The Longreads Blog

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Selena impersonators Lupita Espinoza, Jocelyn Gonzales, and Monica Peralta wait to perform at a Selena tribute. Photo: Scott Squires

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

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China’s Booming Domestic Wine Industry

Although eighty-three percent of the wine China drinks is produced domestically, and baijiu grain alcohol is still its favorite alcohol, that’s changing. China is now the world’s fifth largest wine producer. In The California Sunday Magazine, Amy Qin writes about the changing taste of Chinese drinkers, and profiles Ma Qingyun, one producer who is helping change the face of the country’s fine wine industry:

When Ma started Jade Valley, he was drawn to the idea of saving the village from the fate of so many rural Chinese areas. As China’s cities have expanded and new ones have emerged seemingly overnight, traditionally agricultural regions have been eaten up by urban and industrial sprawl. Ma envisioned a beautifully designed winery that would provide high-paying architectural jobs and draw tourists to the Yushan area, giving it a better chance of fending off Xi’an’s encroaching development.

He pitched the idea to his brother. After years spent working as a technician in a military garment factory in Xi’an, Jianchao had returned to the village to set up a small business growing and selling traditional Chinese medicine. “I knew nothing about wine,” Jianchao says. “I only knew about industrial enterprises — input, output, and raw-material processes.” But as the two brothers talked, Jianchao grew enamored with the idea of helping farmers and bolstering the local economy.

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How Suicide Girls Has Thrived For 14 Years

Photo: El Freddy

Don’t call them alternative: Missy Suicide carved out a niche online for “the sexiest, smartest, most dangerous collection of outsider women in the world”:

She called the site Suicide Girls: “I hated the word alternative. Nobody lived in these John Hughes compartmentalized sects of people anymore, with the squares and the punks and the goths. I felt like alternative was the worst — like, alt to what?” She adopted the phrase “suicide girls” from Chuck Palahniuk’s book Survivor, where it’s used to describe “girls who chose to commit social suicide by not fitting in.”

Photo sets are the site’s centerpiece and consist of anywhere from 40 to 60 photographs. They must start with the model fully clothed and end with them fully nude; nudity begins in the first third of the set. Sets have to be consistent, with the same location and concept throughout. But what makes them particularly unique is that the models, not the photographers, are the ones quite literally calling the shots.

“I used to say we had a thousand applications a month,” says Missy, “but about six months ago I asked if that was still right and was told it’s actually 25,000 a year. Just the other day, I heard it’s about 30,000 now.”

Julia Rubin reports at Racked.

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Stephen Colbert on How All Late-Night Shows Are ‘Chopped’

GQ magazine interviews Stephen Colbert, who compares making a late-night show to the Food Network show Chopped:

Back at his office, Colbert delivered a soliloquy on the necessity of focus and intention, being fully present for whatever moment you are in. He was talking about comedy, and how to make a TV show 200 times a year, but it also felt like a text lifted from the Buddha’s sutras. The final goal, the product, is beside the point. “The end product is jokes, but you could easily say the end product is intention. Having intentionality at all times… The process of process is process.”

And then he talked about the Food Network show Chopped. The reason he loves Chopped is that it’s a show that is wholly about process, about creation within a limited range of possibilities. “This show,” he said, meaning The Late Show, “is Chopped. Late-night shows are Chopped. Who are your guests tonight? Your guests tonight are veal tongue, coffee grounds, and gummy bears. There, make a show.… Make an appetizer that appeals to millions of people. That’s what I like. How could you possibly do it? Oh, you bring in your own flavors. Your own house band is another flavor. You have your own flavor. The audience itself is a base dish, like a rice pilaf or something. And then together it’s ‘Oh shit, that’s an actual meal.’ And that’s what every day is like at one of these shows. Something is one thing in the morning, and then by the end of the day it’s a totally different thing. It’s allprocess.”

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Loving Books in a Dark Age

The Venerable Bede, image via Wikimedia Commons

Michael Pye | The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe | Pegasus Books | April 2015 | 31 minutes (8,498 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from The Edge of the World, by Michael Pye, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

 

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There was nobody else alive, nobody who could read or preach or sing the service, except the abbot, Ceolfrith, and one bright boy: who was local, well-connected and about sixteen, and whose name was unusual. He was called Bede, and he wasn’t called ‘saint’ or ‘venerable’, not yet. Read more…

Jenny Diski Remembers Doris Lessing: Why Can’t People Be Sensible?

Peter Lessing died in his flat, of a heart attack, in the early hours of 13 October 2013, aged 66. His mother, Doris Lessing, died four weeks later, on 17 November 2013, aged 94, in the adjoining house. An interconnecting door had been cut into the shared wall and was always left open. This very nearly tells the story of their lives as mother and son, in the sense that we know our planet is part of our universe, but there remain gaping holes of incomprehension that no one is going to be able to fill no matter how much detail their story is told in.

