The Longreads Blog

‘The Exorcist,’ My Father and Me

So often, we hear stories of people who get help just in time. They hit rock bottom and manage to climb back up. At Electric Literature, Adam Sturtevant has written “That Thing: A True Story Based on ‘The Exorcist.'” It is a terrifying yet beautiful meditation on the impotence of love in the face of an all-too-real demon—alcoholism:

Before performing an exorcism, it must be determined by a qualified priest whether or not the possession is authentic. There are a few ways to do this. A victim speaking fluently in a language he or she has never studied, for example, serves as proof that an outside spirit is at work, as opposed to a disorder of the mind.

One evening, as my mother and I were serving ourselves dinner, the old man staggered into the kitchen. In a stained, wrinkled T-shirt and sweatpants, his hair plastered to his head with sweat, every part of his body swollen and mottled, he looked about eighty years old, though he was only fifty-eight. Wearing that dazed, content look on his face, he opened the freezer and refilled his glass, then slowly shuffled back to his throne.

I had to do something, but there was a question standing in the way. Was it was a conscious act, destroying himself like this, or was he powerless against the booze? If he was powerless, that meant we could help him. We could call an ambulance, get him to a hospital, check him into rehab. But what if he didn’t want our help? What if he wanted to die? 

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Image courtesy of Mother Jones

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…

How Veganism Went Mainstream

It’s as if vegans collectively realized that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, or at least that you spread the message more easily when you don’t start preaching about how eating honey represents an exploitation of bees. Vegans like Mr. Ronnen, Ms. Piatt and Mr. Roll remain highly fluent in the political arguments for plant-based eating, but they’re less likely to be sanctimonious about it, Mr. Ronnen said.

And nonvegans, in turn, seem less likely to be dismissive. Chad Sarno, a 39-year-old chef and culinary educator in Austin, Tex., remembers a time when you’d step into a restaurant and “you would say the vegan word and the chef would look at you like you had three heads and just got off the commune.” Now, with influential nonvegan chefs like David Kinch and Alain Passard rhapsodizing about the glory of vegetables, the dialogue has shifted. “Plants are so sexy,” Mr. Sarno said.

Jeff Gordinier, writing in The New York Times about how veganism has crossed from the subversive, co-op fringe into mainstream America, with delicious new strains of cooking and marketing attracting people concerned with nutrition, physical appearances and activism.

Read the story

Hallowed Ground: Patti Smith on Visiting the Prison of Jean Genet’s Dreams

We were entering a military zone and hit a checkpoint. The driver’s identity card was inspected and after an interminable stretch of silence we were ordered to get out of the car. Two officers searched the front and back seats, finding a switchblade with a broken spring in the glove box. That can’t be so bad, I thought, but as they knocked on the trunk our driver became markedly agitated. Dead chickens? Maybe drugs. They circled around the car, and then asked him for the keys. He threw them in a shallow ravine and bolted but was swiftly wrestled to the ground. I glanced sidelong at Fred. He betrayed no emotion and I followed his lead.

They opened the trunk. Inside was a man who looked to be in his early 30s curled up like a slug in a rusting conch shell. He seemed terrified as they poked him with a rifle and ordered him to get out. We were all herded to the police headquarters, put in separate rooms, and interrogated in French. The commander arrived, and we were brought before him. He was barrel-chested with dark, sad eyes and a thick mustache that dominated his careworn face. Fred quickly took stock of things. I slipped into the role of compliant female, for in this obscure annex of the Foreign Legion it was definitely a man’s world. I watched silently as the human contraband, stripped and shackled, was led away. Fred was ordered into the commander’s office. He turned and looked at me. Stay calm was the message telegraphed from his pale blue eyes.

-From Vogue‘s excerpt of M Train, Patti Smith’s new memoir, in which she and her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, make a pilgrimage to the remains of the French penal colony in northwest French Guiana where Jean Genet longed to be imprisoned, which he wrote about in The Thief’s Journal. Smith collected stones there, to bring to Genet.

Read the excerpt

New York’s Times Square as a Mirror of the City Itself

Throughout New York’s history, Times Square has served as a bellwether of the city’s current mood — as well as the perceptions of the city, both for those who live here and those who don’t. Once, Times Square was a high temple of glamour, the glowing heart of a go-go metropolis. Then it, like the city around it, slid into seedy decline. When much of New York was sleazy and dangerous, nowhere seemed sleazier or more dangerous than 42nd Street. And when Times Square came to feel too touristy, it mirrored a parallel worry that New York itself was losing some of its intrinsic grit. Times Square exists less as a crossroads than as a repository for our collective hopes and fears for the city. Now it’s entering a new phase — perhaps the strangest, most inscrutable one yet.

Adam Sternbergh, writing in New York Magazine about the history and future of New York’s iconic Times Square.

Read the story

The Honest, Creative Cuisine of Iceland

Photo: anroir

I’m no foodie. When I think “culinary haven,” Iceland doesn’t come to mind. Ethereal landscapes, yes; revolutionary cuisine, no. But I’m wrong. Nicholas Gill reports at Roads and Kingdoms:

Everywhere I went there was a person or a small group redefining what Icelandic food and ingredients can be. Many are alone. Trying to break free from the inside. Tiny isolated islands of change, surrounded by mountains and snow. They are Iceland, literally and figuratively.

Among the talented chefs Gill meets is Eyjólfur Fridgeirsson, a Zen Buddhist using a red alga called dulse in new ways, paying homage to the plant’s role in Iceland’s history:

[Dulse] became essential to the health and wellbeing for the people who lived in the inhospitable landscape. During the worst of times, it saved entire families from starvation…Dulse is sold fresh, pickled, or as salt, where it is dried on rocks in the same way the Vikings once did. He dries sugar kelp and makes a soy sauce from other seaweeds. Spices and teas are made from Angelica and arctic moss. There are jams and juices made from blueberries and a rub made of crowberries to put on lamb.

