The Longreads Blog

Eastern Europe: Beyond the Cold War, and Beyond the Stereotypes

Photo of the now-demolished People's Theater in Budapest, Hungary, in 1963.
Photo of the now-demolished People's Theater in Budapest, Hungary, in 1963. (Photo in the public domain.)

The homogenizing force of globalization means that a shopping center in Budapest doesn’t look all that different from one central Turin, or York, or Cleveland. Is “Eastern Europe” as an idea disappearing? What held it together in the first place, beyond stereotypes? Try Jacob Mikanowski‘s essay in the LA Review of Books for some suggestions (and some objections).

Gone are the days of Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series or Susan Sontag exhorting us to read Danilo Kiš while we still had time. Since then, Eastern Europe has been reduced to a backdrop for other people’s fantasies. I know a distinguished scholar of the region, a historian who teaches a regular course on Eastern European history, who told me that every year he has to answer questions from his students about whether people actually love and laugh in this “gray place.” It’s always a bit humiliating to read an English-language book with an Eastern European character. You never know if they’re going to be a world-weary janitor (a Pole), a captivating fraud (a Hungarian), a post-Communist gangster (a Serb), or a source of erotic awakening for a literary-minded man (a Czech for Americans, any of the above for residents of Ireland and the United Kingdom).

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The Anton Chekhov-George Saunders Humanity Kit: An Introduction

George Saunders Photo © AP Photos

A little over three years ago I asked George Saunders whether I could sit in on one of his MFA classes at Syracuse, and, flabbergastingly, he said okay.

This opportunity seemed particularly valuable at a time when education privatizers and MOOC-peddlers were busily attempting to equate “education” with “that which can be bubbled in on a Scantron form.” Saunders’ work is very particularly about human qualities, fallibility, the unexpected; dissonance, misapprehensions; comedy; mystery; beauty. Immeasurable and incommensurate things. What he’d already taught me, just as a reader of his fiction, was and remains the diametric opposite of anything you could answer by multiple choice.

MFA studies consist largely of working on individual students’ writing, in conditions too sensitive for me to be barging in on with a tape recorder. But George’s students were also required to take “ENG 650 (Forms): The Russian Short Story in Translation (for Writers),” a class devoted to learning structures and techniques that might effectively be pilfered from the Russian masters—and that one, I could attend.

My instructions were as follows:

Syllabii attached – looks like you’ll be there for the Chekhov “About Love” trilogy – usually the best class of the year. It’s Bowne Hall 101 or 110 – it says on the sheet. The easiest thing to do is to park at the University Sheraton and have them give you a campus map – it’s a short (though uphill) walk… I’d say read the stories just a few days before and if you really want to do it the way we do it, write a little essay on each, or on the three (they’re linked).

I’ve wrestled with how to write about the resulting experience in a way that would most clearly transmit the benefits I received to readers. I’ve reread the stories many times in the years since, and it’s always acutely pleasurable—increasingly so, in fact. The repetition in slightly different circumstances is something like the telling of a literary rosary; the same ideas seen and considered through all different prisms of personality, time and circumstance grant a newly deepened awareness each time. This is the sensation I sought to reproduce in what follows.

In the end I made this kit, which provides a number of methods by which you can experience The Little Trilogy, and George Saunders’ teaching methods, on your own, according to your own purposes.

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Kathleen Hale Hunts the Most Dangerous Game

Illustration by Perri Tomkiewicz for Elle

The animals, it seems, will not be contained. A few weeks ago, Ollie the Bobcat, on the loose from the National Zoo, was found a near the bird house a few enclosures over; a toilet in Texas revealed not a single rogue rattlenake, but dozens; and Sunny, a female red panda, escaped from the the Virginia Zoo and is still on the lam after a reported refusal to mate.

“In the wild, pregnancy makes animals even more vulnerable to predators,” writes Katheen Hale at Elle. Hale’s essay about her own pregnancy intersects with a move to Los Angeles from Brooklyn and a deep desire to go where no pregnant woman has gone before: Into Griffith Park to hunt P-22, the city’s celebrity mountain lion. “For the neurotic, celebrations of life can conjure death,” Hale’s psychiatrist tells her. “Pregnancy is a time of regression. It throws the mind into maturational crisis.”

