Author Archives

Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

Identify an Aesthetic, and Then Recreate That Aesthetic

To understand why Urban Outfitters and American Apparel have declined so spectacularly, it’s helpful to remember what it was that made them so successful in the first place. In their heyday, each made a science of identifying exactly what it was that made hipsters so attractive, then recreated that aesthetic in their stores.

They mass-marketed the counterculture by honoring art, music, and fashion of the past; rejecting traditional lifestyles and careers; and appreciating irony. “You would flip through one of their lookbooks or walk into their stores and think, I am in this world,” Brandes recalls. They made a hard-to-define bohemian lifestyle accessible to an entire generation of young people growing up in the cookie-cutter suburbs.

Urban Outfitters and American Apparel identified their target audiences, moving into neighborhoods with a high density of 18 to 25 year olds who were beginning to experiment with their personal style and values. In college towns, students looking to express their newfound interest in indie rock or ’80s nostalgia could put together an entire look in a matter of minutes at one of these stores; they didn’t need to dig through bins of old T-shirts at Goodwill anymore. Even though you weren’t technically thrift shopping, the ambiance and layout inside these stores mimicked the experience, making you feel like you were stumbling across rare, special objects.

Elizabeth Segran writing for Racked about the decline of the “hipster brand,” and why American Apparel and Urban Outfitters are struggling.

Read the story

The Inner Workings of an ID Theft Ring

Illustration by I-5 Design

New sketched out the organization. “Jackboys” were responsible for breaking into cars. They would smash up spark plugs, keeping the pieces in their mouths, then pop the windows with the fragments, cracking the glass. “They wrap something around their arm and break it,” New explained. The jackboys hit gyms and daycare centers. “They like Starbucks,” New said. “Women like to hurry and rush in and leave their purses in the car with the door open.” The jackboys were careful to use ordinary vehicles that wouldn’t draw attention. “They never use the cars with the rims. No flashy cars.”

The aim was to scoop up as much of the sensitive personal information from a victim as possible. “We want your social security card,” New explained, “’cause you’ve got to have that number to get the information from the bank. We’re going to look for credit cards that have your bank emblem on it, ’cause we’re going to know what bank you go to so we don’t have to call all the banks. Then I call all the credit cards, the numbers on the back, and put in your account number and see what your credit is on the cards. How we test them to see if they’re still on or if they’ve been reported is by going to a gas station and just slide it through. If it says ‘See Attendant,’ we know it’s burnt. And then we have to keep the ID, the social security card, and one major credit card, ’cause you need the second form of ID to do the check.”

New’s role was as a “casher.” Taking a stolen ID from one victim and a stolen check from another victim, she would write a check to the name of the person on the ID — and then dress like that person and go cash the check.

The charade involved theater-major panache. Cashers dressed up in wigs, dyed their hair, and donned makeup to pull off the scam. “I even played a black lady and a Chinese lady,” New bragged to cops in her interrogation. “The wigs make it.”

The crew had a set payment plan for cashers: If they cashed checks between $1,800 and $2,500, they walked away with $400; checks between $1,000 and $1,800 got the casher $200. Another scam had the casher walking into stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Macy’s to open new cards and immediately buy merchandise; the bill would be sent to the victim weeks later.

Kyle Swenson, writing in the Broward New Times about a ring of ID thieves known as the Felony Lane Gang.

Read the story

When You Make Lifetime Movies, Everyone Wants to Tell You Their Story

Screengrab, 'Pregnancy Pact' Trailer: YouTube

Still, the classic Lifetime movies were the rare piece of pop culture where everyone was in on the joke. As executives talk excitedly about the channel’s new direction, they’re well aware of the extreme curious passion for the low-budget, tabloid-themed movies of Lifetime’s early days. The overwrought acting; the incredible titles; the out-of-control drama; the plots that centered around all the terrible things that could happen, ever. Did we mention the incredible titles?

“Yes, I’ve heard every horrible event in almost everyone’s life I’ve met,” confesses Arturo Interian, the network’s vice president of original movies who started at Lifetime in 2001 and still gets idea pitches from strangers. “I’ll put it this way: People will tell you about some physical ailment they’ve had and it’s very awkward to say, ‘Well, you know, I’m sorry about your terrible limp. But it’s not really a movie.’ ”

***

“I get e-mails constantly from everyone that anytime something horrible happens, they just assume it’s a Lifetime movie,” Interian said. “It’s like, ‘Some cannibal ate his wife; Arturo, make this a movie!’”

