The Longreads Blog

The Midwestern Birthplace of March Madness

(AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but the NCAA wasn’t trying to be coy when it first used the phrase “March Madness” to describe the organization’s annual postseason tournament.

We now associate “madness” with all things brackets and Cinderellas, but for much of the tournament’s early years, it was already seen as the unworthy cousin to the NIT, the postseason tournament which draws more teams and has a larger national profile.

When the NCAA tournament first launched at the end of the 1938-39 season, it flopped, losing more than $2,000 despite the promotional draw of Oregon’s Tall Firs, the nickname for the squad’s front court. (The team won the first-ever title.) At this point, the nation’s only March Madness was the Illinois High School Association’s tournament. The association had hosted the state’s high school tourney since 1908, and its directors liked to tout a 1939 article in the Illinois Interscholastic magazine that read, “A little March madness may complement and contribute to sanity and help keep society on an even keel.”

The NCAA tourney grew, supplanting the NIT. Unfortunately for the IHSA, trademark proceedings for “March Madness” didn’t begin until 1991, more than a decade after the NCAA first began to see the phrase’s true marketing potential. Legendary announcer Brent Musburger began to use it on-air, and by 1989, when CBS and the NCAA signed a $1 billion deal to broadcast the tournament, March Madness had become big business. The NCAA and IHSA met in court in the mid-90s to hash out their disagreement, and the phrase became a “dual-use term.”

While the NCAA was late to adopt the language by which its tournament is known worldwide, it didn’t make the same mistake with the phrases, “Elite Eight,” “Final Four,” and “And Then There Were Four,” which were all trademarked. Interestingly, the term “Sweet Sixteen,” which applies to the tournament’s last sixteen remaining teams, also didn’t originate with the NCAA, starting with the Kentucky High School Athletic Association (which licenses it to the NCAA).

This season’s tournament will be its 78th, and it’s interesting to look back when the NCAA tournament was a still growing tournament instead of a multi-billion juggernaut.

In some circles, the NCAA championship game was a big deal very early on. Horace “Bones” McKinney, who played for a UNC team that lost in the final, 43-40 to Oklahoma State in 1946 at Madison Square Garden, said, “Maybe the final four hadn’t come of age back then, but it couldn’t have been bigger for us. That old Garden was packed with 19,000, and the smoke was so thick I couldn’t even see the upper deck. It was New York, and we were big stuff.”

Big stuff, indeed. That 1946 game was the first title game televised, broadcast to about 500,000 viewers in the New York area over CBS. The first nationally televised final came in 1954—the broadcast rights sold for $7,500—gathered a respectable audience, and the championship game remained a reliable high-ratings Saturday staple for almost two decades.

On January 20, 1968, the sports world was startled to learn just how popular college basketball could be. All of the sudden, it seemed, college basketball was an Event that would fill huge arenas.

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Rachel Cusk on Eschewing her ‘Cuskness’ For Her Alter-Ego in ‘Outline’ and ‘Transit’

Heidi Julavits profiles memoirist and novelist Rachel Cusk for New York Magazine’s The Cut. Julavits focuses on various aspects of Cusk’s writing, including the ways in which her approach to “autofiction” is somewhat different from that of some compatriots in the land of blurred lines between memoir and fiction. Those include Sheila Heti, Ben Learner and Karl Ove Knausgaard, all of whom tend to infuse their protagonists with recognizable strains of their personalities.

Both Outline, which came out in the U.S. in 2015, and Transit are narrated by a woman named Faye, who, like Cusk, is divorced, has two children, and is a writer. Faye describes, or really more accurately transcribes, her encounters with other people. In Outline, she travels to Greece and meets a man on a plane; she goes to a restaurant with a friend; she teaches a writing workshop. She is less an interlocutor than a recording device or a processing machine. She receives. Faye, in literary terms, is a cipher. She is a zero, a naught, a nothing.

In Transit, Faye becomes slightly more “visible” (and audible) via her involvement in a home-renovation project; she converses with contractors and pacifies angry neighbors. Nothing happens, really, but these books are nonetheless gripping self-portraits of multiple humans. They are like eavesdropping on strangers, or watching a secret video feed of strangers, if those strangers were also casual philosophers. The conversations vacillate between the mundane and the lofty, as if the characters — enabled by Faye’s ­presence — are always grasping at bigger life questions. Outline and Transit both are welcome breaches of privacy that emphasize the intensely shapeless loneliness of people. They are books about middles.

