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Mike Dang
Editor-in-chief, Longreads | Editorial, Automattic and WordPress.com

On the Mistakes We Make as New Writers

In the upcoming Sunday Book Review, Anna Holmes discusses some of the rookie mistakes she made as a new writer:

I regret many things, including, but not limited to:

Inserting myself into reported narratives where I didn’t belong.

Crafting long, complex sentences that I thought made me sound intelligent and sophisticated.

Assuming that aggressive, masculine-sounding prose was the ideal style of writing because it was so frequently rewarded in my literature and composition classes.

Taking too long to get to the point.

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The Power of 'Confessional' Writing

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, a book of essays, writes in the Guardian about the power of confessional writing:

Confession doesn’t just allow – it incites. Someone tweeted about my essays: “After reading this book, I want to write about my hidden pain until my fingers bleed, and then I want to write about my bleeding fingers.” One woman wrote to me to say that as she was writing, her mother was collecting her things from her ex-boyfriend’s house: “I don’t know how to hold this hurt inside,” she said. “But I’m mortified at the thought of talking about it or writing about it or painting it – somehow that seems so much more embarrassing than drunk-dialling him, or falling off a bar stool and breaking my wrist, or whatever ways used to seem like options.”

Another woman wrote to say that one of my essays had made her turn down sex with a guy who didn’t love her. “As low as that sounds,” she said, as if it didn’t matter much. But it mattered to me. It didn’t sound low at all. It sounded like something I might have needed – at several points in my life – to hear. She told me she was writing drunk. She’d needed to get drunk to find the courage to write at all.

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Photo: matryoshka

When a Successful Business Is One That Can Pay Employees a Decent Wage

At the New York Times, reporters Steven Greenhouse and Stephanie Strom look at businesses that pay their employees well over minimum wage, including In-N-Out burger, which starts employees off at $10.50 an hour, and Boloco, a burrito chain with 22 restaurants in New England:

John Pepper, Boloco’s co-founder, said the strategy for his Boston-based company evolved after it initially adopted a low-wage approach.

“In the company’s early years,” he said, “our goal, like much of the industry, was to pay as little as you can get away with and have people still show up and be reasonably productive.”

But while watching employees mop floors and work late into the night, he realized that for his company to be as great as he hoped, it needed to treat its workers better.

“We were talking about building a culture in which we want our team members to take care of our customers,” Mr. Pepper said. “But we asked, ‘What’s in it for them?’ Honestly, very little.”

So in 2002, when the minimum wage was $5.15 an hour, Boloco raised its minimum pay to $8. It also began subsidizing commuting costs, providing English classes to immigrant employees and contributing up to 4 percent of an employee’s pay toward a 401(k).

“If we really wanted our people to care about our culture and care about our customers, we had to show that we cared about them,” Mr. Pepper said. “If we’re talking about building a business that’s successful, but our employees can’t go home and pay their bills, to me that success is a farce.”

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Photo: Church Street Marketplace

A History of Scorpion Venom in Medicine

The new issue of Wired has a story about Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can help detect cancer cells in our bodies. Injecting our bodies with scorpion venom may sound somewhat outlandish, but it’s been used in medicine for quite a long time:

Ancient practitioners of medicine were well aware that scorpion venom could heal as well as harm. In imperial China, for example, the cloudy fluid was used to treat ailments ranging from mumps to tetanus. And in certain rural corners of India, whole scorpions were dipped in mustard oil and then rubbed on arthritic joints. Scorpion venom has more recently become an object of fascination for developers of pesticides, who dream of protecting crops using the neuro­toxins that scorpions employ against locusts and beetles.

