The Longreads Blog

On Fashion and Functioning

I can talk about the fact that I went to Yale and Stanford, that my parents are Taiwanese immigrants, that I was born in the Midwest and raised in California, that I am a writer. If the conversation winds its way to my diagnosis, I emphasize my normalcy. See my ordinary, even superlative appearance. Witness the fact that I am articulate. Rewind our interaction and see if you can spot cracks in the facade. See if you can, in sifting through your memory, find hints of insanity to make sense of what I’ve said about who I am. After all, what kind of crazy person has a fashionable pixie cut, wears red lipstick, dresses in pencil skirts and tucked-in silk blouses? What sort of psychotic wears Loeffler Randall heels without tottering?

— In “Fashioning Normal,” Esmé Weijun Wang writes at Catapult about performing wellness in the midst of mental illness.

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What It’s Like to Fly Into a Thunderstorm

Flying near a fast-forming storm in North Dakota.
Flying near a fast-forming storm in North Dakota. (Photo by Shawn,flickr)

Justin Nobel | Atlas Obscura | November 2015 | 14 minutes (3,498 words)

 

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Justin Nobel, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

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The Sight, Sound and Feel of Flavor

Photo: Pixabay

In 2012, the snack company Mondelez, the owner of Cadbury’s, made another misstep. When it changed the classic rectangular chunks of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk into curved segments, customers complained that the chocolate tasted “too sugary” and “sickly.” Spence and other researchers have found that curved shapes can enhance sweetness. In one experiment, diners reported that a cheesecake tasted twenty per cent sweeter when it was eaten from a round white plate rather than a square one. In any case, Spence said, consumers are constantly, if unwittingly, proving his point that taste can be altered through color, shape, or sound alone. “These effects do exist,” he said. “The only question is whether and how we will use them.”

Nicola Twilley, writing in The New Yorker about how the color of containers and the sound of food ─ even the sound of packaging ─ influences our perception of flavor, and how one researcher is enlarging science’s understanding of the multisensorial experience of eating.

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James Patterson, Patron Saint of Literature

Photo: Blaues Sofa

Mental Floss’ November issue focuses on all things books. Camille Dodero profiles bestselling author James Patterson, he of the thrillers and love stories and multiple series and picture books. Patterson loves writing (longhand, every day!), and he loves reading. He’s using his millions to make sure people around the world have the chance to read and write, too:

In 2013, he took out a full-page ad in The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly advocating for government intervention to help save America’s books, bookstores, and libraries. He also established a grant program for school libraries. Two months in, the fund had 28,000 requests. “Twenty-eight thousand just saying, ‘Please help us: We haven’t been able to buy books in seven years, we don’t have a librarian, the shelves are literally falling apart, how can we put books in here?” In 2015, Patterson raised his school contribution to $1.75 million.

Though Patterson’s mass appeal and rapid turnout make him a source of derision in some circles, the author isn’t deterred.

In addition to $1 million in grants to U.S. booksellers in 2014, Patterson topped off his commitment to boosting independent bookstores with around $170,000 in grants to British and Irish independents this year. It’s worth noting that these types of stores are, generally speaking, the places that would steer customers away from his books. No matter to him. “I have never been a fan of payback,” he says. “It’s a good thing to do.”

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The Diluted State of Punk

With a recent slew of documentary films and books, punk’s forty year old body has been repeatedly repackaged, sweetened and sold to the masses at the mall, mystifying and irritating many people in the process. In The Baffler, Eugenia Williamson analyzes punk’s history, evolution, literature and commodifycation and addresses the lingering question: what does being ‘punk’ even mean anymore more?

Besides, anyone who’s seen the Ramones documentary End of the Century knows that punks weren’t entirely free from rules, even within the confines of their small domain. In one of the film’s saddest sequences, Dee Dee Ramone—the band’s lovable, goofy bass player and resident junkie sexpot—tries to set out on his own as a white rapper. By the time he hit his forties, he had grown tired of the bowl haircut, tight jeans, and leather jacket dress code enforced by Johnny Ramone, a man who thanked George W. Bush at his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Chastened by the verdict of the market—and it must be conceded, abundant evidence of his absent rapping talent—Dee Dee fatalistically dons his bomber jacket and returns to the Ramones fold, never again to depart from the prescribed formula in the short balance of his life. So much for punks doing whatever the fuck they wanted.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Courtesy of Time

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Buddy Guy and the Inequity of Musical Fame

Guy heads into his living room and points out some of his favorite memorabilia collected over his 60 years in the business: a photo of him grinning onstage with Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall in 1990; a thank-you note from Mick Jagger for appearing in Shine a Light. There’s a photo of Guy with his family and the president and first lady from the first of four times Guy was invited to the Obama White House. “He’s from Chicago, so he knows,” Guy says of Obama. “As soon as he put his arm around me, I said, ‘Mr. President, it’s a long way from picking cotton to picking the guitar in the White House.’ And we laughed.”

Guy points out a painting of Hendrix, and tells the story of the day Hendrix brought a reel-to-reel recorder to tape Guy’s guitar workshop at Newport. “Everyone was saying, ‘Hendrix is here,'” Guy says. “I’m like, ‘Who?’ We went back to the hotel and played until the sun rose. He was so damn good, so creative.”

