The Longreads Blog

Why Bordeaux Consumption in the U.S. Has Been Declining Since the ’80s

Yet, while the trajectory of Petrus [a major Bordeaux wine estate] has been ever upward (and its price as well), the consumption of Bordeaux in the United States has been declining since hitting its peak in market share in the mid-’80s. Even the boozy precincts of France have become less boozy—about their wine, at least. In 1965 the country drank a liver-pickling 210 bottles a year per capita; today the number is a sober 75. Whatever the cause of that may be, hypotheses abound as to why Americans have cut down on claret. Most obvious, perhaps, is that from Austria to Australia, more places are making quality wine than ever before. There is also the fact that no other wine is as intimidating to talk about—saying the word terroir is a great way to kill the fun at a dinner party—or as confusing to know when to open. Add to this the perception of Bordeaux as being a rich man’s plaything, and the fact that plenty of those tatted-up somms pushing juice from the Jura and garage pinots from the Sonoma coast don’t want it on their precious wine lists, and you can see why Jean, who has more than just Petrus to worry about, is still very much working full-time.

Jay Fielden, writing for Town and Country about Jean Moueix, the charming 29-year-old scion of Bordeaux’s Petrus wine dynasty. Fielden travels from the vineyards of southwestern France to the tasting rooms of New York City in search of answers to a single question: can Moueix make Bordeaux cool again?

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A Drug-Fueled Sprint Through Times Square: The Opening Credits of ‘Broad City’

“I wanted it to be big, bold, and weird,” Perry explains of his initial inspiration during our conversation with him. He highlights his exploration of color as a way to “vibrate the viewer.” His designs nail this goal, flashing fast and bright like a drug-fueled sprint through Times Square…

Artist Mike Perry had so many ideas ahead of his initial meeting with Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, the show’s creators and stars, that one was not enough. So every episode of the Comedy Central series — returning for its third season next spring — offers the viewer a different sequence and a new glimpse into Perry’s limitless imagination.

The Art of the Title takes you behind the scenes with Mike Perry, the illustrator behind the colorful chaos of the “Broad City” credits, and Julie Verardi, Comedy Central Senior Designer and Animator. Both Perry and Verardi grew up doodling; their collaboration on “Broad City” involves Perry hand-drawing 10 to 100 intricate frames, while Verardi edits and perfects the animation.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Refugee camp in Dohuk, Kurdistan. Photo: Enno Lenze, Flickr

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

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A San Francisco Story

Leah Rose | Longreads | August 2015 | 12 minutes (2,876 words)

 

On a Saturday afternoon in February, a group of 15 men stood chatting on the back patio of the Eagle, a leather-themed gay bar on 12th Street in San Francisco. The lone female of the group, 55-year-old Donna Merlino, known as Downtown Donna, untangled a heap of heavy extension cords and powered up a Crock Pot full of lamb stew. Wearing a black leather vest and sturdy black boots, Donna set up two tables of food for the guys, who sipped pints of beer surrounded by paintings of pantless Freddie Mercury lookalikes with enormous genitalia. Read more…

The People Who Get Woken Up at 2am When Bob Ballard Finds Something on the Ocean Floor

73-year-old ocean explorer Bob Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic 30 years ago, and he hasn’t stopped exploring the ocean floor since. In a recent piece for Popular Mechanics, Ryan D’Agostino profiled Ballard and the research aboard his ship Nautilus (a 211-foot former East German research vessel that carries seventeen crew and thirty-one scientists and operations specialists). But what happens when the Nautilus team thinks they might have found something in ” the three-dimensional chess of the oceans deep” and isn’t sure how to proceed? They call in the experts:

Ballard has assembled, over the years, an astonishing roster of experts in many fields, all volunteers. When the Nautilus is at sea, towing its cameras through the depths, and it finds something interesting, the crew needs to know whether to stop and explore further or move on. And they can’t keep fifty experts on board at all times. So the Nautilus has a phone system with a 401 area code. “The ship thinks it’s in Rhode Island at all times, no matter where on the planet it is,” Ballard says. “When we need an expert, we just pick up the phone. It goes like this: ‘Hi, Deb? I know it’s 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, but can you boot up your laptop? We got something. We wanna know what it is. The ship is hovering in twenty thous and feet of water wondering, up or down?’ And we do this literally all the time. All. The. Time. Within twenty minutes we have to deliver the brightest mind in America on whatever subject it is to the spot of the discovery to tell us what to do. If you tell us go, we go into a response strategy,” Ballard says, jutting his chin into the breeze. “It’s an unbelievable feeling. The closest thing to a drug for me is Coke Zero. I don’t drink coffee, I don’t smoke. I do have wine. But you can’t beat the thrill of finding something on the bottom. And I’ll wait and wait and wait for it. We just had one on the last trip!”

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Travel, Foreignness, and the Spaces in Between: A Pico Iyer Reading List

Pico Iyer’s travel writing — whether he’s describing a long walk in Kyoto, a jetlag-fueled airport layover, or a quiet moment in a monastery — captures not just the physicality of places, but also the spaces within and between them.