I’d read laboratory studies on the effect of predator exposure on pregnant mice: expectant mothers that were exposed to rat urine refused to give birth to the litters they were gestating. If they could do that, so could I. I’d hold off giving birth for years if necessary, like an elephant, which cooks its kids for two full years. But my obstetrician said I couldn’t refuse to give birth—apparently that’s physically impossible. I wasn’t a mouse or an elephant, I was a human woman, and I was due on June 2.

The solution was simple: I’d hunt down P-22, and hang his head on the wall of my baby girl’s nursery, so that when she became sentient, she would know that her mother was strong, and that she was safe.

Getting from point A (finding P-22) to point B (decapitation) remained a mystery to me, but in my blurry state of hormonal unbliss, I simply didn’t think about it. Instead, the following day, I laced up my hiking boots, parked my car on the winding road leading to Griffith Park, and set off into the dusty wilderness with only a water bottle, potato chips, and my phone, like a crazier Cheryl Strayed. She’d gone off trying to find herself. I’d find the lion and take it from there.

Like me, he had migrated to Los Angeles. But only one of us could stay.

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Stan Smith, the Tennis Shoe, Has Become Bigger Than the Man Himself

Stan Smith had a respectable tennis career: When he was 24, he won the U.S. Open, and was ranked the No. 1 men’s player in the world. But his Adidas sneakers have recently become a world-wide fashion phenomenon, giving him much more success (at least in the monetary sense) than he could have ever imagined. From a New York magazine story by Lauren Schwartzberg:

In the United Kingdom, soccer fans in Liverpool and Manchester fight over who got into Stan Smiths first. In Greece, Smith says, where it is traditional to give babies white shoes on the day of their christening, Stan Smiths became the white shoe of choice. There’s a professor of theoretical physics in Sweden who owns more than 200 pairs. Both Will Arnett and Hugh Grant have said they kissed their first girl while wearing Stan Smiths. Stan Smith the man once met a reporter from GQ Japan who told him he’s worn his eponymous shoes every day for the past 13 years. (Smith’s response: “I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ ”) More recently, they’ve been taken up by Céline’s Phoebe Philo, as well as Marc Jacobs, A$AP Rocky, and North West, coming to define both a retro and minimalist movement in fashion just a few years after they were sold on the bargain shelves.

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‘4 the Boys’: The Tunnel Creek Avalanche, Five Years Later

Photo by Sam DeLong (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Seattle Met, Eva Holland talks to the survivors and explores the aftermath of the Tunnel Creek avalanche — the tragedy that inspired “Snow Fall” — five years after a massive snow slide claimed the lives of three men.

“The Boys,” in this small, ski-crazy community, is shorthand for three well-known, well-loved local men who were killed in an avalanche at Tunnel Creek, in the Stevens Pass backcountry, on February 19, 2012: Chris Rudolph, 30; Jim Jack, 46; and Johnny Brenan, 41. The men were part of a large group of visitors and local legends who ventured out of the resort gates late on a Sunday morning and were caught up in a massive snowslide.

Avalanches kill an average of 27 people in America every year. This one attracted the attention of the national media. Good Morning America and Today came calling, wanting to speak to the survivors just hours after the slide. Magazines, including Outside and Men’s Journal, published major features on the tragedy. And, most famously, The New York Times spent months producing “Snow Fall,” an ambitious, multimedia feature about the avalanche that would go on to redefine how stories are presented online. Written by John Branch, it won a Pulitzer Prize, spawned hundreds of imitators, and is now taught in journalism schools.

That’s when the snowpack on the hillside let go.

It shed more than 2,500 feet in altitude in a matter of seconds, gaining mass as it went, ripping up trees and rocks along the way and reaching a peak speed of about 70 miles per hour. The New York Times estimated its weight at 11 million pounds.

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Eating In Public Is a Spectator Sport When You’re Fat

Illustration by Hana Jang

Being fat means never being allowed to ignore your fatness. After navigating a lifetime of being fat (and ashamed) in the US, Jonatha Kottler moved to the Netherlands and found a whole new universe of exclusion, which she describes in an essay in New York Magazine.

