Author Archives

Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

ROKIT, MOTOWN and NIMOY: How Aviation Waypoints Get Their Names

Route map of the world's scheduled commercial airline traffic, 2009. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Then there is the intriguing way airways are navigated, using radio beacons and “waypoints”, spots defined by geographic co-ordinates or their bearing and distance from a beacon. These waypoints are typically given five-letter capitalised names that are supposed to be simple enough for any controller or pilot to recognise them, regardless of their first language.

Europe’s sky-mappers turn out to have taken a fairly business-like approach to naming their waypoints, though there is a TULIP off the Dutch coast and England has a DRAKE, for Sir Francis. Australians have had a bit more fun, naming points off their west coast WONSA, JOLLY, SWAGY, CAMBS, BUIYA, BYLLA, BONGS, in honour of the opening lines of the country’s unofficial national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda”. The Americans have just gone mad. Detroit has MOTWN and WONDR (Stevie was born in Michigan). Houston has a ROKIT for its Space Center. There is a NIMOY in Boston (where Leonard was born) plus several local culinary references (CHWDH, LBSTA and CLAWW) and SSOXS, STRKK and OUTTT for the Red Sox baseball team.

Pilita Clark writing in the Financial Times about the future of flying.

Read the story

See Also: “The Secret Language of the Skies” (Deborah Fallows, The Atlantic, 2013)

The Origins of Lilly Pulitzer

[Lilly Pulitzer] Rousseau’s story has been oft-told over the years: Born the middle of three daughters into a socially prominent family in Roslyn, New York, Lilly McKim attended all the right schools (Chapin, Miss Porter’s) with all the right people (Jacqueline Bouvier was a schoolmate at Miss Porter’s) before eloping in 1952, at age 21, with newspaper scion Peter Pulitzer. The pair moved to Palm Beach, where Pulitzer operated a successful citrus grove business, and his bride quickly had three children: Peter Jr., Liza and Minnie. The couple threw fabulous parties, famously tossing water on the tiled kitchen floor of their great big house overlooking Lake Worth so that everyone could do the twist after dinner. Lilly herself became known for “not giving a whit,” according to her longtime friend Susannah Cutts, accruing a menagerie of dogs, cats, monkeys and even a calf (“those awful animals,” Rousseau says now). But then, in 1958, Lilly’s sunniness began to fade. “I had terrible anxiety attacks,” she says, “so I went to the nuthouse.” The nuthouse was a psychiatric hospital in Westchester County, New York—“I can’t really remember how long I was there, but my cousin was there too, so that was nice”—and she returned home armed with but one piece of medical advice: Get a hobby.

“Peter said, ‘Well, why don’t you sell my oranges?’” recalls Rousseau, who promptly started pulling her station wagon up her tony neighbors’ driveways, delivering fruit. The stand quickly followed, though Lilly discovered her crisp white shirts and shorts were becoming ruined with juice stains. “So I went to the five-and-dime, bought some fabric, took it to the seamstress, and she did it up,” Rousseau says, noting that she wanted dresses that were “colorful and cotton and cool,” with slits up the sides for bending over. She even hung a few up in the stand, selling them for $22.50 a piece.

The town went wild. “I couldn’t keep up with all the orders!” she marvels. Soon Lilly was flying regularly to Key West, where she created the prints along with a “gay as your hat” designing couple who ran a textile business called Key West Fabrics.

Sarah Haight profiling designer and Palm Beach doyenne Lilly Pulitzer Rousseau in the December 2008 issue of W Magazine. Pulitzer Rousseau died in 2013.

Read the story

See Also: “Palm Beach’s Barefoot Princess” (Laura Jacobs, Vanity Fair, 2003)

Bill Withers Has Been Out of the Spotlight for So Long That Some People Think He Died

Bill Withers in a 1976 promotional shot. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Withers has been out of the spotlight for so many years that some people think he passed away. “Sometimes I wake up and I wonder myself,” he says with a hearty chuckle. “A very famous minister actually called me to find out whether I was dead or not. I said to him, ‘Let me check.’ ”

Others don’t believe he is who he says: “One Sunday morning I was at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. These church ladies were sitting in the booth next to mine. They were talking about this Bill Withers song they sang in church that morning. I got up on my elbow, leaned into their booth and said, ‘Ladies, it’s odd you should mention that because I’m Bill Withers.’ This lady said, ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You’re too light-skinned to be Bill Withers!’ ”

Andy Greene, profiling Bill Withers for Rolling Stone. 

