The Longreads Blog

Prince: 1958-2016

Photo: "Purple Rain" | Warner Bros. Pictures

Prince, the singer, songwriter, producer, and rock star, died this week at the age of 57. Here are six stories about the legendary musician.

1. Prince’s Obituary in the New York Times (Jon Pareles)

Prince recorded the great majority of his music entirely on his own, playing every instrument and singing every vocal line. Many of his albums were simply credited, “Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince.” Then, performing those songs onstage, he worked as a bandleader in the polished, athletic, ecstatic tradition of James Brown, at once spontaneous and utterly precise, riveting enough to open a Grammy Awards telecast and play the Super Bowl halftime show. He would often follow a full-tilt arena concert with a late-night club show, pouring out even more music.

Read more…

Everything in Moderation, Including Moderation

I’ve been drinking more beer in the last three months than I have in the last fifteen years. Meaning, I’ve been drinking beer at all. I gave it up because it made me sluggish, but I’ve fallen back in love with beer’s flavor. Is this an unhealthy development?

In his 2014 Pacific Standard article “The Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy,” Stanton Peele not only argues that moderate alcohol consumption protects you from cardiovascular disease and helps you live longer, he treats abstinence itself as an undeniable risk factor in heart disease and shortened life spans. “Well-informed Americans,” he says, “think that abstinence is better for them.” The reason: “…Americans’ addiction-phobia, which causes them to interpret any daily drinking as addictive.” A psychologist and addiction specialist by trade, he cites studies that show the positive effects moderate and even “excessive” drinking have on health and longevity. Peele traces this deep-seated cultural issue back to the temperance movement on through modern health care, where the U.S. public health establishment’s standard treatment of alcohol’s cardiovascular benefits is a resounding, systematic silence.

I read this the other night while pouring myself a pint. Maybe I should explore my motives for resuming drinking in case I’m unconsciously reaching for some delicious way to manage the increasing stress in my life. But in terms of volume consumed, there’s no issue. When I drink, I drink one beer. Too much alcohol disrupts my sleep, so I keep it between three and five beers a week. Most people laugh. Five a week? How about five a night! 

According to the Mayo Clinic, my weekly three-to-five fall within the moderate range, which the CDC lists as up to two drinks a day for a man, one for a women, with a drink defined as 12 ounces of beer and 5 ounces of wine. “When it comes to drinking alcohol,” the Mayo says, “the key is doing so only in moderation.” Peele encourages moderate consumption, as does Aaron E. Carroll’s recent The New York Times piece “Drink to Your Health (in Moderation), the Science Says,” which offers stats about how people who don’t drink have a higher death rate than those who drink moderately.

With so many articles giving conflicting information about the pros and cons of contentious foods ─ coffee is good for you, coffee is bad for you; dark chocolate helps your heart, too much fat harms it ─ it’s hard to figure out moderation. 

Moderation lies the core of American dietary thinking. “Everything in moderation,” goes the old line, meaning don’t binge, and don’t abstain, but do take it easy on the bad stuff. Between the two poles of asceticism and indulgence, moderation is about never giving up or fully giving in. It’s a reasonable approach: walk the rational temperate middle road to health. Moderation works well for those of us who want to limit something for physical or ethical reasons, like meat, dairy or dessert, but not abandon it entirely. Life without chocolate is no life at all, but you don’t want to suffer from too much of a good thing, despite what Mae West said. Another example, I’m a weekday vegetarian. I abstain from animal flesh Monday through Friday, and I indulge on Saturday and Sunday. The reason: I object to factory farming on ethical grounds, but I can’t afford to buy only small farm, humanely raised meat. But by abstaining five out of seven days I balance my values with my financial inability to fully live by them, and also accommodate my taste for certain foods, since I do love pork. The result: moderate intake of animal fats and cholesterol; more regular intake of vegetables, legumes and fruits; greatly reduced participation in an unethical farming system; and only moderate guilt about not being able to skirt that system entirely. This approach loosely fits within the Aristotelian idea of the golden mean, and maybe in Confucius’s Doctrine of the Mean.

If I wonder whether I should worry about my sudden return to beer, Peele says it’s because this sort of worried thinking is part of our distinctly American problem. As a nation, we’re ambivalent about alcohol. We see it as poison that’s healthy to avoid, yet we drink it at games and parties and dinner. So we binge, sober up, and wrestle with our urges and guilt, when more of us should be sipping responsibly like so many Europeans. Peele acknowledges that it’s moderate consumption which science has found to have the most health benefits. But in order to reap those benefits, Americans need to get over the idea that daily moderate drinking ─ meaning, a drink or two at night ─ is somehow unhealthy, or a sign of a mounting problem, and the health community needs to stop telling the public that seven drinks a week for women is healthy, but ten is excessive. Peele distinguishes himself from the standard “everything in moderation” ideology in favor of Oscar Wilde’s quip about “Everything in moderation, including moderation because, he says, “the evidence that abstinence from alcohol is a cause of heart disease and early death is irrefutable.” Alcohol’s “benefits are greatest if you drink moderately. But even drinking more than is ‘perfectly’ recommended, without displaying clinical symptoms of problem drinking or alcohol dependence (and these are not subtle), is generally better for you than drinking nothing.”

