Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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Poetry as a salve. What grief can teach. Dinner and theatrics in Branson, Missouri. The pleasures of learning a musical instrument and a behind-the-scenes look at The Fugitive.

1. Ahead of Time

Kamran Javadizadeh | The Yale Review | June 12, 2023 | 3,285 words

Writer Kamran Javadizadeh’s sister, Bita, died a slow, agonizing death from cancer. Here, he writes about losing her through the lens of poetry he encountered during the experience: a volume of Langston Hughes he located in their shared childhood bedroom; a copy of The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds, filled with Bita’s notes from her reading of it in college; a Hafez verse that Bita herself texted to him one day. I adored this essay, a mix of personal history and literary analysis, and I also found it achingly familiar. Exactly 17 years ago this week, when I witnessed the sudden death of someone I loved, I was thrust into a private hell, a netherworld of despair. I struggled to connect with friends and family, and they with me. It was like I was trapped underwater, screaming, and they were looking down at me, unable to hear, much less help. Poetry, though, could breach the surface, offering me what I so desperately needed: a sense of empathy. I analyzed poems about death and mourning, pondering the words, meaning, and mechanics that made me feel the verses so deeply. Poems, as Javadizadeh reminds us in his essay about Bita, can be portals—to other people, to other planes, and even to ourselves. —SD

2. Mount Fear Diary

Joshua Hunt | The Believer | July 26, 2023 | 7,388 words

Struggling with how to grieve his Uncle Bill while on assignment in Japan, Joshua Hunt travels to Mount Fear, a place where the human and spirit world meet and one can go to console, pacify, and communicate with the dead. On the journey, Hunt begins to process his deep love and respect for the man who helped him navigate the trauma of his extended Tlingit family, a family Hunt distanced himself from while pursuing his writing career. Hunt’s faith and conviction in working through loss in words gives this piece life. He gives shape to the amorphous, ethereal, ever-shifting complexity of grief and grasps what it offers him: A chance to embrace his extended family in a new way. “Damp with sweat and rain, I wondered if the bus passengers could perceive the spirit walking with me,” he writes. “It had been there for eighty-five days, mute, but so real to me that I addressed it aloud. So real to me that the following week, while caught in a sudden downpour on the streets of Tokyo, I would burst into tears and thank it for the last gift it gave me: a sorrow deep enough to draw me back for the next funeral, and the next birthday, and all those other occasions when being together is more important than being free from pain.” At its core, this beautiful essay is not just about what grief takes, but what more importantly, what it can give. —KS

3. Dinner Theater and Loathing in Baptist Vegas

Amy McCarthy | Eater | August 2, 2023 | 3,258 words

I had never heard of Branson, Missouri, but after Amy McCarthy describes it as “either the Live Music Capital of the World or Baptist Vegas,” I wanted to know all about it. In Branson, “dinner theater” thrives, a phrase that for me conjures up shoveling down pasta at 5 p.m. before running to catch a show. But not in Branson. In Branson, show tunes come alongside your carbonara. McCarthy throws herself into this world, slurping soup in a 35,000-square-foot arena while watching “Dolly Parton’s Stampede,” complete with flashy costumes adorned with rhinestones, beautiful horses, and some problematic depictions of Native Americans. McCarthy is brilliant at conjuring the sights (and smells) that confront her, and I enjoyed her tepid reviews of the shows and food (particularly a desert that tasted “like the inside of a refrigerator”). But the essay really shines by analyzing what Branson actually is. Selling itself as a place for wholesome entertainment, this pretense of a “white, Christian, conservative utopia” is as thin as the cheerful veneer of the serving staff. Underneath Branson is a “huckster’s paradise” that sells God, guns, and country. I have now heard of Branson, but I don’t think I’ll go. —CW

4. What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me

Jaron Lanier | The New Yorker | July 22, 2023 | 3,794 words

In the opening of this essay, Jaron Laniers sketches a scene of deep intimacy: His mother teaching him to play piano with her hands above his on the keys. I can imagine the touch of her hands on his, the pure and clear tones of the piano, and the joy that these moments of closeness, learning, and beauty must have brought him as a child before she was taken from him, killed in a car accident. These experiences formed a man with an insatiable appetite for musical instruments and the study of music itself, enjoyed in brief respites from other tasks throughout his day. “Holding an oud is a little like holding a baby,” he writes. “While cradling an infant, I feel pretensions drop away: here is the only future we truly have—a sacred moment. Playing the oud, I am exposed. The instrument is confessional to me.” As Lanier surveys his large instrument collection, he delights in the singular joy each invokes, recalling the muscles involved and the physical sensations that translate into their individual music. What I loved most about this piece is how Lanier thrills at moments of discovery in learning to make sounds, unshackled from expectation. “When I played my ‘U’/’V”’ xiao for the first time, I made the futile blowing sound familiar to beginning flutists,” he writes. “Eventually, though, I managed a few weird, false notes. I was surprised but also delighted. Some of my favorite moments in musical life come when I can’t yet play an instrument. It’s in the fleeting period of playing without skill that you can hear sounds beyond imagination.” You need not be a musician or rare instrument aficionado to love this story. Your heart will tell you it’s a piece that hits all the right notes. —KS