Read the story

In the Khmer Language, the Verb ‘to Eat’ Literally Translates as ‘Eat Rice’

Photo by Pixabay

In Khmer language, the verb “to eat,” yam bai, literally translates as “eat rice.” Klean bai, which is how you say you are hungry, literally translates as “hunger for rice.” Rice is the staple accompaniment of every meal in Cambodia, and a driving force behind the economy. The grain is an accompaniment to a variety of meats—mostly fish from the abundant Tonlé Sap and Mekong Rivers—usually spiced with some combination of lemongrass, soy, and ginger. Popular dishes like amok (fish curry) and salam machu (sweet-and-sour fish soup) employ simply prepared ingredients and bright, fresh flavors to produce some of the most delicious, healthy—yet relatively unknown—peasant food the world over.

Richard Parks, writing in the Summer 2012 issue of Lucky Peach about “Khmerican food”—the fused cuisines of America and Cambodia. His piece finds an unlikely subject as its driving force: doughnuts, specifically Cambodian-owned California doughnut shops. A recent count found that 90 percent of all independent doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodians.

Read the story

The Importance of Philadelphia to the Work of David Lynch

Philadelphia, 1977. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Philadelphia looms large in the personal mythology of David Lynch as a place that both terrorized him and changed the course of his life, his Gomorrah and his Rubicon in one. A product of small-town America, Lynch credits this onetime epicenter of urban blight with instilling in him a fear and disgust so extreme it opened a mental pathway to “another world.” He transfigured the city’s postindustrial dereliction into the infernal wasteland of his first feature film, Eraserhead (1977), and the dying gasps of its manufacturing age—clanking gears, droning machines, venting steam—indelibly shaped his aesthetic vocabulary. It was art school that brought Lynch to Philly in 1966, and it was in his studio at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he experienced an epiphany that, in the familiar telling, moved him away from painting. The story appears in his memoir-cum-self-help-guide, Catching the Big Fish (2006). He was at work on a painting of plants in a garden when he sensed a wind emanating from within the canvas, seeming to stir the leaves under his brush. What if paintings could move? he wondered. What if they had sound? The rest is cinema history.

Dennis Lim writing about David Lynch in the January 2015 issue of Artforum.

Read the story (sub req’d)

So You Want to Be Cryonically Frozen—What Happens Next?

Alcor agreed to accept Matheryn as a patient, and enrolled her as a member. The initial plan was to fly Einz to the United States while she was still alive, so Alcor’s team could perform the procedure domestically. That procedure is complex and highly invasive; the BBC calls it “intense.”

It involves moving the patient onto an ice bed, coating her in freezing materials, artificially restarting the heart with a “heart-lung-resuscitator,” administering over a dozen different medications, draining the blood and replacing it with medical grade antifreeze, opening the chest cavity to attach the major blood vessels to a machine that flushes out all remaining blood, then slowly lowering the body’s temperature, at a rate of 1˚ Celsius every hour. (After two weeks, the body reaches deep cryofreeze at -196˚ C.) Alcor had selected  a well-equipped pediatrics hospital in California for the job.

Brian Merchant, writing for Vice about two-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong, the younger person to ever be cryonically frozen.

Read the story

The Astronauts and the ‘Nutella Incident’

Concept for NASA human Mars mission. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Their persistently cheery e-mail updates [from the crew in the Hawaii-based simulation] raise a question: Does a happy crew tell NASA anything useful? Binsted argues that upbeat blog posts don’t always tell the whole story. Small gripes often emerge in the post-study interviews, when subjects know that their replies will be kept anonymous. It was only at the end of one of the four-month food studies in the dome, for instance, that Binsted heard from everyone about the “Nutella incident,” in which a crew member arrogantly finished off the group’s monthly ration, reasoning that the team was scheduled to open a new bin the next day. Stuster’s work with isolated crews found many examples of trivial annoyances growing unbearable, such as complaints from one of Byrd’s Antarctic crewmen about another man’s “way of breathing, his belief in dreams, and his frequent use of the phrase ‘I’m sorry.’ ” Stuster’s latest study for NASA, on private journals kept by astronauts, fairly hisses in places with steam let off by astronauts irritated by overscheduling, by patronizing requests, and by pointless-seeming tasks coming from ground control, such as recording serial numbers on items of trash. In the Mauna Loa dome, crew members simply roll their eyes when Binsted’s far-flung volunteer assistants do something lame, like expecting an immediate response to an e-mail sent when everyone is still asleep, because the sender forgot that sMars, like Hawaii, is not on daylight-saving time. Binsted calls it “crew-ground disconnect,” and deals with the problem in ways that are summarized by her use of the term “mission support,” rather than “mission control.”

