Author Archives

Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

How Many People Does It Take To Power Times Square?

Times Square is one big, busy machine. Powered by American ingenuity and more than a few megawatts of electricity, these six square blocks stay bright 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ve seen Times Square in movies and on TV a million times. A lot of you have probably seen it in real life, teeming with chaos and glowing with capitalism. But how exactly does all that work? The shops and restaurants are one thing, but what exactly makes Times Square such a functional, perpetual spectacle?

That’s a complicated question. Obviously there are the workers themselves. Times Square supports some 385,000 jobs, a little over half of which are in that bright sliver of Midtown, while the other half are strewn across the country supporting Times Square operations from designing the content on the signs to keeping the power plants that power them on line. All together, they help generate about 11 percent of New York City’s economic output, or about $110 billion annually, according to the latest figures. These are the men and women who man the ticket booths, who sell the T-shirts, who clean the hotel rooms, and who keep everyone safe. And since about 350,000 pedestrians pass through Times Square on an average day—that number jumps to 460,000 on the busiest days—that’s no small task.

Adam Clark Estes, writing in Gizmodo about how Times Square—”New York City’s biggest gadget”—operates.

Read the story

More stories from Gizmodo

Photo: Chalky Lives, Flickr

The Remnants of Maycomb: What Happened to Harper Lee’s Hometown

Maybe it wasn’t just Nelle’s insecurity that held her back from becoming “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” but also the dismaying decline of the “small-town middle-class” idyll she’d staked her career on documenting. She had, after all, written a historical novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed not in Monroeville but on an L.A. lot. There were — still are — remnants of Depression-era Monroeville, not least the old Federal-style courthouse. But even as the film came out, a drab new courthouse was being built next door. Downtown’s only movie theater burned down not long after Mockingbird had its first run, and was never rebuilt. In 1997, the city was dubbed “The Literary Capital of Alabama,” prompting Lee, who wasn’t consulted on the nickname, to remark, “The literary capital of Alabama doesn’t read.”

Harper Lee’s assisted-living apartment is on Highway Bypass 21, just a couple of blocks from the town’s real commercial center, a series of malls. There’s a place called Radley’s Fountain Grill down that way, and an old stone wall that once separated Lee’s childhood home from Capote’s — both long gone, replaced by a takeout shack called Mel’s Dairy Dream. Lee prefers the more generic places by the lingerie factory outlet (a remnant of the old Vanity Fair plant). Before her stroke, she could be found at Hardee’s, or better yet at McDonald’s, gulping down coffee during long chats with friends. (There were higher-end expeditions to the local golf club and to casinos on the Gulf coast.) When she watched an advance screening of the biopic Capote at a neighbor’s house — the Lees had no television — she opted for Burger King.

Boris Kachka for Vulturewriting about Harper Lee and her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

Read the story

Photo of the Monroe County Heritage Museum

How to Make Friends and Win Over Bodega Owners

Grabbing the attention of consumers was a big part of the game. Vita Coco bought a van, painted it ocean blue and loaded it with free samples and with women who would jump out and Hula-Hoop on the streets. Zico hired college students to roll coolers around the city.

Bodega owners were often the toughest audience. To make inroads faster, Vita Coco hired a ringer, a former Vitaminwater salesman named Michael Goldstein, identified on his business card and known to almost everyone as Goldy. One name. Like Prince.

“You’ve got to be a little bit of a psychopath,” says Goldy of life as a beverage salesman in Manhattan. “You’ve got to love pain, love being yelled at.”

He and his team memorized phrases in Spanish, Arabic, Korean and Hebrew and quickly learned to tailor their pitches to different ethnicities. Owners from the Middle East wanted to haggle. Dominicans wanted to know why they needed anything other than Goya. When all else failed, $20 was slapped on the counter, though that didn’t always work.

Read the story

More stories about coconut water

Photo: Benben, Flickr

Could the Ideal Mormon City Be One of Inclusion?

In a recent piece for The Big Roundtable, Daniel A. Gross profiled Alasdair Ekpenyong, a gay Mormon struggling to make sense of his sexuality within the context of his faith. Alasdair sought answers in many venues, including alternative communities and Mormon history. From the story:

That winter, Alasdair began to write a series of academic essays about the Mormon city. This was the topic that his former bishop studied, the topic that Alasdair had been researching at the commune back in April. He still worked for that bishop sometimes, combing through old Mormon documents that might illuminate the spiritual dream of a utopian city. The bishop had supported him for a long time. He had been there at the end of Alasdair’s mission, after that first sexual experience with Rick, and during Alasdair’s transition to earning a living without his mother’s support.

