The Longreads Blog

Strange Magic: Four Stories About Disney’s Dark Side

As much fun as it is, Disney can be scary. Any corporation of Disney’s magnitude and influence is scary, no matter how superficially benevolent it seems, or how many cartoon characters it employs. I say this as someone who devoured Disney World guidebooks as an 8-year-old, rode her first plane to Orlando, conquered her fear of roller coasters on Space Mountain, and performed with her high school choir in Tomorrowland. There’s an emotional connection. But I haven’t been to the most magical place on Earth in almost a decade, never as an adult. Revisit Disney through the eyes of these authors and see the good, the bad, and the creepy. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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How a Good Bookie Sets Odds

A good bookmaker will set up odds so they appear enticing to both sides of a bet: if Arsenal plays Stoke in the Premier League, the bookies want an equal amount of action on both clubs, the better to spread risk. (This isn’t how they make money, however. They do that by designing the odds so each bet results in a small percentage going to the house, called the vig or the juice.) If more money than expected goes in on Stoke as game time approaches, bookies will adjust the odds to make Stoke less attractive and Arsenal more so, ensuring things remain balanced.

Brian Blickenstaff writing for Vice about match fixing in the sports world.

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The Enduring Allure of ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’

Photo: Steph

Halloween is mere weeks away—what better time to revisit Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories? In grade school, these collections were highly prized. I read and reread every story, marveling at the disturbing illustrations that were so different from every other book in our school library. (Here’s the scariest, in my opinion. Trigger warning: Spiders.) At Electric Lit, Matt Bell and Amy Valente analyze their favorite stories from each collection, reminiscing about their childhoods. The quotidian becomes terrifying, once more. Here, Bell meditates on the short story, “The Haunted House”:

Do you know that there are Youtube clips of teenagers playing Bloody Mary? Testing the thresholds of reality, Millennial-style. “The Haunted House” is a story that taps the same anxious vein, about a preacher who spends the night sitting up and reading his bible in a house “in his settlement” that has been “haunted for about ten years” … And then, in my edition at least, you turn to the page to find one of Gammell’s most terrifying illustrations, perhaps the one I remember most vividly across all the years between readings of these books. “It look liked a young woman,” Schwartz writes, but this young woman has no eyeballs, just “a sort of blue light way back in her eye sockets,” and “no nose to her face” … Horror is all about getting the reader to imagine something worse than anything you might put directly on the page: What exactly does it sound like when a voice is “coming and going with the wind blowing it”? And why does it get more disturbing the more precisely I try to imagine it?

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Why Greenlanders Don’t Have Epitaphs on Their Gravestones

Nothing is set in stone, except of course your epitaph. In a recent essay for Aeon, Tom Pitock mused on the difficulty of writing his own father’s epitaph, and why we etch words on tombstones to remember people we loved. But not every culture uses epitaphs, as Pitock learned in Greenland:

It took real effort to find the cemetery in Lower Burma, but in Greenland, the world’s largest island, it was impossible to miss it. The capital city, Nuuk, has just 17,000 people, with a mere 39,000 more concentrated in settlements across the rest of the of the country. New graves are decorated with ebullient arrangements of artificial flowers, which, when they wither, are not replaced. ‘We do not visit graves,’ said Salik Hard, whom I met while travelling there. ‘Once a person is gone, we go on to the future.’

And because of that, Greenlanders don’t use epitaphs, not even names.

They are officially Evangelical Lutherans but retain many of the beliefs of their Inuit heritage, including that every person consists of a body, a spirit, and a name. When the body perishes, the spirit and the name travel together in search of a new body.

‘If you put a name on the stone,’ Salik explained, ‘it will never leave the grave. It will be trapped. Obviously.’

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‘The Corrosiveness of Wanting Someone to Stay Hidden’: Carrie Brownstein on Her Father’s Coming Out at 55

So here was my father, in this white apartment with textured walls and thick carpeting, and the scant amount of furniture and paintings he’d brought from Redmond, looking like interlopers, like imposters, neither here nor there. And we’re sitting in this living room and I have no idea who he is and he says, “So I guess I’m coming out to you.” He said it like that, in a sort of meta way, as if he were along for a ride that his new self was taking him on. Which was typical, like he was just a sidekick in his own life, a shadow, though I’m assuming it was more of a linguistic fumbling, not knowing exactly how to come out or what words to use…

…When my father came out to his mom, my grandmother said, “You waited for your father to die, why couldn’t you have waited for me to die?” I knew then that I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden. Despite all my initial conflicts about trying to reconcile the father I had as a child to the one I have now, I am thankful that he is happy, that he did not waste another second.

-From The New Yorker’s excerpt of Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: a Memoir, by musician, writer and “Portlandia” star Carrie Brownstein, in which her father surprises her by coming out. A few years later, Brownstein herself would be outed as bisexual, to her parents and to the world, by Spin magazine. The book is out next week.