Faye, while she shares biographical data with Cusk and appears to present and process events from Cusk’s actual life, is quite different from the characters devised by other autofiction writers of late — Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgaard — with whom Cusk is frequently grouped. The books of these writers, though distinct from one another, more centrally feature an authorial self; about Heti, for example, Cusk says, “She uses herself, her Sheila-ness, much, much, much more than I do.” Cusk does not, in these novels, use her Cuskness. And yet she’s filtering through a narrator that does not by accident resemble her.

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I’d Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For a Hamburger Today, If Only My Debit Card Weren’t Frozen

US dollars and euros, paper bills
Photo by Mark Hodson via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Brett Scott explores the emerging cashless economy in Aeon magazine. Is ubiquitous digital payment the harbinger of a glorious future, or a smokescreen for powerful interests that want to control (and undermine) choice and capitalism?

This is no longer a deal between me and the seller. I am now dealing with a complex of unknown third parties, profit-seeking money-passers who stand between us to act as facilitators of the money flow, but also as potential gatekeepers. If a gatekeeper doesn’t want to do business with me, I can’t do business with the seller. They have the ability to jam, monitor or place conditions upon that glorious core ritual of capitalism – the transfer of money for the transfer of goods. This innocuous device exudes mechanical indifference, reporting only to invisible bosses far away, running invisible algorithms in invisible black boxes that don’t like me.

If we are going to refer to bank payments as ‘cashless’, we should then refer to cash payments as ‘bankless’. Because that’s what cash is, and right now it is the only thing standing between us and a completely privatised money system.

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‘The Stakes May Be the Survival of Civilization’

Paintings supported by the NEA were covered in shrouds at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1990 to protest cuts to the federal program. (AP Photo / Al Behrman)

First Annual Report / National Endowment for the Arts / 1966 / 9 minutes (2,200 words)

With the signing of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act on September 29, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson completed the vision supported by John F. Kennedy for a federal council for the arts. The Trump Administration’s newly proposed budget would eliminate the program entirely. Here is an excerpt from the NEA’s First Annual Report from 1966.

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‘We Love Europa But Europa No Love Us.’

Refugee camp graffiti
Refugee camp graffiti, photo by David Farley (with permission).

Travel writer David Farley spent a month volunteering in a refugee camp in Greece. He wrote about it for Afar. It was not exactly an introduction to the world of good will towards refugees.

Souda briefly gained prominence in November 2016, when it was reported that a right-wing mob stood atop the old city walls and launched large stones and Molotov cocktails down into the camp, setting tents ablaze. Tensions were such that one of the rules of the NGO I was volunteering for stated that once I left the camp, I had to remove my fluorescent green vest and volunteer badge for fear locals would attack me for helping the refugees.

Farley’s piece includes the voices of people we perceive as a generic mass with unified motives.

One day while serving lunch—a tomato and chickpea stew made by a Basque NGO—I met a Syrian named Dallal. He was a new arrival and was aware he might be at Souda for a while. “I don’t understand why we have to wait so long. Some people have been here for nearly a year,” he said. “Our collective goal is that we want a new future, a good future, a safe life. I have a degree in mechanical engineering. My friend here,” he pulled over a 25-year-old from Iraq, “he’s a veterinarian. We’re not poor. We just want a normal life. We are here for survival.”

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A March Madness Reading List, with Music By Céline Dion

Jim Valvano
North Carolina State coach Jim Valvano, shown after his basketball team defeated Houston to win NCAA championship at Albuquerque, N.M., April 4, 1983. (AP Photo)

The idea started last July. Everybody loves buzzer beaters in college basketball—but what if someone were to publicize just those moments on a Twitter feed, and then remix them with a 20-year-old hit Céline Dion song? That, my friends, is a recipe for viral magic. Read more…

Enormous Changes… Arrived at Slowly, Over a the Course of a Politically Engaged Lifetime

Author Grace Paley sits beside a pile of books in her home in Thetford, Vt., April 9, 2003. Paley, a critically acclaimed writer of poetry and short fiction, was named Vermont's state poet in March. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot)

For the April edition of The Atlantic, Nicholas Dames profiles late author and activist Grace Paley. In particular, Dames focuses on Paley’s persistence in the face of political obstacles, as an activist, and as a writer — often through a stalwart recurring character, Faith Darwin Asbury.

