The Longreads Blog

Hunting for Prince’s Secret Vault of Unreleased Music

Vice: Is there anything, just a taste, that you’d be able to share?

Mobeen Azhar: Yeah—OK, I want to know how to put this diplomatically—let me put it like this: One big theme which comes across no matter whom you speak to, in terms of people who have dealt with Prince—everyone respects him hugely, but if I had to sum up their experience in one word, that word would be control. And he has constructed this world in which, thankfully for him at least, he is in control of everything. He is one of the freest artists, you could say, in the world. He has a record contract only when he wants one. And unlike everyone else who is trying to make it in the music business, he will have record contracts that have special terms on them, distribution deals, where he can decide what he delivers, he can decide what’s on the record—he has his own studio for god’s sake—it’s not like he’s hiring studio time or the record company’s paying for anything.

Something else that’s snappier and isn’t mentioned in the documentary is, without mentioning any names, I know on good authority that one thing that’s in the vault and unlikely to ever come out is a collaboration with Madonna that Prince has toyed with releasing and was going to release it at one point but he hasn’t. So that’s quite a big deal, and also there’s a collaboration with—do you know who Meshell Ndegeocello is?

Vice Editor James Yeh speaking with journalist and Prince fanatic Mobeen Azhar, about his new BBC radio documentary, Hunting for Prince’s Vault.

Read the interview

How Shake Shack is Avoiding Chipotle’s Mistakes

Photo: LWYang

Making sure Shake Shack doesn’t run out of beef is a big part of Jeff Amoscato’s job. As VP of supply chain and menu innovation, he’s responsible for sourcing the company’s meat—along with its bacon, buns, pickled cherry peppers, and every other ingredient that goes into its offerings. One of his biggest challenges is ensuring the Shacks never encounter the sort of shortages that have plagued Chipotle. Earlier this year, the burrito purveyor stopped selling pork in around a third of its stores after it decided a major supplier wasn’t meeting its standards. When Garutti heard about the situation, he asked Amoscato and culinary director Mark Rosati to talk. “He was just like, ‘By the way, guys, where are we at with this stuff?’” Rosati says.

Amoscato has developed relationships with both ranchers and large natural-meat processors, such as Kansas-based Creekstone Farms. “I’ll get in the truck with their cattle buyer and go around to some of the ranchers,” says the former manager of Meyer’s restaurant The Modern, who looks like he’d be far more at home sipping rioja than roping steer. “We get to understand what they’re doing. We’re working to convince more farmers that this is a better way of growing cattle.”

— Rob Brunner, writing about the rise of the popular Shake Shack burger chain in Fast Company.

Read the story

Misty Copeland’s Achievement and the Future of Ballet

“My goal is to become the first African-American principal dancer with A.B.T.”

-That’s Misty Copeland, in a 2014 profile in The New Yorker. She was promoted on June 30, becoming the first African-American female principal dancer in the American Ballet Theater’s 75-year history.

Copeland got her start in ballet when she was 13:

Cantine had a background in classical dance, and, after working with Misty for a short time she suggested that she try the ballet class at the Boys & Girls Club. “I wasn’t excited by the idea of being with people I didn’t know, and though I loved movement, I had no particular feelings about ballet,” Copeland said. “But I didn’t want to displease Liz.”

Cindy Bradley, who taught the class, told me, “I remember putting my hand on her foot, putting it into a tendu pointe, and she was definitely able to go into that position—she was able to go into all the positions that I put her into that day—but it wasn’t about that.” Bradley said she had a kind of vision, “right then, that first day, of this little girl becoming amazing.”

Copeland recalls her first class differently: “I was so embarrassed. I didn’t know anything that the other girls in the class knew; I thought I was doing everything wrong.”

In this segment for CBS, Copeland says the ballet world still has a long way to go in terms of embracing diversity:

“It doesn’t matter what color I am, it doesn’t matter what body type I have. … It’s something that’s going to take the ballet world a long time to get used to, and I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime. But it’s starting.”

Read the story

Death Made Material: The Hair Jewelry of The Brontës

Portrait of Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (via Wikimedia Commons)

Deborah Lutz | The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects | W.W. Norton | May 2015 | 42 minutes (6,865 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book The Brontë Cabinet, by Deborah Lutz, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor A. N. Devers.

* * *

Long neglect has worn away

Half the sweet enchanting smile

Time has turned the bloom to grey

Mould and damp the face defile

But that lock of silky hair

Still beneath the picture twined

Tells what once those features were

Paints their image on the mind.

—Emily Brontë, Untitled Poem

If the Brontës’ things feel haunted in some way, like Emily’s desk and its contents, then the amethyst bracelet made from the entwined hair of Emily and Anne is positively ghost-ridden. Over time the colors have faded, the strands grown stiff and brittle. Charlotte may have asked Emily and Anne for the locks as a gesture of sisterly affection. Or, the tresses were cut from one or both of their corpses, an ordinary step in preparing the dead for burial in an era when mourning jewelry with hair became part of the grieving process. Charlotte must have either mailed the hair to a jeweler or “hairworker” (a title for makers of hair jewelry) or brought it to her in person. Then she probably wore it, carrying on her body a physical link to her sisters, continuing to touch them wherever they were. Read more…

Megan Tan, ‘Millennial’ Radio Producer

When I first met Megan Tan, she was a talented photojournalist at the daily paper where I was a religion reporter. Today, Tan is the producer of Millennial, a new podcast about “maneuvering your 20s, after graduating college, and all the things that nobody teaches you.” Tan avoids artifice in her work; the podcast is from her perspective. She talks about her waitressing job, her boyfriend’s career successes, and conversations with her parents. Megan is down-to-earth: charming, relatable, hard-working. She records from her apartment. PRX interviewed Tan about her inspiration and goals for her first podcast.

