Author Archives

Em Perper
Bookseller, writer, editor.

A Visit to the Outer Banks

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There are small shifts from year to year, variations that are traditions in themselves: We alternate who gets first pick of the bedrooms, which duo makes the expedition to the Food Lion to buy a car-load of groceries, which family hosts the mid-week covered dish supper, who cooks what and when. The first night we always pick up pizza from the place down the road. At some point all the women convene at The Top Dog for a “long ladies lunch,” followed by a stop at the Pea Island Gallery. There are trips to pick up more beer, wine, chips, bread and cream cheese (a top five of Things We Always Run Out Of), a wild goose chase or two in search of some hard-to-find ingredient for dinner. Inevitably someone will need to drive to the far-away state-run liquor store to re-up. One day will probably be consumed by rain.

There is a short list of things we could do that we haven’t done before, that we talk about doing while knowing we probably will not do them.

-At Vela, Eryn Loeb returns to the shores of North Carolina, juxtaposing the subtle changes to the landscape with the familiarity of her family’s routine.

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Photo: James Jordan

Obsessed With Racking Up Credit Card Reward Points

In the credit card blogging community, the main objective is to amass travel rewards. Consumers can opt for other alternatives, like receiving cash back or purchasing gadgets from their credit card company’s overpriced catalog, but rewards tend to weigh out in favor of travel perks. The value of a first class ticket to Seoul on Korean Air, for example, is $13,000, but can be bought with 160,000 miles—miles that can be earned with a few of the right credit cards.

Most credit card obsessives align the hobby with a love of travel; they tend to suffer from strong cases of wanderlust or want to see family living abroad. As Emily Jablon, who runs the blog Million Mile Secrets with her husband Daraius Dubash, puts it, “We’re able to travel to places we’d never have gone otherwise, and we’re making memories that will last a lifetime. We’ve taken my parents on a world trip, we visited my grandmother in Florida before she passed away. Just in the last two years, we’ve gone on $220,000 worth of trips and we didn’t pay anywhere close to that out of pocket.”

— At Racked, Chavie Lieber investigates the dedicated—obsessive?—credit card users who rack up millions of points and thousands of dollars to travel first-class and score the best deals, as well as their busy, blogging mentors.

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Four Stories About Disordered Eating

(TW: eating disorders, weight loss, body image.)

No woman I know has a 100 percent healthy relationship with food, with eating. Our childhoods deny us. We see the furrowed brows of our moms and our sisters; we hear the offhand comments about the women on TV or read headlines in Impact font on the magazines at the grocery checkout. Even in the most well-intentioned comments, there is a veiled threat. “You look so thin.” “I could never wear that.” “Have you lost weight?” You don’t always look this good. Careful, or you might not be able to wear that one day. You were fat before, and fat is the enemy. I’ve met many people who would say they’ve had experiences with “disordered eating”—I’m one of them. I never binged or purged, I never purposefully starved myself, but in college, eating fell by the wayside. I was depressed and overworked, and food didn’t seem important.

I think many of us have experiences with disordered eating, subconsciously or not. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), 95% of those with eating disorders are between 12 and 25 years old. That’s middle school, high school, and college, right there. That’s the first few years out of college when many of us (myself included) are negotiating how to cook, what snacks to bring to our office jobs, where we can afford to buy groceries despite thousands of dollars in student debt.

I’ve gained weight. Even though I identify as a body-positive feminist, I lament my fat rolls to my boyfriend. I cry and tell him I’m the fattest one in my friend group (as if there was something wrong with that!). As though my body is quantifiable through a number on a scale or the fit of my old jeans. I can buy new jeans. I can learn to love my body. Read more…

The Tell-Tale Hairs of Edgar Allan Poe

A reporter for the Baltimore American was there when the coffin was first re-opened, where it was inspected by a small gaggle of curious onlookers. According to him, the skeleton was “almost in perfect condition, and lying with the long bony hands reposing one upon the other,” while the skull had “some little hair…still clinging near the forehead.”

– In the 19th century, hair from loved ones was clipped as a sort of “memento mori,” a secular relic. Around the country, Edgar Allan Poe’s hair has turned up in attics and libraries. Is it all legitimate? Elon Green writes about it at Atlas Obscura.

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How Many Gigs Does It Take to Make It in NYC?

The gig economy (“a phrase which encompasses both the related collaborative economy and sharing economy”) is inescapable. AirBNB (now in Cuba) and Uber flood your feeds regularly. Chipotle recently announced its partnership with delivery startup Postmates—burritos at your doorstep are imminent (Quality? Price? Questionable). These companies seem successful, but what about the individuals who carry out their mission statements—the couriers, the hosts, the drivers? Is there genuine money to be made in the gig economy? Is it an economically—and emotionally—viable means of support? For one month, Sarah Kessler attempted to employ herself using TaskRabbit, Fiverr, Skillshare and other “sharing”-centric companies. It didn’t go well.

When I come across the task, “Proposal Flash Mob in Central Park,” I know immediately that I am exactly the wrong person for the job. The training video opens in a mirrored dance studio, with a man in a tight-fitting black t-shirt. “Please make sure you are familiar with this choreography before you commit to that rehearsal so we don’t have to waste any time,” he explains in a high-pitched voice before counting out about three minutes of what looks to me like complex choreography. During slow claps at baseball games, I’m the fan who claps on the wrong beat. A real rabbit might have a better chance of learning this dance.

