The Longreads Blog

The Freelancers’ Roundtable

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Eva Holland | Longreads |February 2016 | 25 minutes (6,339 words)

 

There’s been more talk than usual lately about the state of freelance writing. There are increasing numbers of tools for freelancers: among them, the various incarnations of “Yelp for Journalists.” There’s advice floating around; there are Facebook support groups.

With the exception of one 10-month staff interlude, I’ve been freelancing full time now for seven and a half years. I’ve learned a few things along the way, but I also still have a ton of questions, and often feel as if I’ve outgrown some of the advice I see going by in the social media stream.

So I gathered a handful of well-established freelance writers and asked them to participate in a group email conversation about their experiences and advice. Josh Dean is a Brooklyn-based writer for the likes of Outside, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science. Jason Fagone lives in the Philadelphia area and has recently published stories in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Matter, and Grantland. May Jeong is based in Kabul, and has written for publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and Al-Jazeera America. (She managed to fit in her contributions to this roundtable while reporting from a remote corner of Afghanistan, so thank you, May.) As for me, I live in Canada’s northern Yukon Territory, and my work has appeared in AFAR, Pacific Standard, Smithsonian, and other places on both sides of the border. Read more…

Jia Tolentino on the Story of Lori Maddox and David Bowie

At Jezebel, Jia Tolentino has written a superb essay about Lori Maddox, who recounted losing her virginity to David Bowie when she was 15 years old:

There are no precise enough words or satisfying enough conclusions to fully account for her story, or any like it. It’s easy to see what Bowie represents here: a sexual norm that has always appallingly favored men, and the abuse that stems from and surpasses even that. It is easy to denounce the part Bowie played in this, even with any number of purportedly mitigating factors: the political context, Maddox’s story, the fact that he lived with generosity and openness, the less generous fact that his synapses were perpetually blitzed with cocaine. It is less easy to turn over what Maddox evinces in this narrative, from the late 1970s to her account of it now—which is that women have developed the vastly unfair, nonetheless remarkable, and still essential ability to find pleasure and freedom in a system that oppresses them.

The persistence of that reality—that we learn to have sex not in a utopia but within and around whatever norms we are presented with—is why it matters that things were different in the ’70s. It is possible to say that there don’t ever need to be any other Lori Maddoxes without saying that there never were. It is possible for me to read all the rape stories in my inbox and still know with certainty that something enormous is different—and, that acknowledging that is the only way to credit the second-wave women who forced that change with rhetorical fervor that girls now would find insane. It’s because of them that we have both the words to identify power and, now, the freedom to do so more ambivalently. It’s their stringency that spared me from having to know how I would have played it if I’d grown up at a time when there was no vocabulary to separate a party girl from a body for the taking, when grown men said fair game at the age of 13.

Read the essay.

What Sexual SEO Looks Like

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Photo by differitas

In The Walrus, Natalie Zina Waschots describes her time doing search-engine optimization for a Toronto pornography curator. She tagged images with anatomical and other sexual descriptors to help randy users find the type of porn they wanted. Although the optimization was standard, Waschots’ essay shows how sex work affects a person’s own sex life, and how working with sexual content makes some employees think it’s okay to be sexist.

It feels strangely noble to shepherd horny web surfers along in their pursuit of self-gratification, and under different management, it would probably be a fulfilling, even pleasant, job. I could learn to deal with the fact that constant exposure to sexual content is starting to alienate me from my body and make me distant in my romantic relationships, that my brain is slowly becoming saturated with the language of fucking. But what really gets to me are the standard-issue white-collar indignities: an overbearing, creepy boss, and the singular tediousness of cubicle life.

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If Oprah Can’t Achieve Permanent Weight Loss, Can Anyone?

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Longtime Oprah lover over here. Since my tweens, I’ve admired how she’s made celebrities seem like regular people and turned regular people into celebrities. I read the books her Book Club boosted. Hell, I’m wearing a bra she recommended on her “Favorite Things” episode in 2003. I think she has earned every ounce of success she enjoys, so I am glad for her that she made $70 million on the first day of her deal with Weight Watchers. That amount of money will be heavy, and if she binds it together, she can use it to weigh down stacks of her other money so none of it blows away when she opens a window in one of her many beautiful homes.

But by the ninth or 10th time I heard Oprah talk about how we’re gonna go on this weight loss journey together, I had an epiphany: I have put on my sneakers and jogged down this road with Oprah before.

— Writer and television producer Caissie St. Onge, writing in Vox, on Oprah, diets, and liking (or not liking) yourself — and how all the money and drive in the world doesn’t help.

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Mallory Ortberg’s Favorite Advice Columns

Last year, I became an advice columnist. This is my only qualification for being an advice columnist, as I am quite literally just some guy. “Noted some guy Mallory Ortberg.” Here are a few of my favorite advice columns:

1. “The Monty Hall Problem” (Marilyn vos Savant, Parade Magazine)

Priceonomics describes this column thusly:

When vos Savant politely responded to a reader’s inquiry on the Monty Hall Problem, a then-relatively-unknown probability puzzle, she never could’ve imagined what would unfold: though her answer was correct, she received over 10,000 letters, many from noted scholars and Ph.Ds, informing her that she was a hare-brained idiot.

What ensued for vos Savant was a nightmarish journey, rife with name-calling, gender-based assumptions, and academic persecution.

