The Longreads Blog

Happy Birthday, Joan Didion

Joan Didion, in a moment from the forthcoming documentary
Joan Didion, in a moment from the forthcoming documentary, We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live

I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

-Joan Didion, who turns 81 on Dec. 5, in a famous quote from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Below is the trailer and Instagram account from We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live, the documentary of the beloved author, directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne, currently in production.

Remembering the Female Voice of the Blues

In the 21st century, if “the blues” has any face, it’s Robert Johnson’s, or, more typically, a Johnson-esque silhouette, dark and downtrodden: slumped, itinerant, devastated, male. He has usurped all the torture and torment, a fantastical incarnation of a fantasy. That, in the 1920s and ’30s, commercial artists like Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith were the dominant figures of the genre has become irrelevant to the myth of the blues as it’s been written by collectors and critics. Smith was phenomenally successful—a stout, outspoken black woman in a fur coat and pearls, stuffing theaters—and her success so directly contradicts a more romantic saga (the-blues-as-marginalized-cry) that she’s been nearly excised from its telling.

Amanda Petrusich, writing in the Oxford American magazine about blues singer Bessie Smith, one of the most popular blues musicians of all time, an architect of the musical form, and the first to appear on Columbia Records’ “race series” in 1924. Petrusich’s piece ran in December, 2013.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by Jessica Rinaldi, Boston Globe

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Speed-Dating in Shanghai: Finding a Mate at the ‘Love and Marriage Expo’

The Panda and The Bear - 3 by Andrew Baldacchino (CC BY-SA 2.0)

As a 23-year-old only child from a working-class family from Shanghai, I am in no rush to find a girlfriend. But marriage at a young age in China is considered the norm right now. My parents certainly think it should be. Since I got a job, they’ve now and then asked me euphemistically, “Do you have a direction?” By “direction,” they mean a girlfriend—one with whom I’m in a stable and serious relationship, and can bring home to visit at the Chinese New Year.

My mother didn’t force me to go to the matchup event. She just hinted that I should—every time we talked on the phone. “Nothing wrong with just having a look,” she told me. So here I was, dressed decently, and looking at a huge noticeboard, on which I saw my picture alongside hundreds of others, and below it the words:

Name: Mr. Huang
Education: Master’s degree
Birthdate: March 1992
Yearly salary: …

I’m listed on the wall for buyers.

I had filled in my yearly salary when I’d registered online—it’s a required question, along with those about your height, weight, zodiac sign, and whether you have a property or own a car. But I didn’t expect they would make rows and rows of “wanted” posters for every participant with his or her salary visible to every passer-by.

At Quartz, Zheping Huang navigates the highly competitive sea of red tables in search of wife at the Love and Marriage Expo in Shanghai, China.

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Call and Response: Roxane Gay Reflects on Tragedy

Every day, terrible things happen in the world. Every damn day too many people die or suffer for reasons that defy comprehension.

All too often, suffering exists in a realm beyond vocabulary so we navigate that realm awkwardly, fumbling for the right words, hoping we can somehow approximate an understanding of matters that should never have to be understood by anyone in any place in the world.

This is the modern age. When tragedies occur, we take to Twitter and Facebook and blogs to share our thoughts and feelings. We do this maybe, just maybe, to know we are not alone in our confusion or grief or sorrow or to believe we have a voice in what happens in the world.

We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly. Life is a mess.

At The Rumpus, Roxane Gay guides us toward compassion as we navigate the anger, grief, sorrow, and frustration we feel in times of tragedy.

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The ’90s Soda that Nobody Cared About Until It Was Dead

In The Believer in February, 2014, Michael Schulman wrote about one of the most dramatic and memorable failures in American branding: Coca-Cola’s OK Soda. Marketed to Gen X’ers in 1994, the OK Soda brand died by 1995, though its artifacts live on in collector circles and advertising lore. As ’90s fashion and music cycle back through popular culture, this epic story of food, failure and the secret heart of youth culture highlights the arrogance of business people who think they know what you want and how to manipulate you into buying it.