Today pharmaceutical companies regularly obtain venom for commercial use by milking deathstalkers—that is, jolting the yellow arachnids with electricity, then collecting the droplets that dribble forth from their tails. Courage is an essential trait for the technicians who handle this sort of work, for the deathstalker is among the most dangerous scorpions in the world: In certain instances, L. quinquestriatus venom can cause cardiac arrest.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Problem With Strong Female Characters in Hollywood Right Now

At the Dissolve, Tasha Robinson discusses why having a Strong Female Character in a film isn’t good enough if her presence is superficial. Robinson cites Valka from How To Train Your Dragon 2 as an example, as well as Strong Female Characters from other recent films:

And Valka’s type—the Strong Female Character With Nothing To Do—is becoming more and more common. The Lego Movie is the year’s other most egregious and frustrating example. It introduces its female lead, Elizabeth Banks’ Wyldstyle, as a beautiful, super-powered, super-smart, ultra-confident heroine who’s appalled by how dumb and hapless protagonist Emmet is. Then the rest of the movie laughs at her and marginalizes her as she turns into a sullen, disapproving nag and a wet blanket. One joke has Emmet tuning her out entirely when she tries to catch him up on her group’s fate-of-the-world struggle; he replaces her words with “Blah blah blah, I’m so pretty.” Her only post-introduction story purpose is to be rescued, repeatedly, and to eventually confer the cool-girl approval that seals Emmet’s transformation from loser to winner. After a terrific story and a powerful ending, the movie undermines its triumph with a tag where WyldStyle actually turns to her current boyfriend for permission to dump him so she can give herself to Emmet as a reward for his success. For the ordinary dude to be triumphant, the Strong Female Character has to entirely disappear into Subservient Trophy Character mode. This is Trinity Syndrome à la The Matrix: the hugely capable woman who never once becomes as independent, significant, and exciting as she is in her introductory scene. (Director Chris McKay sorta-acknowledged the problem in a DailyMail interview presented as “The Lego Movie filmmaker promises more ‘strong females’ in the sequel,” though his actual quotes do nothing of the sort.)

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Falling in Love, 30 Years Later

At Vogue, Mira Jacob writes about watching her parents love 30 years after being paired up in an arranged marriage:

The night before I went back to New York, I came home to a sight so disquieting that I stood outside in the dark for a full five minutes, just watching. It was late. The television was on in our living room. In front of it, my father sat on the couch, my mother cradled in his arms. She was fast asleep, her cheek pressed to his chest.

I went inside. Though I hardly made a sound, my mother woke up. She blinked quietly, than sprang up with the realization that I was there. “I was asleep!” she said, as if I’d accused her of something. Then she got up and took herself to bed, disappearing down the hallway. My father gave me a funny grin and followed her. I stood alone in front of the television clutching my heart, which I suddenly realized was not a mere figure of speech.

Flying back to New York, I could not stop thinking one thing: Why now? Why this sudden attraction to someone who had been there the whole time? Sure, it’s a plot staple in American movies, where clumsy, high-cheekboned beauties regularly realize their “best friend” just happens to be Justin Timberlake, but in real life? In real life, my parents had bypassed that kind of irresistible attraction with almost three decades of houses, children, and pets. In real life, their marriage had proved to be a patchwork of incongruities, the kind that were bound to exist between a cosmopolitan girl from Bombay and a small-town boy from outside Madras.

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Photo: Cindy Funk

Revisiting the Hobby Lobby Case in Two Stories

In light of today’s Supreme Court ruling on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, we’re revisiting two stories:

1. Spin, Measure, Cut: Hobby Lobby and the Tangled Skein of Reproductive Rights (Susan Schorn, The Hairpin)

Susan Schorn writes about family history, crafts, and the power of choice:

In America, my great-grandmother endured multiple pregnancies, many of which ended in miscarriage due to violence at her husband’s hands. But five of her children survived, among them my grandmother and great-aunt. What values did their mother pass on to them? For one thing, they learned that letting men control their bodies and lives was a very bad idea. They were Americans, their mother assured them; they couldn’t be forced into illiteracy, dependency, marriage, or pregnancy. Here in America, the priests didn’t make the laws, and fathers and husbands couldn’t invoke tradition to control women’s live.