But the job pays $20, and because it involves a two-hour rehearsal beginning at 8 a.m., it could help me finally achieve an elusive goal I had been working toward for weeks: a full day of micro-entrepreneurship employment. I had already lined up a personal assistant gig for mid-afternoon, and I had bids out on a handful of odd jobs in the evening. Experience has taught me not to count on any of these, but still, here was the morning timeslot that could lead me to an eight-hour workday. I accept the offer.

And then I immediately panic.

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Jessica Hopper on Being a Writer Who’s ‘Rough Around the Edges’

I was told by editors that my weird auto-didactic style and reference points…basically my lack of a college or journalistic education meant the quirks in my writing hadn’t been bred out of me when I went on to be a full-time writer. I was told that again and again until I was like, oh, perhaps that’s my calling card: I’m a little bit rough around the edges. I do not have this critical framework … I did not come in with anything more than a high school education and an absolute devotion to music and a very sincere desire to give everyone my opinion about everything at all times.

– Jessica Hopper is the author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, editor of The Pitchfork Review and a legend in her own right. Anupa Mistry recently interviewed her for The Hairpin about living outside of NYC, her brilliant writing team and feeling like an outsider.

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A Collection of Stories About Not Choosing Motherhood

Here’s the thing: Moms, on an individual basis, may be taken for granted throughout much of the year, but motherhood itself is a status symbol. It’s a time-honored, accepted, even revered, path. Having children is, supposedly, one of the most fulfilling, important, life-affirming things a person could ever do.

So I wanted to write about women (rather, people—not everyone with a uterus identifies as a woman) choosing, actively, not to be mothers. I wanted to find joy in a countercultural narrative. And, yes, I wanted to write about this on Mother’s Day. Because it’s a day some well-meaning family member or total stranger might say, “So, when are you going to have kids?” It’s none of their business, but also, not everyone wants to have kids, and that’s totally okay. These folks have given their decisions a lot of thought—choosing not to parent at all is as big a decision as choosing to have a baby, or two, or five. It isn’t flippant, or silly, or selfish, as you’ll read in these essays and interviews.

• Author Meghan Daum has done her part in bringing childless-by-choice into the contemporary public consciousness; she edited the anthology Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have KidsThe table of contents boasts essays from Lionel Shriver, Geoff Dyer, Daum herself and a host of other authors. I enjoyed this interview with Daum at Jezebel, especially this line: “Choosing not to have kids is actually a way of showing respect for parenting (at least good parenting) and is ultimately good for kids because it creates a society in which kids are truly wanted”. Peep her own essay, “Opting Out of Motherhood,” at Harper’s. And if you’re intrigued by the anthology, I recommend Courtney Hodell’s beautiful piece on chosen childlessness at Elle. She’s a great storyteller. Read more…

When Adjunct Professors Bag Groceries to Get By

Photo: Megan Byrd

The day in January I brought my job application back to the grocery store, I assumed I’d just be dropping it off…

Scott flipped the application over again, looked at my info, then back up at me. “How many hours are you hoping for?”

I was teaching two three-credit undergraduate courses at one college near my home in Connecticut and a three-credit class at another, along with a private writing workshop Tuesday nights. I also write weekly reviews for a TV website and do private editing work when it’s available. I’m 44 years old. My wife and I have two teenagers. The town we live in is one of the most expensive in the country.

“As many as you can give me,” I said.

— Matt Debenham, adjunct professor and grocery store employee, for BuzzFeed.

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The Skin I’m In: Stories By Writers of Color

I wanted to share these stories about love and music and beauty and family. These stories are also about hair, about plastic surgery, about skin color, about contending with the harmful standards imposed by white privilege. They’re all written by writers of color, whose stories don’t always get the air time they deserve. My inspirations for this list: summer is coming; Arabelle Sicardi’s unique aesthetic; my haircut; Baltimore; and more. I hope you find a writer you love and a story that resonates with you, today.

1. “Hair Trajectory.” (Sharisse T. Smith, The Los Angeles Review, April 2015)

This essay blew me away. Sharisse writes about the history of her hair: the painful braiding process, and how it affects every aspect of her life. The offensive questions from strangers. The nervousness she feels when she finds out she’s pregnant with a girl, and the irony infused in her daughter’s desire to imitate her mom’s many fashions. Read more…

The Almost-Real Science in ‘Orphan Black’

Photo: a olin

On television, women don’t usually play grownup human beings; they play slightly oversize children, helpless and pouty, driven by appetites they can’t possibly understand. At the show’s surfeit of interesting, adult females, the mind reels. That they are merely egg containers would seem boringly reductive, in a biology-is-destiny way, except that it’s such an interesting answer to science fiction’s big question: Who creates life? It could be said that “Orphan Black” is a feminist “Frankenstein,” if it weren’t true that “Frankenstein” was a feminist “Frankenstein” … One trick, in “Orphan Black,” is keeping the story ahead of the science; another is keeping the women ahead of the men.

— If you’re not watching “Orphan Black,” a BBC sci-fi drama about six? eight? twelve? clones, each played by the unbelievably talented Tatiana Maslany: start. Today, preferably. (The third season premiered earlier this month—two seasons won’t take long to binge-watch.) At the New Yorker, Jill Lepore draws parallels between the vaguely nefarious scientific undertakings on “Orphan Black” and the very real history of eugenics, germline editing, genome mapping and birth control. “Orphan Black” stands at the crossroads of feminist television—full of brilliant, distinct women who are, to cop another popular TV show’s theme, strong as hell—and controversial science.

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