Read more…

Volkswagen and ‘the Normalization of Deviance’

Volkswagen recently admitted to intentionally skirting U.S. emissions controls by installing “defeat devices” in nearly 500,000 vehicles. This scandal has undermined their credibility and profitability. In The Atlantic, Jerry Useem looks at historic precedents in other large organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, Ford and NASA to explore Volkswagen’s expensive mistake and the corporate climate that led to it:

The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.” In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.” Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.

If that comparison sounds overwrought, consider the words of Denny Gioia, a management professor at Penn State who, in the early 1970s, was the coordinator of product recalls at Ford. At the time, the Ford Pinto was showing a tendency to explode when hit from behind, incinerating passengers. Twice, Gioia and his team elected not to recall the car—a fact that, when revealed to his M.B.A. students, goes off like a bomb. “Before I went to Ford I would have argued strongly that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall,” he wrote in the Journal of Business Ethics some 17 years after he’d left the company. “I now argue and teach that Ford had an ethical obligation to recall. But, while I was there, I perceived no strong obligation to recall and I remember no strong ethical overtones to the case whatsoever.”

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14 Stories About Love: A Reading List

Photo: fly

Heartbreak, desire, dating, romance—Valentine’s Day brings all of these experiences to the forefront of our minds and hearts. Revel in all the feels with these 14 (get it?) essays and interviews.

1. “A Modern Guide to the Love Letter.” (John Biguenet, The Atlantic, February 2015)

2. “Love is Like Cocaine.” (Helen Fisher, Nautilus, February 2016)

3. “Unlove Me: I Found Love Because I Was Lucky, Not Because I Changed Myself.” (Maris Kreizman, Brooklyn, February 2016)

Read more…

The People You Meet on Tinder

Fresh from a go-nowhere relationship, Gemma Sieff writes an engrossing personal essay in Harper’s about her passing encounters with a series of men she met on Tinder. Sieff’s quick, vivid scenes put the reader there in the kitchen with the stranger, they put your face on another good-smelling man’s chest, and they show that, as she says, “there’s such a thing as a good man you don’t have to keep.”

An awkward segue to suggest lying down in the next room, but I muscle through, and he’s amenable. He takes off his sneakers in the living room and lies in the bedroom wearing all his clothes. I cuddle up to Kenneth, who smells nice, and objectify him from the side. He puts his hands all over me with enjoyable urgency. He takes off his clothes and I take off his socks. We sit facing each other and kiss like the most beautiful pornography never made.

“You took off my socks,” Kenneth observes afterward.

“Isn’t it nice?”

“I don’t always do that.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I thought it was romantic.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Logan Cyrus, Charlotte Magazine.

1. Life Below the Poverty Line in Banktown, USA

Lisa Rab | Charlotte Magazine | Feb. 1, 2016 | 15 minutes (3,769 words)

A searing, nuanced portrait of a single mother living in poverty in Charlotte, N.C.

2. My Last JDate

Esther Schor | Tablet Magazine | Feb. 10, 2016 | 37 minutes (9,455 words)

A three-part essay on Jewishness, cancer, and finding love in your fifties. (Read Part II and Part III).

3. Justin Bieber Would Like to Reintroduce Himself

Caity Weaver | GQ | Feb. 11, 2016 | 21 minutes (5,338 words)

Justin Bieber is not easy to talk to. Despite that, Caity Weaver is able to write a funny and engaging celebrity profile of the pop star.

4. A Killing in the Hills

Nicholas Phillips | Riverfront Times | Feb. 10, 2016 | 23 minutes (5,882 words)

Looking for answers in a decades-old murder case set deep in the Missouri Ozarks.

5. The Wow Factor

Don Van Natta Jr., Seth Wickersham | ESPN | Feb. 11, 2016 | 24 minutes (6,044 words)

The story behind the complicated and bitter fight between owners in the NFL over which teams would have the right to move to Los Angeles and build a stadium.

The Selling of ‘Valley of the Dolls’

Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann’s magnificently juicy 1966 novel, was released 50 years ago this week. In The Telegraph, Martin Chilton relays the story of the book’s promotion—essentially how Susann made it into a record-breaking best seller through sheer force of will (and savvy). “A new book is like a new brand of detergent,” Susann famously said. “You have to let the public know about it. What’s wrong with that?”

She and her husband criss-crossed America, dropping in on bookstores in every one of the 250 cities they visited. Susann would ask the head sales clerks if they had read her novel. If they hadn’t, or did not have a copy, she would give them one and autograph it. “Salesmen don’t get books free, you know,” she told Life magazine. “I tell them ‘be my guest’ and then they can recommend it honestly to their customers.”

The flattered bookshop staff would often change their window display to give a prominent slot to her novel, with its slick cover, showing coloured pills scattered against a white background. The only time she lost her cool in a shop was when she found out that the books department of the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago was selling Valley of the Dolls under the counter, as if it were pornography.

Another factor in her favour was that she understood the power of television and made great efforts to appear on national and local stations during her PR tours. The former actress knew how to play the fame game. As the blurb on Valley of the Dolls proudly stated: “Miss Susann has been stabbed, strangled, and shot on every major dramatic show on the airwaves”. She was a canny guest star, giving around 30 televised interviews a week. “No matter what an interviewer asks, I can work the conversation back to the book,” she said.

And she wasn’t afraid of using any means possible, including her little “dolls”, to keep her energy levels up, “I took amphetamine pills when I was on tour,” she told Pageant magazine in 1967. “I felt that I owed it to people to be bright, rather than droop on television. I was suddenly awake, and could give my best.”

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