The Longreads Blog

Curation: The Best Reading, Hand-Picked, For You

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As a word, curation flirted with disaster in the ’90s, tarnished by overuse. But here at Longreads — before we started to work with journalists and writers to publish deeply reported pieces, fun satire, and thoughtful essays and criticism — our founder Mark Armstrong started a movement, nay a community, with a Twitter hashtag geared to sharing the best writing online. Eleven years later, curation remains our labor of love.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider what reading a great piece of writing does and more importantly, how it makes us feel. I remember when I first fell in love with longform writing. “Nureyev Dancing In His Own Shadow” appeared in the March 1991 edition of Esquire. I was a young adult. I had little exposure to culture. I had zero figs to give about ballet. (My mom tried to put me in ballet at age 5 and as soon as I figured out you had to wear not just a dress (ugh) but a pink dress, I was out.) But I started to read Elizabeth Kaye’s profile and I was rapt. I slowed down to savor it. I re-read it. I discovered a world I knew nothing of, a world far away from my modest upbringing. I hung on every word. For me, this is the feeling I get when my horizon expands, that spark of learning something new, that keen sense of optimism where the rest of the day is filthy with potential.

Since Longreads got started with a tweet in 2009, we’ve highlighted nearly 11,000 pieces from 6500 authors at over 1,000 publications. And, almost every week for the past six years, we’ve shared the pieces we loved best in the Weekly Top 5 Newsletter — available for free — to anyone who’d like to subscribe. Sharing great writing is our raison d’être and we’re asking for your help to keep Longreads free for as many readers as possible.

Great writing teaches. Great writing moves us. It makes us feel good. It fills us with potential. Doesn’t everyone want to feel good and optimistic? Is this a mission you can get behind? We’d love it if you would consider a contribution to our member drive. Thank you for reading.

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This Month in Books: The Decameron Is Online

John William Waterhouse, A Tale from the Decameron, 1916. (Wikimedia Commons)

“The pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry and oily things will set them aflame. And the evil of the plague went even further: not only did talking to or being around the sick bring infection and a common death, but also touching the clothes of the sick or anything touched or used by them…” —Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

“At the beginning of the plague, when there was now no more hope but that the whole city would be visited;…you may be sure from that hour all trade, except such as related to immediate subsistence, was, as it were, at a full stop.” —Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

 

Dear Reader,

When the pandemic comes, the usual thing is for people to stop talking to one another. I’ve been consulting my small collection of plague books (a normal thing to own), and I’m getting the impression that this has always been the case. Talking and touching are, after all, biologically indistinguishable; to communicate, you have to get close to someone. Close enough to catch whatever it is they’ve got.

Or anyway that used to be how it went. It used to be that, when a plague came around, if you were worried you couldn’t live without other people and their stories and all their little habits and funny dances and things, you had better secure a few charming young noblewomen to take with you into seclusion at your country villa for the duration of the epidemic. Nowadays the script has been flipped. Clubbers can go to “cloud raves,” bored teens can post funny videos, and I can write and publish this month’s books newsletter from the comfort of my living room — I can communicate myself to thousands of you even though I haven’t left my house in like 90 hours, having been a little too spooked by the specter of “community spread” in New York to see First Cow at the Angelika this weekend even though I already had tickets.

(Not, to be honest, that I don’t always write the newsletter from my couch! But it’s a little different, obviously, working from home as opposed to actively avoiding other people.)

The coronavirus is “the first pandemic in history that could be controlled,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Monday. What he meant is that it’s the first pandemic for which we’ve had a whole host of technologies at our disposal that can allow society to screech to a grinding halt without totally collapsing — arguably the most important of which is the internet. Solitude without loneliness is, incredibly, achievable on a wide scale. We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud. No need to recruit the noblewomen. The Decameron is online.

With that in mind, here’s a round-up of nine not-to-be-missed book-related stories from all around the web this past month, communicated from me to you with zero physical contact. And, while reading, if you happen to get tempted to go out into a big crowd and breathe other people’s air and feel the heat from other people’s bodies, remember this important piece of advice: don’t.