5. ‘I Didn’t Kill My Wife!’ — An Oral History of ‘The Fugitive’

Andy Greene | Rolling Stone | July 29, 2023 | 12,243 words

If you’ve watched The Fugitive more times than you can count—and let’s face it, you have—you probably think of the 1993 movie as a perfectly crafted thriller. Not so much, it turns out! As Andy Greene’s oral history makes clear, the classic result belies the seat-of-the-pants execution. A star who was convinced the film would tank his career. A screenplay that never got finished. An ensemble actor who constantly found ways to maximize his screen time. A cast member who fell out after most of the movie had already been shot (and, consequently, a janky fake beard). A climax that was plotted on set. Dialogue that, seemingly more often than not, came straight from the ever-fizzing brain of Tommy Lee Jones. As much as I usually despise the word, this story officially qualifies as “rollicking.” Harrison Ford may not have participated, but Greene’s reporting ensures that his presence is still felt, whether laughing over the movie’s impending dud status or inviting Sela Ward to improv their scenes together on the fly. At this rate, every movie is going to get an oral history on every major anniversary, and I regret to inform you that next year marks 30 years since Ernest Goes to School and 3 Ninjas Kick Back. Then again, as long as those inevitable pieces aim to replicate the good vibes and rich details of this one, there’s no such thing as too many. —PR

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Audience Award

Here’s the piece our readers could not resist this week:

Fahrenheit 105: Why I No Longer Love the Texas Heat

Forrest Wilder | Texas Monthly | July 27, 2023 | 1,727 words

You expect heat in Texas, but Forrest Wilder remembers a far more forgiving climate growing up than the one he is experiencing now. A personal microcosm of climate change that really brings reality home. —CW

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Beirut, at Sunset

Tamara Saade’s beautiful essay attempts to make order and meaning from the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the ammonium nitrate explosion at the Port of Beirut in 2020.

It took time until I was ready to watch sunsets again. On the day of the explosion I had looked up at the sky, and seen a pink, orange, and white mushroom cloud. Like many Lebanese, I began experiencing PTSD symptoms in the months following the explosion. When the sky would turn warmer, and I’d see a color palette reminiscent of the sunset, I would get anxious, trying to avoid it. I used to love sunsets. I would chase them across the city, one of the first subjects I learned to photograph. When I lost my father at twelve years old, I grieved by walking the sadness away in the streets of Beirut, looking in the small alleys of my city for the security a parent would provide. I tried to capture sunsets through the lens of the camera I carried everywhere. They were my northern star, my anchor in such an ephemeral life. But August fourth robbed me of the comfort I had always found in the colors of Beirut’s sunsets. I was not alone. So many of us lost what we’d clung to for a sense of stability and safety. Since the explosion, I feel as if I am grieving all over again, mourning the loss of the city that is my home. 

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The Struggle Is Awesome

If you’re a runner who also browses TikTok, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of @mrs.space.cadet, a.k.a. Erin Azar, a 39-year-old mother of three who’s taken the running world by storm. Her quirky, lighthearted videos have inspired amateurs and Olympians alike. Unlike other fitfluencers, though, it’s Erin’s relatable, real-life, unglamorous approach to the sport that makes her content so appealing. In this delightful and uplifting Runner’s World profile, Jill Waldbieser gets to the heart of what motivates Azar. As an amateur (and very occasional) runner myself, I’ve never felt more validated.

“People see someone who’s not super skinny and think they must be running to lose weight,” she says. “They’ll comment to the effect of, ‘You’ve been running for three years and you look the same.’” But Erin’s goal is health, physical and mental, not a certain physique or number on the scale. When she did focus on weight loss, running didn’t bring her any joy. “Eating pizza and drinking beer made me happy, so I decided to just be happy.” Besides, she adds, “you can’t train for a marathon and try to lose weight. You have to eat so much.”

