The Longreads Blog

Going Underground into New York’s Tunnels: A Glimpse at Life in the Dark

“You’re the first person to visit this week,” he says. “People don’t want to speak to me when they come here. I don’t know, man. They’re scared or something. I can get why, it’s a spooky place when you don’t know it. But people, they like it when it’s scary. They like it when it’s dirty, right? It makes them feel alive. That’s why they make up these stories about cannibalism and stuff. Like alligators in the sewers.”

Jon offers me a sip of vodka. We drink together. He tells me to stay safe and to watch out for trains when I go back walking into the tunnel. I hear him talk to himself as I go away from the entrance and from the white sky.

The smell down here is the one of brake dust and mold. I can see rats scouring for food and drinking from brown puddles in the tracks ballast. EXISTENCE IS FLAWED, a graffiti inscription reads.

The city growls over my head — a distant growl muffled by the concrete, almost a snarl, like something cold and foul spreading over the long stretches of stained walls, like a dark and wild beast curling up around me and breathing on my neck. A dark and wild beast silently trailing me.

— At Narratively, Montreal-based freelance writer Anthony Taille takes us into New York’s underground among “Mole People,” the Amtrak tunnel residents under Riverside Park. Taille has spent time with people who have lived under the city for many years, from Bernard Isaac, a legend among Mole People, to longtime resident Brooklyn, who has lived underground since 1982.

Read the story

How the Emperor Became Human (and MacArthur Became Divine)

The sun goddess Amaterasu, the divine ancestor of the Emperors of Japan, emerging from a cave. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Victor Sebestyen | 1946: The Making of the Modern World | Pantheon Books | November 2015 | 23 minutes (6,202 words)

Below is an excerpt from 1946, by Victor Sebestyen, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.  Read more…

Ten Years After Juilliard

In 2004, Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times tracked down the instrumentalists of Juilliard’s 1994 graduating class, whose members were by then in their 30s and “mostly embarked on careers and family life.” Though now over a decade old, “The Juilliard Effect: Ten Years Later” stands as a compelling look at the difficulties of making a living in classical music after training at one of the world’s most prestigious conservatories:

The results suggest how hard it can be to live as a classical musician in a society that seems increasingly to be pushing classical music to the margins, even as Juilliard and scores of other music schools pour out batches of performers year after year. Orchestras and chamber ensembles are under increasing financial pressure as subscriptions have dropped and government arts financing has dried up, the recording industry has shrunk and the median age of classical audiences is not getting any younger.

Sometimes the struggle is just too much, and many drop out, perhaps disillusioned with a once-sacred endeavor that has come to seem a cold, unforgiving trade. Others, like Mr. Alexander, are simply sick of the financial grind: the low pay, the lack of benefits, the scramble for work. But many others make it, and what also came clear from the analysis of this class were the high levels of dedication many of the graduates maintain and the satisfactions and excitement of expressing oneself through one of the purest forms of communication: the making of music.

Read the story

Searching for Meaning Inside a Tech Company’s First Bookstore

books

University Book Store—begun by students in 1900—is just up the road from University Village, and while they serve superficially different markets, it’s difficult not to see Amazon’s choice of location as yet another act of aggression toward indie bookstores, whose owners and employees are particularly suspicious of the company’s motives.

Speaking over her reading-stack-as-topography desk Cady outlined a history of other provocations by her city’s tech giant. Amazon staff have wielded clipboards in sign-up efforts directly outside of at least two of her store’s locations…

…Cady had already visited Amazon Books opening morning, as had some of her staff. They spoke about it with exaggerated grimaces, more dismissive than unnerved. “The selection is not bad,” Cady emphasized. Indeed, the store carries books by some prominent independent publishers—Coffee House Press, Europa Editions, Melville House—and the selection on their front fiction table would not have been out of place at many indie bookstores. The new Kenzaburo Oe was there, as was the new Mary Gaitskill, the new Joy Williams. It was not wildly adventurous but neither was it uninteresting.

