Search Results for: Adam Sternbergh

Adam Sternbergh on the Wordlessly Expressive Language of Emoji

Photo via Sari Botton's iPhone

Happy World Emoji Day, everyone. The occasion seems an appropriate time to re-read Adam Sternbergh‘s layered history of this “wordless tongue” in the November 2014 issue of New York Magazine. Sternbergh considers not only how those funny little icons came to be, but also how our relationship to them has evolved–and how they make the hard, cold digital world just a little nicer:

When I first encountered emoji, I assumed they were used only ironically—perhaps because, as a member of Generation X, I am accustomed to irony as a default communicative mode. And it’s certainly true that emoji have proved popular, unsurprisingly, with early adopters and techno-fetishists and people with trend-sensitive antennae—the kinds of people who might, for example, download a Japanese app to “force” their iPhone to reveal a hidden emoji keyboard. But emoji have also proved to be popular with the least ­techno-literate and ironic among us, i.e., our parents. Many people I spoke to relayed that their moms were the most enthusiastic adopters of emoji they knew. One woman said that her near-daily text-message-based interaction with her mother consists almost entirely of strings of emoji hearts. Another woman, with a septuagenarian mother, revealed to me that her mom had recently sent a text relaying regret, followed by a crying-face emoji—and that this was possibly the most straightforwardly emotional sentiment her mother had ever expressed to her.

And now we’re getting to the heart of what emoji do well—what perhaps they do better even than language itself, at least in the rough-and-tumble world online. Aside from the widespread difficulty of expressing yourself in real time with your clumsy thumbs, while hunched over a lit screen, and probably distracted by 50 other things, there’s the fact that the internet is mean. The widespread anonymity of the web has marked its nascent years with a kind of insidious incivility that we all now accept with resignation. Comment sections are a write-off. “Troll” is a new and unwelcome ­subspecies of person. Twitter’s a hashtag-strewn battlefield.

But emoji are not, it turns out, well designed to convey meanness. They are cartoons, first of all. And the emoji that ­exist—while very useful for conveying excitement, happiness, bemusement, befuddlement, and even love—are not very good at conveying anger, derision, or hate. If we can take as a given that millennials, as a generation, were raised in a digital environment—navigating, for the first time, digital relationships as an equally legitimate and in some ways dominant form of interpersonal ­interaction—it stands to reason they might be drawn to a communicative tool that serves as an antidote to ambient incivility. They might be especially receptive to, and even excited about, a tool that counteracts the harshness of life in the online world. They might be taken with emoji.

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The Writers’ Roundtable: Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad and Katie Kosma

Eva Holland | Longreads | April 2018 | 23 minutes (5,900 words)

A lifetime ago, it seems, I used to write fiction. I wrote little stories on scraps of paper as a young kid; throughout grade school, I filled my unused notebooks with attempts at novels; I wrote a few short stories in high school and college. But since I started freelancing full-time a decade ago, I haven’t written a single line of fiction.

For a few years now, I’ve been intrigued by the writers who manage to produce both fiction and nonfiction work — the ones who excel on both sides of the divide. How do they do it? Why? Do they prefer one to the other? Does one feed the other? I had so many questions, I finally decided to convene another writers’ roundtable (last time around, we talked freelancing) and I asked a few writers I admire to weigh in.

Benjamin Percy is a Minnesota-based writer of novels (most recently, The Dark Net), comics, and the nonfiction book Thrill Me: Essays On Fiction. His nonfiction stories have also appeared in the likes of GQ, Esquire, Outside, and Men’s Journal. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times, a contributor to GQ and many other fine magazines, and the author of a forthcoming novel. Mary H.K. Choi has written for Wired, GQ, The Atlantic, and more. Her first novel, Emergency Contact, recently debuted on March 27. Adam Sternbergh is an editor at New York magazine and the author of the novels The Blinds, Shovel Ready, and Near Enemy.

ORIGIN STORIES

Eva Holland: When I was younger, I admit I barely even understood that nonfiction writing existed, outside of daily hard news reporting. My understanding of “writing” was entirely “fiction writing,” and I only fell in love with magazines and narrative nonfiction much later. So, my first question is: What came first for you as a writer — fiction, or non?