Tom Kizzia, writing in The New Yorker about how NASA is preparing its astronauts for the long-haul isolation and travel that a possible Mars expedition would require.

Read the story

People, Let Me Tell You ‘Bout My Best Friend

Photos by Wikimedia Commons

Ringo first met [Harry] Nilsson after the singer did a gonzo version of Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep-Mountain High.” “It was bordering on madness, and so we thought, ‘We gotta meet this guy,’ ” says Ringo. While Nilsson’s destructive friendship with Lennon got the ink — they drunkenly heckled the Smothers Brothers at L.A.’s Troubadour, and Nilsson infamously ruined his voice doing a cover of “Many Rivers to Cross” with Lennon sitting at the console — it was the drummer in the world’s most famous band and the songwriter who hated playing live who became inseparable as they drank away the 1970s.

“He was my best friend,” says Ringo softly. “Yeah. I loved Harry.”

The two made an unwatchable Dracula movie together and tried to collaborate through their drug-and-booze haze. “I had one song with 27 verses that I gave to Harry to edit, and he got it down to about eight verses,” Ringo says. “It never got recorded.”

—Stephen Rodrick, profiling Ringo Starr for Rolling Stone.

Read the story

Who Wrote ‘Happy Birthday’?

Photo by Pixabay

Most musicologists who’ve traced the origins of “Happy Birthday” agree that its musical score dates back to the work of two Kentucky sisters in the late 19th century: Mildred Jane Hill (b.1859), and Patty Smith Hill (b.1868).

After graduating as valedictorian of Louisville Collegiate Institute, Patty went on to be a central figure in the progressive education movement, endorsing hands-on learning techniques and interactive teaching methods. She invented “Patty Hill Blocks” — a set of large, cardboard bricks that children could use to learn about structural engineering — and then founded the Institute of Child Welfare Research at Columbia University Teachers College.

In 1889, while serving as a kindergarten teacher at a Kentucky grade school, she began working on a set of childrens’ songs with her older sister Mildred, a well-known organist, composer, and “Negro music” scholar. Four years later, the two released their first collection of tunes in a book titled “Song Stories for the Kindergarten.” Among the songs, was a little ditty entitled “Good Morning to All,” which would later be the source of the sheet music for “Happy Birthday.”

Zachary Crockett writing for Pricenomics about who owns the copyright to “Happy Birthday.” Update: On Tuesday, September 22, a federal judge struck down Warner/Chappell Music’s long-standing claim to the copyright for “Happy Birthday.”

Read the story

How Does a Magazine Go About Calculating the Financial Cost of Gun Violence?

To begin to get a grasp on the economic toll, Mother Jones turned to Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an independent nonprofit that studies public health, education, and safety issues. Miller has been one of the few researchers to delve deeply into guns, going back to the late 1980s when he began analyzing societal costs from violence, injury, and substance abuse, as well as the savings from prevention. Most of his 30-plus years of research has been funded by government grants and contracts; his work on guns in recent years has either been tucked into broader projects or done on the side. “I never take positions on legislation,” he notes. “Instead, I provide numbers to inform decision making.”

Miller’s approach looks at two categories of costs. The first is direct: Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations, and long-term medical and mental-health care, as well as court and prison costs. About 87 percent of these costs fall on taxpayers. The second category consists of indirect costs: Factors here include lost income, losses to employers, and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death.

Mark Follman, James West, Julia Lurie, and Jaeah Lee writing in Mother Jones about the magazine’s six-month-long investigation into the financial costs of gun violence in America.

Read the story