The Longreads Blog

The Problem With Hollywood’s Portrayal of Pregnant Women

The post-apocalyptic thriller Mad Max: Fury Road has been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award, numerous Producer Guild of America awards, two Golden Globes, and an Academy Award for Best Picture. It’s been hailed as a stealth feminist masterpiece—and it is! But it also contributes to a larger problem: Nobody knows anymore what a pregnant woman looks like.

The plot of Mad Max centers on the escape attempt of several women who have been sexually abused by the monomaniacal cult-leader Immortan Joe. They are as nubile and scantily clad as the patriarch is decrepit and disgusting. A scene in which they take a break in the desert to drink some water resembles nothing so much as a bikini car wash. Read more…

Who Owns Tattoos?

Over at Vice Sports, Aaron Gordon has a fascinating piece up about intellectual property rights and tattoos. He opens with the case of the NBA2K video game series, which is currently being sued by a tattoo artist agency over the games’ digitally recreated tattoos, which appear on the virtual bodies of players such as Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. But copyright issues get murky when we are talking about tattoos. So just who exactly owns those inked images?

On the face of it, the answer seems obvious. Tattoo artists charge for their work, with a reasonable expectation that the art will be seen by others, according to Yolanda King, Associate Professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law and counsel at Advitam IP, an intellectual property law firm. For example, when Shawn Rome gives James a tattoo, he is giving James an implied license to display the tattoo in the arena, on television, and anywhere else a camera catches him. Rome owns the design, and James owns the right to display it on his body.

But when that tattoo is on the body of a celebrity, and the design gets copied, re-created and sold for profit by third parties, the ownership issue becomes much thornier. NBA2K publicly touts its ultra-realistic graphics and player design, specifically singling out tattoo recreation as an element of that realism. It features specific NBA player tattoos prominently in promotional materials. However, the game’s makers didn’t get permission from the legal rights holder of those designs, Solid Oak Sketches. So the basic question before the Southern District of New York courts is this: is what NBA 2K does with tattoos any different than if the game’s makers had used an unlicensed photograph to promote their product?

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Technology for Problem Sleepers

Having trouble sleeping? In The New Yorker, Patricia Marx writes about the economy of slumber, offering a lively survey of current gadgets and expensive equipment designed to get you a night of rest, and she nestles it snug as a bug with a primer on the growing science of sleep. From deprivation to natural cycles to oversleep, Marx’s piece is far from zzzzzzz.

If you are hoping to excel at sleeping, you’ll need a high-performance pillow, Eugene Alletto, the C.E.O. of Bedgear, told me. (His observation that “many people have never been fitted for a pillow” was not exactly a shock to me.) You’ll also want sheets and a mattress protector made from “climate-control fabric.” Bedgear is one of several new companies that sell technologically advanced bed accessories. My friend Marshall’s Pillow ID—based on a Web questionnaire concerning his size, sleep position, and type of mattress—pegged him as a perfect candidate for the Dusk 2.0, a spongy cushion with a crimson border made from “nature’s most durable support material, derived from the frothed milk sap of natural rubber trees,” as opposed to fake rubber trees ($162). He took it to his mother’s house in the Hamptons, where the cacophony of nature tends to keep him up. After a week with Dusk 2.0, he said, “It’s the kind of pillow I like, mostly because it’s cold and firm. I also like that it is red and distinctive.”

On the other head, there is Pillo 1, a large, bouncy, latex-foam model from a company called Hall Innovations ($199). With a scooped-out hollow for your skull, the Pillo 1 would make perfect packing material for a cantaloupe. But, as a sleep aid, it disappointed my friend Penny: “I woke up that first morning with an acute pain in my neck, so I wasn’t willing to be a volunteer for this pillow anymore.” The directions indicate that, because it can take from three to four weeks to “break in” (whether it is the pillow or you that is broken in is unclear), you should use it at first for only one or two hours a night. Isn’t that like waking the patient to give her a sleeping pill?

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I Was a Super Bowl Concession Worker

Last Sunday, Super Bowl 50 descended upon Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. At Slate, freelance journalist Gabriel Thompson describes game day from the perspective of a worker in one of the stadium’s upscale food courts, where he earned less than $13 an hour to serve $13 beers.

It doesn’t take long to realize that the Chrome Grill, which functioned perfectly well for sparsely attended 49ers games, is not quite ready for the Super Bowl and its crowd of 71,000. Our cooks, three temps who earn $10 an hour for typical Levi’s Stadium events, but $15 an hour for the Super Bowl, are cranking out food. Still the lines keep growing. It doesn’t help that the fancy new registers tend to freeze up, or that we sell out of the jumbo dogs an hour before kickoff, which means that we have to waste precious time absorbing complaints. “At the Super Bowl?” one lady asks. “No hot dogs? You have got to be kidding.” I apologize—as sincerely as possible, given the circumstances—but she just stands there, unconvinced. When I pull off the lid of the hot dog container to reveal greasy water, she stomps off.