Benjamin Percy: Growing up, my only doses of nonfiction came from The Oregonian, Time, Newsweek, Fangoria, National Geographic, and Archaeology Magazine. Most of my reading was devoted to novels — mass-market paperbacks with embossed titles and dragons on the cover — and that’s what I hoped to become when I stepped into my first creative writing workshop: a genre novelist. The first time I wrote something that resembled “creative nonfiction,” I was in my mid-20s and only attempted it because a magazine approached me about an assignment.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I was absolutely, definitely, without a doubt going to be a fiction writer or a screenwriter. And then I wasn’t! When I left NYU with a BFA in screenwriting, I realized I had zero version of a plan. I didn’t know what to do, so I got a job that was advertised in the New York Times classifieds (a fiction writer might call this foreshadowing). It was to work at a Soap Opera Magazine. I was still writing screenplays, but they weren’t good—they were cynical, in the way that ’90s screenplays were cynical. And I was taught how to write those things so that they would sell, not so they would be meaningful. So I worked at the soap opera stuff, and I wrote profiles of the actors. I was going to get back into fiction…one day. But it was always hovering in the background. It seemed very fancy to me, to write a novel. And very big and out of reach. I became a freelance writer after a time, and realized I couldn’t devote the amount of time to a novel that a novel would need because I couldn’t bet so many working hours on something that wasn’t a sure thing. Read more…

🗺️ Emoji Day: A 📖 List

Image by Dimitri Otis / Getty Images

👋 July 17 is 🗺️ Emoji Day! To 🎉 this ever-changing visual language that we use on our 📱 and 💻 and across social media, here are five 📖 recommendations — including a delightful post series on a blog about punctuation — on the history and evolution of the emoji. 😘

1. A Series on Emoji (Keith Houston, August 2018-January 2020, Shady Characters)

Don’t have time to read 10 posts? 😛 Adam Sternbergh’s 2014 New York magazine piece, “😊, You’re Speaking Emoji,” covers the emoji’s evolution.

On his blog Shady Characters, Houston tells the histories of our favorite punctuation marks, from the ⁉️ to the #️⃣. In a 10-part series on the emoji, he chronicles the beginning; its ancestor, the emoticon; its adoption outside of 🗾; the gatekeepers; its presence in the 📰; the challenges in making the character set more inclusive and representative; its future; its nature (“What are emoji?”); and, in the series conclusion, its current state. Don’t overlook the reference 📜 at the bottom of each post, which include even more recommended stories and articles.

It was into this text-only world that emoji’s first true an­cestor was born. Com­pris­ing only a colon, a hy­phen and a clos­ing par­en­thesis, the emoticon, or :-), was per­fectly de­signed to pierce the dis­in­ter­ested blank­ness of a crt mon­itor. Gran­ted, so-called emoticons have been dis­covered in many pre-di­gital sources, such as sev­en­teenth cen­tury poems:

Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ru­ins, (smil­ing yet:)
Tear me to tat­ters, yet I’ll be
Pa­tient in my ne­ces­sity.

and tran­scrip­tions of Ab­ra­ham Lin­col­n’s speeches:

…there is no pre­ced­ent for your be­ing here yourselves, (ap­plause and laughter;) and I of­fer, in jus­ti­fic­a­tion of my­self and you, that I have found noth­ing in the Con­sti­tu­tion against.

“Emoticon, Emoji, Text: Pt. 1, I Second That Emoticon” by Tom McCormack in Rhizome covers this joke gone wrong in more detail.

but these are al­most cer­tainly ty­po­graphic mis­steps rather than in­ten­tional smi­leys. The con­sensus is that emoticons proper ar­rived in 1982 in re­sponse to a joke gone wrong on an elec­tronic bul­letin board at Carne­gie Mel­lon Uni­versity.

2. How Emoji Conquered the 🌎 (Jeff Blagdon, March 2013, The Verge)

Blagdon tracks the beginnings of this digital communication through the 👀 of Shigetaka Kurita, the 💡👨🏻 of emoji.

Windows 95 had just launched, and email was taking off in Japan alongside the pager boom. But Kurita says people had a hard time getting used to the new methods of communication. In Japanese, personal letters are long and verbose, full of seasonal greetings and honorific expressions that convey the sender’s goodwill to the recipient. The shorter, more casual nature of email lead to a breakdown in communication. “If someone says Wakarimashita you don’t know whether it’s a kind of warm, soft ‘I understand’ or a ‘yeah, I get it’ kind of cool, negative feeling,” says Kurita. “You don’t know what’s in the writer’s head.”

Face to face conversation, and even the telephone, let you gauge the other person’s mood from vocal cues, and more familiar, longer letters gave people important contextual information. Their absence from these new mediums meant that the promise of digital communication — being able to stay in closer touch with people — was being offset by this accompanying increase in miscommunication.

“So that’s when we thought, if we had something like emoji, we can probably do faces. We already had the experience with the heart symbol, so we thought it was possible.” ASCII art kaomoji were already around at the time, but they were a pain to enter on a cellphone since they were composed with multiple characters. Kurita was looking for a simpler solution.

