he says bears are the number one threat to America, then that is the case.
"PLAYBOY: He’s justifying his own anxieties?
"COLBERT: Exactly. 'I want to make you afraid of the things I’m afraid of.'"
See also: "An Oral History of the Rise and Fall (and Rise) of 'The Dana Carvey Show'" (Mike Ryan, GQ, 2011)
Books by Spitznagel on Amazon
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Fiction Pick: West of the Known Chanelle Benz | The American Reader | October 1, 2012 | 20 minutes (5,136 words) [Fiction, not single-page] Loyalty, betrayal and a final judgment for a brother-sister duo in the Old West:
"My brother was the first man to come for me. The first man I saw in the raw, profuse with liquor, outside a brothel in New Mexico Territory. He was the first I know to make a promise then follow on through. There is nothing to forgive. For in the high violence of joy, is there not often a desire to swear devotion? But what then? When is it ever brung off to the letter? When they come for our blood, we will not end, but go on in an unworldly fever.
"I come here to collect, my brother said from the porch. If there was more I did not hear it for Uncle Bill and Aunt Josie stepped out and closed the door. I was in the kitchen canning tomatoes, standing over a row of mason jars, hands dripping a wat’ry red when in stepped a man inside a long buckskin coat.
"I’m your brother, Jackson, the man smiled, holding out his hand."
See also: "His Mother's Wish" (Pramodini Parayitam, Indian Review)
More Longreads fiction picks
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"The longread that caught, held, and horrified my attention this week was 'The Truck Stop Killer,' by Vanessa Veselka, in GQ [not single-page]. Having spent a lot of time on the road over the past decade, the universe inhabited by long haul truckers and truck stop inhabitants has long fascinated me. Veselka spent much of her teens 'hitchhiking in circles' and in this piece considers a terrifying night in the summer of 1985 when she believes she may have escaped noted truck driver/serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades. Veselka deftly navigates the unreliable echo of memory and her survivor’s guilt in describing a vivid periphery inhabited by the invisible and the demonic." The Truck Stop Killer Vanessa Veselka | GQ | Oct 24, 2012 | 32 minutes (8,063 words) |
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