Author Archives

Sari Botton is a writer living in Kingston, NY. She edited the award-winning “Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY” and the NY Times Bestselling “Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY.” She is the essays editor for Longreads, and teaches at Catapult. She tweets at http://twitter.com/saribotton

What ‘Ask Polly’ Columnist Heather Havrilesky Learned About Love as a Video Game

At The Atlantic, Julie Beck talks to Heather Havrilesky about her new book How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly’s Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life, a collection of her “Ask Polly” advice columns on New York Magazine‘s The Cut blog (originally at The Awl) plus some that haven’t been published before.

In a voice that’s simultaneously compassionate, confessional and no-nonsense, Havrilesky regularly decodes the most frustrating human tendencies and the motivations behind them, leaving you to wonder how you never saw them so clearly before. Like this video game/manipulation analogy:

More and more, the longer I do this, I notice how much there’s this illusion that people have, especially with love, that they can control what happens next. It’s like they’re playing a video game, and if they play everything the right way, they can affect the outcome. It’s like, you meet someone, you decide this person is the person who is going to make everything right, who’s going to be your partner forever and ever, and you’re never going to have to solve this problem again. And then once you’re locked into that idea, it’s like you’re playing a video game.

It’s hard not to develop that idea that you can control the people around you. When you’re young, you suddenly realize that when you’re not interested, other people like you. I was literally just speaking to my 7-year-old, and she said when she wants to play, her big sister doesn’t want to play, but when she doesn’t want to play, that’s when her big sister wants to play with her. It makes her crazy. It’s like when you’re dating someone and you suddenly realize they’re losing interest, if you start acting like you’re losing interest—Ding! They’re back in the ring with you. So it’s hard not to believe you can manipulate your circumstances in various ways, because you can. It’s just, you’re not going to get what you want doing that, you know?

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Rukmini Callimachi, a Reporter With Jihadists on Speed-Dial

Rukmini Callimachi
Rukmini Callimachi. Screenshot via Charlie Rose.

At Slate, correspondent Isaac Chotiner has a fascinating discussion with Rukmini Callimachi, The New York Times‘s intrepid correspondent on the al Qaeda and ISIS beat.

The interview reveals the very human aspects of a reporter who is dedicated to revealing the very human aspects of terrorists—including her husband’s request that she not check her phone in bed so that he doesn’t find himself inadvertently glimpsing beheading videos.

One of the most surprising revelations she shares is how close she sometimes has to become with jihadists in high places, such as Oumar Ould Hamaha, who had been a commander in al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb:

For about eight months, he had a cellphone. I still have it programmed in my phone. You could actually call him and speak to him on the phone. At first I was speaking to him every week or every few days. It got to the point where he was calling me three times a day.

We were having these long drawn-out conversations that often involved him trying to convert me to Islam and him laughing when he didn’t succeed. I don’t want to make too much of it, but I suddenly felt like I had a human interlocutor in this crazy group. I could call him. I could start texting with him. We would call him whenever there was breaking news, like when they announced they were going to destroy this next mausoleum or when they announced they stoned to death a couple for adultery. But on some of the other stuff he told me, I just never felt comfortable quoting him because I didn’t know if he was telling me the truth.

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Proust as Antidote for Smartphone-Induced Attention Deficit

Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Confession: I have never read Proust. Not one word, let alone the 4,300 pages of them in the English translation of his seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past).

On the occasion of the French author’s 145th birthday, LitHub invited six authors to sing his praises, and explain why his work remains essential reading. Siri Hustvedt, Edmund White, André Aciman, Francine Prose, Aleksandar Hemon, and Daniel Mendelsohn all weighed in. Mendelsohn had a particularly modern take on the value of reading Proust’s densely written, heavily detailed, slowly unfolding opus:

Recently I was traveling on a train next to a young man—a recent college graduate, I guessed—who was reading a hugely fat Victorian novel. Since I teach literature, this made me happy. But as I watched him I noticed that roughly every 90 seconds he’d fish out his iPhone to check his text messages. After a while this reflexive tic made me so nervous that I moved to another seat. As a writer as well as a teacher, I found it nerve-wracking to think that this is how some people are reading novels these days—which is to say, not really reading them, because you can’t read anything serious in two-minute spurts, or with your mind half on something else, like the messages you may be getting. Multitasking is the great myth of the present era: you cannot, in fact, do two things at the same time.

