The Longreads Blog

Season’s Greetings from Amazon Fulfillment

Is all this a matter of life and death? I’ll say no for the moment and come back to the question later. At that point I’ll say: not directly, but in a way yes. It’s a matter of how far death is allowed into our lives. Or the fatal, that which kills us. To be precise: compared to the fatal, death is nothing but a little orphan boy. Or: death, compared to the fatal, is a gentleman with good manners and a shy look in his eye.

From now on, the fatal is your constant companion; that much I can say. But first of all we’ll set out, because you have a job interview.

— Money is tight. To alleviate her ailing bank account and help support her family, author/translator Heike Geissler goes to work for an Amazon Fulfillment center in Germany. N+1 has published two excerpts from her nonfiction work, Saisonarbeit (“Season’s Greetings From Fulfillment”). Geissler’s use of second-person narrative blurs the line between reader and writer—her situation, she implies, could easily be yours. Read “The Interview” first, then “Training Day.”

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How Burger King Generates Buzz on a Budget

Burger King likes being edgy, Schwan says, and it has proved that it doesn’t mind doing things that might make other brands blush. In August, as the company pushed a new spicy version of its chicken fries—a cult favorite the chain returned to the menu after a flood of social media requests—it tweeted a picture of what appeared to be a stack of pornographic magazines. The skin books, their cover images blurred, were set next to a box of Fiery Chicken Fries, and the tweet read: “Hotter than your summer reading list. #fierychickenfries.” Less than a week later, a similar tweet featured blurred-out images of bikini-clad women with this message: “Hotter than your browsing history.”

In an age when office chatter has moved from last night’s TV episode to the latest viral video, part of Burger King’s marketing advantage has been its willingness to move quickly to exploit a constantly churning Internet news cycle. After the company reentered France in 2013, following a 16-year absence, social media there were besieged with negative comments from French customers complaining about long lines at the restaurants. Burger King didn’t waver in the face of the apparent customer service crisis. Instead, it printed some of the “angry tweets” on construction panels at the new locations as proof it had heard the negative feedback. That gambit generated millions of retweets, won a marketing award, and again showed Burger King to be a brand that isn’t afraid to ignore conventional wisdom. “The better it is you understand what you stand for, the easier it is to react quickly,” Schwan says.

Craig Giammona, writing in Bloomberg Business about how the Burger King chain’s bolder, racier viral marketing strategy is increasing sales by using social media to integrate itself into pop culture, and it’s doing it for less money.

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Kay Redfield Jamison, William Styron and the True Stories of Mental Illness

Kay Redfield Jamison
Kay Redfield Jamison. Photo by hocolobrary, Flickr

Journalist Mary Pilon is a former reporter for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and the author of 2015’s The Monopolists, the best-selling book about the origins of the board game Monopoly . She’s just announced her next book, The Kevin Show (Bloomsbury, publish date TBD), about a manic depressive Olympic sailor who believes he is the star of ‘The Kevin Show’—hearing and speaking to the voice of the Director, who tells him what to do in the ongoing TV movie of his life. Given her latest project, we’ve asked her to share some of her early book research and recommendations on mental health. Read more…

There Once Was a Dildo in Nantucket

Photo: Doug Butchy (CC BY 2.0)

Nineteenth-century Nantucket brings to mind whaling ships, harsh weather, and austere morality. So when a Victorian-era dildo was found in the chimney of an old Quaker home, back in 1979, it quickly became the subject of local lore.

In an essay at Literary Hub, Ben Shattuck traces the provenance of this unlikely sex toy (called a “he’s-at-home” by Nantucketers). Along the way, he also reflects on the tricky art of reconstructing intimate histories, and the ways that the objects we leave behind define us:

Mattie died at seventy-eight, in 1928, from a stroke. She had chronic myocarditis, an inflamed heart. At some point in the thirty years since James had passed, it seems, she’d gathered what she had left of him and stuffed it up the chimney, along with her dildo. All of it was small enough to fit on a damper ledge, and later inside a pink dress box. James and Mattie didn’t get to curate what they left behind, didn’t get to clean up.

Often, in death, you exit in a rush, with your things scattered about, your life exposed, your desk drawers a mess. That will be the case for all of us — leaving behind more than what we’ve accounted for. The valuables and debris of your life reach equal status at death. They are simply everything that’s left behind. Everything that was once yours. You will have thought of money, jewelry, maybe car or house, but you will not have thought of your toothbrush, your old slippers, letters from your first girlfriend you could never bring yourself to throw away, a favorite book, your child’s baby teeth. These items will be found, puzzled over, and either tossed out or kept in the back of a drawer to follow the next generation and maybe the one after that. There will also be those items you always intended to throw out but which your death will have safeguarded. I recently found in my great-grandmother’s correspondences a few letters from the secretary of state talking about the kiss they’d shared in her bedroom (she was sixteen at the time). Burn this letter, he’d written in red ink on the top of each one she saved.

