The Longreads Blog

Some Pig

Cover of 45 rpm record of Three Little Pigs

This story is very short, but it’s ridiculous and wonderful.

Derek was a magician and I thought I’d convince him by saying a mini pig would be perfect for his act. The two of us had met at a smoke and rib house where I worked as a waiter. But when Derek came home he was furious that I hadn’t spoken to him first. The pig (whom we later named Esther) looked like hell. She had a ratty pink collar, sunburned ears, her nails had chipped varnish and she looked so sad.

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“Modern Life Is Not Violent Enough,” Said Nobody — But They Thought It

football field

GQ published an excerpt from Chuck Klosterman’s book But What If We’re Wrong? last May — and while it’s nominally about football, violence, and why the sport isn’t going away anytime soon, it’s also a prescient analysis of current U.S. politics.

There’s an embedded assumption within all arguments regarding the doomed nature of football. The assumption is that the game is even more violent and damaging than it superficially appears, and that as more people realize this (and/or refuse to deny the medical evidence verifying that damage), the game’s fan support will disappear. The mistake made by those advocating this position is their certitude that this perspective is self-evident. It’s not. These advocates remind me of an apocryphal quote attributed to film critic Pauline Kael after the 1972 presidential election: “How could Nixon have won? I don’t know one person who voted for him.” Now, Kael never actually said this. But that erroneous quote survives as the best shorthand example for why smart people tend to be wrong as often as their not-so-smart peers—they work from the flawed premise that their worldview is standard. The contemporary stance on football’s risk feels unilateral, because nobody goes around saying, “Modern life is not violent enough.” Yet this sentiment quietly exists. And what those who believe it say instead is, “I love football. It’s the last bastion of hope for toughness in America.” It’s not difficult to imagine a future where the semantic distance between those statements is nonexistent. And if that happens, football will change from a popular leisure pastime to an unpopular political necessity.

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Green Juice and the Grim Reaper

Nikolai Tarkhov, "La Grande Faucheuse." Image in the public domain.

Nutritionist, writer, and intuitive eating advocate Michelle Allison pens an essay in The Atlantic on diet culture, our relationship to food, and what really underlies our obsession with food choice and finding the “best” diet.

This is how the omnivore’s paradox breeds diet culture: Overwhelmed by choice, by the dim threat of mortality that lurks beneath any wrong choice, people crave rules from outside themselves, and successful heroes to guide them to safety. People willingly, happily, hand over their freedom in exchange for the bondage of a diet that forbids their most cherished foods, that forces them to rely on the unfamiliar, unpalatable, or inaccessible, all for the promise of relief from choice and the attendant responsibility. If you are free to choose, you can be blamed for anything that happens to you: weight gain, illness, aging—in short, your share in the human condition, including the random whims of luck and your own inescapable mortality.

Humans are the only animals aware of our mortality, and we all want to be the person whose death comes as a surprise rather than a pathetic inevitability. We want to be the one of whom people say, “But she did everything right.” If we cannot escape death, maybe we can find a way to be declared innocent and undeserving of it.

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‘Elephant and Piggie’ Author Mo Willems on the Importance of Teaching Kids to Fail

We are in a #longread!

Over the past eight years, when I wasn’t reading Pamela Colloff or Ariel Levy, I was probably reading Mo Willems. The children’s book author made the world giggle with Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and the Elephant and Piggie series, and reduced every parent to tears with Knuffle Bunny Free, the final installment in the Knuffle Bunny series that is making me cry again just thinking about it. Darn you, Mo!

