Lara Logan rose to broadcast stardom as a hungry reporter who capitalized on both her fearlessness and her telegenic appearance. That was before she drifted into a nest of conspiracy theories that would get her ousted from numerous TV gigs; now, she travels a far-right lecture circuit, fearmongering for profit. But Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile doesn’t relish in the gory spectacle—it’s a dispassionate, empathic look at how someone so talented can lose their way so completely.
Logan’s success at events like this—she now features at many—turns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids,” it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of America’s wars.
Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this “war against humanity.” And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides.
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This essay defies easy description. It is about love. It is about perseverance. It is also about many cruelties—the cruelty of poverty, of terminal illness, of grief, of generational trauma:
What you know of your mother’s childhood can be summarized in a single story that is about not her childhood but her father’s:
There once lived a little boy, the son of impoverished tenant farmers. One day, he was invited to the village fair by the child of his richer neighbor. The neighbor gave the boy a few coins to spend at the fair. Ecstatic, he bought himself the first toy of his life, a wooden pencil, which he hung proudly around his neck the whole day. When he returned home, his parents beat him within an inch of his life. Those coins could have bought rice and grains! Enough to feed the family for a week!
This was the only story your grandfather told your mother of his childhood, and the first time she told it to you, you recognized the echo of every hero tale you were taught as a child. A Communist cadre till the end, your grandfather had run away at age sixteen to join the Party, which had given him the first full belly he had known. Just as important, the Party had taught him how to read, inspired the avidity with which he had marked up Mao’s Little Red Book: his cramped, inky annotations marching up and down the page like so many ants trooping through mountains.
The second time your mother told you the story, you were ten or eleven and she didn’t have to tell it at all. The two of you were at Staples, shopping for school supplies. “back-to-school sale,” the posters all over the store screamed. Four notebooks, four mechanical pencils, your mother had stipulated, but you wanted more. You always wanted more. When you persisted, she had only to look at you and utter the words “You have more than anyone” for you to know exactly whom she was referring to.
The story was growing inside you, just as it had grown in your mother: a cactus whose spines pierced their way through your thoughts.
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The Rim Fire in Tuolumne County, Florida, ate over 250,000 acres and cost nearly $130 million to put out. One man confessed to starting it—accidentally—but the case against him fell through. What really happened back in 2013? For Rolling Stone, Joseph Bien-Kahn attempts to find the truth.
It’s admirable for Skalski to be so unbothered by the criticism. Still, I press on. She, more than anyone, embodies the feds to the locals of Tuolumne County. Why, in her view, had the area been so ready to forgive the man rescued from the scene of the crime? “I think what people were surprised at was that it was a local person. Not even so much that it was a hunter, but that it was a local person,” she says. “We all knew how dry it was out there, so they’re like, ‘Why would you do that?’ I don’t know — that could’ve been a disappointment to find out it was somebody local as opposed to somebody coming from a city out there.”
Of all the explanations, Skalski’s rings most true. We say we tell stories to understand the world, but the ones we choose to believe often fit into our existing understanding of it. A local kid should’ve known better than to start a fire on the hot, dry afternoon of Aug. 17, 2013. A terrible accident with untold costs was too simple an explanation. And so, many other stories began to be told.
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With today’s news of Cormac McCarthy’s death at age 89, American literature has lost another giant. As with so many giants, McCarthy inspired a journalistic cottage industry of sorts; his stylistic and creative influence touched countless other writers, many of whom felt moved to acknowledge that influence in their own writing. What follows is a quintet of such pieces that Longreads editors have read and enjoyed over the years.
