The news from the Middle East remains grim. The State Department has issued a worldwide travel advisory. China has dramatically expanded its nuclear arsenal. And a U.S. warship has intercepted multiple missiles near Yemen.
But fear not! Disciples of Bengali guru Sri Chinmoy have been trying to do something about it.
Today in The Free Press, Suzy Weiss reports from Queens, where the world’s longest certified footrace, which takes place in almost endless laps around a four-block loop for 3,100 miles, has just finished. “The goal,” says one participant of the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, is “to bring humanity together.”
How’s that working out?
Down 84th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, around the four blocks that circle Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School, 14 people are running 3,100 miles in an attempt to do an even harder thing: transcend themselves.
“It’s a spiritual journey,” Jason Lester, the only American runner taking part, tells me during his 50th lap of the 33rd day of the 52-day race.
I’m wheezing, trying to keep up with him and Adrian Papuc, who came to Queens from Romania. I’m far too late in the game and far too out of shape—I ran high school cross-country, but was the slowest on the team and once lost a trail race to a girl on crutches—but I’m not past trying to achieve some measure of inner peace, especially these days. Even if it means getting up early on a Sunday to take the train, then a bus, to jog around a high school.
When I ask Lester why he thinks he’s the lone U.S. citizen he retorts, “I don’t see myself as an American. We’re all one.”
“The goal of this is to bring humanity together, and stop having these borders,” he explains. “There’s no way that we’re gonna be one in any of our issues that we have until we take those walls down.”
Also in The Free Press today, Nancy Rommelmann writes about this week’s big movie release. Killers of the Flower Moon marks a moment that Native American actors, including her father-in-law, have been dreaming of for decades: a major film in which they can tell their own stories, have their stories told, and be portrayed not as caricatures but as fully human.
It’s 1985, and I am 24—a few years removed from smoking cigarettes in front of the Baskin-Robbins in Brooklyn Heights.
I’m in Georgetown, South Carolina, and I jump off the back of the production van and directly into the path of two men wearing Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots. I recognize the older one, his silver hair braided with red ribbon, as the actor Will Sampson, who played Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He is with his son Tim, with whom I will fall in love.
We are filming a PBS miniseries, Roanoak, and Will again plays the role of chief. At six feet, seven inches, he is a commanding presence.
Before becoming an actor, Will, a full-blood Muscogee, or Creek, had been a rodeo rider, a lineman, and an artist. The Cuckoo’s Nest producers had heard about a “big Indian” and tracked him down. After a few days on set of hurry-up-and-wait, Will had gotten back in his pickup and driven away—fuck this noise. But he’d been cajoled back and made history. (The movie remains one of only three to have won the Big Five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay.)
You can find our latest coverage of the Israel-Hamas war here.
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It's good exercise 💪
Very looking forward to KFM.
Hi, I have a question that is more of an app or system than content. I use the audio on Substack to read the articles. I’m very dyslexic and it helps me immensely. The way that the FP has been doing these embedded post disables the audio for the read more articles. Is there a way around that? Am I doing something wrong or is it the way it works? I’ll try to reach out to Substack too but just wanted to see if anyone here or maybe someone at the FP can figure it out. Thanks