He isn’t talking about just drinking a few beers. He’s saying drink to live. I love it when science tells me what I want to hear.

***

Additional Reading:

“Drink to Your Health (in Moderation), the Science Says” (Aaron E. Carroll, The New York Times, Dec. 21, 2015)
“The Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy” (Stanton Peele, Pacific Standard, Aug. 12, 2014)

Could You Afford a $400 Emergency? Neal Gabler Says His Financial Confession ‘Was Not an Easy One to Write’

If there are two things Americans are good at, it’s mishandling our finances, and using Twitter to judge those who are in worse shape than us.

Thus we have the perfect Atlantic cover story this week—a refreshingly honest and desparingly relatable personal essay by writer Neal Gabler about his many financial mistakes, as well as a look at why even high-earning families in the U.S. are still living paycheck to paycheck. Gabler told me the piece “wasn’t an easy one to write.” Read more…

Why Is There a Patient Cap on Medication Used to Treat Heroin Addicts?

Photo by Joe Loong CC-BY 2.0

At Guernica, Lucas Mann (who lost his brother to heroin addiction) writes on why abstinence and methadone don’t work and how doctors are failing in their fight against arbitrary, DEA-enforced patient caps on buprenorphine — a promising treatment for heroin addiction.

Curran began prescribing in 2002. He was stunned by the results, and so were his patients. The first patients went out and told others, and there were many others. But he wasn’t supposed to treat an endless supply; at the time, a doctor was capped at thirty buprenorphine patients in any given year. Curran hit his cap in less than a week. In a matter of months, he was looking at over 700 people in need. He didn’t know what to do. He tried to get local methadone clinics (who were authorized to dispense buprenorphine) to take his patients, but they were unwilling to use anything but methadone.

“The people kept coming,” he tells me. “It was like Schindler’s List.”

It’s hard to turn away someone prostituting for drug money because of a number you’re not supposed to cross. And this is where the Hippocratic Oath comes in. He prescribed to all of them.

“They told me I was the biggest violating doctor in America,” he says.

When the DEA agents—young blonde women in professional attire, like pharmaceutical reps—first showed up at his office in 2005, it was a surprise. The waiting room was full, and his patients watched as the officers told him to start letting people go.

Read the story

Weed Reads: A Reading List About Marijuana

Over the weekend, Pennsylvania became the 24th state in the U.S. to legalize medical marijuana. For your April 20th, here are eight reads on cannabis, from one writer’s journey into America’s first legal pot festival in Colorado to a profile on a scientist researching safe pesticide use in Washington State.

“More Reefer Madness.” (Eric Schlosser, The Atlantic, April 1997)

“More Americans are in prison today for marijuana offenses than at any other time in our history.” In 1997, Schlosser examined the case to decriminalize marijuana. (Dive deeper in his award-winning two-part series from 1994: “Reefer Madness” and “Marijuana and the Law.”)

“The Scientist Pot Farmer.” (Brooke Borel, Undark Magazine, April 2016)

In Washington State, which legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, scientist Alan Schreiber has studied pesticides for 18 years. Working to further agricultural research, Schreiber focuses on safe pesticide use in cannabis production and provides safety workshops for pot farmers. Read more…

A Dead Superhero Is a Marvelous Corpse

Ramzi Fawaz | The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics | New York University Press| January 2016 | 25 minutes (6,662 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The New Mutants, by Ramzi Fawaz, which examines “the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.” This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

* * *

We’ve changed! All of us! We’re more than just human!

—THE FANTASTIC FOUR #1 (November 1961)

We might try to claim that we must first know the fundamentals of the human in order to preserve and promote human life as we know it. But… have we ever yet known the human?

—JUDITH BUTLER, Undoing Gender (2004)

*

Who might legitimately represent the human race?

In November 1992 Superman died. The Man of Steel would fall at the hands of the alien villain Doomsday, a thorny-skinned colossus who single-mindedly destroys life throughout the cosmos. Arriving on Earth seeking his next conquest, Doomsday meets his match in the planet’s longtime guardian, known to few in his civilian garb as the meek journalist Clark Kent but beloved by all as the caped hero Superman. After an agonizing battle in the streets of Metropolis, Superman’s urban home, Superman and Doomsday each land a final fatal blow, their last moments of life caught on camera and broadcast to devastated viewers around the world. The fictional media firestorm surrounding Superman’s death mirrored real-world responses to DC Comics’ announcement of their decision to end the life of America’s first superhero earlier that year. Months before the story was even scripted, national print and television media hailed Superman’s death as an event of extraordinary cultural significance, propelling what initially appeared as an isolated creative decision into the realm of public debate.