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Robert Draper | Texas Monthly | July 1992 | 2,116 words
Cormac McCarthy showed up in El Paso around January 1976, his move from Knoxville unannounced and his arrival completely unnoticed. He was a 43-year-old writer of three out-of-print novels, a man twice divorced, living exclusively off of literary fellowships. He began to be seen in pool halls and bowling alleys on the south side of town, as well as in various Mexican restaurants, always with some esoteric book under his arm. The friends he slowly accumulated had no idea who Cormac McCarthy was in literary terms. They knew him as a short, handsome man who wore simple clothes, who seemed to live comfortably with little income, and who enjoyed talking about almost any imaginable topic—except, as it happens, contemporary literature. He did allow as to how El Paso was a proper setting to research his latest project: the spectacular Blood Meridian, perhaps the most unyieldingly savage vision of the Old West ever committed to print, in which cowboys and Indians scalp each other and their own kind without a moment’s hesitation or remorse. But something else about El Paso appealed to McCarthy. It was, as he told a friend, “one of the last real cities left in America,” with its own unvanquished eccentricities and the added feature of geographical remoteness. A man could move freely in El Paso. He could get lost there.
David Kushner | Rolling Stone | December 1, 2007 | 4,196 words
But among this rarefied gathering of leading intellects, none is more respected than the spry old cowboy dipping his tortillas in beans at the lunch table. Dressed in a crisp blue shirt and jeans, he sits comfortably with his weathered boots crossed and listens intently as a theoretical biologist who has flown in from Berlin discusses something called evolutionary economics – the relationship between animal behavior and marketlike forces. This is quintessential Santa Fe stuff, examining one phenomenon (biology) in the light and lexicon of another (economics).
The discussion soon turns to the topic of suicide. As a slide of a West African tribe flickers on the biologist’s computer screen, the researchers dig into the idea that suicide attempts can be evaluated as a kind of expression of market forces – a threat to remove oneself as a source of benefits to others. The neuroscientist in the corner raises her hand and poses a question to the group: “Does anyone know another animal besides humans who commit suicide?”
Brains churn. Air conditioning whirs. For once, though, the scientists are stumped.
Then the cowboy chimes in, as he often does, with the answer.
Tom Chiarella | Esquire | June 28, 2009 | 5,900 words
Cormac McCarthy fathered a son as an old man, and this story is an ode to a ticking clock, to the diminishment of time, to last chances. Last chance to parent. Last chance to warn, to train, to prepare. The father fights to teach. And the father teaches the boy to fight. In the movie’s first teaching moment, the father shows his son where to shoot himself in the head should it come to that. With the gun loaded. It is perhaps the movie’s only lurid turn, a moment that, like almost every moment in the movie, appears in the book as well. By the time it occurs, it is understood to be a gesture of necessity. There they are, citizens of a kind of now, bad teeth and all, pallid, filthy, damp to the bone, at their end, and whether you’ve read the book or not, the sight of it makes you seize.
Jim White | Radio Silence | June 12, 2012 | 4,987 words
In my left coat pocket is a dog-eared copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, which happens to be set here in Knoxville way back in the ’50s. I’m not much of a planner, so to some extent or another (depending on your take on the mechanics of serendipity) it’s sheer coincidence that it ended up in my suitcase as I packed for this tour. Likewise I’m no great bibliophile, certainly not one of those types who might find it exhilarating to locate and use, say, the exact toilet that Jack Kerouac took a shit in while writing On the Road. That said, I’m happy it ended up with me here in Knoxville, as the city itself is practically a character in the novel. Gay and Central Streets, where Walter’s barbershop is, are mentioned frequently, so it’s interesting to be in the physical locale where the action takes place. I’m about halfway through Suttree this time around. I’ve read it front to back many times, usually when events in my life have gone spiraling out of control and that black cloud of depression that’s dogged me off and on for much of my adult years descends.