—From “The Delightfully Weird History of Lifetime Movies,” Emily Yahr’s retrospective of the network and iconic franchise for the Washington Post. Over the last few years, Lifetime has made a concerted effort to distance itself from its “guilty pleasure” image. Yahr chronicles the network’s quarter-century history in her piece. Of particular note is the network’s relationship to women: even as it retools its voice and image, the network continues to be “a haven for movies about complicated female protagonists (still a rarity in Hollywood) as well as female directors.” About half the network’s films are helmed by women, a statistic that takes on particular weight when compared to the staggeringly low industry standard of around 6 percent.

Read the story

Why Watching ‘Survivor’ Is Like Watching Sports

The sense of participation is key, both in competition-based shows like Project Runway and programs like Dance Moms that don’t have a prize, but position players as teams in drama-filled social acrobatics. The format “invites the audience to participate, either directly (through voting) or indirectly (by imagining how they might behave in similar situations),” Papacharissi says.

Dawson suggests these shows are more closely related to sporting events than scripted dramas. In the case of Survivor, viewers get an experience similar to televised sports, Papacharissi explains: “You can root for your favorite castaway like you do for your favorite team, and vicariously experience her triumphs and setbacks from episode to episode.”

That unlikely alignment could explain why reality TV, mocked though it may be, is being watched—perhaps surreptitiously—heavily, and with consistency. “The core elements of Survivor are pretty much the same as they were when the show debuted in 2000,” Dawson says, an unusual feat for any series in the current TV climate. “It’s a pretty unexpected turn of events, that 15 years after its debut, the show that was responsible for starting the reality TV tidal wave that dramatically disrupted the status quo of the American TV industry has become a sort of year-in, year-out institution.”

Lizzie Schiffman Tufano, writing in Pacific Standard about how reality television conquered the airwaves, and “unseated the Rachels and Monicas of the world.” The new season of Survivor, which debuted last week, is the show’s 30th.

Read the story

In Honor of National Grammar Day: What It Was Like to Copy-Edit Pauline Kael

In honor of National Grammar Day—a relatively recent addition to the holiday mix, established in 2008—we are celebrating the copy-editing of Mary Norris. Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker’s copy department, and in a recent piece for the magazine she reflected on her life in grammar:

There were competent writers on interesting subjects who were just careless enough in their spelling and punctuation to keep a girl occupied. And there were writers whose prose came in so highly polished that I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to read them: John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier! In a way, these were the hardest, because the prose lulled me into complacency. They transcended the office of the copy editor. It was hard to stay alert for opportunities to meddle in an immaculate manuscript, yet if you missed something you couldn’t use that as an excuse. The only thing to do was style the spelling, and even that could be fraught. Oliver Sacks turned out to be attached to the spelling of “sulphur” and “sulphuric” that he remembered from his chemistry experiments as a boy. (The New Yorker spells it less romantically: “sulfur,” “sulfuric.”)

When Pauline Kael typed “prevert” instead of “pervert,” she meant “prevert” (unless she was reviewing something by Jacques Prévert). Luckily, she was kind, and if you changed it she would just change it back and stet it without upbraiding you. Kael revised up until closing, and though we lackeys resented writers who kept changing “doughnut” to “coffee cake” then back to “doughnut” and then “coffee cake” again, because it meant more work for us, Kael’s changes were always improvements. She approached me once with a proof in her hand. She couldn’t figure out how to fix something, and I was the only one around. She knew me from chatting in the ladies’ room on the eighteenth floor. I looked at the proof and made a suggestion, and she was delighted. “You helped me!” she gasped.

Read the story

How an Online Forum Made the World’s Oldest Profession Less Dangerous

Omuro started Redbook so that Bay Area mongers would have a home on the web. It succeeded, ultimately attracting so many users that the site became a full-fledged business, with massive profits. But when RedBook was shut down, the people who were hit the hardest weren’t the buyers, but the sellers—sex workers like Cathy for whom the site had made the world’s oldest profession significantly less risky.

One of the ways the site reduced danger for workers was by making it easier for them to weed out bad dates, from poor tippers to full-on abusive creeps. Providers could choose to meet only customers who were well known and well liked on RedBook’s forums, and some workers even required references from other escorts on the site before taking on a new client. “RedBook provided a space to safely negotiate and screen clients that reduced the likelihood of being victimized by predators or cops,” says Kristina Dolgin of the Sex Workers Outreach Project, a national advocacy group.

***

If sex workers simply want to buy an ad, they can still use Cityvibe, Lovings, Backpage, and Eros Guide. RedBook was different, in that its vast network of message boards made it possible for workers to not only advertise but ask questions of one another, find support, and even make friends. This is one of the things that Siouxsie Q, a sex worker in Oakland, misses most about RedBook. “We lost a critical resource for building community,” she says. “And building community is already tough enough when you’ve been marginalized and your work is criminalized.” Women used RedBook’s forums to share everything from jokes to medical and financial tips that were useful to people in the sex industry, she says.