In Rivka Galchen’s wonderful New Yorker profile of Willems, we learn that Knuffle Bunny’s real-life main character Trixie (Willems’s daughter) is now 15, that Willems couldn’t write another Pigeon book (“He’s a monster!”) and that he’s particularly focused on kids learning to embrace the “f” word:

Willems’s books reveal a preoccupation with failure, even an alliance with it. In “Elephants Cannot Dance!,” they can’t; in “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!,” Pigeon, despite all his pleading and cajoling, never does. Willems told me, “At ‘Sesame Street,’ they would give us these workshops about the importance of failure, but then in our skits all the characters had to be great at what they did, everything had to work out. That drove me crazy.” One of his most memorable sketches on “Sesame Street” was about a Muppet, Rosita, who wants to play the guitar; she isn’t very good, even by the end of the episode. Many artists talk about the importance of failure, but Willems seems particularly able to hold on to the conviction of it. He is a distinctly kind, mature, and thoughtful person to spend time with, and there was only one anecdote that he told me twice. It was about a feeling he had recently while walking his dog, a kind of warm humming feeling starting in his abdomen, which, he said, he had never had before. Was it happiness? I asked. He said no. He’d felt happiness before. This was something different. He said he thought that, for the first time ever, he was feeling success.

The feeling would appear to be transient. When I asked him if it felt strange to no longer be writing Elephant and Piggie books—I was still working on a way to break the news to my daughter, who had been using the Other Titles endpaper as a field of dreams—he said, “Well, at least now I have my obituary.” Shortly afterward, he said, unprompted, “I think ‘What are you working on next?’ is the worst question. It’s such a bad question. I hate that question. Everyone asks that question. I want to say, ‘Isn’t this good enough for you?’ ”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week’s Top 5, read a letter from Coretta Scott King and stories by Lizzie Presser, Kathryn Schulz, Michael Friscolanti, and Mitchell Sunderland.

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We Spend Six Months Over the Course of Our Lives Searching for Lost Things

In the New Yorker, Kathryn Schultz writes about two forms of loss: grief and the misplacement of everyday objects. Regarding the latter, it appears we have a tendency to lose items on a daily basis, and spend half a year over the course of our lifetimes searching for them:

Passwords, passports, umbrellas, scarves, earrings, earbuds, musical instruments, W-2s, that letter you meant to answer, the permission slip for your daughter’s field trip, the can of paint you scrupulously set aside three years ago for the touch-up job you knew you’d someday need: the range of things we lose and the readiness with which we do so are staggering. Data from one insurance-company survey suggest that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that, by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost up to two hundred thousand things. (These figures seem preposterous until you reflect on all those times you holler up the stairs to ask your partner if she’s seen your jacket, or on how often you search the couch cushions for the pen you were just using, or on that daily almost-out-the-door flurry when you can’t find your kid’s lunchbox or your car keys.) Granted, you’ll get many of those items back, but you’ll never get back the time you wasted looking for them. In the course of your life, you’ll spend roughly six solid months looking for missing objects; here in the United States, that translates to, collectively, some fifty-four million hours spent searching a day. And there’s the associated loss of money: in the U.S. in 2011, thirty billion dollars on misplaced cell phones alone.

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Free Education, or Freedom From Education? A Deep Dive Into DeVos

Journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire traveled to the heart of DeVos-land — the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan — to learn more about Betsy DeVos and her family’s life-long attempt to dismantle the “nanny state.”

Listen closely to Betsy DeVos on the state of the nation’s public schools, and you can hear distinct echoes of the sturdy free-market shibboleths advanced by the families’ economic heroes, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Public schools are a monopoly. They are government schools, and “government truly sucks,” as she said a couple of years ago at a South by Southwest gathering in Austin, Texas. It is the free market, not loathsome and unholy government regulations, that will at last propel America’s youngsters, its school-bound serfs, to the top of the international test scores. The education marketplace will make our children free, whilst making others rich—and that, too, is OK.

In sum, the DeVosian vision of school reform is the anti–New Deal offensive launched by the free-market reactionaries of the American Liberty League, retooled for schools and delivered with evangelical zeal. During her confirmation hearing, DeVos gave a pointed shout-out to a handful of schools that are doing it right. Acton Academy, described by Forbes as “Socrates’ Antidote for Government School Hemlock,” was one of these. Acton Academy (also named for the Lord of sainted laissez-faire memory) offers up “disruptive education” to propel its students on a “hero’s journey,” all the while teaching them to treasure “economic, political and religious freedom.” You can start your own franchise today!