 

1. “Sex in the Theater: Jeremy O. Harris and Samuel Delany in Conversation” by Toniann Fernandez, The Paris Review

A remarkable conversation on sex, art, and so much more between acclaimed playwright Jeremy O. Harris and sci-fi legend Samuel Delany, whom you may or may not know is also, in the vein of his childhood inspirations Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, a writer of erotic novels, such as the “unpublishable” Hogg.

2. “A Dirty Secret: You Can Only Be a Writer If You Can Afford It” by Lynn Steger Strong, The Guardian

Novelist Lynn Steger Strong examines the damning economics of authorship.

3. “The Post-Traumatic Novel” by Lili Loofbourow, The New York Review of Books

“What I have found myself hungering for, in short, is literature that stretches past legal testimonies and sentimental appeals toward what, for lack of a better phrase, I’m calling post-traumatic futurity.” Lili Loofbourow reviews three recent books reflective of the Me Too moment and outlines a new approach to the survivor’s story.


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4. “Jericho Rising” by Allison Glock, Garden & Gun

A profile of the incredible Jericho Brown. “In person, Brown is an explosion of life, magnetic, boisterous, a one-man carnival ride. Simply put, there is no scenario where one would be unaware that Jericho Brown is in the room.”

5. “Fan Fiction Was Just as Sexual in the 1700s as It Is Today” by Shannon Chamberlain, The Atlantic

Get this: Henry Fielding made a smutty fanfic of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and he called it… Shamela.

6. “Killing the Joke: On Andrea Long Chu’s Females” by Elena Comay del Junco, The Point

Like pretty much everyone, I take perverse delight in a good takedown. There have been a lot of spicy takedown reviews already this year— Lauren Oyler on Jia Tolentino, Emily Gould on Meghan Daum, Jennifer Szalai on Katie Roiphe — and I suppose that, technically, this not-exactly-positive review of Andrea Long Chu’s Females could be seen as something like a takedown; but in the end Comay del Junco’s approach is so thoughtful that it just makes me more interested in the book. Sometimes disagreement is not discouragement.

7. “Behind the Green Baize Door” by Alison Light, The London Review of Books

A review of Feminism and the Servant Problem, a history of the political tension between the suffragettes and their maids: “Employers protested against interference in the relations between mistress and maid. Some believed that their servants had it easy — novel-reading was a particular irritant. One cautioned against leaving the suffrage paper lying around the house: it was too sexually explicit and political discussion might give servant girls the wrong idea.”

8. “Opportunity Costs: On Work, Idealism, and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley” by Eryn Loeb, Guernica

Eryn Loeb reflects on her own work history while reviewing Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir of selling out in Silicon Valley.

9. “The Beats, the Hungryalists, and the Call of the East” by Akanksha Singh, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Singh reviews Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury’s The Hungryalists, a book that explores the connection between Allen Ginsberg and the eponymous group of radical Bengali poets. “Their name is in reference to Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of hungry in in the sowre hungry tyme in his translation of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.”

 

Happy reading, and good luck! Stay inside if you can!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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15 True Crime Longreads and the Questions We Should Ask Ourselves When Reading Them

(Armin Weigel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

“I think one of the reasons these stories are so popular — and they’ve been very popular since long before whatever true crime boom we’re currently in,” Rachel Monroe notes while discussing her book Savage Appetites, on our cultural fascination with crime, is that “they’re very emotionally engaging.”

“Whenever we’re telling these stories,” Monroe continues, “we’re participating in that emotional, social, political conversation, whether we want to admit it or not.”

For all that we can stream entire seasons of docudramas in a single day, true crime stories often take years to report out and get right. Whether the person facing the facts of any given case is a staff writer or a law enforcement official, even full-time, invested professionals can lack the bandwidth or the resources to investigate every life story that crosses their desks, with the undivided attention each of those lives deserves.

Read more…

What Do We Do With Feelings Now That They Don’t Matter Anymore?