In those months and months of research, Alasdair felt he had found some deep kernel of truth. He had read the prophet Joseph Smith’s writings on architecture and urban planning, writings that had deeply influenced the layout of both Provo and Salt Lake City. Smith had mapped out the city of faith he imagined. It was a careful grid, split up for farms and factories, for houses of worship and houses of men—each of the many pieces that comprise a House of the Lord. “Let every man live in the city,” wrote Smith, “for this is the city of Zion.”

One of Alasdair’s essays took Smith’s command literally. In the city Alasdair described, perhaps a man did not need to date a woman to remain in the church. He proposed a city designed for inclusion, a city with fewer locks and more doorways.

Read the story

More stories about religion

Photo: Miami University Libraries, Flickr

‘Orange Is the New Black’ as a Trojan Horse for Prison Reform

When Piper optioned her book to Jenji Kohan, the creator of Weeds, a number of people were asked to sign over something called “life rights.” In short: Some version of our lives could be depicted on the show, and we each agreed not to sue its creators if, for example, the character based on one of us was depicted as snobby, dopey, bitchy, overbearing, short, whatever. There’s a tremendous amount of trust that Piper had to put in Jenji.

If the show was unrealistic, salacious, or just plain bad, it could tarnish Piper’s book, a serious, accessible, and largely sex-free window into the women’s federal prison system. It was also a memoir written by a reluctant memoirist. Piper is a private person who told her story because she believed she could get a lot of people to pick up a book about prison who probably wouldn’t otherwise. Through this “Trojan horse” protagonist who might remind them of themselves, their daughter, or their niece, readers would get a peek into the diverse and complex world of women in prison: who they are, what happens when they get there, and what kind of world they’re dropped back into when they are released. The reaction to the book Orange Is the New Black gave Piper an opportunity to speak out on criminal justice reform—an opportunity very few prisoners have. The decision to give such a personal work over to a stranger—albeit an Emmy-winning one—looks easy now. Back then it wasn’t.

Larry Smith, husband of Piper Kerman, writing in Medium about the other true story behind “Orange Is The New Black”—his own life.

Read the story

More stories about OITNB

 

Photo: PEN American Center, Flickr

Solitude, and the Contrast Between the Outside World and Our Inner Selves

There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory about that feeling of self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances in which we can feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and our inner selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of solitude-on-display that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that “street haunting,” as she called it, allows you to lose and then find yourself in the rhythm of urban novelty and familiarity. She was drawn to the figure of the hostess: the woman-to-be-looked-at, standing at the top of the stairs, friendly to everyone, who grows only more mysterious with her visibility. (One of the pleasures of throwing a party, Woolf showed, is that it allows you to surprise yourself: surrounded by your friends, the center of attention, you feel your separateness from the social world you have convened.) She showed how parents, friends, lovers, and spouses can become more unknowable over time, not less—there is a core to their personhood that never gives itself up. Even as they put their lives on display, she thought, artists thrive when they maintain a final redoubt of privacy—a wellspring that remains unpolluted by the world outside. “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter,” Clarissa thinks, at the end of “Mrs. Dalloway.” Of course, it’s the chatter—the party—that helps her know that she has something to lose in the first place.

Joshua Rothman, writing in the New Yorker about Virginia Woolf’s idea of privacy.

Read the story

 

Calling Their Mothers From the Front Lines

And in the middle of this tumult, I came back to the relative calm of my hotel room in the Hotel Palestine. There was no electricity. Sunlight slanted horizontally into the dusty, dim corridors and I saw at the end of the passage, outside my room, two figures silhouetted against the white glare of the sun. As I approached I saw that they were soldiers, their uniforms stained with the mud of the Tigris valley, Americans, for they were cradling US Army assault rifles in their arms.

They were an intimidating presence. Until they spoke. “Sir,” one of them said, and there was a quiet, shy deference in his voice. I saw that they were young, achingly young, perhaps 19 years old, lettuce-fresh faces above long, lean, loose-limbed frames – no more than boys in the grown-up garb of desert camouflage. “Sir,” he went on, “we heard that there was a satellite phone in this room. We haven’t been able to call home in four months.”

They were the first in a little trickle of young US servicemen who would come to my room for this purpose in the weeks that lay ahead. What struck me with great poignancy was this – that almost always they phoned their mothers. From the other side of the room you would hear the phone sound in some far place in Kentucky or Idaho. The boy would say “Hi Mom!” and then you would hear the excited, disbelieving scream of delight echoing down the line.