Through Faith, Paley discovered her great subject: the evolving political engagement of the generation of women who came of age in the shadow of World War II. The stories Paley wrote after The Little Disturbances are ever more plotless. They are snapshots of female community—in particular, the group of Greenwich Village women early to the postwar quest for feminist consciousness—or, in Faith’s own words, “a report on … the condition of our lifelong attachments.” Paley borrowed the method of linking characters across a story series from Isaac Babel, one of her lodestars. But unlike Babel’s Odessa stories—–or, for that matter, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—–Paley’s stories about Faith extend the timescale well into adulthood. Faith and her friends age, shedding lovers and children and parents, and finding new objects for their political passions. It turns out that rather than voice, Paley’s true subject was time.

Put another way, her theme was how the ethical aspirations of political life extend over time: how they survive inevitable disappointment; how they steel themselves into endurance.

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A Heart-Shaped Life: Twelve Ways of Looking at Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Amy Krouse Rosenthal
John J. Kim/Chicago Sun-Times via AP Images

“What constitutes a life worthy of being remembered? How do you want to be remembered?” These are the kinds of questions Amy Krouse Rosenthal always asked in her work. When Amy died this week at 51, her obituary described her as a “children’s author, memoirist, and public speaker” who found “an extraordinarily large readership this month with a column in the New York Times titled “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” But Amy was far more than her final, heartbreaking column. Amy Shearn details what Amy did with her brief, inspired time, and how she came to inspire others. Read more…

I’m on a Boat, Y’all! (With Canada’s Hyper-Conservatives)

Ricky Brigante via Flickr ((CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In The Walrus, Canadian writer Peter Norman spends a week with followers of Canada’s fear-mongering conspiratorial conservative Ezra Levant to explore how Trump’s nationalistic fervor has taken hold across the border, and what it portends.

How does an ordinary Canadian become a Rebel? During my week at sea, I began to classify Rebels according to the issues that made them angriest—the ones that had originally brought them into Levant’s orbit. Fear of Islam and a distrust of mainstream climate-change science were the most prevalent. Rebels might start out as temperate conservatives, centrists, or even leftists (Faith Goldy said that her conservatism had emerged from the ashes of a youthful hard-left zeal). But at some point, a gateway issue draws them in.

Maybe a sudden spike in a tax bill is what enrages them, or they lose their job. It could be a workplace incident in which they’re accused of exhibiting some stigmatized trait—racism, sexism, transphobia—that they don’t believe they possess. Or, watching the news, they are overcome by the horror of an Isis terrorist attack.

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Filmmaker Kyrre Lien Traveled the World Interviewing Internet Trolls in Person

Photo by Ysingrinus (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Three years ago, filmmaker Kyrre Lien became curious about what drives people to make hateful comments online. He pored over 200 online profiles and traveled the world to interview internet trolls in person to uncover why they say the things they do. Kyrre’s look into the bowels of humanity is at once absurd and terrifying — proof that hate and those with “illogical beliefs” may be living right next door. Watch Kyrre’s troll documentary at The Guardian.

Norwegian filmmaker Kyrre Lien began researching online commenters on Christmas Day 2014. “I became fascinated by how much hate and ignorance people were writing in the comments section of a news site,” he says, “so I began looking at people’s profiles, trying to work out who they were. Many seemed quite normal. They had families and looked like nice people, but the comments they were writing in a public space were so extreme. There was a disconnect.” And so began Lien’s three-year journey into the lives of some of the internet’s most prolific online commenters, now the subject of a documentary, The Internet Warriors.

Lien’s research took him across the world – from the fjords of Norway to the US desert – meeting people of extreme, “often illogical” beliefs: the racists, the homophobes, the slut-shamers. Lien initially researched 200 potential subjects. Half said no when he approached them. It was then a process of elimination: “To find out what their motives were, who they were, and why they held the views they did. In a way,” he says, “I became an investigator.”

Kjell Frode Tislevoll used to spend hours debating online. “Like when I commented on an article: ‘What we need in Oslo is a sidewalk for those with dark skin and a sidewalk for those with white skin. That way, we won’t be attacked or mugged.” He got 20 likes. Eventually he decided to apply a filter on Facebook, so he’d no longer see posts about immigration.

But things are changing for Tislevoll. Last year, a refugee reception centre was built in his home town, and he slowly found he was becoming “less sceptical of immigrants”. It coincided with the arrival of a Muslim man at work. “He’s OK,” he says, “so my issues with immigration are going away. If I met my former self in a discussion forum now, I’d probably get into an argument with him.”

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