The Longreads Blog

Serena Williams and Roger Federer: The Greatest of All Time

This weekend, Serena Williams and Roger Federer each won their respective singles titles at the Australian Open, the first major tennis tournament of 2017. The achievement by two of the greatest tennis players of all-time was remarkable for several reasons: Serena Williams set an Open Era record with 23 Grand Slam singles titles under her belt. Roger Federer extended his record as the male tennis player with the most Grand Slam titles with his 18th win. And both players, at the ripe old tennis age of 35, demonstrated athletic excellence in a sport dominated by 20-somethings (I should also note that the Australian Open women’s final also featured Serena’s sister, Venus Williams, 36, who is also excelling at an age when most other players have chosen to retire). To celebrate these achievements, I’d like to share two of my favorite profiles of Serena and Roger. Read more…

Junot Díaz on What It’s Like to Be an Immigrant in America

Photo by ala_members

I mean, the solitude of being an immigrant, the solitude of having to learn a language and a culture from scrap, led me to the need for some sort of explanation, the need for answers, the need for something that would give me – that would in some ways shelter me, led me to books, man. I was trying – as a kid I was very, very curious, kind of smart, and I was trying to answer the question, first of all, what is the United States, and how do I get along in this culture, this strange place, better? And also, who am I and how did I get here? And the way I was doing it was through books, man. You know, I just – I found books – when they’d showed me the library when I was a kid, a light went off at me in every cell of my body. Books became the map with which I navigated this new world.

-Author Junot Díaz, in a 2008 NPR interview, on the American immigrant experience.

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When a Sibling Transitions

What I call heroism, Kenyon calls survival. I get worked up when our friends say, “We’ll love her anyway,” or “That must be so hard for your family,” implying that Kenyon’s transition was a problem, not a solution. But Kenyon simply says: “Well, yeah, it is weird. But all I want is tolerance.”

I wonder, Do these friends understand why I’ve called my brother “Lolly” and taken an extra second to correct myself. Do they know I wore Lolly’s jacket to a friend’s house, hoping it still smelled of her? I wonder if they sometimes think about who Kenyon used to be.

I think Kenyon knows Lolly still exists somewhere for our family. I don’t talk about it with him very often, because I have been the one to coach my parents out of their ignorance, and I’ve worked hard to show Kenyon that I agree that transitioning is the best thing he’s ever done for himself. He’s happy now, and proud of his work toward a graduate degree in chemistry. Three years after he began his transition, he says he is the most emotionally and physically comfortable he’s ever felt. When I see stories about people like Leelah Alcorn, the Ohio teen whose parents refused to accept her as transgender and who killed herself, I think about how everything could have turned out differently for our family.

In GlamourMeghan Tear Plummer reflects on her sister’s transition to her brother late in life, and wrestles with what his liberation means for their relationship.

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The Cultural Revolution of Anthony Bourdain

Image by Peabody Awards (CC BY 2.0)

Anthony Bourdain’s on-screen persona strikes a careful balance between discipline and recklessness. In her Eater essay on Bourdain’s writing career, Maria Bustillos reveals a similar dynamic at play in his early works of fiction, and all the way back to his suburban upbringing in New Jersey:

Bourdain came of age in the mid-1970s, a time of no brakes at all, a moment of pure hedonism in America. “Decadence” meant the dark beauty and excitement of debauchery, rather than anything gnarly. (The gnarly part was coming up fast, but it was a ways off yet.) A keen reader even as a teen growing up in Leonia, New Jersey, he wolfed down Hunter S. Thompson, Orwell, Burroughs, Lester Bangs, and I bet Baudelaire and DeQuincey; listened to the Stooges, the Dolls, Roxy Music, the Velvets, and The Ramones. (He dedicated his 2006 essay collection, The Nasty Bits, “To Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee.”)

The only culture worth knowing then was the counterculture. The Vietnam War began in 1956, the year of his birth, and ended the year he turned nineteen — surely now, in 1975, the reign of the liars and the squares had ended for good. Cocaine was routinely touted as a natural, plant-based high — health food, practically. (“It’s made from leaves!”) There was, as yet, no AIDS. Peak Free Love had arrived. That the young Bourdain literally “wanted to be a junkie” only meant that he was a little more committed than most to the prevailing atmosphere of pleasure and abandon. “I always wanted to be a criminal,” he confesses blithely in the essay, “A Life of Crime.” He once told an interviewer that he was expelled from Vassar as the result of a “depraved incident” involving angry lesbians and firearms.

This rebel son was raised in an ultra-civilized suburban family atmosphere. His mother, Gladys, was a New York Times editor, and her byline, G.S. Bourdain, appears over Times stories about Robbe-Grillet, opera stars, Cinecitta and the opening of Fauchon in Manhattan; her subjects and her writing both are suggestive of high standards, formality, propriety. Sam Sifton once described her as “a legendary editor… with a legendary temper.” She was a good cook, too. Bourdain describes favorite childhood dishes now and then — his mother’s meatloaf, her crème renversée — though his memories of the crisply pressed shorts and matching socks he and his younger brother were made to wear as kids, boarding the Queen Mary for a vacation in France, are not so fond.

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Publishing’s New Four-Letter Word

Writing in LitHub, Alana Massey responds to Emily Gould’s essay on publishing’s “niceness” requirement for women to ask: what’s wrong with nice? Shouldn’t we ask men to be more nice, rather than giving women permission to be less so?