CSA Images / Getty / Illustration by Longreads

Sarah Miller | Longreads | March 2020 | 7 minutes (1,800 words)

A few months ago I was visiting my brother in suburban San Diego, a place that always makes me wonder if the world should just start over. My sister-in-law and niece and I were in the car together, and my iPad started playing over the stereo, by accident, the song “Funeral” by Phoebe Bridgers.

I had never even heard of Phoebe Bridgers until three months before this happened, when I was visiting New York City and the song played in the Cobble Hill outpost of the store BIRD as I was leafing through $150 T-shirts. (I bought one, because it was the nicest T-shirt I have ever seen, and because I had a job with a salary, and I figured I would probably never have one again, so why not?) The song made me cry. I didn’t want the salespeople to see this so I had to take cover in the corner of the shop for a minute and pretend to be looking at a pair of shoes — which, as worth it as the T-shirts at BIRD are, the shoes are useful only to look at to hide the fact that you’re crying.

I binge-listened to the song during that whole trip and then after, and then for a few months forgot about it, until the day when it just started playing in my sister-in-law’s car. I started to turn it off but my sister-in-law said, “Oh just leave it,” and I started to remember how much I liked the song, because it is so skillfully sad, and just lays you out, when my niece started making fun of it. “What is this? Jesus Christ, ‘I’m so blue all the time’!?” she quoted the song in an exaggerated sad-sack tone of voice, mimicking its bleakness. “This is sooo depressing. Why do you LISTEN to stuff like this?” She listened again for a moment and recommenced her assault. “Oh my God — she just said ‘We might just kill ourselves,’ What is WRONG with this person?”

Nothing would be better for the world right now than if we all stopped trying to achieve things and said, ‘We no longer believe work will set us free, it is the opposite, in fact,’ and behaved accordingly.

I felt simultaneously enraged and sad — the way I feel a lot of the time, the way that is my knee-jerk reaction to so many things. First of all, she was making fun of something I liked, and I felt exposed, particularly because I’m not a Phoebe Bridgers fan, per se — like I’m not a Moon juice-fasting 30-year-old living in Echo Park — and listening to her, I guess, I felt like my niece might think I was trying to pose as one.

I had kind of wanted my relationship to “Funeral” to be private. I felt like liking this song tapped into parts of my personality that would be difficult to explain, and that most people who knew me wouldn’t understand. Mostly, I was upset because the song is so brutally sad. It’s about someone dying, but it’s also about how when something sad happens and you’re already a depressed person you’re less like, “Here is a sad event that made me sad,” than like, “When someone dies or something else bad happens I merely see more clearly how sad I am all the time.”

The saddest part of this sad song is the chorus, the very part my niece singled out for ridicule: “Jesus Christ I’m so blue all the time and I guess that’s just how I feel. I always have, and I always will, I always have, and I always will.” The repetition at the end is the knife in the heart. It’s at once maturely resigned and immaturely petulant. The singer wants to be understood and sympathized with, but she also knows it doesn’t matter, because it won’t change anything.

I don’t remember what I said to my niece. I do know that I was trying really hard not to show too much sadness or anger because my niece, of course, hadn’t done anything wrong. It was my problem, not hers, that I was so upset. Her attack was full of youthful, energetic certainty, which is appropriate, and expressing the enormity of my sadness and anger would have been in no way appropriate. I’d like to add that she is not generally someone who bothers me, so there was no need to serve as an adult curb to her developing personality. Plus, her mother seemed annoyed enough. She said something like, “It’s a sad song, surely you’ve heard sad songs before?” and then kind of looked at me like “Sorry.” I shook my head and said, “It’s fine,” and was sure that I would get over it soon, since nothing had really happened.
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Life Advice from Jazz Genius Sonny Rollins

Close-up of American jazz musician Sonny Rollins playing the tenor saxophone mid 1950s. (Photo by Bob Parent/Getty Images)

At age 89, after 70 years as a jazz saxophonist who played with John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker (to name just a few), Sonny Rollins quietly gave up playing in 2014 due to pulmonary fibrosis. At The New York Times Magazine, David Marchese talks to Rollins about why he decided not to publish his ideas on saxophone technique and harmony, and his distinct lack of nostalgia for jazz days gone by.