My great-grandmother made sure her daughters went to school; she taught them to value education and knowledge over superstition and religious doctrine. Today, the women in my family make afghans, and some of us go to church. We also have college degrees. We have our own beliefs about procreation, but we also think critically, and we value the expertise of scientists and physicians who study pregnancy and childbirth. We trust their opinions on the subject more than we do that of priests, religious leaders, or CEOs of hobby stores. Why? Because they tell us what our bodies do, not what we must do with them. They provide information that helps us make decisions for ourselves. And that is a paramount value in my family: When it’s your body that bears the consequences, you make the decisions. All of them.

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When David Sedaris Became a Fitbit Addict

From David Sedaris in The New Yorker: acquiring a Fitbit™ and an addiction to tracking his movements:

I was travelling myself when I got my Fitbit, and because the tingle feels so good, not just as a sensation but also as a mark of accomplishment, I began pacing the airport rather than doing what I normally do, which is sit in the waiting area, wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what. I also started taking the stairs instead of the escalator, and avoiding the moving sidewalk.

“Every little bit helps,” my old friend Dawn, who frequently eats lunch while hula-hooping and has been known to visit her local Y three times a day, said. She had a Fitbit as well, and swore by it. Others I met weren’t quite so taken. These were people who had worn one until the battery died. Then, rather than recharging it, which couldn’t be simpler, they’d stuck it in a drawer, most likely with all the other devices they’d lost interest in over the years. To people like Dawn and me, people who are obsessive to begin with, the Fitbit is a digital trainer, perpetually egging us on. During the first few weeks that I had it, I’d return to my hotel at the end of the day, and when I discovered that I’d taken a total of, say, twelve thousand steps, I’d go out for another three thousand.

“But why?” Hugh asked when I told him about it. “Why isn’t twelve thousand enough?”

“Because,” I told him, “my Fitbit thinks I can do better.

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Photo: Ian Dick

Childhood Heroes: A Reading List

Earlier this year, a 17-year-old high school student from the Bronx named Donna Grace Moleta won the chance to meet Bill Nye “the Science Guy.”

“Meeting my childhood hero was one of the greatest experience of my life,” she told the Bronx Times. “It’s something I’ll never forget. He’s such a strong believer in what science and education can do.”

Inspired by Ms. Moleta’s experience, here’s a reading list of some of our childhood heroes:

1. Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. (Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine, 2014)

Getting to work with a celebrated comic artist:

…I emailed him the strip and thanked him for all his great work and the influence he’d had on me. And never expected to get a reply.

And what do you know, he wrote back.

Let me tell you. Just getting an email from Bill Watterson is one of the most mind-blowing, surreal experiences I have ever had. Bill Watterson really exists? And he sends email? And he’s communicating with me?

 

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After the Television Cameras Go Away

In MIT’s Technology Review, Antonio Regalado reports that paralyzed patients are participating in long-term studies of how putting implants in the brain to create brain-controlled prosthetics and computers may help paralyzed people in the future. Jan Scheuermann, 54, is one of these patients. After she awoke from her brain surgery, she was able to control a robotic arm within days. The findings from these studies were published in journals and made it onto the newsmagazine program 60 Minutes. But Scheuermann wasn’t expecting what would happen to her after she was out of the spotlight:

Since the TV cameras went away, however, some of the shortcomings of the technology have become apparent. At first Scheuermann kept demonstrating new abilities. “It was success, success, success,” she says. But controlling Hector has become harder. The reason is that the implants, over time, stop recording. The brain is a hostile environment for electronics, and tiny movements of the array may build up scar tissue as well. The effect is well known to researchers and has been observed hundreds of times in animals. One by one, fewer neurons can be detected.

Scheuermann says no one told her. “The team said that they were expecting loss of neuron signals at some point. I was not, so I was surprised,” she says. She now routinely controls the robot in only three to five dimensions, and she has gradually lost the ability to open and close its thumb and fingers. Was this at all like her experience of becoming paralyzed? I asked her the question a few days later by e-mail. She replied in a message typed by an aide who stays with her most days: “I was disappointed that I would probably never do better than I had already done, but accepted it without anger or bitterness.”

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Photo: Joshua Zader