The idea that writers are good at writing and little else perpetuates a mythology that we are special creatures whose agility with language renders us more deeply attuned to the human condition than others and therefore exempt from doing the bare minimum: answering questions in full sentences at industry events and talking about our work when we are, indeed, at work. It is the decency of returned emails and speaking to your tablemates at a party thrown to honor you. Such decency is demanded in every other profession on Earth besides being a Real Housewife or playing in the NHL, and I don’t think that just because the men in our industry eschew this in favor of offensive levels of self-regard makes it courageous or authentic in women. This decency need not be the over-indulgence of cookies or new friendships on demand, but a manifestation of that thing we are allegedly so good at: seeing the human condition and responding to it with just enough tenderness to connect but not attach.

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Guilt: The Unwanted Guest at Every Family Holiday Celebration

Photo by Phing Chov (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In this humorous take on passing down family holiday traditions, NPR Code Switch’s Kat Chow reflects on how duty and guilt mute her enthusiasm for Chinese Lunar New Year until she accepts that guilt is simply a natural part of the ritual.

The Lunar New Year of my youth:

Dad pushes our kitchen table to the center of the room. He’s clearing space for the family to stand and pray. He and mom coat the table with platters of fish (symbolizing surplus, prosperity), black moss noodles (more prosperity), roast duck, poached chicken with ginger and scallion oil. Before we eat, my parents set out framed photos of our dead relatives (symbolizing filial duty, I guess) next to the food offerings.

We light incense. Clasping the puffing sticks in our palms, we bow three times (symbolizing … I don’t know) and dispose of them outside on the back deck. The smoke from the incense licks our eyeballs and clings to our winter jackets, which we wear throughout the night (symbolizing we’re cold).

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Cat Marnell’s Rehab Writing Retreat

At New York Magazine’s The Cut, Emily Gould profiles Cat Marnell, the famously self-destructive former beauty editor who miraculously managed to complete a compelling, well-written memoir, How to Murder Your Life — despite first blowing her entire advance on drugs.

Marnell missed her first book deadline, overdosed on heroin, and spent her whole advance before writing a word. She more than justified the concerns of everyone who thought that book would never be written.

But then Marnell managed to get herself to rehab, at a facility in Thailand helmed by a guru who also treats Pete Doherty. There, she finally started writing without her usual helpers. “Rehab is basically a memoir-writing workshop,” she told me. “You have to reiterate your story so many times, you storyboard it out. You basically leave with an outline that you can send to a publisher.” Now, despite a recent “drug vacation” (more on that below), she says that she’s healthier than ever before. “My survival is not a fluke. I have definitely chosen the better path.” The mere fact of the book’s existence means that she is capable of putting her ambition ahead of her addiction, at least temporarily. The book is also far from messy — her control of style and tone is impressive, as is her wry self-awareness.

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Just One of Millions of American Immigrant Stories

This is me, just as I was about to immigrate to the United States. Before 1965, it was legal to ban immigrants based on nationality, and Asians in particular were targeted. It was actually referred to as an Asiatic Barred Zone. Then, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, banning discrimination on the basis of national origin. For all who believe everyone should be treated equally, please contact your representatives.

-From a Facebook post by my friend, journalist Mary Green. …  Read more…

‘This Is Home Now’: The Karen People’s Journey from Myanmar to Australia

Escaping persecution and conflict, many Karen people of southern and southeastern Myanmar have migrated to Thailand, settling primarily in refugee camps at the Myanmar-Thailand border. As Margaret Simons reports on SBS, about 200 Karen people have since found a new home in Nhill, a country town halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide in Australia. Their presence has brought new life to the town — jobs, connections, and a sense of community — making Nhill a model for the rest of the country.

A board outside the shop announces, in the exotic Brahmin script of Myanmar, Kay’s great act of generosity and now her cause for hope. She has given, rent free, the space at the rear of her store to Karen community leader Kaw Doh Htoo. There, he has opened a grocery store for the Karen people who have made this remote country town their home. . . .

He sits at the formica table and tries to describe how he came to live here, in this little declining town with its wide streets and closed shops speaking of past prosperity. The Karen come from the hills and mountains of Karen state, part of Myanmar near the Thai border. He gets choked up.

This is home now, he says. It is a good place. But he misses the hills and jungle. Ask him what he hopes for his children, and he weeps.

Hope, after all, can be as sharp as a knife. . . .

But there are other things here, too — less visible to the passing eye. Nhill has a higher rate of volunteering than the nation as a whole. It has what Deloitte Access Economics has termed unusually high levels of social capital. Put more simply, it is a town with a big heart and, over the last six years, it has come to stand for a very different kind of Australian story.

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Life in a Post-Soviet Melting Pot

Photo by Nicolai Bangsgaard (CC BY 2.0).

These days the museum has no ticket office, schedule, or employees. An elderly Georgian man named Soso, who introduced himself as a former KGB colonel, guides the tours. Soso said that when he returned to Tbilisi from Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was unable to obtain a pension or an apartment, so he moved into the museum. He survives on donations from tourists.

“There are sometimes no tourists for two weeks,” he complained.

While we were talking, kids from the neighboring houses dashed into the museum. They said it was the first time they had seen the museum’s gates open, and they wanted to see what was inside. They looked at the numerous portraits and busts of Stalin and Lenin.

“Do you know who that is?” I asked, pointing to a bust of Lenin.

They said they didn’t know.

n+1 publishes an excerpt, with illustrations, from Victoria Lomasko’s 2015 book, A Trip to Tbilisi. Journalist and illustrator Lomasko was first noticed in the West for her graphic reportage from the Pussy Riot trial. In Tbilisi, Georgia, she spoke with historians, artists, journalists, activists, squatters, and local clergy about the political and cultural climate in a former Soviet republic that continues to have a tense relationship with Russia.

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