When I had to stop playing it was quite traumatic. But I realized that instead of lamenting and crying, I should be grateful for the fact that I was able to do music all of my life. So I had that realization, plus my spiritual beliefs, which I’ve been cultivating for many years. All that work went into my accepting the fact that I couldn’t play my horn.

Does believing in the transience of life mean you’re not nostalgic for jazz’s past? Or your own life in jazz? Wayne Shorter’s still here, but Miles is not here. Max Roach is not here. Trane is not here. Monk is not here. Do I feel nostalgic about that? No. These guys are alive to me. I hear their music. OK, Charlie Parker is not in his body, but everything about Charlie Parker is here to me in spirit. Any time of day, any time of night, I might think of Miles, and the spirit is there. Occasionally I go, Gee, I can’t hang out with Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown after a gig. I think about that, but it’s receding. Those guys — I don’t worry about them not being here in the flesh. I’m not going to be in the flesh, either. You’re not going to be in the flesh, either, David. So what? It’s OK.

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The Consequences of Surviving

Courtesy of Getty Images

PTSD is defined as an anxiety disorder caused by a traumatic event, or stressor, such as a natural disaster. A life-threatening illness is only considered a stressor if it involves a ‘sudden, catastrophic event’ such as waking up during surgery.

In this article for Aeon Liza Gross explores an argument put forward by Phil Wolfson, a psychiatrist in Marin County, that hearing the words “You’ve got cancer” is a catastrophic event in itself, and even when the tumors retreat, “that kind of fear stays with you.” Wolfson is campaigning for a new diagnosis: PTSD-life-threatening illness (PTSD-LTI) — to increase support both for the survivors of life-threatening illnesses, and for their carers.

Although a diagnosis can bring benefits, Cole says, ‘you are in a state of anxiety at all times.’ He can’t shake the thought that any aches and pains, normal for his 67 years, might be new signs of his body’s betrayal. Today, he practises palliative care at a hospice. He knows the patients are probably floating in space, too, needing specialised care to manage their distress.

He believes no one should leave an oncologist’s office with a cancer diagnosis without a referral to someone trained to manage the anxiety and trauma that inevitably shadows the course of treatment. But that’s not what happens. ‘As medicine advances, we have more survivors,’ Cole says. ‘That’s a good thing. But those survivors carry trauma to their graves, and we haven’t recognised that it’s a disease process that needs treatment.’

Wolfson is also an advocate for using ketamine and MDMA in the treatment of those suffering from this form of PTSD.

Therapists have long known that MDMA, outlawed in 1985 as having no medical use and a high potential for abuse, melts defences and eases anxieties while boosting mood and trust – key ingredients for successful therapy. The drug works partly by dissipating the crippling fear that prevents people from revisiting a trauma, a necessary step in learning how to live with it. ‘It opens the doors of the heart and removes some of the blocks to feeling and suppression,’ Wolfson says, making it easier to tolerate deeply distressing memories and emotions.

Feeling unburdened, Wolfson’s patients were willing to plumb the depths of their psychic pain in profound ways, looking at how the disease disrupted their lives, self-worth, and personal and professional interactions. Their ability to confront their worst fears helped Wolfson chart a therapeutic path to ease their suffering and anxiety.

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Strong Writer-Editor Partnerships Create the Best Stories, As This Extended Bus Metaphor Will Prove

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Editors don’t make stories better because we’re pedantic about grammar and sentence structure (although we are) or because we’re better writers (we’re not) or because we have some kind of special insight into what people want to read (we wish). Editors make stories better because we free writers: to experiment, to push boundaries, to explore the limits of their topics. Editors give writers the support they need to take risks, and risks lead to more interesting, thought-provoking stories.

A good story takes you on a journey. Think of it like being on a bus tour. No, really; stay with me here.