“The system is not working,” says Khalid Subainati. A jack-of-all-trades at the Chrome Grill, Kal usually works as an expeditor, but today he’s spending much of his time serving as a buffer between angry customers and us, as well as trying to get the registers to work. I’m totally absorbed in slapping pizza slices onto plates while trying to keep five orders straight in my head. Relief finally comes in the form of the national anthem, performed by Lady Gaga. Ticket-holders rush to their seats, which gives us a moment to collect ourselves. “Shit,” says Joshua. I nod. For weeks, our Centerplate supervisors have reminded us about the importance of today, when we’ll put “Fans First!” to “create excitement and lifetime memories at America’s greatest event.” That’s not where this day seems to be headed.

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A Brief History of Solitary Confinement

Eastern State Penitentiary, c. 1876. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Jean Casella and James Ridgeway | Introduction to Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement | The New Press | February 2016 | 20 minutes (5,288 words)

 

Below is Jean Casella and James Ridgeway‘s introduction to Hell Is a Very Small Place, the collection of first-person accounts of solitary confinement which they edited together with Sarah Shourdas recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. 

* * *

Imagine you’re locked in the cell, and don’t know if you’ll ever get out.

Imagine a corridor flanked by closed, windowless cells. Each cell may be so small that, inside, you can extend your arms and touch both walls at the same time. The cell contains a bunk, perhaps a solid block of poured concrete, with a thin plastic mattress, a stainless steel toilet, maybe a small table and stool. A few personal possessions—books, paper and pencil, family photos—may be permitted, or they may not. The door to the cell is solid steel.

Imagine you’re locked in the cell, and don’t know if you’ll ever get out. Three times a day, a food tray slides in through a slot in the door; when that happens, you may briefly see a hand, or exchange a few words with a guard. It is your only human contact for the day. A few times a week, you are allowed an hour of solitary exercise in a fenced or walled yard about the same size as your cell. The yard is empty and the walls block your view, but if you look straight up, you can catch a glimpse of sky.

Imagine that a third to a half of the people who live in this place suffer from serious mental illness. Some entered the cells with underlying psychiatric disabilities, while others have been driven mad by the isolation. Some of them scream in desperation all day and night. Others cut themselves, or smear their cells with feces. A number manage to commit suicide in their cells. Read more…

The Misguided Meal-in-a-Box Phenomenon

Photo by Iris, Flickr

Andy Samberg and Colonel Sanders aren’t the only people to put memorable things in boxes. Corby Kummer wrote about his trials and issues with the booming meal kit delivery industry in The New Republic last October, weighing the benefits of convenience and culinary experimentation with the reality of waste:

I won’t be marketing my services as an investment adviser, at least not soon. Friends and relatives are ordering these boxes—functional adults who know how to cook and have at least a passing familiarity with grocery stores and farmers’ markets. More startlingly, one friend is putting money into “meal-kit” companies, as he informed me is the term of art. It seemed clear I couldn’t keep dismissing Blue Apron, with its three million meals a month and almost $200 million in venture capital raised so far. Or its rival Plated, co-founded by two fresh-out-of-Harvard-Business-School entrepreneurs, Nick Taranto and Josh Hix, whose office I recently visited. On one wall was a huge drawing of the Plated world of the future, with employees dispensing Plated boxes as if from a CSA in a mini-grocery store run, of course, by Plated; vertical farms along the brick walls of a reclaimed factory neighborhood; cyclists bearing Plated boxes; and, my favorite touch, hovering drones dangling multiple boxes emblazoned with the bright red Plated logo. Both services deliver to all the Lower 48—or as Matt Salzberg, the founding CEO of Blue Apron, put it, “We reach 99.7 percent of the population.”

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The Art World Is Crazy

I have been mildly obsessed with freeports—the secretive, treasure-crammed warehouses where Picassos are stashed alongside stacked bars of gold, tax-free—since David Segal’s 2012 New York Times article on the Geneva Freeport. Freeports, Segal explained, “remain the closest thing to the Cayman Islands that the art world has to offer.”