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Using Technology to Fight the Power

In a new story for Wired, Bijan Stephen looks at how the Black Lives Matter movement uses social media to organize and fight for change. As Stephen writes, “any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it,” tailoring their goals and tactics to the media of their time. For the nascent Black Lives Matter movement, that technology has been platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But civil rights organizers were using technology to mobilize long before the advent of social media. Here’s what that looked like in the Jim Crow South:

In the 1960s, if you were a civil rights worker stationed in the Deep South and you needed to get some urgent news out to the rest of the world—word of a beating or an activist’s arrest or some brewing state of danger—you would likely head straight for a telephone.

From an office or a phone booth in hostile territory, you would place a call to one of the major national civil rights organizations. But you wouldn’t do it by dialing a standard long-distance number. That would involve speaking first to a switchboard operator—who was bound to be white and who might block your call. Instead you’d dial the number for something called a Wide Area Telephone Service, or WATS, line.

Like an 800 line, you could dial a WATS number from anywhere in the region and the call would patch directly through to the business or organization that paid for the line—in this case, say, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

On the other end of the line, another civil rights worker would be ready to take down your report and all the others pouring in from phones scattered across the South. The terse, action-packed write-ups would then be compiled into mimeographed “WATS reports” mailed out to organization leaders, the media, the Justice Department, lawyers, and other friends of the movement across the country.

In other words, it took a lot of infrastructure to live-tweet what was going on in the streets of the Jim Crow South.

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Terry Gross, National Interviewer: 40 Years of Fresh Air

Photo by Will Ryan

This fall, Gross marks her 40th anniversary hosting “Fresh Air.” At 64, she is “the most effective and beautiful interviewer of people on the planet,” as Marc Maron said recently, while introducing an episode of his podcast, “WTF,” that featured a conversation with Gross. She’s deft on news and subtle on history, sixth-sensey in probing personal biography and expert at examining the intricacies of artistic process. She is acutely attuned to the twin pulls of disclosure and privacy. “You started writing memoirs before our culture got as confessional as it’s become, before the word ‘oversharing’ was coined,” Gross said to the writer Mary Karr last month. “So has that affected your standards of what is meant to be written about and what is meant to maintain silence about?” (“That’s such a smart question,” Karr responded. “Damn it, now I’m going to have to think.”)

Gross is an interviewer defined by a longing for intimacy. In a culture in which we are all talking about ourselves more than ever, Gross is not only listening intently; she’s asking just the right questions.

In The New York Times Magazine Susan Burton profiles “national interviewer” Terry Gross, who celebrates 40 years behind the microphone as the host of NPR’s Fresh Air.

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Chuck Klosterman on the Success of Taylor Swift, and the Word ‘Calculating’

If you don’t take Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. With the (arguable) exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel—she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, during an era when most major artists are thrilled to move 500,000 albums in a year. If a record as comparatively dominant as 1989 had actually existed in the year 1989, it would have surpassed the sales of Thriller. There is no demographic she does not tap into, which is obviously rare. But what’s even more atypical is how that ubiquity is critically received. Swift gets excellent reviews, particularly from the most significant arbiters of taste. (A 2011 New Yorker piece conceded that Swift’s reviews are “almost uniformly positive.”) She has never gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy. There’s simply no antecedent for this kind of career: a cross-genre, youth-oriented, critically acclaimed colossus based entirely on the intuitive songwriting merits of a single female artist. It’s as if mid-period Garth Brooks was also early Liz Phair, minus the hat and the swearing. As a phenomenon, it’s absolutely new.

-In GQ, Chuck Klosterman interviews Taylor Swift on self-awareness while deducing whether or not she’s as shrewd and “calculating” (a word she hates) as her reputation suggests.

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Do Music Biographies Really Enhance Our Musical Experience?

If [Rhiannon] Giddens were to tell us in a memoir that she’d been thinking about her own child when she sang, it would make the line a poignant narrative moment. But really, what would that reveal that we don’t know from her performance? It might risk drowning out other information we already have: Michael Brown’s mother in tears at a press conference last summer; Mamie Till choosing an open coffin for her son in 1955; Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot protecting his mother in an Alabama café in 1965, days before marchers massed in Selma.

A singer of mixed African American, Native American, and Caucasian ancestry, Giddens is occasionally asked in interviews to offer up a personal explanation for her connection to the music she sings. On NPR’s Morning Edition last winter, Renee Montagne asked, “I know you’ve recorded songs in Gaelic. Is that your tradition?” You could hear Giddens kind of sigh—OK, here we go. “That whole idea of, is it my culture—you know,” she replied, “it gets asked of me in a way that white people who do blues music don’t get asked. I don’t know all of my genealogy, but my point is that if music speaks to you, I think that you have the ability to do that.” And she’s right to push back; when she sings Scottish folk, audiences don’t need a genealogical chart to know they’re witnessing something extraordinary.

Sara Marcus, writing in The New Republic about how the immediacy of music always outlives and out-performs the effect of reading a biography, or viewing a documentary about a musician ─ a phenomenon she calls the “power of songs over their singers.” Marcus’s piece ran in August 2015.

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