The writer is the guide driving the tour bus, taking you past the key sights and using color commentary to explain how they’re linked and to give you context and insight. The reader — you — are sitting on the bus, sometimes listening closely, sometimes lost in thoughts inspired by the trip. And the editor is the person in the passenger seat, keeping track of the time, checking the map so we don’t miss any exits, turning on the A/C when the bus gets stuffy and off again when it gets too chilly, making a note of that interesting new building on the side of the road.

(In case you’re wondering, we’re on a double-decker bus here, because that’s obviously the most fun kind of bus.)

A good tour guide needs to be engaging and in-the-moment, or the tour’s boring. They need to describe things to the passengers in interesting and accessible and fresh ways, and make sure passengers get the detail necessary to understand what they’re seeing. That is, they need to be focused and present. But they can’t be focused if they’re thinking about whether their new anecdote is landing, or about whether a stop has gotten boring and should be removed from the tour. And they can’t be present if they have to worry about logistics — how to deal with a detour or how much gas is left or what that weird clanking noise is. They need someone in the passenger seat taking care of all that. That person — the editor — takes the notes that enable the tour guide to do their thing and helps them hone their delivery for the next group.

Tragically, most double-decker bus tours don’t have editors, so they’re rote and boring and the stops are in the wrong order. But Longreads stories do have editors, which is why Anne Thériault can have fun with the text message dialogues in her “Queens of Infamy” pieces — her editor has his eye on the overall shape of the story. It means Rachel Somerstein can lay her pain bare in “How to Survive a Vivisection,” because her editor is there to make sure that every detail is both checked and handled with the utmost care. It means writers can write, knowing that someone will tell them if a paragraph is unclear or a flight of fancy flutters a little too far, knowing that someone’s making sure facts get checked and typos get found, knowing that their blind spots will be IDed and their strongest ideas brought to the fore.

For the past two years or so, I’ve edited Soraya Roberts‘s culture columns for Longreads. Here’s a selection of the notes I’ve left on her drafts lo these past 24 months:

  • Obviously, we are a shitty country. But is it just us? Is this not a larger Western issue?
  • It feels like a significant gap in the piece to say that “I believe X” rather than laying out the why. It’s important to explain, not least because the simple statement is going to raise hackles and prevent people from engaging with your actual arguments, but also because then you can compare contrast U.S./French actions later on in the piece to really illustrate the ramifications of this understanding of #MeToo.
  • I think you need more of a segue into this quote, and then a little more unpacking; it’ll better set up the final section. I’d put a para break here and then flesh this out a little more.
  • YES.
  • Master’s house, master’s tools, why do we never listen to Audre Lorde.
  • Small potato? Pshaw. You’re at least a medium-sized potato, with a healthy blorp of sour cream.

The push and pull has (I think) resulted in some remarkable criticism from Soraya, and it’s helped me hone my own philosophies and politics, both as an editor and a human being. Supporting our writers like this is a gift. Every day, I get to ride new buses, see new places, hear new voices. I lend my support to every journey, and in turn learn things that I’ll be able to bring to the next trip I get to go on.

Every Longreads story is a partnership between a passionate writer and an equally passionate editor, and always will be. It’s how we best serve our writers and our readers. When writers have that support and freedom, they produce amazing work that we’re privileged to publish for you.

We can only keep doing this with your support. If I may stretch my already-exhausted metaphor: bus tours aren’t free, and neither is publishing the calibre of work we publish (and compensating writers fairly). We don’t put Longreads stories behind a paywall, but we do ask for your help.

Become a member, or give a one-time gift. Click the button. You know what to do.

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The Criminalization of the American Midwife

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Jennifer Block  |  March 2020  |  32 minutes (8,025 words)

Elizabeth Catlin had just stepped out of the shower when she heard banging on the door. It was around 10 a.m. on a chilly November Wednesday in Penn Yan, New York, about an hour southeast of Rochester. She asked her youngest child, Keziah, age 9, to answer while she threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. “There’s a man at the door,” Keziah told her mom.

