Longreads of the Year 2012: January-June
“National Public Rodeo”, by David Margolick, Vanity Fair, January 18, 2012
Williams was in Fox News’s green room, between appearances with Shepard Smith and Sean Hannity, when Weiss told him the news. He was dumbfounded. Had she read the entire interview? Couldn’t he at least come in to talk about this? There was no point, she replied. Hannity immediately called Fox News’s senior vice president, Bill Shine, awakening him at home. Sit tight until tomorrow, Shine told Williams. The next day, Ailes gave Williams a three-year deal worth a reported $2 million.
NPR officials weighed offering a full account of Williams’s tortured history at the place. But whether out of cowardice or guilt or loyalty or decorousness or just an inability to think tactically and defend themselves, they took the high road, saying simply that Williams had strayed beyond his proper role as NPR news analyst. This left Williams free to portray himself as a betrayed loyalist, victim of political correctness and martyr for free speech.
“One Town’s War on Gay Teens”, by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone, February 2, 2012
The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, “I would hear people calling people ‘fags’ all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn’t respond.” In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a “faggot,” he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a “lesbo” and a “sinner” – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to “lay low”; the girl would later attempt suicide. At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon from above in a boys’ bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, “It was probably water.” Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed notes saying, “Get out of this town, fag”; when a teacher intercepted one such note, she simply threw it away.
“Obama’s Dangerous Game With Iran”, by Daniel Klaidman, Eli Lake, and Dan Ephron, Newsweek, February 13, 2012
On Jan. 12 of this year, Obama called Netanyahu to clarify again, in part, the national interest and policies of the United States in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. The message has been conveyed repeatedly, via many channels: the administration is asking for “the time and the space for the sanctions to work,” says a senior administration official. “Not only have we put in place the most robust economic sanctions ever, but we’ve just started to move on the energy sector.” Above all, the White House doesn’t want Israel to start a war—not yet, anyway.
“Ghosts in the Newsroom”, by Sarah Ellison, Vanity Fair, April 2012
One attempt to revive it, in 2003, was mounted by Steve Coll, who was then Len Downie’s managing editor and is now the president of the New America Foundation. In the wake of the paper’s ejection from the International Herald Tribune, Coll went to Graham with an idea. “I said, ‘This is an opportunity for us to rethink what our alternative futures are post-I.H.T., in terms of the global and online audience,’ ” Coll told me. “Don encouraged the exercise.”
…In May 2003, at an off-site meeting of top editors at the Inn at Perry Cabin, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Coll and others discussed the findings of the project. Then Graham rose to address the room. “He very emphatically emphasized that the Washington Post franchise was local, and that our emphasis on this opportunity represented a threat to the franchise because it might pull the journalism and energy away from serving the local audience,” Coll told me. “He unintentionally delivered the speech in a way that felt like he had just shot me in the head.”
“Life of the Party”, by Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, March 12, 2012
Romney won twenty-four votes to Gingrich’s eight, Santorum’s three, and Ron Paul’s three. Phyllis, who backed Santorum, told me that Romney won because of his religion. “This is L.D.S. territory, and Romney is L.D.S.,” she said. “They’ll support their own no matter what.”
It was just the sort of caucus that critics of the system, including the late Polsby, feared. It had broken down into factions, based partly on religion. It had devolved into name-calling.
“The Devils in the Diva”, by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair, June 2012
By the late 90s, however, her voice would begin to betray her, and she would have to lower the keys in live performances. The reason wasn’t just cigarettes and her age. Whitney’s drug use escalated after the 1993 birth of her only child, Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown. She started lacing her joints with cocaine, as she later told Oprah Winfrey. She confessed that she would spend her days and nights getting high with Bobby, watching TV, not getting out of her pajamas for seven months, while Brown lost control—“he would smash things, break things … cutting my head off a picture.” In short, she began the degrading process of what Oprah would call “making herself smaller … so the man could be bigger.”
The pop diva was reverting to the New Jersey street kid. “People think I’m Miss Prissy Pooh-Pooh,” she told Time magazine. “But I’m not I can get down, really freakin’ dirty, with you.” She told Rolling Stone, “I can get raunchy I’ve learned to be freer from Bobby.” She said in a later interview, “I started in the hood.” And she admitted, “Yeah, man, I’m what you call a functioning junkie.”
No Arabs Allowed
by Dan Ephron, Newsweek, February 20, 2012
On paper, it looked like a match. Mohammad Ghadir was playing striker for a professional Israeli football team that had too many strikers. Though heralded as a talent, he was spending most games on Hapoel Haifa’s bench. On the other side of the country, Beitar Jerusalem was in desperate need of a player who could score goals. Once a powerhouse, the team now ranked near the bottom of the league. So when Ghadir told an Israeli news site that he was interested in moving to Jerusalem, it seemed reasonable to assume Beitar would make him an offer. His phone never rang. Instead, Beitar fans bristled at the idea, and managers closed ranks around an unwritten policy the team has held to for more than 75 years: no Arabs allowed.