In his essay “Why We Travel,” Iyer writes that he has been a traveler since birth: born in Oxford to parents from India, schooled in England and the United States, then living in Japan since 1992 (with annual trips to California). These seven reads reveal Iyer as a perpetual wanderer of both place and time: navigating spaces in flux or forgotten, meditating on finding one’s place in an ever-shifting world, and, as part of this journey, exploring that which is deep within us. Read more…

The Sound of Pavement’s Early Days

Some of the best songs on The Secret History, Vol. 1 come from the summer of ’92, when the band went to London to appear on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show. Songs like the moody ballad “Secret Knowledge of Backroads” (which later appeared on a Silver Jews EP) and the Pixies-esque “Circa 1762” show a songwriter who was already restless to roam past Slanted. “My mind was like, ‘Let’s just mess around in here and make something new that’s not been done before,'” [singer Stephen] Malkmus says. “And that’s what we did.”

Nastanovich recalls the creative process in Pavement at the time: “To keep from getting bored, Stephen would always be making up songs in soundchecks. A lot of those ideas just came from him having a really active mind and loving to play guitar, so when we were put in those impromptu situations, he was ready to fire something out. Some of it is pretty good, and some of it’s eminently discardable.”

Simon Vozick-Levinson writing in Rolling Stone about the release of rare music recorded during the formative years of one of the 1990s’ most beloved indie bands: Pavement.

‘The Fight Is Yours’: Roxane Gay & Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing and Talking About Race

Photos via Wikimedia Commons and Flickr

RG: Discussions about race, particularly in mixed company, are often combative and contentious. How the hell do we talk about race?

TC: No idea. I just try to communicate with as much honesty and respect as possible. I think we should not forget that a not so insufficient portion of this country sees it as in their interest to disrupt and marginalize such discussions. Everyone isn’t convince-able…

RG: How can allies best serve as allies? What is an ally? Are they needed?

TC: I don’t know. I think it’s probably terribly important to listen. It’s terribly important to try to become more knowledgeable. It’s important to not expect that acquiring of that knowledge — in this case of the force of racism in American history — to be a pleasant experience or to proceed along just lines. They certainly don’t proceed that way for black people. It’s going to be painful. Finally I think one has to even abandon the phrase “ally” and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours.

-From a conversation between An Untamed State author Roxane Gay and Between the World and Me author Ta-Nehisi Coates about the challenges in writing and discussing race in our culture, at Barnes & Noble‘s site.

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Why Do We Judge Virgins?

Jessica Gross | Longreads | August 2015 | 14 minutes (3,532 words)

 

Rachel Hills’ first book, The Sex Myth, presents a radical deconstruction of our cultural narratives about sex. Hills, an Australian journalist and blogger who lives in New York, argues that we have imbued sex with undue meaning, treating it as one of the most important markers of our identities. This overemphasis, she writes, is the root of both our fear of sex as a dangerous force and our lionization of it as a vital act. Moreover—and this is the part I found most revelatory—Hills describes how we have moved from decrying promiscuity as dirty to treating sex as a source and symbol of liberation to, now, upholding sexual adventurousness as the ultimate good. Being promiscuous and adventurous in bed, she argues, has transformed from being an option to an obligation. Conversely, having vanilla tastes, or a seemingly less-than-exciting sex life, has come to be regarded as a badge of shame. Hills’ wish: that we treat all sexual appetites and practices (including not having sex) as legitimate and, further, that we deemphasize sex’s role in our self-definition.

Hills and I—who work in the same writers’ co-working space in downtown Manhattan—wandered to Washington Square Park on a hot afternoon in June. We discussed her writing process, delved into the theory of her book, and talked about grade school crushes.

This book was seven years in the making. Could you start by telling me how the idea first came to you, and whether it then took a while to get the guts to pursue it as a project?

When I was 24, I was walking home from a party with a friend one night in Sydney, having a casual conversation. My friend is a very outspoken, forthright person, so she just turns to me and says in this kind of outraged-at-herself way, “Rachel, can you believe that next month it’ll be two years since I’ve had sex and one year since I’ve kissed anyone?”

I think I tried to play it cool at the time, but it was a revolutionary moment for me. I had, to some extent, bought into this idea that we have about people in their twenties, and single people, and the kinds of sex lives that they have. Even though my sex life was very barren—nothing to write home about, or to write about in a book—I assumed that most other people I knew had sex lives that were very different. So the fact that this girl, who I considered to be really cool, was admitting she had a sex life that did not fit our culture’s idea of what cool is, was really interesting to me and unexpected. Read more…

My Hijab, My Choice

Photo: Kamyar Adl

There’s also such diversity in the way Muslim women feel about, understand, and observe hijab. Some women hate it because forms of it are forced on them. Some Irani women have undertaken a social-media campaign to show themselves without the scarves and the long black chador coverings as a way of protesting being made to wear them. I get that. The headscarf is a source of strength for me, but that stems largely from the luxury of having a choice about if I want to wear it and how I want to wear it.

I’m a professional in my 30s, living on her own and working as an attorney and consultant in New York City. I am also a former hijabi, a de-jabi, and now a re-jabi. These things might seem like contradictions to some, but it’s entirely consistent in my mind as part of a long, nuanced spiritual journey that continues to change and challenge me even today. My story only seems novel because it disturbs the existing narrative about what the headscarf and dressing more modestly signifies.

— At Refinery 29, Zehra Naqvi shares her story of emotional and spiritual growth, and how coming into her own meant reclaiming the hijab.

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