Next to that is a painting of Stevie Ray Vaughan, playing his guitar behind his back — a trick he learned from Guy. “That one’s priceless,” he says. Vaughan had been a fan ever since he heard Guy singing and playing alongside Wolf and Waters on the 1963 American Folk Festival of the Blues LP as a kid. Whenever Guy played Antone’s nightclub in Austin, he invited Vaughan and his older brother Jimmie onstage. “He became like a big brother to us,” says Jimmie. “It was such a trip.” Guy played with Stevie Ray at Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley in 1990 — Guy took a different helicopter back to Chicago; Vaughan’s helicopter crashed, killing him and four others.

Patrick Doyle, writing in Rolling Stone about the life of trailblazing bluesman Buddy Guy, a brilliant guitarist and longtime Chicago club manager whose influence is as sweeping as Howlin’ Wolf’s, B.B. King’s and Sonny Boy Williamson’s, but whose name isn’t as recognizable.

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When Cecil B. DeMille Went Way Over Budget

The costs were mounting even before DeMille arrived in Guadalupe to begin shooting. Preproduction expenses were already approaching $700,000—an astronomical sum in the early days of Hollywood. More than a million pounds of statuary, concrete, and plaster were used to construct the 120-foot-tall, 800-foot-long temple and surrounding structures, and whole plaster sphinxes were sculpted and loaded onto trucks bound for the dunes. Every day on location meant feeding and housing the thousands of workers and animals. DeMille drove his construction team to work faster. Paramount Studios, the film’s backer, began sending DeMille increasingly desperate letters demanding that he cut costs. One receipt, for $3,000 spent on a “magnificent team of horses” for the pharaoh, pushed the studio over the edge, according to Sumiko Higashi, a professor emeritus at The College at Brockport, SUNY, and author of Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: the Silent Era, a biography of DeMille.

“You have lost your mind,” telegraphed Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures. “Stop filming and return to Los Angeles at once.” DeMille refused. He took out a personal loan and waived his guaranteed percentage of the movie’s gross to ensure the production continued. “I cannot and will not make pictures with a yardstick,” he wired back to the studio. “What do they want me to do?” he was rumored to have said, according to Higashi. “Stop now and release it as The Five Commandments?”

—David Ferry, writing in Outside about the extravagant faux-Egyptian set built for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 film The Ten Commandments. DeMille’s set—the biggest, most expensive one ever built at the time—was later buried beneath sand dunes on California’s Central Coast. The decades-long quest to unearth it, which Ferry covers in his story, is its own epic.

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Johnny Appleseed and the Golden Days of Hard Cider

Up until Prohibition, Michael Pollan wrote in The Botany of Desire, in rural areas “cider took the place not only of wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water.” It’s easy to see why: Until the 1900s, most water was contaminated with bacteria. Beyond issues of sanitation, cider was America’s homegrown answer to wine — our native grapes weren’t sweet enough to ferment. And just like European wines, American ciders could be incredibly complex, even nuanced — that’s why Thomas Jefferson grew cider apples at Monticello, where Hewes Crabs are kept to this day.

Cider, not snacking, was the real reason John Chapman — better known as Johnny Appleseed — was flinging seeds and setting up nurseries through the Ohio Valley and the Midwest in the early 1800s. Growing apples is easy, but cultivating a tree that bears palatable fruit is rare. Most of the chance seedlings that germinated in Chapman’s wake weren’t fit for his tin-pot hat — but they were plenty suited for a decent quaff, or even a nip of applejack. In fact, Chapman couldn’t possibly have known what he was growing. Apples are extremely heterozygous, meaning each seed contains the genetic makeup for a completely new and different type of apple tree. If you were to plant a seed from a McIntosh apple, the one thing you could be sure of is that the sapling it produced wouldn’t be a McIntosh tree.

Christopher Hughes writing for Boston Magazine about America’s early history of hard cider, and the search for the next great apple.

The Many Deaths of California

When “the big one” strikes California, the state isn’t going to fall into the Ocean the way so many Arizonans who want beachfront property like to imagine. But there are many ways to die. In The New York Times, author Daniel Duane writes about what he calls the Golden State’s “sense of unraveling” and its associated “profound mood of loss.” Drought. Forest fire. Air pollution. Gentrification. Loss of open space. Skyrocketing real estate costs and traffic and sweeping changes in values. The California Duane and many natives love is rapidly disappearing, but it always has been. For everyone who feels conflicted and paralyzed about loving a place that’s being loved to death, Duane offer a reappraisal of California, change, and the way we think about place.

Confusing one’s own youth with the youth of the world is a common human affliction, but California has been changing so fast for so long that every new generation gets to experience both a fresh version of the California dream and, typically by late middle-age, its painful death.

For Gold Rush prospectors, of course, that dream was about shiny rocks in the creeks — at least until 300,000 people from all over the world, in the space of 10 years, overran the state and snatched up every nugget. Insane asylums filled with failed argonauts and the dream was dead — unless you were John Muir walking into Yosemite Valley in 1868. Ad hoc genocide, committed by miners, settlers and soldiers, had so devastated the ancient civilizations of the Sierra Nevada that Muir could see those mountains purely as an expression of God’s glory.

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