-At The New Republic, Dustin Kurtz visits Amazon’s first physical store in Seattle’s University Village, and tries to puzzle together why they bothered, what their strategy is, and whether it’s worth the expensive real estate and $18-per-hour employee wages. He gives his visit a 2.5 rating.

Read the story

By the Reflection of What Is

Plate 2. Unknown photographer, July–August 1843.

John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd | Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American| Liveright | Nov. 2015 | 22 minutes (5,654 words)

The following excerpt appears courtesy of Liveright Publishing.

Get the book

 

Frederick Douglass was in love with photography. During the four years of civil war, he wrote more extensively on photography than any other American, even while recognizing that his audiences were “riveted” to the war and wanted a speech only on “this mighty struggle.” He frequented photographers’ studios and sat for his portrait whenever he could. As a result of this passion, he also became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.

It may seem strange, if not implausible, to assert that a black man and former slave wrote more extensively on photography, and sat for his portrait more frequently, than any of his American peers. But he did. We know this because Douglass penned four separate talks on photography (“Lecture on Pictures,” “Life Pictures,” “Age of Pictures,” and “Pictures and Progress”), whereas Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Boston physician and writer who is generally considered the most prolific Civil-War era photo critic, penned only three. We have also identified, after years of research, 160 separate photographs of Douglass, as defined by distinct poses rather than multiple copies of the same negative. By contrast, scholars have identified 155 separate photographs of George Custer, 128 of Red Cloud, 127 of Walt Whitman, and 126 of Abraham Lincoln. Ulysses S. Grant is a contender, but no one has published the corpus of Grant photographs; one eminent scholar (Harold Holzer) has estimated 150 separate photographs of Grant. Although there are some 850 total portraits of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West Show, and 650 of Mark Twain, no one has analyzed how many of these are distinct poses, or photographs as opposed to engravings, lithographs, and other non-photographic media. Moreover, Cody and Twain were a generation younger, and many if not most of their portraits were taken after 1900, when the Eastman Kodak snapshot had transformed the medium, bringing photography “within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees,” as Kodak declared. In the world, the only contemporaries who surpass Douglass are the British Royal Family: there are 676 separate photographs of Princess Alexandra, 655 of the Prince of Wales, 593 of Ellen Terry, 428 of Queen Victoria, and 366 of William Gladstone.

Douglass’s passion for photography, however, has been largely ignored. He is, perhaps, most popularly remembered as one of the foremost abolitionists, and the preeminent black leader, of the nineteenth century. History books have also celebrated his relationship with President Lincoln, the fact that he met with every subsequent president until his death in 1895, and that he was the first African American to receive a federal appointment requiring Senate approval. His three autobiographies (two of them bestsellers), which helped transform the genre, are still read today. Yet, because his photographic passion has been almost completely forgotten, historians have missed an important question: why would a man who devoted his life to ending slavery and racism and championing civil rights be so in love with photography? Read more…

‘Don’t You Write Anything Happy?’: Chinelo Okparanta on Learning from Public Readings

Once, I did a reading in New York where an older lady came up to me afterwards and said, “Your writing is beautiful, and there’s no doubt you’re a great writer, but I’m sorry I won’t be reading any more of that story. That was just too painful for me.” Then, a year or two later, I did a reading in Florida where another lady raised her hand and asked, “Don’t you write anything happy?” After a couple more of those, it finally clicked. I realized that for many people attending a reading is like watching television at the end of a long day. They don’t want to be sad. They want to laugh. Chances are they’ll pick the sitcoms over the horror movies. This writing business is all about learning. So I learned. I learned that, while one’s larger body of fiction can have quite a bit of sadness and conflict and tragedy in it (and in fact, most good fiction does), in a reading environment, the average audience member seems able to tolerate only a little bit of sadness. They’d much rather the reading be sexy, funny, intelligent, and witty. But little to no sadness. Life is hard these days. There’s more than enough sadness in the world, so I certainly can’t blame them.

At The Rumpus, en route to the Wordstock Festival in Portland, Nigerian writer Chinelo Okparanta–author of the recently released novel Under the Udala Trees, and the 2013 story collection Happiness, Like Water–talked to Ryan Krull about waiting until stories feel ready to be written, trying not to bum out the people who come to readings, and Americans’ naivete about the dangers faced by LBGTQ people in other countries.

