Longreads That Caught Our Eye This Week

Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser] We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. The Preposterous Success Story of America’s Pillow King Josh Dean | Bloomberg Businessweek Former drug addict Mike Lindell’s multimillion-dollar idea came to him in a dream. --------------------------------------------------------------- As so many great entrepreneurial success stories do, the tale of Mike Lindell begins in a crack house. It was the fall of 2008, and the then 47-year-old divorced father of four from the Minneapolis suburbs had run out of crack, again. He had been up for either 14 or 19 days—he swears it was 19 but says 14 because “19 just sounds like I’ve embellished”—trying to save his struggling startup and making regular trips into the city to visit his dealer, Ty. This time, Lindell arrived at Ty’s apartment expecting the typical A-plus service and received a shock instead: The dealer refused his business. Ty wasn’t going to sell him any more crack until he ended his binge. He’d also called the two other dealers Lindell used and ordered them to do the same. “I don’t want any of your people selling him anything until he goes to bed,” Ty told the dealers. When Lindell protested, he cut him off: “Go to bed, Mike.” [Read More] How Nat Hentoff’s Love For Individualism Influenced His Jazz And Politics David Reaboi | The Federalist Nat Hentoff was widely known as a muckraking journalist, a defender of free speech and the Bill of Rights but, most of all, as a passionate advocate for jazz. --------------------------------------------------------------- Nat Hentoff, who passed away this weekend at age 91 “surrounded by family listening to Billie Holiday,” as his son Nick wrote, was an American original. He was widely known as a muckraking journalist, a defender of free speech and the Bill of Rights but, most of all, as a passionate advocate for jazz. Summing up his life and career is daunting. There are too many Nat Hentoff anecdotes to cram into the 90-minute evocative and charming (and, sadly, currently unavailable) 2014 documentary, “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step.” But it manages to cover high points like the iconoclastic Hentoff’s friendships with Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, musicians Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, and countless others; his role in kick-starting the career of Bob Dylan; and his impassioned, tireless, and articulate stand in the arena of American politics and culture, defending his beloved Constitution and the liberties it enshrines. [Read More] The Forbidden Fruit of Cuba Isn't Cigars—It's Rum Alyson Sheppard | Esquire An extensive guide to the rich taste—and tumultuous history—of Cuban rum. --------------------------------------------------------------- For Cubans, rum is personal. The spirit is a core part of Cuba's national identity and has, along with cigars, fueled the country's economy for decades. And as diplomatic relations and travel regulations thaw between the U.S. and Cuba, more Americans are becoming interested in all things Cuba, with certain illicit agricultural products at the top of their minds. Americans have been fascinated with Cuban rum for centuries. Soldiers first got a taste of it while fighting the Spanish-American War on Cuban soil. During Prohibition, wealthy Americans chartered private flights to wet Havana to sip rum on the weekends. And of course, there's the mythical lure of Ernest Hemingway, who spent the mid-20th century drinking daiquiris in Cuba's cocktail mecca. [Read More] The Genius of Bernard-Henri Lévy Neil Rogachevsky | Jewish Review of Books The French have called Bernard-Henri Lévy simply by his initials, BHL, since the 1970s. They also call him a philosophe, which, even today, is no ordinary thing. In America, a philosopher is someone explaining that “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; so Socrates is mortal” to an audience of bored 19-year-olds scrolling through their iPhones. In France, a glossy color magazine called Philosophie appears on news-stands—which France has in abundance. A philosophe is heir to the great figures of the Enlightenment, expected to be possessed of effortless learning and culture, a part of the country’s rich literary tradition, who is “engaged,” as well, in public affairs. When BHL first appeared on the scene, more old-fashioned philosophes envied or looked down upon him for his big, broad, flexible approach to public affairs, not to mention his very public private life. To this day, BHL is as likely to appear in the glamorous pages of Paris Match as in Philosophie. In his new book, The Genius of Judaism, he recalls the lesson an old, rich, and cultivated Jew of his acquaintance once gave him about how to combat anti-Semitism: “have nicer teeth than they do; get their women to love you . . . Live in castles as big as theirs.” A promise kept. [Read More] For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II Mike Dash | Smithsonian Magazine In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered a family of six, lost in the taiga --------------------------------------------------------------- Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia’s arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people. [Read More] An Ancient City Emerges in a Remote Rainforest Douglas Preston | The New Yorker Most of the important archaeological sites in Central America were “discovered” by archaeologists who, in fact, didn’t discover them at all but were led to the ruins by local people. I’ve known several Maya archaeologists who routinely started fieldwork in a new area by heading into a dive bar and hoisting beers with the locals while listening to various bullshitters spin tales about ruins they’d seen in the jungle; once in a while, a story would turn out to be true. But, because these sites were long known to local people, they had invariably been disturbed, if not badly looted. [Read More] Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. Our mailing address is: The Federalist 8647 Richmond Highway Suite 618 Alexandria, VA 22309 [Add us to your address book] This email was sent to [{EMAIL}] [why did I get this?] [unsubscribe from this list] [update subscription preferences] The Federalist · 8647 Richmond Highway · Suite 618 · Alexandria, VA 22309 · USA