At London Review of Books, Jenny Diski reflects on Doris Lessing’s hierarchy of writing, life, and motherhood.

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The Responsibility of Being Both a Reporter and an Army Veteran

Photo by  US Army, Flickr

Veteran status cuts both ways. Because I’m an army veteran, other vets often tell me things they wouldn’t tell those who haven’t served. It is a privilege to be given this confidence, and yet I’m filled with an overwhelming obligation to get their stories right. Although I’m a longtime reporter, writing about veterans has been the hardest subject for me to cover, because their stories are so nuanced, and reporters, most of whom have never served in the military and have no connection with the armed services, frequently get their stories wrong and paint them as one-dimensional lunatics. I wanted to get Capps’s story right and not come off as a voyeur. There was some precedent for my concern: a month before our interview, Capps had spoken about his struggle with PTSD at the National Endowment for the Arts, which sponsors his NICoE seminar, and after his talk he told me he was destroyed for the rest of the day.

—Veteran and freelance reporter Kristina Shevory profiling Army combat veteran and former Foreign Service officer Ron Capps in The Believer. Capps was haunted by PTSD after serving in Iraq, Darfur, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Kosovo; writing brought him relief and helped him make sense of his experiences. He formed the Veterans Writing Project in 2011.

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Raising Our Gender Fluid Four-Year-Old

“Is that a boy or a girl?”

My child is what you might call gender non-conforming, or gender fluid. You could also call it being a kid. She’s OK with the female pronouns, but she consistently requests short hair “like a boy.” The haircut seems to throw people off most of all, because it does look very much like a typical boy haircut. And if she is mixing what you would consider “boy” clothes with her gold shoes? It seems to really confuse people…

When you have a child who wants to dress a certain way, or play with a certain toy, and you tell them they can’t because you’re worried what someone else might think, or because you are uncomfortable with it because of your own gender bias – you’re essentially modeling that the child should view themselves externally. That how they see themselves is not as important as how others see them. That’s not the message I want to send to my children.

— Author Erika Kleinman explains why she and her husband aren’t pressuring their youngest child to fulfill stereotypical gender norms at Role Reboot.

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When Gelatin Was a Status Symbol

Gelatin dishes as we know them date all the way back to medieval Europe. From that period up until the mid-nineteenth century, jellied dishes were foods of the elite, served as elaborate molded centerpieces on the tables of nobility. The reason was simple: the process of rendering collagen from animal bones and then clarifying it was exceptionally time-consuming, even by the slower-paced standards of the day…

Few home cooks bothered with such labor-intensive dishes—gelatin indicated to dinner guests that you had a kitchen staff large and well-appointed enough to spare the hours. This remained the case in the American colonies, where elites adapted European customs to their own tastes. Gelatin dishes were a delicacy in New York high society, where the size of one’s household staff was a status symbol; and on the plantations of the South, where enslaved cooks labored in the kitchens. At Thomas Jefferson’s estate, Monticello, wine jelly was often served to guests, Jefferson’s time in France having influenced his tastes.

—Sarah Grey, in her wonderful (and wonderfully enlightening) social history of of Jell-O salad, which ran at Serious Eats today.

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Phoebe Gloeckner on ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ and the Women of Juarez

At The Rumpus, Whitney Joiner recently interviewed Phoebe Gloeckner, author of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the controversial illustrated novel about a girl who loses her virginity to her mother’s boyfriend, originally published in 2002, and just made into a feature film. It was the second time Gloeckner sat down with Joiner—a senior features editor at Marie Claire and co-founder of The Recollectors, a website and storytelling community for the children of parents who died of AIDs—the first time being a dozen years ago, for a Salon piece. This time, Gloeckner confessed that the story is autobiographical. The two also talked about the projects Gloeckner has been working on in Juarez, Mexico, including a novel based on one of the many young Juarenese women who have been killed there in recent years.

Rumpus: In the transcripts of our conversation last time, there’s a lot of discussion of why you didn’t want to call it an autobiography. At this point you’ve answered that so many times. I know you don’t like answering it. You talked about how, if it you’d written it as an autobiography, then you would hate her. You needed that separation because you needed to protect her.

Gloeckner: I had to look at her and accept her as any girl. But myself—I was ugly, I kept getting kicked out of school, I had no future, no one really liked me…

…I always resisted this thing about an autobiography, because honestly, what does it matter if it’s me or not. Every work of art is about the artist.

I’m finally admitting, yes, that’s my experience. I’ve given up trying to explain to people. It’s not like I just took my life; it’s not a document. I had no interest in saying, “This is me and this is my story.”

Rumpus: It’s easier to find compassion for a fifteen-year-old girl going through that kind of experience if it isn’t you.

Gloeckner: No one gives a fuck about an old woman trying to deal with her stupid past and problems!

I had all my old diaries and I was working from those. And I realized when I was reading them, I actually really liked that person.

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