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Taken and Told

Lucy Sexton and Joe Sexton| The Atavist Magazine |July 2023 | 1,233 words (5 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 141, “Held Together.”

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Becoming a single dad ended my sportswriting career; I couldn’t make a West Coast swing during baseball season while responsible for two young girls. So I moved to the Times’ metro desk and became a decent city reporter, doing a mix of hard news and feature stories. Over the years, my girls tagged along on some of my assignments, from the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island to a Hasidic mother in Brooklyn who was one of the most sought-after nitpickers during a plague of lice in local schools. When the Times asked me to help conduct in-house seminars on street reporting, I made a point of telling younger reporters that success is often determined before you get out the door. If you’re fatalistic about getting what you need, failure awaits. If you force yourself to believe that an improbable reporting coup could happen, often as not it does. Corny maybe, but also true, at least in my experience.

The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.

I felt naive, then, when two members of our team returned to the Royal Gardens after venturing out to Al Mabani. Their driver had refused to even slow down while passing by the jail, so fearful was he of being stopped at gunpoint.

I followed my own advice with Libya, trying before I arrived to imagine what reporting there would be like. I foresaw secretive conversations with friends and relatives of jailed migrants in dusty streets outside detention facilities. Maybe there would be a way to talk to prisoners through barred windows. Notes might be exchanged.

Needless to say, the landscape of the city was less than ideal for the kind of street reporting I knew. To merely venture out, by foot or by car, was to risk being confronted by the armed men stationed at a convoluted pattern of checkpoints throughout Tripoli. And then there was the matter of our security team. Though they had been assigned to us with the help of the Red Crescent, a little googling showed that the firm they worked for seemed to be run by a former Libyan military official accused of war crimes. Were they actually government minders monitoring our doings? Militia members themselves? Did it matter?

Libya, I was discovering a little late, was an inscrutable place.

In addition to me and Ian Urbina, our team included Dutch documentary filmmaker Mea Dols de Jong and Pierre Kattar, a video journalist who’d spent years at The Washington Post. Against the odds, we soon got some reporting breaks. A variety of aid organizations had done years of work documenting abuses and offering comfort to the tens of thousands of migrants swept up and detained inside Libya. One of those organizations was able to provide us with the names of the young migrant shot dead at Al Mabani and of a witness to the killing. The dead man was Aliou Candé, a farmer and father of three from Guinea-Bissau, captured by the Libyan Coast Guard as he tried to make his way to a new life in Italy. The witness was a man from Ivory Coast named Mohammad David; he had managed to escape Al Mabani in the tumult that followed Candé’s murder. We had a cell phone number for him.

On our first night in Tripoli, three of us made it to Gargaresh, an area that had become a migrant ghetto. Militias liked to make brutalizing sweeps of Gargaresh’s mix of hideouts and encampments. Along the neighborhood’s main drag, a blur of neon lights, furtive figures, internet cafés, and cheap food joints, we met Mohammad David. He spoke French, and Pierre, whose father once served as a translator for the U.S. embassy in Paris, could make out enough of what he said to extract a rough narrative of Candé’s killing.

There had been a fight inside one of Al Mabani’s crowded, fetid cells. Guards fired their automatic rifles indiscriminately. Candé was struck in the neck, and his blood streaked a wall as he dragged against it before falling down dead. Other detainees didn’t allow his body to be removed from the cell until they were granted their freedom, which was how Mohammad David made it to Gargaresh.

The incident was a stark reminder that Al Mabani, like many other jails in Libya, was run by one of the violent militias that had divided Tripoli into wary, sometimes warring fiefs. These forces extort the families of jailed migrants for ransom payments, steal aid money meant to help feed and clothe their captives, and sell men and women into forced servitude. Candé’s killing, for a rare, brief moment, gave some of his fellow prisoners leverage over their captors.

In the days that followed our conversation with David, other unlikely reporting triumphs piled up. We found a man who served as a kind of informal liaison for migrants from Guinea-Bissau eking out a living in Tripoli. He brought us to Candé’s great-uncle, who showed us police documents pertaining to Candé’s death; a “fight” was listed as the cause of his demise. The liaison said that Candé had been buried in a vast walled-off expanse of dirt that served as the graveyard of Tripoli’s unwanted. We hired a local photographer to launch a drone camera over the acres of burial mounds, most of them unmarked. He managed to locate one into which someone had scratched the name “Candé.”