One day, about 12 weeks after blowing up my whole life and moving my family to what seemed like a very hostile environment, my son and I decided we would go to the cinema and see The Great Gatsby to cheer ourselves up and feel less homesick. We did what we sometimes did at home — skipped dinner to have popcorn for dinner instead. Already flummoxed by having to preorder our tickets for assigned seats on a Dutch website (none of these were cinema-hurdles back home where you’d just walk up and buy a ticket), we arrived at the cinema. We bought the largest popcorn (which is in fact a product they sold — we didn’t bring our own trash barrel and ask to have it filled) and settled in to enjoy our treat. I felt a tap on my shoulder, which was strange since I knew a total of three people in the entire country. I spun around, startled, and the Dutch man sitting behind me said, “Are you going to eat all of that? I see why you are so fat.”

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On Midlife, Failure, and Thwarted Ambition: Sarah Manguso and 300 Arguments

Photo by Kelly Teague (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Anna Furman interviews Sarah Manguso about the process of writing her new book, 300 Arguments, her writing influences, failure and thwarted ambition, and how Sarah’s sleeping post-inauguration.

I wrote 300 Arguments when I was in a bit of a midlife funk. I was thinking about certain types of failure that just sort of collect at midlife. The idea of midlife is itself a sort of a cliché; it’s a very conventional mode of thinking about the human lifespan. It’s an assumption, to start, that everybody has the same life span. But there really is something to getting to a point in life where major decisions have been made—maybe they’re not permanent but they feel permanent. You choose a vocation and the thing that you do all day long. You choose your people, and if you have a family you’ve chosen the people to include in your family. What felt really sharp to me at the time that I was writing this is that there’s this experience of failure that seems fairly generally applicable to being in one’s midlife. All of a sudden there are these desires that felt obsolete to me that I thought would always feel necessary. There were thwarted ambitions. You sort of realize that failing is a skill of general utility.

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John Oliver on the Media’s Struggle to Confront Disinformation

Did you share the general shudder when Kellyanne Conway introduced the idea of “alternative facts”?

It’s just a framing device, an ear-catching phrase, but it’s nothing new. The content of what she’s wrapping a bow on is something that everyone has been bearing witness to. We’ve had 18 months of feelings over facts. The only thing that’s remotely new about it is the location that it’s coming from.

Is interviewing her essentially pointless?

In general, it’s very dangerous to keep the old campaign architecture around with this presidency, to have an eight-person panel on CNN debating whether or not he said something. “Did he or did he not do this thing we watched him do?” There’s actually serious harm in that discussion. And, yeah. I really don’t see the point of talking to Kellyanne Conway because her language jujitsu is so strong. You know she can look you in the eyes and tell you the opposite of what you just saw happen, and she will be more confident in her answer than you are in your question.

-John Oliver, in a wide-ranging Rolling Stone interview with Brian Hiatt, on how his weekly HBO show Last Week Tonight will need to adapt to the chaos of the Trump Administration. His season four premiere attempted to tackle the question of Trump and reality:  Read more…

The Changing Formation of the Modern American Family

A picture of the writer's sister-in-law, her wife, and their two children (Jack and Beatrix) during last year's Portsmouth (NH) Pride festival.

The dynamics of what constitutes the American family is rapidly changing. According to a 2014 PEW study, less than half—46 percent, to be exact—of children younger than 18 years old are living in a home with “married heterosexual parents in their first marriage.”

And it’s not just that adults are waiting longer and until they’re farther into their careers to conceive: PEW reported a year later that 16 percent of children live in ‘blended families’ (e.g. a household with a stepparent or a stepsibling); in the same study, it also announced that while seven percent of kids live with cohabiting parents, some estimates expect that rate could jump to nearly 40 percent by the time that child becomes a teenager. Read more…

A Side Effect of Airport Design: Protests

Protestors at Los Angeles International Airport, photo by Kayla Velzaquez via Unsplash.

English professor and scholar of airports (yes, it’s a thing) Christopher Schaberg writes about the recent Trump administration travel ban protests in airports for Real Life magazine — they didn’t gum up the airport works so much as take advantage of all the ways airports are already designed to welcome mass action.

Yet this was no mere matter of poor design: It was always in airports’ very nature to welcome, shepherd, and display such collective action — passengers routinely clump up and board together, linger around baggage carousels in masses, and cluster and fume together when there’s a hiccup in the system. The protests were like a major wave of airline delays or cancellations, but instead of domestic flights in question, people were responding to entire ontological trajectories suddenly put on hold.

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