Fridgeirsson sees endless possibilities of what can be done with the plant life in Iceland. “The secret is just here,” he says with a shrug. “Being careful and putting my mind to it. As a good Buddhist, just putting loving care in what I’m doing.”

Read the story

An Oral History of Langtang Valley, Destroyed by the Nepal Earthquake

We spent our first night there not really sleeping at all, just kind of leaning with our backs against this boulder. It snowed most of the night. Everyone was really on edge, and every time there was an aftershock, people would start screaming and running. I was terrified of every aftershock. We were saying that we couldn’t tell if the earth was still moving or if it was just us trembling.

I had a satellite phone with unlimited minutes, so I became the telephone booth for the village. Some of it was logistical stuff: the leaders of Kyanjin Gomba were using the phone to call the Nepalese army to make arguments for why the helicopters needed to come, but the majority of the calls were people calling family members. Each day, people would line up and have a number written down on a scrap of paper, and we would try calling. These people were crying into the phone. You don’t need to speak Nepalese to understand that.

American mountain climber Colin Haley, in Outside magazine, recounts waiting for help after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Langtang Valley, 40 miles northeast of Kathmandu, on April 25, 2015. In this oral history compiled by Anna Callaghan and Rabi Thapa, residents and foreigners describe this day of destruction, how half of the village population was buried, and what happened in the days that followed.

Read the story

Critiquing the Foodie

In our era of Whole Foods, slow foods and meal worship, many Americans have become fixated on both the pleasures and ethics of eating. As chefs became celebrities and food writing earned its own anthology series, simple eaters transformed into locavores who write Yelp reviews and buy into the marketing idea that we can somehow eat with abandon and sustainably. But are culinary passion and compassion diametrically opposed? In The Atlantic, B. R. Myers analyzes America’s vocal modern taste-makers’ books, values and influence on our culture of consumption. The piece appeared in March 2011 and remains timely.

If nothing else, Bourdain at least gives the lie to the Pollan-Severson cant about foodie-ism being an integral part of the whole, truly sociable, human being. In Bourdain’s world, diners are as likely to sit solo or at a countertop while chewing their way through “a fucking Everest of shellfish.” Contributors to the Best Food Writing anthologies celebrate the same mindless, sweating gluttony. “You eat and eat and eat,” Todd Kliman writes, “long after you’re full. Being overstuffed, for the food lover, is not a moral problem.” But then, what is? In the same anthology, Michael Steinberger extols the pleasure of “joyfully gorging yourself … on a bird bearing the liver of another bird.” He also talks of “whimpering with ecstasy” in a French restaurant, then allowing the chef to hit on his wife, because “I was in too much of a stupor … [He] had just served me one of the finest dishes I’d ever eaten.” Hyperbole, the reader will have noticed, remains the central comic weapon in the food writer’s arsenal. It gets old fast. Nor is there much sign of wit in the table talk recorded. Aquinas said gluttony leads to “loutishness, uncleanness, talkativeness, and an uncomprehending dullness of mind,” and if you don’t believe him, here’s Kliman again:

I watched tears streak down a friend’s face as he popped expertly cleavered bites of chicken into his mouth … He was red-eyed and breathing fast. “It hurts, it hurts, but it’s so good, but it hurts, and I can’t stop eating!” He slammed a fist down on the table. The beer in his glass sloshed over the sides. “Jesus Christ, I’ve got to stop!”

Read the story

Can a Company Really Disrupt Itself? Roger Hodge on Zappos and Holacracy

zappos
From a Zappos office tour. Photo by techcocktail, Flickr

Roger Hodge went inside Zappos for his October 2015 in the The New Republic, investigating CEO Tony Hsieh’s radical decision to eliminate management and fully embrace the concept of Holacracy at the online shoe retailer.  Read more…

The Impossibility of Building a Personal Brand

Creating a personal brand is exhausting, but potentially rewarding. It requires maintenance on all fronts, social media and IRL. Is it tenable for the average human being?

Branding yourself has become a professional goal for more than just journalists. Today, Fortune 500 companies hold seminars to train their employees in the art of personal branding, and an entire industry of coaches is flourishing to teach nonprofit managers and small-business owners how to get a leg up on the competition. By the year 2020, according to software company Intuit, 40 percent of the workforce will consist of freelancers and independent contractors. Whether you’re a financial planner or a fashion blogger, a personal brand has come to seem like a professional requirement—the key to success and fulfillment in an increasingly cutthroat and unstable economy. “Every person is a media company,” said Dan Schawbel, 32, a brand consultant in New York and one of the leading figures in the personal branding industry. “Anyone can have a platform now, whether you’re a janitor or a CEO.”

Ann Friedman investigates all of this at The New Republic, and decides to undergo her own rebranding. She consults with Karen Leland, president of Sterling Marketing Group.

We struck a deal: Leland, who is based in San Francisco, would walk me through a truncated version of her personal branding services—which she’s been offering for 20 years and normally cost between $25,000 and $75,000 for anywhere from three months to six months or longer…She started with some questions: What do you do? What are the qualities with which you do it? And what is the result or impact?

A personal brand, Leland cautioned me, is “something that you actively have to manage online, offline, in your organization, in your industry, and on social media.” Which means there are dozens of opportunities every day to question whether you’re doing it right. Is this crop top on-brand for a networking happy hour? Is this joke tweet-worthy or something I should merely text to a friend? Is this stupid assignment I accepted in order to make rent detracting from my reputation too much? Life is not always on-brand.

Read the story