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The Word ‘Allergy’ Didn’t Exist Until 1906

Photo: Pixabay

Writing for The Boston Globe, Neil Swidey makes a compelling case for how the rising tide of food allergy fakers may endanger actual sufferers, as restaurants begin to take “allergy” requests less seriously. But his piece is more than just an anti-faker missive, it’s also a fascinating history of food allergies in America, and their place in the restaurant world. Much of the history is interesting, but I was most surprised by the very newness of the term “allergy,” which is barely a century old:

The word “allergy” has been around only since 1906, when Austrian pediatrician Clemens von Pirquet coined it to describe altered biological reactivity. It didn’t gain traction until the mid-1920s, when it took on a big-tent definition describing reactions to everything from food and insect stings to mold and hay fever, says medical historian Matthew Smith, author of the new book  Another Person’s Poison: A History of Food Allergy. For most of the 20th century, research-focused “orthodox” allergists, who insisted on a definition requiring a measurable immune reaction, battled with more flexible food allergists, whose main focus was bringing relief to their patients’ hypersensitivities.

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How the ACLU Came to Publish a Powerful Piece of Investigative Journalism

“Out of the Darkness” is not an easy story to read. It chronicles how two psychologists who had previously devoted their careers to training US troops to resist abusive interrogation tactics teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings. The story is a torrent of information artfully webbed into a fluid narrative, fleshed out with specific, vivid details. It has all the elements we’ve come to expect from strong investigative longform journalism, albeit from an unlikely outlet: The American Civil Liberties Union.

One doesn’t typically think of the ACLU as a journalism outlet, so I reached out to the story’s author, Noa Yachot, to hear more about how the piece came about, and the ACLU’s role as publisher (the story was also syndicated on Medium). Yachot is a communications strategist at the ACLU, and she spoke to Longreads via email. Read more…

The Most Haunted Road in America

Greetings from Clinton Road, N.J.
Illustrations by Matt Lubchansky

Taffy Brodesser-Akner | Atlas Obscura | October 2015 | 20 minutes (4,944 words)

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

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In a part of New Jersey where snakes slither slowly across a road, still coiled and yet somehow still moving; in a part of New Jersey where an insect that looks like a miniaturized bat sits on your windshield, menacing you while you make a sound that doesn’t sound quite like you from inside your car; in a part of New Jersey with a disproportionate amount of road kill in an already highly populated-by-road kill state; in a part of New Jersey where your phone cannot, will not pick up any kind of signal; here, in West Milford, in the county of Passaic, lies Clinton Road, a 10-mile stretch of haunted highway. Read more…

‘The Past Is More Now Than Usual’: Eileen Myles on Having Two Books Released with Mercury in Retrograde

I think there’s a very interesting poetry moment going on culturally now. Part of what I’m experiencing with this nice reception of this book is the way being a female poet is a certain version of coming of age — poetry is very diaristic, small pieces, an art form you can realize — you wrote poems when you were young — a quick, young, cheap available art form.

I’m getting a sense, because I’m meeting so many young people on this tour and a lot of them are writing poetry and a lot of them are female, and so there’s a way I feel there’s a revolution going on, like the road saga of the ’50s and ’60s for boys might be writing poetry for females right now. And I just love how poetry seems to be totally … the notebook is open — girls, and girlboys, young people and older people and all kinds of people are writing in it. Something special, mortal, cheap and fun, a new way of being smart and fast — it coincides with texting, and social media — it’s a leaky, glittering sort of form.

-At the Los Angeles Times, poet Eileen Myles speaks with novelist Alexander Chee about poetry in the digital age, writing her dog’s memoir, and her “retrospective moment” with the release of two books at once: I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975 – 2014and a new edition of Chelsea Girls, her autobiographical coming of age novel, originally released in 1994.

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The Wild Times of Billy Idol

Before there was pop-punk, there was Billy Idol. More than any other artist of his era, the man born William Broad brought the style and attitude of punk rock into the American mainstream, via massive hits including “White Wedding” and “Rebel Yell.”

For this, he was both celebrated and vilified. Fans adored Idol’s bad-boy image and his music’s cagey mix of aggressive guitars, dance beats and pop hooks. But to his detractors, he was a fraud — the “Perry Como of punk,” in Johnny Rotten’s famously dismissive phrase.

Throughout his career, Idol has seldom addressed such criticisms directly. But in his latest album, Kings and Queens of the Underground, and a new [2014] memoir, Dancing With Myself, both released last October, the veteran singer clearly is shoring up his legacy. Both the book and the album’s title track explore at length his role in the birth of British punk, as lead singer of the band Generation X and part of the crew that launched the Roxy, London’s first punk-rock club, in 1976.

Andy Hermann writing in LA Weekly about the musical highs and personal lows of the singer with the snarling lip and studded leather wrist-guards, Billy Idol. Hermann’s piece ran in February, 2015.

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Hell—Nothing Less—And Without End: Six Days in Warsaw

German soldier setting fire to a building in Warsaw, September 1944. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Miron Białoszewski | A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising | New York Review Books | translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine | October 2015 | 37 minutes (10,141 words)

Below is an excerpt from A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, by Miron Białoszewski, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Originally published in Poland in 1970, in this new edition translator Madeline G. Levine has updated her 1977 English translation, and passages that were unpublishable in Communist Poland have been restored. Read more…