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Founder of Longreads.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Could You Afford a $400 Emergency? Neal Gabler Says His Financial Confession ‘Was Not an Easy One to Write’

If there are two things Americans are good at, it’s mishandling our finances, and using Twitter to judge those who are in worse shape than us.

Thus we have the perfect Atlantic cover story this week—a refreshingly honest and desparingly relatable personal essay by writer Neal Gabler about his many financial mistakes, as well as a look at why even high-earning families in the U.S. are still living paycheck to paycheck. Gabler told me the piece “wasn’t an easy one to write.” Read more…

Longreads Turns Seven Years Old: Unfinished Business

Just a few of the many current Longreads contributors, to whom we are thankful.

Seven years ago this month I started Longreads. To say the word “longread” has taken hold beyond my wildest expectations would be an understatement. It was a Twitter hashtag experiment — which I started because I wanted story recommendations for my subway commute — that turned into a company, a meme, an original publisher, and, of course, an endless cycle of writers debating whether longform storytelling is good or bad for the internet. (Well, thank god for that.) Read more…

Paul Beatty’s ‘The Sellout’ and the Racism of The Little Rascals

Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty. Image via PBS NewsHour

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

-Paul Beatty’s satirical novel The Sellout, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction (and now the 2016 Man Booker Prize), is a brutally funny-awful-sad-funny riff on racism in America, about an African American man who attempts to re-segregate his hometown — a fictional suburb of Los Angeles called Dickens. Beatty’s protagonist paints a border around Dickens, distributes “No whites allowed” signs to the local businesses, and gets help from a local celebrity, Hominy Jenkins, who was an understudy to Buckwheat and the last surviving cast member of the 1920s and ’30s serial “The Little Rascals.”

Through Hominy we also get a primer on the racist history of Hollywood — what was removed from public view, and what is still on display today. Beatty’s book led me back through my own childhood memories watching “The Little Rascals” in reruns during the early 1980s, unaware of the racist humor that was excised from syndication. Through The Sellout we get a tour of our ugly cultural past — Our Gang and Looney Tunes as just a start — and Beatty’s humor guides us through the injustices of the present.

Further reading:

• Interview with Paul Beatty (Scott Simon, NPR)
• New York Times Book Review (2015)
• An excerpt from The Sellout

The Story of a Marriage: Jenny Offill’s ‘Dept. of Speculation’

“The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.”

-From Jenny Offill’s wonderful 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation — the story of a married couple in Brooklyn, told through snippets of wisdom, anger, love, and bedbugs. In the New York Times Book Review, Roxane Gay called the book “joyously demanding because you will want to keep trying to understand the why of each fragment and how it fits with the others.”

Further reading:

One-Minute Readings: Ben Montgomery Remembers Journalist Michael Brick

Above is a brief tribute to journalist Michael Brick, who died in February at the age of 41. The video features Tampa Bay Times writer Ben Montgomery reading from Brick’s 2006 New York Times story, “Dusk of the Drummer” — and it’s one of many pieces featured in a new collection, Everyone Leaves Behind a Name: True Stories, published by The Sager Group. Proceeds from the book will go to Brick’s wife and children.

In a brief note, Montgomery tells us:

When journalist Michael Brick died from colorectal cancer in February at the age of 41, he left behind a wife, three kids and a body of work that rivals the best of the best. His friends collected his stories in a remarkable anthology, along with original essays from greats like Tom Junod, Gary Smith, Charles Pierce, Amy Wallace, Michael Paterniti, Dan Barry, Chris Jones, Kurt Eichenwald and Wright Thompson. Sales benefit Brick’s family, and the book solidifies his place in American letters.

Thank you, Ben, for sharing, and you can purchase the book here.

The Making of Janet Jackson’s ‘Control,’ 30 Years Later

The way our studio was set up back then was we had a control room where our mix board was and all that stuff, then there was a little lounge right outside with a couch. She was out there sitting and when I put it on, I could see her starting to move a little bit to it, then she got what we called “the ugly face.” The ugly face is something you get when something is really funky. She said, “Ooooh, who is that for?” I replied, “It can be for you, if you want it.” She said, “Oh. I want it.” That song turned into “What Have You Done for Me Lately.” The rest is history. It became the first single.

-Producer Jimmy Jam, at Red Bull Music Academy, reflecting on his and Terry Lewis’s work with Janet Jackson on her smash hit album, Control, released in 1986. The album included hit singles “What Have You Done for Me Lately,” “Nasty,” “Control,” “Let’s Wait Awhile,” and the No. 1 track “When I Think of You.”

Read the interview

Jia Tolentino on the Story of Lori Maddox and David Bowie

At Jezebel, Jia Tolentino has written a superb essay about Lori Maddox, who recounted losing her virginity to David Bowie when she was 15 years old:

There are no precise enough words or satisfying enough conclusions to fully account for her story, or any like it. It’s easy to see what Bowie represents here: a sexual norm that has always appallingly favored men, and the abuse that stems from and surpasses even that. It is easy to denounce the part Bowie played in this, even with any number of purportedly mitigating factors: the political context, Maddox’s story, the fact that he lived with generosity and openness, the less generous fact that his synapses were perpetually blitzed with cocaine. It is less easy to turn over what Maddox evinces in this narrative, from the late 1970s to her account of it now—which is that women have developed the vastly unfair, nonetheless remarkable, and still essential ability to find pleasure and freedom in a system that oppresses them.

The persistence of that reality—that we learn to have sex not in a utopia but within and around whatever norms we are presented with—is why it matters that things were different in the ’70s. It is possible to say that there don’t ever need to be any other Lori Maddoxes without saying that there never were. It is possible for me to read all the rape stories in my inbox and still know with certainty that something enormous is different—and, that acknowledging that is the only way to credit the second-wave women who forced that change with rhetorical fervor that girls now would find insane. It’s because of them that we have both the words to identify power and, now, the freedom to do so more ambivalently. It’s their stringency that spared me from having to know how I would have played it if I’d grown up at a time when there was no vocabulary to separate a party girl from a body for the taking, when grown men said fair game at the age of 13.

Read the essay.

The ‘Airplane!’ Guide to Joke Delivery

We found that it was easier to keep an audience laughing than to start them up all over again.

—David Zucker, in New York magazine, on how he and his co-directors, Jim Abrahams and brother Jerry Zucker, approached comedy and rapid-fire joke delivery with the classic 1980 movie Airplane!. Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker broke down the origins of their classic joke “…don’t call me Shirley.”

Read the story

In Praise of Public Pitching

I’ve always been fascinated by how narrative journalism gets commissioned, reported, and published–but the most perplexing part of the entire system is the continued power imbalance between writers and publishers.

This imbalance persists in spite of the internet “democratizing” publishing. More digital publishers are embracing feature writing, but the process behind the scenes feels stuck in the past–a time-consuming marathon of unanswered emails and rejection. Read more…