“He said, ‘I’d like to question you,” Caitlin tells me. A woman also stood near the steps leading up to her front door; neither were in uniform. “I said, ‘About what?’” The man flashed a badge, but she wasn’t sure who he was. “He said, ‘About you pretending to be a midwife.’”

Catlin, a home-birth midwife, was open about her increasingly busy practice. She’d send birth announcements for her Mennonite clientele to the local paper. When she was pulled over for speeding, she’d tell the cop she was on her way to a birth. “I’ve babysat half of the state troopers,” she says.

It was 30 degrees. Catlin, 53, was barefoot. Her hair was wet. “Can I get my coat?” she asked. No. Boots? She wasn’t allowed to go back inside. Her older daughter shoved an old pair of boots, two sizes too big, through the doorway; Catlin stepped into them and followed the officer and woman to the car. At the state trooper barracks, she sat on a bench with one arm chained to the wall. There were fingerprints, mug shots, a state-issue uniform, lock-up. At 7:30 p.m. she was finally arraigned in a hearing room next to the jail, her wrists and ankles in chains, on the charge of practicing midwifery without a license. Local news quoted a joint investigation by state police and the Office of Professional Discipline that Catlin had been “posing as a midwife” and “exploiting pregnant women within the Mennonite community, in and around the Penn Yan area.”

Catlin’s apparent connection with a local OB-GYN practice, through which she had opened a lab account, would prompt a second arrest in December, the Friday before Christmas, and more felony charges: identity theft, falsifying business records, and second-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument. That time, she spent the night in jail watching the Hallmark Channel. When she walked into the hearing room at 8:00 a.m., again in chains, she was met by dozens of women in grey-and-blue dresses and white bonnets. The judge set bail at $15,000 (the state had asked for $30,000). Her supporters had it: Word of her arrest had quickly passed through the tech-free community, and in 12 hours they had collected nearly $8,000 for bail; Catlin’s mother made up the difference. She was free to go, but not free to be a midwife.

Several years back, a respected senior midwife faced felony charges in Indiana, and the county prosecutor allowed that although a baby she’d recently delivered had not survived, she had done nothing medically wrong — but she needed state approval for her work. The case, the New York Times wrote, “was not unlike one against a trucker caught driving without a license.” As prosecutor R. Kent Apsley told the paper, “He may be doing an awfully fine job of driving his truck. But the state requires him to go through training, have his license and be subject to review.”

But what if the state won’t recognize the training or grant a license? 

Catlin is a skilled, respected, credentialed midwife. She serves a rural, underserved, uninsured population. She’s everything the state would want in a care provider. But owing to a decades-old political fight over who can be licensed as a midwife, she’s breaking the law.  Read more…

A Design Aesthetic That Lets You Succeed In a World That Doesn’t Care If You Fail

Christoph Hardt/Geisler-Fotopres/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

If I remember correctly, the term “fern and brass” has been used to describe the hideously bland interior design of lookalike chain restaurants from the 1980s. It didn’t matter what city you were in, be it Spokane or Topeka, they all looked the same. I’m glad I was too young to have fully experienced that, but each generation has their aesthetic and its burdens. For The Cut, Molly Fischer writes a richly detailed analysis and history of a modern design style she calls the “millennial aesthetic,” in a story that has more personality, color, and life in it than any of the interiors she describes. One photo caption in Fischer’s story names the aesthetic’s hallmarks as “Motivational ad copy, soft colors, and photogenic domesticity.” Originality isn’t the point. Sameness has certain virtues, even if they’re clichés. So where did this aesthetic come from? How does it work, and will it and its pinkness ever go away? Our era has eaten the pink pill that sells us design as palliative medicine, something that, as Fischer put it, “functions like a CBD seltzer.” Also, advertising, aspirational lifestyle branding, and consumption are all intertwined in this aesthetic.

