|
|
|
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week November 9, 2012Longreads Member Exclusive: 'Cormac McCarthy's Apocalypse,' by David Kushner
Become a Longreads Member for $3 a month and we'll send you full text and ebook versions of our latest exclusive stories. This week's pick: "Cormac McCarthy's Apocalypse," a profile of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist by Rolling Stone contributing editor David Kushner.
With a Longreads Membership, you're also supporting our service. Here's how. |
|
|
1. Rio: The Fight for the Favelas Misha Glenny | Financial Times | November 2, 2012 | 16 minutes (4,088 words) In 2009, Brazil introduced "one of the boldest experiments in policing ever witnessed in the democratic world"—the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, or UPP—to rid its poorest neighborhoods from the grip of drug traffickers and violent militias before the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics:
"'Everybody in Rio knew – every taxi driver, every senator, every sociologist and every journalist,' he says with a hint of controlled anger. 'They all knew that Rio was a divided city. But for 40 years, nobody did a single thing about it.'
"The favelas, Beltrame argues, were islands from which the state had just decided to absent itself. Their residents were forgotten and ignored, stewing in a toxic juice of extreme poverty, domestic violence and, from the late 1980s onwards, the omnipotence of Uzi-wielding drug cartels or their vigilante alter-egos, the militias, who specialise in blackmailing entire communities. Regular police raids peppered by arbitrary killings and extortion ensured that favela residents regarded the state not as an ally, but perhaps as their worst enemy.
"Appalled by this collective inaction and the stain on the city’s reputation, Beltrame decided to do something about it. In times past, he would have struggled to receive the backing from the governor of Rio state to divert public funds into the favelas. But with the World Cup and Olympics looming, the moment for the UPP had come."
More FT: "The Whistleblowers Club" (Carola Hoyos, September 2012)
Books by Glenny on Amazon
 |
2. The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills Ben Austen | Grantland | November 8, 2012 | 34 minutes (8,503 words) Undying hope from a city's football fans—and a fear that their team will soon disappear:
"For Bills partisans, white, black, or anything else, the greatest fear is not that the team will lose a game or suffer another demoralizing season. A far more distressing concern is that the team will follow industry and investment and generations of young Buffalonians before it and abandon the region for good. Ralph Wilson, who founded the Buffalo Bills in 1959, still owns the team. He's 94. For a few of those years it seemed one of his daughters, the NFL's first female scout, was being groomed to replace him, but she died of cancer in 2009, at the age of 61. Wilson has refused to announce a plan of succession or to comment further on the team's future without him. Upon his death, his heirs appear ready to sell the Bills to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, fans exist in a suspended state of disbelief and existential terror. They are sure one moment that Mr. Wilson must have a backroom deal set up to keep the team in Buffalo, a city he'd stuck with for the past half-century, even if often at a distance from his mansion in Michigan. But the next instant they can't figure why he'd then let them suffer. The old man had done all right for himself in Buffalo, paying just $25,000 for a team currently worth about $800 million, while Erie County has covered the costs of stadium renovations. Yet now he seems ready to allow Toronto, with its armada of newly built glass and steel towers, to pirate away their team. Since 2008, the Bills have been playing one 'home' game a season in Toronto, which for many in Buffalo feels like an unwanted trial separation. Maybe more threatening is Los Angeles, with its mega-market revenues and media, which is angling to lure not just one NFL franchise but two. When Bills management negotiated a lease extension on its current property, they signed up for only a year. Hardly the long-term commitment of a Bills fan's dreams."
More Austen: "The Last Tower: The Decline and Fall of Public Housing" (Harper's, May 2012)
|
3. The GOP and Me Rany Jazayerli | Rany on the Royals | November 6, 2012 | 31 minutes (7,996 words) A Muslim-American's history with the Republican Party—and how they lost him:
"Newt Gingrich, who also ran for President, introduced an angle that I – and presumably every American of sound mind – had never considered before. Speaking at a Texas church in March, 2011, Gingrich brought up his grandchildren to the audience, and then said, 'I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.'
"I’ll admit: I had never considered the threat of secular, atheist, radical Islamists before. But then, that’s why Newt Gingrich was running for president and I wasn’t. He sees things the rest of us don’t. He even has the ability to see things that don’t actually exist."
See also: "Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit" (Shoshana Hebshi, September 2011)
|
4. Come On, Feel the Buzz Alex Pareene | The Baffler | November 5, 2012 | 26 minutes (6,530 words) A critical look at the political newspaper and website Politico:
"One classic method of unleashing irresistible Drudge bait on the Internet is to boil another outlet’s story down to a couple salacious-sounding excerpts, or (failing an effective condensing strategy) to simply reinterpret the material to fit a Drudge-friendly narrative. This past May, for example, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Maraniss’s biography of Barack Obama. (The liberal media vetting blackout continued apace, in other words.) Politico’s Dylan Byers took the excerpt and turned it into a little micro-news story: Obama admitted to Maraniss that certain figures in his first memoir were 'compressions'—i.e., composite characters. Byers completely missed that Obama explicitly said at the outset of his own book that some characters were composites, but Drudge didn’t care. 'Obama Admits Fabricating Girlfriend in Memoir,' went his headline, with a link to Politico instead of Vanity Fair—and another false right-wing meme got its wings."
More Baffler: "Dead End on Shakin' Street" (Thomas Frank, July 2012)
|
5. Love on the March Alex Ross | The New Yorker | November 5, 2012 | 30 minutes (7,526 words) A brief history of the LGBT movement:
"I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind. Even in the liberal press, homosexuality drew scorn: in The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth denounced the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee, and a Time cover story dismissed the gay world as a 'pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.' David Reuben’s 1969 best-seller, 'Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)'—a book I remember perusing shakily at the library—advised that 'if a homosexual who wants to renounce homosexuality finds a psychiatrist who knows how to cure homosexuality, he has every chance of becoming a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual.'"
More New Yorker: "Lawrence v. Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional" (Dahlia Lithwick, March 2012)
Books by Ross on Amazon
|
Fiction Pick: The Eye Alice Munro | The Guardian | November 2, 2012 | 16 minutes (4,160 words)From Munro's collection Dear Life: A young girl develops a special bond with her housekeeper:
"I suppose all this was making me ready for Sadie when she came to work for us. My mother had shrunk to whatever territory she had with the babies. With her not around so much, I could think about what was true and what wasn't. I knew enough not to speak about this to anybody.
"The most unusual thing about Sadie – though it was not a thing stressed in our house – was that she was a celebrity. Our town had a radio station where she played her guitar and sang the opening welcome song which was her own composition.
"'Hello, hello, hello, everybody – '"
See also: "Lizards' Colony" (Mahmoud Saeed, World Literature Today)
Books by Munro on Amazon | More Longreads fiction picks
|
|
|
|
"After a week overwhelmed with election-related news, it's refreshing to take a break and read something that has nothing to do with polls, politics or shifting voter demographics. One such diversion: John Lingan's entertaining account of time spent shopping for books with Michael Dirda. Lingan spots the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic in a basement bookstore in suburban Maryland; months later, he joins Dirda to observe him in his 'natural habitat.' It's interesting to see just how someone like Dirda approaches the shelves. And for anyone who has too many books waiting to be read or wonders about the habits of highly respected critics, Lingan's excursion with Dirda provides a lovely glimpse." Book Shopping with the Best-Read Man in America John Lingan | Paris Review | November 7, 2012 | 13 minutes (3,271 words) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