…Supporters of the team have a more nuanced explanation. They say the ban is bound up with Beitar’s history and with tensions in Jerusalem, a city where Arabs and Jews live mostly in their own segregated neighborhoods (Israeli Arabs make up 20 percent of Israel’s population). Until a few years ago, most Israeli football teams were affiliated with political parties. Beitar’s sponsor was the right-wing Likud, the party now headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though Likud was never an overtly Arab-hating party, Beitar became a magnet for right-wing extremists, who would often shout chants like “Death to Arabs” at players of opposing teams. According to an organization that tracks racist outbursts at football games, Beitar Jerusalem is consistently at the top of the list.
Obama’s Dangerous Game With Iran
by Daniel Klaidman, Eli Lake, and Dan Ephron, Newsweek, February 13, 2012
Well before he moved into the White House, Barack Obama began talking to Israel about Iran’s nuclear program, and even then there was mistrust. He met in 2008 with several leading Israelis, including Benjamin Netanyahu—before Netanyahu was elected prime minister—and impressed everyone with his determination to stop Iran from going nuclear. Netanyahu liked much of what he heard, according to a source in his inner circle. What troubled him, however, was that Obama didn’t talk specifically about Israel’s security.
Rather, he discussed Iran in the context of a broader non-proliferation policy. “He showed much command of the issues, even though it was months before he got elected,” says the Netanyahu source. “It was clear that he read and internalized things. But when he spoke about Iran and his opposition to the nuclearization of Iran … the Israeli factor did not play prominently.”
That discomfort has continued through a series of meetings and conversations since both men took office. On Jan. 12 of this year, Obama called Netanyahu to clarify again, in part, the national interest and policies of the United States in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. The message has been conveyed repeatedly, via many channels: the administration is asking for “the time and the space for the sanctions to work,” says a senior administration official. “Not only have we put in place the most robust economic sanctions ever, but we’ve just started to move on the energy sector.” Above all, the White House doesn’t want Israel to start a war—not yet, anyway.
Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Problem
by Dan Ephron, Newsweek, January 2, 2012
Modiin Illit [is] home to about 60,000 Haredim, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Built in the 1990s to help solve the housing shortage for ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem and elsewhere, it’s one of Israel’s fastest-growing cities. “Families here have 10 or more children, on average,” says Yehiel Sever, a spokesman for the community. The city winds along the slopes of several hills and has a synagogue or seminary on almost every block. What it noticeably lacks: parks and playgrounds. Nearly all of Modiin Illit’s residents, because of their low income, qualify for a 90 percent discount in city taxes, Sever says, making it difficult for the municipality to build public facilities or fund services.
The pace of growth in the city is significant not just because it helps perpetuate the poverty. Modiin Illit is actually a West Bank settlement, about a mile inside what Palestinians regard as the territory of their future state. In recent years, Modiin Illit and another Haredi city, Beitar Illit, have become the most populous settlements in the West Bank. And their large numbers lend increasing weight to the argument that the settler population is just too big for Israel to contemplate ceding the West Bank. “This area is so close to the green line,” says Avraham Kroizer, a resident, referring to the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank. “It will never be given back.”
Kroizer, who is 33 and a rabbi, sees the secular angst regarding Haredim as mostly a case of cultural misunderstanding. He says ultra-Orthodox Jews contribute to Israeli society by raising Torah scholars, whose numbers vastly diminished in the Holocaust. “Studying Torah helps protect the Jewish people no less than serving in the Army,” he says. Kroizer’s three sons, like other Haredi youngsters, spend 70 percent of their school day on Torah and Talmud, and 30 percent on “secular studies”—math, history, and grammar (but no English and little science). After eighth grade, the students focus solely on religion. He hopes his boys will remain in seminary throughout their adult lives, but if they decide to enter the workforce, they could close the gaps with their secular brethren by taking adult education classes.
But Haredim are so cloistered, it’s hard to see how they could ever catch up. Kroizer says no one at Modiin Illit owns a television and few residents have computers. This past summer an entrepreneur persuaded rabbis in the city to allow him to open a cybercenter—three computers in a small room above a dingy shopping strip—where customers can access the Internet for about $5 an hour. The computers are reasonably new, but the Internet is filtered through a server that blocks access to all but a few dozen websites—mostly on religious instruction and family services. A search for news sites yielded just one hit—Haredi Jewish Daily News. Wikipedia and Yahoo came up as dead links. “It’s kosher Internet,” the woman behind the counter told me apologetically. “It’s very limited.”