Especially if one of them requires considerable resources of attentiveness and intellectual commitment. To my mind, a very important reason to have a go at Proust right now—which is to say, to read him with a mind as receptive as his was large—is to exercise one’s powers of commitment.

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Muhammad Ali: Literary Muse

Earlier this year, on the occasion of the release of Approaching Ali: A Reclamation in Three Acts, Davis Miller’s second biography of Muhammad Ali, Financial Times political columnist Janan Ganesh considered the question of what made Ali such an appealing subject for so many writers. Read more…

Unchain My Heart: On the Emotional Effectiveness—and Lingering Sexism—of Jewish Divorce

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Sari Botton | Longreads | May 2016 | 21 minutes (4,983 words)

Initially, the twenty-story Manhattan office building threw me off. I had in my hand the address for a beth din, a rabbinic court, and had pictured a cluttered rabbi’s study in some old world synagogue—like the one in the divorce scene in Hester Street, the 1975 film about a Jewish immigrant couple at the turn of the twentieth century, starring a very young Carol Kane.

I rode the elevator up to find my ex-husband on a couch in the reception area—yes, this was the place—and settled in a full cushion’s distance from the person I’d once revolved my life around, the man whom I’d walked in seven symbolic circles around during our wedding ceremony, seven years before. Read more…

‘Hey, Friend, All Asians Are Not Interchangeable!’: Nicole Chung Weighing Responses to Casual Racism

Photo from ABC, Flickr

The social pressure on people of color to keep the peace, not get mad, just make sure everyone keeps having a nice time — even when we hear these remarks in public, at our workplaces and schools, in our own homes and from our friends’ mouths — can be overwhelming, bearing down on us in so many situations we do not see coming and therefore cannot avoid. What does our dignity matter, what do our feelings amount to, when we could embarrass white people we care about? When our white relatives or friends or colleagues might experience a moment’s discomfort, anxiety, or guilt?

–At The Toast, Nicole Chung writes about a casually racist comment of the they-all-look-the-same variety made at her white in-laws’ holiday table. It’s still been haunting her, right into the new year, leaving her racking her brain, wondering: Was the woman who made the comment ignorant or being passive aggressive? Should Chung have spoken up, and if she did, what would she have said, with what tone? Should her husband have said something? Would saying something have ruined the rest of the night? What difference would it make?

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‘My Depression’ Author Elizabeth Swados on Her Brother’s Mental Illness, Homelessness and Early Death

Photo via NYCReligion

The theater and lit worlds suffered a great loss this week with the passing, Tuesday, of Elizabeth Swados, 64, a prolific writer and composer of groundbreaking, socially conscious musicals like “Runaways” and a collaboration with Garry Trudeau on a production of “Doonesbury.” She was the author several novels, memoirs and children’s books.

Most recently, Swados published My Depression: A Picture Book, a graphic memoir about her struggle with depression. It was made into an animated HBO documentary, which aired in July.

But long before she wrote about her own mental illness, Swados wrote about her brother’s. In an excerpt from her memoir, The Four of Us: The Story of a Family, which appeared in The New York Times Magazine in August 1991, she told the story of her brother, Lincoln, who suffered from schizophrenia, and died homeless in New York City in the late eighties.

Several months before my brother’s housing crisis reached its peak, I was walking down Broadway on my way to a Korean deli. I saw two derelicts seated in the middle of the sidewalk. They were dressed in layers of rags and having a heated argument about Jesus Christ. One of them had paraphernalia spread around him in a semicircle, as if to sell his wares. But none of his rags or rusty pieces of metal or torn papers was a recognizable item. He wore a jaunty cap pulled to one side, and there was tinsel in his filthy hair. His face was smeared black. A few steps farther along, I realized the “derelict” was my brother. I leaned down next to him, softly said his name and waited. He stared at me for several moments and didn’t recognize me at first. When he finally saw that it was me, he let out a cry like a man who’d had a stroke and couldn’t express his joyous thoughts. We embraced for a long, long time. His smell meant nothing to me.