Noah Gallagher Shannon | Oxford American | September 5, 2017 | 6,836 words
If it’s not so uncommon for a writer to traverse literary landscapes, McCarthy does seem unique in being claimed by the native intelligentsia of two separate regions. In the late sixties, Guy Davenport wrote that in McCarthy, Appalachia “has found a new storyteller to depict the darkness of its heart and its futile defiance of its luck.” So too in the West, where he is considered the reviver of an aesthetic long cheapened. A poll taken a few years back by High Country News named the Border Trilogy, which comprises All the Pretty Horses and its sequels, asamong readers’ favorite books about their home, alongside canonical texts by Lewis and Clark and Wallace Stegner.
All this critical sorting and swerving tells us a few things about McCarthy: that no one quite fathoms him enough to name his place in the culture; and that his absence has shifted the responsibility of this naming over to his obsessives, many of whom have become fixated on figuring out the best method to secure his legacy, a task which, the closer you get to it, feels less and less like scholarship and more like a Rorschach test. To many, he has become a ghost, a figment of study—which is strange since, of course, he’s alive, and writing. His existence today, at eighty-four years old, feels already posthumous.
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Amanda Chemeche shares her memories of when the Chelsea Hotel was “a home to artists and outsiders alike who lived, tried, and beautifully failed.” Her reminisces are almost dreamlike, yet capture the essence of a special time in this hotel’s history.
There used to be a bookcase, half obscured by a large tropical plant, in the lobby. Looking at it evokes a haptic experience for me. On each shelf is a table setting: one all in blue, another in red, and so on. I remember my curious, child fingers nudging the objects in confusion, mistaking them for a glued-down Fisher-Price tea set. My hands came away coated with tacky dust and grime.
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In his own words, Hashim Mohammed, 26, tells the story of his escape from the Uyghur region of China via a Thai detention center. His goal was to navigate “the smugglers’ way” through Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, to be able to fly to freedom in Turkey. In China, Uyghur faithful have been persecuted for displays of devotion to Islam, which the Chinese government considers a threat.
The authorities bulldozed mosques, saw any expression of religion as extremist and confiscated Qurans. By 2018, as many as one million Uyghurs had been sent to so-called “re-education” camps. Across the region, an extensive high-tech system of surveillance was rolled out to monitor every movement of the Uyghur population. This remains the case to this day, with the Chinese police in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, reportedly requiring residents to download a mobile app which enables them to monitor phones.
It started back in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang, 10 years ago now. I was 16 years old and had recently begun boxing at my local gym. In the evenings, I started to spend some time reciting and reading the Quran. The local Chinese authorities were beginning their mass crackdown on Uyghurs in the name of combating terrorist activity. Any display of religious devotion was deemed suspicious.
The local police considered my boxing gym to be a sinister and dangerous place. They kept asking us what we were training for. They thought we were planning something. They started arresting some of the students and coaches at the gym. Police visited my house and went through all my possessions. They couldn’t find anything.
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Last night the Denver Nuggets secured their first NBA Championship in team history. Though the group made it clear that this is the best team in the league, nobody doubts that the effort was led by the unlikeliest of superstars: Nikola Jokic.
Jokic’s eye-popping statistical superlatives have come fast and furious in the last few years, but ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne does the much tougher work of getting to the core of his makeup. How did he go from being a longshot in an NBA no-man’s land to undisputed MVP on a championship team? In this profile, Shelburne talks to those around the Serbian big man—reporters know that Jokic won’t talk about himself—to uncover the genesis and story of how he molded his body to fulfill a lifelong dream for not only himself, but also the team, coaches, and city around him.
Focus on the work, not what it means to be an MVP.
Jokic thought about it for a little bit before answering.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
After every game, no matter how many minutes he played, they’d lift weights. He would change his diet, cutting out as many indulgences as possible, which meant no soda, no beer, no snacks while he played video games.
An exception was made for orange juice and the occasional bite of his mother’s cooking, when she visited from Serbia. But just a bite. “I actually told him to enjoy his mom’s food after games,” Eichenberger says. “Like, come on, you can’t not eat your mother’s cooking.”
“But once he gets something in his head,” Eichenberger adds, “that’s how it’s going to be.”
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