If you simultaneously can’t afford any frills and can’t afford any failure, you end up with millennial design: crowd-pleasing, risk-averse, calling just enough attention to itself to make it clear that you tried. For a cohort reared to achieve and then released into an economy where achievement held no guarantees, the millennial aesthetic provides something that looks a little like bourgeois stability, at least. This is a style that makes basic success cheap and easy; it requires little in the way of special access, skills, or goods. It is style that can be borrowed, inhabited temporarily or virtually. At the very least, you can stay a few hours in a photogenic co-working venue. At the very least, Squarespace gives you the tools you need to build your own presentable online home.

Fischer explains the central role that the color pink plays, and its surprising popularity.

No account of the millennial aesthetic could fail to address pink: For the better part of a decade, millennial pink bedeviled anyone a color could bedevil. When Facebook rolled out a corporate rebrand last fall, the lead image in the press release showed the new logo — breezily spaced sans serif — in a muted shade somewhere on the ham-to-salmon spectrum. Samuel keeps wondering when people will get sick of the color, but they don’t; almost every client asks for pink. She thinks this is because it’s soothing. They want houses that remind them of vacations, suggest Mediterranean idylls.

“It kind of feels like a binky,” Deborah Needleman, the former editor of T, WSJ., and Domino, says of millennial interiors. (Boob-print pillows and bath mats are perhaps the most literal expression of a general tendency toward the comforts of babyhood.) Needleman sees not a trip to Greece but something more like childproofing. “It’s like it has no edge or sense of humor or sense of mystery,” she says. “There’s no weirdness. There’s nothing that clashes. It is very controlled.”

It’s amusing to note that the PRADA ad in this article’s sidebar turns the brand name into an acronym for “Play Responsibly And Dress Authentically” — one of the motivational ad slogans that Fischer mentions. The ad’s background is 80% pink, and its design elements lack the authenticity its motto tries to sell.

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Mowing the Lawn to Map the Ocean Floor, One Long, Slow Pass at a Time

A scuba diver explores an old, wooden shipwreck in Lake Michigan. The waters of the Great Lakes are so cold that they preserve the many wrecks on bottom.

Related underwater reading: Gene and Sandy Ralston use specialized sonar on their boat to locate bodies under water.

As Matthew Braga reports at The Verge, we’re flithy rich with land maps, ones that show us “how the planet has changed, and how we’ve changed the planet,” over time, but that’s not the case where land is covered by water. The treasure trove of information to be gleaned from mapping the world’s oceans could help scientists understand climate change. Enter BEN, an automated map-making boat Braga met while it plotted Lake Huron. According to Braga, “we’ve mapped just 9 percent of the world’s oceans to modern standards,” which is “why BEN and vehicles like it hold so much promise.” (Note, the fantastic illustrations in this piece were done by the incomparable Zoë van Dijk. Check out some of her illustrations for Longreads.)

It was just past midnight when the Ironton punched a 200-square-foot hole in the side of the Ohio. It was dark, the waters were rough, and the Ohio, a wooden bulk freighter loaded with flour and feed, was no match for the Ironton, a schooner heavy with coal. The Ohio sank within half an hour, and the Ironton soon followed, taking five of its crew down too.

Their ghostly hulls have sat largely undisturbed at the bottom of Lake Huron since colliding in late September 1894 — just two of the many wrecks that lie in a treacherous stretch of water called Thunder Bay off Michigan’s northeastern coast. Some are so well preserved by the lake’s frigid freshwater that their unbroken masts point definitely towards the surface, rigging still intact. Others have dishes in the cupboards, a century late for dinner. A few years ago, local media reported that divers found a 1927 Chevrolet Coupe amid the wreckage of a steamship, covered with algae and barnacles, but nonetheless pristine. You can thank the rocky shoals, frequent fog, and sudden gales of Thunder Bay for turning what was once the bustling marine interstate of America’s early industrial age into a modern-day museum of Great Lakes maritime history. Locals called it “Shipwreck Alley.”

Divers flock from all over the world to see the wrecks for themselves each year — and last spring, they were joined by an unusual interloper: an autonomous boat named BEN. BEN is a self-driving boat that’s been tasked with making maps, and it was brought to Thunder Bay to help lay bare the long-lost secrets of the lakebed.

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