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Reading Lolita in Patriarchy: Rebecca Solnit on Being Mansplained About How She Must Have Misread Nabokov

Rebecca Solnit
Photo by shawncalhoun

It isn’t a fact universally acknowledged that a person who mistakes his opinions for facts may also mistake himself for God. This can happen if he’s been insufficiently exposed to the fact that there are also other people who have other experiences, and that they too were created equal, with certain inalienable rights, and that consciousness thing that is so interesting and troubling is also going on inside their heads. This is a problem straight white men suffer from especially, because the western world has held up a mirror to them for so long—and turns compliant women into mirrors reflecting them back twice life size, Virginia Woolf noted. The rest of us get used to the transgendering and cross-racializing of our identities as we invest in protagonists like Ishmael or Dirty Harry or Holden Caulfield. But straight white men don’t, so much. I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn’t need to be aware and, often, isn’t. Which is a form of loss in its own way.

-At Lithub, Men Explain Things To Me author Rebecca Solnit writes about all the mansplaining she was treated to in response to her November essay, “80 Books No Woman Should Read” on the same site—itself a response to a much re-posted Esquire feature called “80 Best Books Every Man Should Read,” which includes 79 men. Most of all, men—”liberal men”—told her she misunderstood Lolita and was wrong for identifying with the young girl who’s been raped and robbed of her agency, “which made me wonder,” she writes, “if there’s a book called ‘Reading Lolita in Patriarchy.'”

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Siri Hustvedt on Knausgaard’s ‘Feminine Text’ and the Gendering of Literature

A few years ago, novelist Siri Hustvedt interviewed fellow Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in public. Toward the end, she asked why, in thousands of pages filled with hundreds of mentions of writers, he’d mentioned only one woman writer, Julia Kristeva. “No competition,” he said without much thought.

This stunning comment from a man whose six-volume autobiographical opus, My Struggle, treads in territory long considered the unserious domain of women writers–deeply emotional self-examination and domestic ennui–provoked Hustvedt’s curiosity about the gendering of literature. At Lithub, she presents a deep examination of gender bias among readers and writers alike, and asks what bearing an author’s sex has on the writing itself.

When I look back at the “no competition” remark, I suppose I should be offended or righteously indignant, but that is not at all how I feel. What I feel is compassion and pity for a person who made a remark, no doubt in earnest, which is nevertheless truly silly. Thousands of pages of self-examination apparently did not bring him to enlightenment about the “woman” in himself. “It’s still in me.” It is not enough to notice that a feminine text by a man and a feminine text by a woman are received differently or to call attention to numbers that represent sexual inequality in the world of letters. It is absolutely essential that men and women become fully conscious of what is at stake, that it is blazingly clear to every single one of us who cares about the novel that there is something at once pernicious and silly at work in our reading habits, that the fate of literary works cannot be decided by a no-competition clause appended to a spurious homo-social contract written under the aegis of fear, that such a clause is nothing short of “insane.”

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Belly Chains on a Baby Bump: What It’s Like to Be Pregnant in Prison

Shortly after she became pregnant a few years ago, Mira Ptacin, author of the forthcoming memoir Poor Your Soul, began teaching at a prison. There, she met a woman named Courtney Fortin, who was pregnant, too—and incarcerated. At Elle.com, Ptacin tells Fortin’s story, shedding light on the experience of being pregnant in prison, and how frequently that involves being illegally shackled:

A recent study published earlier this year by the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit organization with the authority to inspect prisons, found that 23 of the 27 inmates who’d given birth while incarcerated in New York had been shackled in violation of the law, and this is not uncommon elsewhere. “You comply when you’re in prison,” says Amanda Edgar, an advocate with the Incarcerated Women’s Project. “One woman [told me] that if she didn’t keep her shackles on, she wouldn’t be able to go to her appointment and [that] other women have been denied access to prenatal vitamins.”

So shackles—belly chains around a baby bump during transport, chains around ankles during active labor—continue to be routinely used on inmates during pregnancy, even where they are technically banned, and even though there have been zero documented cases of pregnant inmates attempting to escape during prenatal checkups, labor, or postpartum recovery. Nor is there any documentation of a pregnant inmate attempting to cause harm to herself, security guards, or medical staff. The vast majority of female prisoners are non-violent offenders who pose a low security risk.

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