3. Everybody 😊💩 (Mary Mann, August 2014, Matter)

Mann discusses her conflicted feelings around her use of emojis: she’s fascinated by their ability to encapsulate our emotions so succinctly, and that they are understood across 🇺🇸🇯🇵🇫🇷🇨🇳🇧🇷 and 👶🏻🧒🏻👩🏻👵🏻, but also 🤦🏻‍♀️ to rely so heavily on them.

And of course emojis are inherently silly, but that’s not in and of itself a bad thing. Silliness is not necessarily an indication of shallowness. In fact, I’d argue the opposite: A capacity for real silliness is usually born out of pain. We’re attracted to silliness because we need it. We need it because life isn’t easy.

Your mom is sick.

Your grandfather died.

You got laid off.

Your company folded.

Your rent went up.

Your husband left.

He didn’t call.

She didn’t call.

They never call.

All these things happen every day, to billions of people all over the world. And if a stupid cartoon of smiling poop makes you feel better, well, that’s:

😜 + 💡

4. The 👄 History Of The 💩 Emoji (Or, How Google Brought 💩 To 🇺🇸) (Lauren Schwartzberg, November 2014, Fast Company)

Schwartzberg compiles an 👄 history on the origin and evolution of the beloved 💩 emoji, created in 🇯🇵 and brought to the 🇺🇸 by a team at Google.

Darick [Tong, Google 👨🏻‍💻 and 🇺🇸lead of its emoji project]: It struck me as a particularly flexible and effective emoji. It provides a way to say shit or crap in an email without explicitly typing the words, and it catches the reader’s attention in a way that smiley faces don’t. Most importantly, it always elicits a smile from the reader and the writer, which is ultimately the purest purpose of emoji: to add emotional expressiveness to written communication.

5. Emoji Don’t Mean What They Used To (Ian Bogost, February 2019, The Atlantic)

While it makes sense for emoji to cover the range of the human experience, Bogost ✍🏻 that “more specificity means less flexibility,” and that this visual language has shifted away from the abstract. More choices at our 📱fingertips changes the way we select and use emoji, viewing them more as 🖼️ rather than 💡. “Counterintuitively, all these emoji are less applicable because they contain more information.”

A skull (💀) almost never means that the speaker has a braincase in hand, Hamlet-like, but rather offers an ashen reaction or a lol, I’m dead sentiment. An emoji originally designed to signify an Eastern bow of greeting or politesse (🙇‍♂️) takes on the more abstract meaning of mild subjugation or psychic deflation in the West. Fire (🔥) could mean a campfire or house fire, but more often it suggests enthusiasm, ferocity, or even spice. Eggplant (🍆) could denote a nightshade, but more likely it suggests, well, something else. These and other meanings are possible because the emoji function primarily as ideograms.

But as emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded.

Losing the Middle Ground

Bettmann / Getty

Middle children, your worst nightmare may be coming true: you really are fading into the background. In a cruel self-fulfilling twist on the Middle Child Syndrome, statistics show that a family’s ideal size has shrunk to two kids, leaving the middleborns to go the way of the mastadon. More than just numbers, those in the middle often exhibit strong traits of empathy, diplomacy, and liberalism. Adam Sternbergh of The Cut asks: what are we giving up as a culture if we lose the Jan Bradys?

According to a study by the Pew Research Center in 1976, “the average mother at the end of her childbearing years had given birth to more than three children.” Read that again: In the ’70s, four kids (or more) was the most common family unit. Back then, 40 percent of mothers between 40 and 44 had four or more children. Twenty-five percent had three kids; 24 percent had two; and 11 percent had one.

For Hopman, middle children are primarily distinguished by an inexhaustible need for attention, a description from which he does not exempt himself. “Britney Spears: middle child,” he points out. “Kesha: middle child. Nicki Minaj: middle child. Also a middle child: Don King.”

“Middle children are evaporating from life, and that isn’t good for all of us,” says Kevin Leman, who literally wrote the book on the subject, his 1985 The Birth Order Book: Why You Are the Way You Are, which has sold over a million copies. “Middle children are like the peanut butter and jelly in the sandwich,” he explains. As for the coming extinction event, he says, “If you like a sandwich with nothing on it, enjoy.”

Birth order also appears to play a part in the decisions of Supreme Court justices. A 2015 paper in Law & Society Review found that, among the 55 justices who served from 1900 to 2010, oldest and only children showed a strong tendency toward conservative ideology, while middle and youngest children favored liberal decisions.