When OK Soda was introduced, of course, Coke executives were certain they had it right. Drawing on a study from MIT, the company had pinpointed what Generation X was all about. “Economic prosperity is less available than it was for their parents,” Lanahan theorized. “Even traditional rites of passage, such as sex, are fraught with life-or-death consequences.” Tom Pirko, a Coke marketing consultant, told NPR, “People who are nineteen years old are very accustomed to having been manipulated and knowing that they’re manipulated.” He described the soda’s potential audience as “already truly wasted. I mean, their lethargy probably can’t be penetrated by any commercial message.”

How to sell soft drinks to such people? The answer was to embrace the angst. Coke turned to Wieden + Kennedy, the ultra-hip Portland, Oregon, ad firm that had devised Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign. The agency’s pitch has become the stuff of soda lore: research had shown that Coca-Cola was the second most recognized term in the world. The first was OK, which, the firm pointed out, was also the two middle letters of Coke. So why not combine the two? The drink was christened OK Soda, and its semi-reassuring motto was “Things are going to be OK.”

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Are We Too Late to Save Antarctica?

World leaders have converged in Paris this week for COP21, the United Nations conference meant to foster a global consensus on climate change. As is often the case with these events, it feels incredibly late. Back in 2008, Julia Whitty wrote in Mother Jones about her trip to Antarctica. Her reflections on the fragility of the landscape — from fast-melting icebergs to dying penguin colonies — feel eerily prophetic, with a layer of nostalgic patina already forming in the edges.

There’s talk aboard the Endeavour of climate change, including from a vocal contingent of naysayers quoting mythical studies. One woman repeatedly cites a fictional cluster of 19,000 denialistas hunkered down in German institutes of higher learning, until someone asks her to prove it. There are also a surprising number of middle grounders leaking equal parts confusion and skepticism about “this global warming business.” The two groups manage to exhibit all five stages of climate-change denial: There’s nothing happening; we don’t know why it’s happening; climate change is natural; climate change is not bad; climate change can’t be stopped. The true believers discover each other mostly through shared incredulous silence.

Yet all come together when we happen upon an ancient ice floe topped with a single sleeping emperor penguin. It’s a juvenile that has just completed its inconceivable genesis in the dark of the Antarctic winter, perched atop its father’s webbed feet, tucked into the brood pouch, enduring 100-knot winds and subzero temperatures. The young bird utters three soft braying calls as we approach, then stands. The motor drives on a hundred cameras whine. Everyone whispers to no one in particular, as all are joined by an invisible thread of respect woven into the collective consciousness by March of the Penguins. You can almost hear the Morgan Freeman narration hang in the air.

Directly ahead lies heavy pack ice, the dividing line between ships and penguins. We turn back, leaving the young bird to its solitude.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

How Sarah Schweitzer Discovered the Story About a Boy Rescued from Near-Fatal Abuse

There are stories that creep up and remind us that there is no substitute in journalism for simply spending time with a subject. It’s a luxury many reporters don’t get, but what these stories reveal about the depth of humanity—the best and worst sides of it—make them so worth it.

The Boston Globe’s Sarah Schweitzer was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for last year’s “Chasing Bayla,” and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see her nominated again for “The Life and Times of Strider Wolf,” in which she and photographer Jessica Rinaldi documented the difficult life of a young boy and his brother, rescued from near-fatal abuse, and sent to live with their grandparents, who face their own troubles. I sent her a few follow-up questions via email: Read more…

Borders: A Reading List

When I think of borders, several things come to mind: covert darkness, hundreds or thousands of dollars handed to a coyote, desperation. In the news, Donald Trump vows to build some sort of ridiculous fence along the Mexican-American border to keep people out, and cowardly United States governors swear innocent Syrian refugees will not enter their states.

Borders are not only political. In reading for this list, I read about all sorts of boundaries—in jazz music, in science fiction and in desert landscapes. Borders are implicit in the designation of which bookshelves belong to me and which are my partner’s. In this list, I stuck to geography: islands bursting out of the sea, a property feud gone horribly wrong, the billions of dollars backing border control in the American South, and the American South itself. Read more…