Eric Steuer writing in Wired about the rise and fall of the Bay Area website myRedBook.com (commonly referred to as RedBook). RedBook, which was shutdown last year by law enforcement, “served as a vast catalog of carnal services, a mashup of Craigslist, Yelp, and Usenet where sex workers and hundreds of thousands of their customers could connect, converse, and make arrangements for commercial sex.” Many sex workers have struggled since the site’s shutdown, with an activist from the Electronic Frontier Foundation quoted as saying that its closure has actually brought more sex workers out onto the street.

Read the story

The Reporter at the Ayahuasca Tea Ceremony

Céu de Maria: Flickr, Lou Gold

In a piece for the Financial Times John Paul Rathbone wrote about the murder of Glauco Villas Boas, one of Brazil’s best-known cartoonists. Glauco was a leader of the Céu de Maria church, one of the many churches in Brazil that treat hallucinogenic ayahuasca tea as a sacrament. The young man charged with murdering Glauco had partaken in the religious rituals of the church, and the murder provoked a heated national debate about the dangers of ayahuasca. While reporting the story Rathbone took part in an ayahuasca ceremony at Céu de Maria, which is described in the excerpt below:

Beatriz pointed me to a seat near the front and rang a captain’s bell to announce the start of the service. The congregation filtered in, some 200 people chatting easily among themselves. There were all types: young, old, fat, thin, black and white. Some looked like pirates, their faces etched with poverty; others like bank managers with the complexion that only a good diet brings. I was impressed by the social mingling and sense of community, so rare in Brazil, one of the world’s most unequal countries.

Beatriz nodded. To her left, four guitarists and a flautist, all men, began to play; to her right, a choir of women began to sing. The rest formed a queue at the back of the church where the tea was served in shot glasses. I knocked back an acrid brown mixture that tasted of rotten leaves and sat down again. The songs continued and a gentle lassitude filled my limbs. Two hours later we drank another glass. Some of the congregation sang; most sat quietly, absorbed in inner states. Occasionally, someone would go outside and I would hear vomiting. All the while the singing continued.

“I have had a dream,” comments Bottom when he awakes in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” I remember a feeling of waves. Around midnight, Beatriz had handed me a book of songs that Glauco had composed. The room suddenly seemed to fill with energy and joy. A drum began to sound, joining the guitars, flute and falsetto voices of the girls, and I remembered a phrase of St Teresa, the Catholic mystic: “Words lead to deeds . . . They prepare the soul, make it ready and move it to tenderness.” I heard the music as if listening to stereo for the first time, and the high chorus of a song penetrated me with its words: “I pray to my holy Father with extraordinary joy, extraordinary joy . . . ”

Read the story

Meet the Man Behind the First Slavery Museum in America

The Whitney Plantation, mid-restoration in 2008: Flickr, Corey Balazowich

He was driving around the Whitney in his Ford S.U.V., making sure the museum would be ready for the public. Born and raised in New Orleans, Cummings is as rife with contrasts as the land that surrounds his plantation. He is 77 but projects the unrelenting angst of a teenager. His disposition is exceedingly proper — the portly carriage, the trimmed white beard, the florid drawl — but he dresses in a rumpled manner that suggests a morning habit of mistaking the laundry hamper for the dresser. As someone who had to hitchhike to high school and remains bitter about not being able to afford his class ring, he embodies the scrappiness of the Irish Catholics who flooded New Orleans in the 19th century. But as a trial lawyer who has helped win more than $5 billion in class-action settlements and a real estate magnate whose holdings have multiplied his wealth many times over, Cummings personifies the affluence and power held by an elite and mostly white sliver of a city with a majority black population.

“I suppose it is a suspicious thing, what I’ve gone and done with the joint,” he continued, acknowledging that his decision to “spend millions I have no interest in getting back” on the museum has long been a source of local confusion. More than a few of the 670 residents of Wallace — 90 percent of whom are black, many the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers who worked the region’s land — have voiced their bewilderment over the years. So, too, have the owners of other tourist-oriented plantations, all of whom are white. Members of Cummings’s close-knit family (he has eight children by two wives) also struggle to clarify their patriarch’s motivations, resorting to the shoulder-shrugging logic of “John being John,” as if explaining a stubborn refusal to throw away old newspapers rather than a consuming, heterodox and very expensive attempt to confront the darkest period of American history. “Challenge me, fight me on it,” he said. “I’ve been asked all the questions. About white guilt this and that. About the honky trying to profit off of slavery. But here’s the thing: Don’t you think the story of slavery is important?” With that, Cummings went silent, something he does with unsettling frequency in conversation.