In subsequent days, our team snuck two other men who’d spent time at Al Mabani into our hotel. One of them, a teenager, told us that he’d taken a bullet in his leg the night Candé was killed. We pushed the limits of prudence in pursuit of these reporting coups. Pierre had brought a drone camera with him, which he flew above Al Mabani. The scene he captured looked a lot like a concentration camp: men huddled under threat of violence after being fed in a courtyard, then marched back to their cells single file, beaten in the head for so much as looking up at the sky.

It soon became clear that our security guys were reporting back to their bosses, whoever they were, at least some of what we were up to. At one point, we got a visit from an American expatriate who said she worked for the security outfit. She warned us that what we were doing was dangerous and demanded we apprise her of any further proposed reporting efforts outside the confines of the hotel.

One morning we notified Red Crescent officials that we wanted to visit the morgue where Candé’s body had been taken. Mea and I got in a van and made our way through Tripoli’s streets. The morgue was part of a complex of squat buildings shielded by an imposing set of walls and fences. Inside was a man at a desk. We asked to see Candé’s records, and he rifled through several filing cabinets.

A freshly wrapped body lay on a gurney in the middle of the main room. In a side room, a worker ran water from a hose over another body. Behind a set of curtains was a wall of refrigerated chambers that could hold perhaps two dozen corpses. It was impossibly hot and completely quiet.

Mea recorded what we were seeing from a small camera set discreetly against her stomach, until someone noticed and reported it to the man at the desk. It was time for us to go.

Read the full story at The Atavist

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‘We Have Fire All Around Us and We Can’t Get Out’

Last October, the Bolt Creek Fire helped give Seattle the worst air quality in the world—a dubious distinction more and more North American locations are getting in recent years. While the fast-moving blaze destroyed thousands of acres, no human lives were lost. But two very nearly were. Matt Bishop and Steve Cooper escaped certain death; this is the story of how.

Halfway down the chute, Bishop and Cooper watched in horror as the fire, hungry for fuel, snaked its way around the backside of the ridge and emerged in front of them. Flames engulfed the trail below the gully, consuming their escape route, roaring like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. “Oh fuck,” Cooper said. “That came fast, dude.” “Hopefully you guys get to see this video,” Bishop added, brow furrowed. “Otherwise, we didn’t make it.” He sent another message to his wife: “We’re trapped.”

Their breathing short and shallow, they considered their only option: Scramble back up the scree they’d just descended to huddle below Baring Mountain’s jagged peak, the rocky, open space a potential refuge — or a dead end.

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Dinner Theater and Loathing in Baptist Vegas

Amy McCarthy combines a fun look at “Dinner Theater” shows with thoughts on the more sinister side of the tourist town that hosts them. You’ll find playful descriptions and disturbing concepts in this compelling essay.

Still, I was aware that the Branson of today has a decidedly mixed reputation. Those who love it say that it’s a wholesome destination for good, clean, Christian fun in the Ozark Mountains, while its critics would suggest that it’s a haven for aging white baby boomers who are clinging to their God, their guns, and their wistfulness for a bygone era. In the midst of a 35,000-square-foot arena on the city’s theater-packed Strip, Dolly Parton’s Stampede is proof that it’s both — and a whole lot more.

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‘I Didn’t Kill My Wife!’ — An Oral History of ‘The Fugitive’

With apologies to The Shawshank Redemption, The Fugitive might be the greatest Aimless Sunday Afternoon Basic Cable Rewatch of all time. Is it Harrison Ford’s greatest? Nope. But it is a functionally perfect action-drama movie. And yet, it might actually be outshined by this doozy of an oral history—which, for all its lack of Harrison Ford, delivers more “how have I never heard that before?” details per square inch than seems possible. Read it, then watch the movie again. You were going to anyway, right?

Tom Wood: There’s a scene where we’re all sitting on the side of the train-wreck demolition site. We were questioning the dialogue and saying, “Let’s spark this up a bit.” I’m not the fastest thinker and was caught a little off-guard. Tommy turns to me [with the cameras rolling] and says, “What are you doing?” I go, “I’m thinking.” He goes, “How about you think me up a cup of coffee and a chocolate donut with some of those little sprinkles on top?” Later on, at the hotel scene, he says to me, “Don’t let them give you shit about your ponytail.” That was completely improv’d.

Daniel Roebuck: The quote that everyone brings up to me is “If they can dye the river green today, why can’t they dye it blue the other 364 days of the year?” That was an improv. And that was because we had that huge walk that we had to cover. And I remember asking Andy, “Did you shoot the green river?” He goes, “Yeah, we’re cutting it in.” And that’s how it came to be.

Joe Pantoliano: When we first get into the storm drain, I go, “Goddammit, I just got these shoes.” All the lines down there were improvised.

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