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Living Differently: How the Feminist Utopia Is Something You Have to Be Doing Now

Cover of program for the National American Women's Suffrage Association procession. (Getty Images)

Lynne Segal | Verso | November 2017 | 32 minutes (8,100 words)

The following is an excerpt from Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, by Lynne Segal (Verso, November 2017). This essay is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

The utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.

It is sometimes said that the twentieth century began with utopian dreaming and ended with nostalgia, as those alternative futures once envisioned seemed by then almost entirely discredited. However, it was never quite so straightforward. The challenge to envisage how to live differently, in ways that seem better than the present, never entirely disappears.

The most prominent American utopian studies scholar, Lyman Tower Sargent, notes that dystopian scenarios increasingly dominated the speculative literary form as the twentieth century progressed. In the UK, the equally eminent utopian studies scholar Ruth Levitas concurs, pointing out, for instance, that as sociology became institutionalized in the academy, it became ‘consistently hostile’ to any utopian content.

What stands out in speculative fantasies of the future arising towards the end of the twentieth century are their darkly dystopic leanings, whether in books, cinema, comics or elsewhere. The best known would include the mass surveillance depicted in the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s satirical novel We (1921).

Set in the future, it describes a scientifically managed totalitarian state, known as One State, governed by logic and reason, where people live in glass buildings, march in step, and are known by their numbers. England’s Aldous Huxley called his dystopic science fiction Brave New World (1932), where again all individuality has been conditioned out in the pursuit of happiness. Bleaker still was George Orwell’s terrifyingly totalitarian 1984 (1945): ‘If you want a picture of the future,’ Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

These imaginings serve primarily as warnings against futures that are often read, as with Zamyatin and Orwell, as condemnations of Soviet society. The happiness expressed in Huxley’s ‘utopic’ universe depicts a deformed or sinister version of the route where all utopias end up, as totalitarian regimes, in which free will is crushed. As the Marxist political scientist Bertell Ollman later noted: ‘From a means of winning people over to the ideal of socialism, the utopian novel had become one of the most effective means of frightening people off it.’

Post-1945, public intellectuals for the most part broadcast the view that democracy and utopic thinking were opposed, the latter declared both impossible and dangerous. The influential émigré and British philosopher of science Karl Popper argued in his classic essay ‘Utopia and Violence’ (1947) that while ‘Utopia’ may look desirable, all too desirable, it was in practice a ‘dangerous and pernicious’ idea, one that is ‘self‐defeating’ and ‘leads to violence’. There is no way of deciding rationally between competing utopian ideals, he suggested, since we cannot (contra Marxism) scientifically predict the future, which means our statements are not open to falsification and hence fail his test for any sort of reliability.

Indeed, accusations of ‘totalitarian’ thinking were the chief weapon of the Cold War, used by Western propaganda to see off any talk of communism. In the USA it was employed to undermine any left or labour movement affiliations, as through the fear and financial ruin inflicted upon hundreds of Americans hauled before Senator McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s – over half of them Jewish Americans. Read more…

New York’s Times Square as a Mirror of the City Itself

Throughout New York’s history, Times Square has served as a bellwether of the city’s current mood — as well as the perceptions of the city, both for those who live here and those who don’t. Once, Times Square was a high temple of glamour, the glowing heart of a go-go metropolis. Then it, like the city around it, slid into seedy decline. When much of New York was sleazy and dangerous, nowhere seemed sleazier or more dangerous than 42nd Street. And when Times Square came to feel too touristy, it mirrored a parallel worry that New York itself was losing some of its intrinsic grit. Times Square exists less as a crossroads than as a repository for our collective hopes and fears for the city. Now it’s entering a new phase — perhaps the strangest, most inscrutable one yet.

Adam Sternbergh, writing in New York Magazine about the history and future of New York’s iconic Times Square.

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His best-known novel, Et Tu, Babe, was published 20 years ago, but now the writer has returned (with a new book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack) to a world that matches the absurdity of his pre-Internet work: 

On Charlie Rose [in 1996], Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Mark Leyner sat together in the familiar round table, infinite-void-of-nothingness that is the Charlie Rose set. Each responded to Rose’s questions about the state of fiction more or less in character: Franzen, who had a wavy pageboy haircut that frizzed out untempered to nearly chin level, defended the classical novel as an oasis for readers who feel lonely and misunderstood. Leyner, wearing a robust, Mephistophelian goatee — perhaps fitting for the man Wallace once accused of being “a kind of anti-Christ” — said simply: ‘My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.’ Wallace looked much as we picture him now, posthumously chiseled into Mount Literature: the ponytail, the bearish features, the rough scruff on his jaw. He played the part of a calming, Midwestern-inflected mediator, saying, ‘I feel like I’m, if you put these two guys in a blender… . ‘