“Well, I checked into it, and I heard you weren’t telling it,” he finally resumed, “so I figured I might as well get started.”

David Amsden writing in the New York Times Magazine about John Cummings and Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation. Cummings has spent the past fifteen years and $8 million of his personal fortune turning the plantation into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery in America.

Read the story

How Paul Rand Made Companies Care About Design—And Influenced Steve Jobs

NeXT Poster by Paul Rand: Flickr, Graham Smith

It was the success of [Paul] Rand’s corporate communications for IBM in the ‘50s that inspired future businesses, including Steve Jobs’s NeXT, to put design first. When Thomas Watson Jr. took over IBM in 1956, he was struck by how poorly the company handled corporate design. The aesthetic was inconsistent across various platforms–for example, “branches in different regions would use different stationery,” Albrecht says… “Watson Jr. was one of the first to say ‘good design is good business,'” Albrecht says.

Led by design consultant Eliot Noyes, previously of the New York Museum of Modern Art, this program ultimately hired Charles and Ray Eames to do IBM’s exhibitions and books, architect Errol Saarinen to design buildings, and Paul Rand to design new logo and graphics. “Rand made everyone use his logo and branding,” Albrecht says. At the time, this sort of visually cohesive communication across all platforms of a brand was just gaining traction as a business strategy.

***

In the ’80s, the power of IBM’s visual communications program inspired Steve Jobs, a longtime admirer of Rand’s work, to hire Rand as a designer for NeXT, his educational computer company. “Rand was the first and only designer Jobs looked to,” Albrecht says. One reason for Rand’s success with clients, aside from the sheer beauty of his visual work, was that he was “one of the guys,” Albrecht says. “He wasn’t coming into boardrooms acting like an artiste. He was very down-to-Earth, and fit into this Brooklyn boys’ world of corporate advertising in New York.”

“In a way, what Apple does today with design is what IBM was doing in ‘50s,” Albrecht says. “It was about simplification and cohesiveness across all platforms of the brand–products, ads, stores. These are all ideas in the modern vein that came about with Rand’s work with IBM. It set a precedent.”

Carey Dunne, writing for Fast Co.Design about how the legendary graphic designer Paul Rand pioneered the era of design-led business. Rand created some of the most iconic American corporate logos, many of which are still in use today. László Moholy-Nagy described him as “an idealist and a realist,” fluent in both “the language of the poet and the businessman.” There is currently an exhibit of Rand’s work at the Museum of the City of New York, and Dunne spoke with Donald Albrecht, the exhibit’s curator for her piece. As a side note, Rand’s seminal—and famously hard to find—book Thoughts on Design is back in print for the first time since the 1970’s.

Read the story

Fact-Checking ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’

[William] Powell quit his job and began writing for up to ten hours a day. Despite the title, there is nothing about anarchism as a political theory in the book, which focuses on drugs, surveillance, weapons, and explosives. About drugs, Powell knew plenty. He had overcome a speed habit, smoked lots of pot, consumed his fair share of LSD, and seen lives destroyed by heroin. What he didn’t know he borrowed from underground publications like the Berkeley Barb, passing on tips that hadn’t been fact-checked. As it turns out, one cannot get high by eating banana peels that have been boiled and baked, or smoking crushed peanut shells. (Powell was right, however, about nutmeg’s hallucinogenic potential.) Nor had the city’s sewer system been taken over by “New York white,” the giant marijuana plants said to be the result of people flushing seeds to avoid arrest. “The sewer plants usually reach a height of between 12 and 15 feet and are bleached white because of the lack of sunlight,” Powell wrote, in the authoritative voice that permeates the book.

He researched the other sections at the main branch of the New York Public Library, flipping through the card catalogue and returning with books such as the U.S. Army Field Manual for Physical Safety and Homemade Bombs and Explosives. He holed up in the building for months, reading about wristlocks and tear gas and nitroglycerine. Most of the book is a cut-and-paste creation; when Powell’s voice does emerge beneath the technical-manual speak, it’s usually in the form of a cocky young man trying to sound streetwise beyond his years. About explosives, he wrote: “This chapter is going to kill and maim more people than all the rest put together, because people just refuse to take things seriously.”

Gabriel Thompson, writing in Harper’s about The Anarchist Cookbook and it’s author, William Powell. The book was published in 1971 when Powell was an angry and disaffected nineteen-year-old; today, he is a sixty-five-year-old grandfather. Powell has spent much of the last four decades fighting to take the book out of print. For further reading, check out Powell’s 2013 op-ed on the topic, which ran in The Guardian.

Read the story