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All You Have to Bring is Your Love of Everything

Ada Calhoun writes, in Elle, about a weekend getaway with her husband to the kind of “romantic” Poconos resort she used to see advertised on television as a kid. Could a couple of nights away from their kid and all the post-election news — not to mention sleeping on a bed beneath a mirrored ceiling, plus baths in a champagne-glass-shaped jacuzzi — help to rekindle their spark?

Sitting around the bar for Sexual Feud, I saw couples aged 25 to 75 yelling out answers: “Balls!” “Blindfold!” “PMS!” The breakdown between white and African-American guests was about 50-50, and I tried to remember the last time I saw such a diverse group—an older white woman with long gray hair and big glasses, a middle-aged white man with the manner and attire of a duck hunter, and a stylish young black couple with matching cherry-red high-tops—laughing together. There were even people in their twenties and thirties who seemed to be there without irony.

Here the Northeastern middle class, with everyone smelling like bubble bath and sandalwood, was united by its knowledge of popular erogenous zones—”the neck!”—and its stoic refusal to ever laugh at the host’s rape-y “take it” joke. And this may just have been the three glasses of Barefoot pinot grigio talking, but as I looked at the scene I felt genuinely optimistic about America for the first time since the election.

I looked over at Neal. He, too, seemed to be happily watching the couples around us. I wondered if he might also be reflecting on our nation, perhaps having a similar epiphany—that there could be some way to unify the country under a banner of booze and R-rated game shows.

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Refugees Welcome Here: Bringing ‘Family No. 417’ to Canada

Photo by walterw.a (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In Maclean’s, Michael Friscolanti reports on the 14 everyday Canadians who — galvanized by the sickening image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi face-down on the beach — banded together to sponsor a family of Syrian refugees whose names they did not know, in a bid to “do what’s right. To do something.” In a story reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan, Friscolanti travelled to war-torn Beirut to find and interview Amal Alkhalaf, the single-mother and her three children, dubbed “family no. 417.”

“I have not been outside since the explosion,” the woman says, speaking Arabic. “If you didn’t call me to meet you, I wouldn’t have come outside. It is too scary.”

Her name is Amal Alkhalaf, and although she doesn’t realize it yet, that name alone means so much to so many. On the other side of the world—in Peterborough, Ont., a city that could not be further away from the armed checkpoints that surround Bourj el-Barajneh—a group of strangers has made it their mission to sponsor her family and bring them to Canada, despite never seeing her face or hearing her voice. All they know is her name, and that she and her three kids, living somewhere in Lebanon, are among the many millions of Syrian refugees who fled for their lives.

A single, sickening image—a three-year-old boy dead on a beach, when British Columbia could have been home—became a nationwide rallying cry. Hundreds of private sponsorship groups mobilized in a matter of days, each one determined to rescue the next Alan Kurdi.

Near the end of the call, Amal asks a question: “Who is doing this for me?”

A collection of families, Serout replies, explaining how the sponsorship group will cover her family’s first year of expenses in Canada. “They don’t care if you are a Muslim or not a Muslim,” he says.

“At last, we are humanity,” Amal answers. “There is no black or white.”

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Science vs. the Jellyfish! (Hint: the Jellyfish Are Winning)

black and white photo of a jellyfish
Photo by Bryan Jones (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Jellyfish: we can’t predict where and when they’ll appear, we can’t anticipate where they’ll go, they can shut down an aircraft carrier, and we can’t figure how how to reduce their population. Tamar Stelling, in the Correspondent, looks at these amazingly resilient sacks of goo.

“Fight jellyfish?” Boero says when I speak with him on Skype. “Forget it.” Any tactic you’d use to combat any other plague is useless against jellyfish. Pesticides don’t affect them. Many species don’t actively swim in any particular direction, so you can’t chase them away. Electrocution doesn’t work. Acoustic shocks? Nope: with no brain or ears, a jellyfish has no notion of sound. “Jellyfish shredders, hormones – you’re just treating the symptoms,” Boero says.

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