Read the story

Surveying Sin in American Music

What a blast! But there’s danger in the air─someone on the dark floor’s got a gun, and everyone “does his best to act just right, ’cause it’s gonna be a funeral if you start a fight.” In [Billy] Hughes’s terms, folks “struggle and they shuffle” until the sun comes up, delicate diction for a Saturday of screwing and fighting. “Tennessee Saturday Night” hit number one on March 19, 1949, and remained on the Billboard country charts for nearly three months.

“Gonna push the clouds away, let the music have its way, let it steal my heart away, and you know I’m-a-goin’.” On Saturday nights, the journey is as jubilant as the destination. So affirms John Fogerty in “Almost Saturday Night, from his self-titled album, released on Asylum in September of 1975. This narrative is fractured, too: there’s a train bringing the rodeo to town, or is it bringing the singer home? A radio is playing outside the window (a bedroom? a train compartment?), but it competes with the bells at the train crossing, or from an imagined Gibson in the hands of a Chuck Berry wannabe. The story is embodied in the singing, exultant melody, and arrangement that praise and make passionate contact with the expectations of a long-awaited weekend night. Six years after Fogerty released the song, Welshman Dave Edmunds issued his own rollicking version (on his album Twangin), its joy elevating the song’s hopes and promises in the universal, trans-oceanic desire: bye bye tomorrow. The most powerful word in the song is “almost.” The taste of a Saturday night’s recklessness and exhilaration is more rousing at the brink of maybe, when anticipated, when prayed for.

Joe Bonomo, writing in The Normal School about the role sex, drinking, violence and catharsis play in American music, particularly country, blues and rock and roll, and the ways people sing about blowing off steam. Bonomo’s essay ran in Spring 2014.

Read the story

Stories of Syrian Refugees: A Reading List

I am not a political scientist, an aid worker, nor a refugee. I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of Syria’s politics or the motivations of ISIS completely. I read, share, and little by little, I learn.

Broadsided Press has collected statistics, resources and articles about the conflict in Syria, and Sarah Grey’s essay for The Establishment (included below) had this synopsis:

…More than 240,000 people have been killed since the 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad turned into a nightmarish civil war. Four million have fled the devastated country and 7.6 million more are internally displaced, according to a UN inquiry. An estimated 2,000 people have died at sea while attempting to enter Europe. Syria is now 83% darker at night. The outlook is bleak for a country that was once known for taking in refugees.

Broad strokes, to be sure, but important context for the following six stories. You’ll meet a teenager preparing for her wedding, queer lovers separated by bureaucracy, war and thousands of miles, and four women who defended their Kurdish city to the death. There are artists and activists and archeologists, all working together to preserve Syrian culture and the lives of its citizens. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Florida State Hospital. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

The Irish Women Forced to Travel for Abortions

As parts of the United States tighten their legislation against women’s reproductive rights, Northern Ireland comes to mind. At the Guardian, Amelia Gentleman reports on the harrowing circumstances its residents face if they need to get an abortion. Gentleman spoke to several women who traveled to England, as well as their advocates. According to Kally, an English clinic manager:

“It is very difficult for women from Ireland to come [to England]. Lots of things contribute to the stress: they don’t want people to know; there is the extra cost, and they have to travel; there is still a stigma attached to abortion; they are afraid they may meet someone here who knows them. It has happened. I’m not saying that women from England aren’t anxious and worried, but they don’t have the added stress that the women from Ireland have.”

Abortion in Northern Ireland is lawful only in extremely restricted circumstances, where there is a risk to a pregnant woman’s life or a real and serious risk of long-term damage to her physical or mental health; just 23 legal abortions were carried out on the NHS in 2013-14. Under any other circumstances, a penalty of life imprisonment could be imposed on both the woman undergoing the abortion and anyone assisting her – even if the abortion is sought because of a fatal foetal impairment, for example, or because the pregnancy is the result of rape. This is the harshest criminal penalty for abortion anywhere in Europe.

Read the story