“Mark Leyner, World-Champion Satirist, Returns to Reclaim His Crown.” — Adam Sternbergh, New York Times

See also: “Just Kids.” — Evan Hughes, New York magazine, Oct. 10, 2011

Inside the social media factory created by former Huffington Post cofounder Jonah Peretti—how they’ve cracked viral content, invested in original content, and made money: 

At around 5 p.m., Stopera published ‘48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the ’90s’ on BuzzFeed. ‘These pictures are all that and a bag of chips!’ he wrote at the top of the list. A BuzzFeed visitor with an appetite for ’90s nostalgia could scroll down, gawk at the 48 retro images, read the deadpan captions, recall Bob Saget, Tipper Gore, and Scottie Pippen, laugh at the crazy fashion, and resurface to the present day in a matter of minutes. It racked up 1.2 million page views.

“BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?” — Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Can CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen Turn Viral Funny into the Future of TV?” — Adam Sternbergh, New York magazine, Dec. 13, 2010

New York Magazine's Ben Williams: My Top Longreads of 2011

Ben Williams is the online editorial director at New York Magazine.

•••

1. Celebrity profiles are the hardest genre to make fresh. So props to GQ for doing it not once but three times, with Jessica Pressler on Channing Tatum, Edith Zimmerman on Chris Evans, and Will Leitch on Michael Vick. With Pressler and Zimmerman, what’s great is the willingness of both subject and writer to play, and the dynamic between them—these pieces exploit the “profile as date” subtext really well. It’s fun to think about them as a sort of inverse to Jennifer Egan’s brilliant satire of the profile biz in A Visit From the Goon Squad.  In the Vick piece, what I like is the way that Leitch uses the PR apparatus around the process of profiling Michael Vick to reveal what’s at stake for him. He didn’t get much time with Vick, just a photo shoot and a phone call, but he used it to both explain and complicate the Michael Vick Story that the quarterback’s handlers want to tell. 

2. There are a bunch of New Yorker stories I could pick—Ryan Lizza’s “leading from behind” piece on Obama’s foreign policy was so influential; Jane Mayer on Thomas Drake and state secrets was fascinating and moving; Kelefah Sanneh not only wrote a great analysis of Odd Future, he tracked down their missing member; David Grann is David Grann—but my favorite was Jeffrey Toobin’s take on Clarence Thomas. There are so many things going on here: It’s a revisionist view that frames Thomas as very smart and canny; it shows how one justice can move the entire Supreme Court over decades through the way opinions are written; it sets the stage for next year’s healthcare ruling as a culmination of Thomas’s entire mission; and it makes clear once again just what a strange, extremist man he is.

3. Overall, my favorite thing in the new New York Times Magazine is probably the Riffs section—it identified a gap in the preview-and-review saturated culture journalism market, which is (relatively) long form argument/idea-driven pieces. To pick a few highlights: Dan Kois’s piece on avant-garde movies kicked off a fierce, endless, at times kind of ridiculous debate that just about every movie critic had to weigh in on; Adam Sternbergh’s piece on jokeless comedies defined an era; Sam Anderson on Derek Jeter both mocked empty sports hagiography and read like a hilarious version of Donald Barthelme. Alternate winner in this category is the New York Review of Books, which published some of the best cultural essays this year—Daniel Mendelsohn on Mad Men and Spiderman, Lorrie Moore on Friday Night Lights, and Dan Chiasson on Keith Richards were all delightful and provocative.

4. I just loved Paul Ford’s “The Web is a Customer Service Medium.” It’s the kind of piece that would be hard to get into a print magazine for various reasons, but it resonated instantly online. It’s a pretty abstract argument about a subject that’s not exactly under-analyzed—what is web content about, and how is it different from other forms of content?—but it opens by coining a phrase which instantly makes sense to anyone who works on the web: “Why wasn’t I consulted?” And then it goes on to make a very detailed, specific, convincing, and non-buzzword-filled argument that isn’t formulated expressly to piss off anyone who works in “old media,” which is refreshing.

5. Finally, some favorites in the emerging multimedia genre of longform tweeting. I probably read more words on Twitter than anywhere else this year, and I am grateful for the stamina of those who somehow manage to tweet and retweet extended thoughts all day, every day on specific themes. I learned as much about the Arab Spring by dipping into @acarvin’s feed as from any essays about it. @daveweigel is constantly insightful, and one of the few people capable of being funny about politics. Following @questlove’s stream is like listening to the world’s kindest, most passionate music geek.

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