BBC correspondent Allan Little recalls a memory from the spring of 2003, during his time covering the war in Iraq. Little’s essay explores the role of civilian correspondents from the battle front, as well as the “magnetic pull that war has on the young male imagination.”

Read the story here

Image: “Paths of Glory” by Christopher Nevinson, via Wikimedia Commons. The painting, which depicts a World War I battlefield, was deemed bad for morale and immediately censored. 

How the 'Williamsburg Effect' Is Transforming Brooklyn's Jury Pool

Brooklyn’s courthouses are being rocked by the “Williamsburg Effect.”

The influx of well-off and educated white people to trendy neighborhoods such as Williamsburg is rapidly “gentrifying’’ the borough’s jury pool — and transforming verdicts, lawyers and judges told The Post.

It’s good news for prosecutors in criminal cases — and bad news for plaintiffs in civil lawsuits, they said.

“The jurors are becoming more like Manhattan — which is not good for defendants,’’ noted veteran defense lawyer Julie Clark.

“They are . . . much more trusting of police,” Clark said of the jurors. “I’m not sure people from the University of Vermont would believe that a police officer would [plant] a gun.’’

Former Brooklyn prosecutor and defense lawyer John Paul DeVerna said, “The ‘Williamsburg Effect’ affects every case that goes to trial.

Josh Saul, writing in The New York Post, about the effect of gentrification on Brooklyn’s court system.

Read the story here

More stories about gentrification

Photo: Flickr, Erin

The Subconscious Cues That Guide Visitors Through The World’s Busiest Airport

In a recent blog post for The Atlantic, David Zweig spoke with wayfinding expert and airport-sign designer Jim Harding about his work on the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson. According to Hartfield, the highest mark of success in Harding’s work is invisibility: if his job is perfectly executed, “you will never think of him or his work.” In Harding’s work, no decision is arbitrary; even the tiniest aesthetic choices are part of a carefully orchestrated ballet, subconscious triggers that point the visitor in the right direction without them even realizing that they are being guided. Even something as seemingly minor as the shape of a street sign takes on great weight:

When undertaking a major wayfinding project like the one at the Maynard Jackson Terminal, as the ripple effect on the maps shows, everything outside the core area must be tied in to the master plan. On the roads encircling Maynard Jackson the top of every street sign related to the terminal has a slightly curved edge, echoing the gentle undulating aesthetics of the terminal’s roofline. It’s a subtle, likely subconscious wayfinding cue, letting you know you are in the vicinity of the international terminal. Many of the interior signs share this shape as well. This distinguishes the area from the domestic terminal and concourses, where all the signs are a standard rectilinear shape. If you are ever in an airport or campus or hospital or other complex environment and suddenly something feels off, you sense you are going the wrong way, there’s a good chance it’s not just magic or some brilliant internal directional sense, but rather you may be responding to a subconscious cue like the change of shape from one sign system to another. “Signage isn’t only about consistency in terminology and typefaces,” says Harding, but also about placing the overall ecosystem in a particular frame. It establishes a sense of place.

Read the story here

More stories on design

 

Our Stick Figure Family Decals, Ourselves

In a recent issue of Maclean’s, Anne Kingston tackled the sociology—and potent symbolism—of those cartoon stick figure decals you see affixed to the back windows of SUVs the world over. “Few trends,” she argues, “reveal shifting family values in a mobile, personal-branding-obsessed society as do family stick figures.”
From the piece:

Between those extremes, a create-your-own-stick-family narrative has emerged. Sociologist Lisa Wade, an associate professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, sees stick-figure families and their evolution as a profound cultural marker: “They’re so trivial, yet so powerful,” she says. “Their story suggests we do still have a family ideal, a norm.” At the outset, stick-figure families seemed to “represent what we’re allowed to be proud of,” Wade says. “They were strongly hetero-normative and supported the idea of having children.” That they showed up on SUVs first is predictable, she says. “When people have four kids, their entire life tends to revolve around their family; that’s their identity—so an opportunity to advertise family-orientedness is appealing.”

What interests Wade most is the blowback to “traditional” stick-family families, from people like Pavlovic. “This is activism happening, when you see couples with no children put decals of two people and piles of money on their cars, or women choosing to put a figure of a woman with a cat, or six.” Identifying yourself as a same-sex couple is another form of resistance, Wade says: “It’s very visible. They’re not coming out to somebody; they’re coming out to everybody.”

Read the story here

More stories on sociology

Photo: Tasayu, Flickr