Public opinion ranged widely, from those who interpreted Superman’s downfall as a righteous critique of America’s moral bankruptcy to those who recognized it as a marketing stunt to boost comic book sales. In an editorial for the Comics Buyer’s Guide years later, leading comic book retailer Chuck Rozanski claimed that upon hearing about the decision, he had called DC Comics editor Paul Levitz, pleading with him that “since Superman was such a recognized icon within America’s overall popular culture . . . DC had no more right to ‘kill’ him than Disney had the right to ‘kill’ Mickey Mouse.” According to Rozanski, by choosing to kill Superman for sensational purposes, DC would be breaking an implicit promise to the American people to preserve the hero’s legacy as a “trustee of a sacred national image.” Read more…

The 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The 2016 Pulitzer Prizes winners have been announced: The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum won the prize for criticism. Lin-Manuel Miranda won the drama prize for “Hamilton.” The New York Times’s Alissa J. Rubin won the international reporting prize for her work investigating the abuse of Afghan women. The Boston Globe’s Farah Stockman won the prize for commentary for her series examining race and education in Boston after busing.

A list of the all the winners and finalists can be found here. Below is a short list of other books and features that were honored today:

Explanatory Reporting: “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” (T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project)

Read more…

Longreads Turns Seven Years Old: Unfinished Business

Just a few of the many current Longreads contributors, to whom we are thankful.

Seven years ago this month I started Longreads. To say the word “longread” has taken hold beyond my wildest expectations would be an understatement. It was a Twitter hashtag experiment — which I started because I wanted story recommendations for my subway commute — that turned into a company, a meme, an original publisher, and, of course, an endless cycle of writers debating whether longform storytelling is good or bad for the internet. (Well, thank god for that.) Read more…

Our Well-Regulated Militia

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Alexander Chee | Longreads | April 2016 | 15 minutes (3,713 words)

My partner Dustin and I recently bought a cabin in a 1930s-era hunting association a few hours from New York City. Out in the yard is a game hook for hanging a deer after shooting it. We are thinking of turning it into a swing.

Last summer, my retired prison guard neighbor there tried to convince me to do two things: marry Dustin—“I’ve seen too many gay guys like you get screwed by the family when something happens to one of you”—and get a hunting license to help him shoot some of the bears. We thanked him but did not marry, and as for the hunting license, we prefer watching the bears eat apples from the trees in the meadow—you could even say we prefer the bears to some of our neighbors.

The bears don’t bother us.

Most of the members of the association don’t seem to hunt much. Dustin and I go up regularly, every other weekend, and only a few times a year do we really hear anyone off in the woods shooting at anything. One day another neighbor appeared in camouflage and a bush helmet, carrying a bow and arrow, inviting us over to drinks.

Real hunting, as I know from my own family life, is hard. You have to be in decent shape, you need to be dressed for the weather, sprayed for bugs, you need sunblock, you need food packed for the day, you have to have a good dog you’ve trained year round, and you have to be able to field-dress what you kill or at least drag it to where you parked your car. Also: you need to know how not to get lost in the woods. I have a lot of respect for many of these hunters even if I don’t agree with what they’re doing or want to participate in it.

But I also know my cousin Jon back in Maine has a sideline as a butcher for deer and moose, was young when he learned how to carve them up from his game warden father, and he gets a little money and a little or sometimes a lot of meat from it, plus bones for his dog. This sideline exists because most of the hunters coming through his small town don’t know how to do what he does, or they can’t be bothered to do it.

His venison with garlic marinade is exceptional. Every time I have it, I’m grateful to his clients.

I wonder if the day will come when I’ll have to buy a gun. I’m just afraid that when the day comes, it won’t be because I’m hunting bears. Read more…

Our Temporary Homes: A Reading List About Hotels

One of my favorite childhood memories is going to Kentucky to visit my grandmother’s hometown. We stayed in the same hotel during every trip: the Best Western. My mom loved it for its consistency and affordability. I loved the popcorn machine in the lobby and the indoor swimming pool.

Hotels are weird, with their anonymous, uniform rooms; where you have to give your name at the desk in order to sleep there. As writer Aaron Gilbreath finds out in “Three Feet by Six Feet by Three Feet,” hotels are, paradoxically, monuments to isolation and to community. Suzanne Joinson feels the weight of being everywhere and nowhere at once in “Hotel Melancholia.” These essays and the others stories in this list will take you all over the world, to the hotels we call our temporary homes. Read more…