Sam Knight takes coverage of international freeport intrigue to the next level in this week’s New Yorker, with “The Bouvier Affair.” His story delves into the machinations of the Geneva Freeport and describes how one Swiss shipper saw the potential of the freeport as an adjunct to the art market, ultimately transforming himself into an under-the-radar dealer and bilking a Russian oligarch out of a billion dollars. It would not be an overstatement to call the story completely bananas. It is also a magnificently fun read—a delicious rollercoaster of a narrative, undergirded by a foundation of detailed, careful reporting. Of particular note are Knight’s nuanced insights into the bonkers world of art, like this description of the relationship between dealer and collector:

The relationship between art dealer and collector is particular and charged. The dealer is mentor and salesman. He informs his client’s desires while subjecting himself to them at the same time. The collector has money, but he is also vulnerable. Relationships start, prosper, and fail for any number of reasons. It is not always obvious where power lies. Over time, each one can convince himself that he has created the other.

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See Also:
“Swiss Freeports Are Home for a Growing Treasury of Art” (David Segal, July 2012, The New York Times)

The ‘Wellness Craze’: Six Stories About Fitness

I have this pair of running shoes that I bought three years ago, and the last time I wore them was in the shoe store. I had the best of intentions. My then-boyfriend encouraged me to buy them. I was always complaining about how out-of-shape I felt, which was code for how unsatisfied I was with my looks.

These days, I’m cooler with how I look, trying to navigate body-positive feminism and genuine self-care. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to put those running shoes on, even if it’s just for a walk around the park.

Maybe it’s because I’m so enamored with Netflix binges and junk food and sleeping in, but I’d rather read about exercising than exercise myself. Here are several of my favorite stories about fitness magazines, FitBit, yoga and athleisure.

1. “Why Can’t Fitness Magazines Cash in on the Wellness Craze?” (Erika Adams, Racked, January 2016)

“Wellness” is so hot right now. It sounds holistic, body positive, more all-encompassing than plain old “fitness”—so why are magazines geared towards the health-obsessed floundering?  Read more…

Suicide in the Family

In the literary magazine Post Road, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about how her grandmother ─ a smart, talented woman born in repressive times ─ committed suicide for unclear reasons, and how silence and that gap in the family narrative shapes the way we view ourselves. As a historian and author, Dickinson’s father made a living telling stories that reflected how, in his words, “Life is messy.” The same applies to the end of life, too, and Dickinson explores the benefits of talking openly about tragedy and personal history. Her essay appeared in Fall 2015.

Silence, though, is not an uninhabitable vacuum. It is no black hole. The place where stories stop and silence starts becomes its own fertile ground; other notions take root. A story grew in my childhood, one of my own devising. I believed, from a young age, that I was Wilmeth reincarnate. This idea was reinforced by the way my father sometimes looked at me, or in the rare breaches when he would say, “You remind me of your grandmother today.” I believed that I had to make amends for Wilmeth’s truncated life. I would be healthy and normal. I would be smart and successful.

Unlike my grandmother, I had the power of choice and I made hard ones. I chose not to marry that man in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and to risk waiting for a different kind of love. I chose to be a writer, to work for myself, to buy a very old house and to tear it to the studs in order to bring it back to life. In a letter written to me a few years before his death, my father recounted these choices and he told me that I was brave. I had to be, you understand. Here, I had no choice. I had to prove what my grandmother might have become if given the chance. I had to show that it was merely thwarted opportunity, and not biology, that pulled that trigger.

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How to Drop Out of a Presidential Race

Adlai Stevenson (left) at a 1952 AFL convention. Photo: Kheel Center, Flickr

This is not an idle consideration. Dropping out of the presidential race can be more important—and can have a more lasting impact—than entering it. Departing the right way can help a candidate built a lasting “brand” and set him or her up for speaking fees, TV contracts, a book deal and, who knows, maybe another run for the top prize one day.

Of course, some candidates go out with more grace and style than others. One of history’s best dropout lines came from Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who, after losing to Dwight Eisenhower, confessed, “It hurts too much to laugh, but I’m too old to cry.” Richard Nixon, after he lost his race for governor of California in 1962, chose a different tack, famously proclaiming he’d quit politics forever and snapping to reporters, in words that would haunt him the rest of his life, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” Ronald Reagan fought Gerald Ford all the way to the convention in 1976, and spent the next four years giving speeches and addresses that set up his frontrunner status in 1980. In 2008, when Hillary Clinton left the presidential campaign after a long, bitter struggle against Barack Obama she proclaimed herself a “glass ceiling” breaker—and made it pretty clear she’d be back to try to shatter the glass again.

—Matt Larimer, writing for Politico. Larimer’s piece offers an excellent guide for the losers of Iowa and New Hampshire and armchair analysts alike.

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