PRX: How has Millennial changed the way you think about your future?

Megan Tan: I think a lot of the things that I was really scared of when I started this are so much more tangible than they have ever been, which is remarkable. I write down a lot of goals. I write down lots of lists and things that I want. For a while I had a list and I took a picture of it with my iPhone and had it as my background. A lot of things I had written just felt unachievable. One of those things was making a podcast. But now because I’ve created Millennial, a lot of the things that I wanted I’ve gotten lot closer to.

Read the story

E. B. White on the Secret of Writing for Children

Anybody who shifts gears when he writes for children is likely to wind up stripping his gears. But I don’t want to evade your question. There is a difference between writing for children and for adults. I am lucky, though, as I seldom seem to have my audience in mind when I am at work. It is as though they didn’t exist.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse-boy, and they accepted it without a quiver. In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.

Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common.

E. B. White, in the Paris Review (1969).

Read the interview

Another Supreme Court Death Penalty Ruling, Issued 43 Years Ago Today

Executions in the United States from 1930 to 2009. Graph via Wikimedia Commons

In a headline-making decision issued earlier today, the Supreme Court ruled against three Oklahoma death row inmates in Glossip v. Gross, upholding the use of a sedative called midazolam for lethal injections. Interestingly, Glossip v. Gross isn’t the first time the court has issued a major death penalty decision on June 29.

43 years ago today, the Supreme Court issued another 5-to-4 death penalty opinion, albeit one with very different results: 1972’s Furman v. Georgia ruling found a number of death penalty statutes to be unconstitutional, effectively halting executions in America for four years. Some context on the landmark case, from a 2013 New York Times article by David Oshinsky:

Furman v. Georgia is among the oddest Supreme Court cases in American history. Decided in 1972, it struck down every death penalty statute in the nation as then practiced without outlawing the death penalty itself. The ruling, based on the constitutional protection against “cruel and unusual punishment,” stunned even the closest court watchers. The death penalty seemed impregnable. It was part of the bedrock of America’s legal system, steeped in the intent of the founders, the will of most state legislatures and the forceful — if occasional — rulings of the courts.

The 5-4 vote in Furman reflected a striking political split: all five members of the majority were holdovers from the Warren Court, known for its liberal decisions, while all four dissenters were recent appointees of Richard Nixon, who had won the White House with a carefully orchestrated law-and-order campaign. And notably, each justice wrote his own opinion in Furman, meaning there was no common thread to the case, no controlling rationale. The decision ran to several hundred pages, the longest handed down by the court at the time.

Read the story

More on the death penalty from the Longreads Archive

How Prison Nurseries Help Incarcerated Mothers and Their Babies

Photo: Janine

Looking more closely at the results, the researchers found that children who stayed the longest in the nursery had the best outcomes. About half of the mothers had less than a year left on their sentence when their baby was born, and had returned home by the time of the assessment. The rate of secure attachment among those children, while still not significantly different from the rate for the comparison group of middle-class children, was lower than among their peers who had stayed in the nursery for a full year. Byrne hypothesized that rather than being harmed by the correctional setting, the babies actually benefitted from the structure the prison provided—particularly the restriction of drugs and alcohol, as well as the parenting support their mothers got from staff and other inmates. (The longitudinal study included parenting guidance from a nurse practitioner, which Byrne believes also contributed to the outcomes.)

— Sarah Yager reports in The Atlantic about how nursery prisons are helping incarcerated mothers and their babies.

Read the story

The Mechanics of a ‘California Accent’

Regional dialects in English are largely informed by the particular way people in different geographic areas make their vowel sounds. Consonants can inform the sounds of vowels, but are largely static; going from an “F” sound to a “T” sound is a huge leap, whereas vowels are a little bit fluid, bleeding into each other. The entire game is to make sure you have enough difference between vowel sounds so that words can be distinguished from one another. But the specific sounds you make? Not so important, as long as they get the idea across of what word you’re trying to say.

A key change in the California Shift is what’s called the cot/caught merger. Northeasterners and Midwesterners pronounce those words differently, giving the former an “ah” sound and the latter an “aw” sound. “Californians do not,” says Eckert, who is originally from New York. “They have no idea. That vowel is almost completely merged. Think ‘mawwm’ instead of ‘mom.’”

Vowel sounds work like those sliding puzzle games where you have to unscramble a picture by sliding one piece of it at a time. As soon as you move one piece, you’re left with an empty space behind you, which has to be filled by something else. Californians dropped the “cot” vowel sound, pronouncing it like “caught” instead. So something had to fill that space. “The California Shift is this kind of combined change in the pronunciation of short vowels,” says Kennedy. The easiest way to think about it? Look at the words kit, dress, and trap. In the California Shift, “kit” becomes “ket”, “dress” becomes “drass”, and “trap” becomes “trop”.

Dan Nosowitz writing for Atlas Obscura about the linguistics behind the “pop punk voice” employed by bands like Blink-182.

Read the story

Vagabonds, Crafty Bauds, and the Loyal Huzza: A History of London at Night

Photo by Garry Knight

Matthew Beaumont | Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London | Verso | March 2015 | 37 minutes (10,129 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from Nightwalking, by Matthew Beaumont, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. In this excerpt, Beaumont describes the complex and transgressive act of nightwalking in London during the 16th & 17th centuries. He paints a vivid picture of the city at night and explains what nightwalking revealed about class, status, and the political and religious leanings of those who practiced it. The plight of the jobless and homeless poor in this era, which also witnessed the birth of capitalism, are dishearteningly familiar today.

Beaumont draws on a variety of compelling sources, which have been linked to when possible, such as Beware the Cat, a puzzling English proto-novel that features a man who attains cat-like superpowers, The Wandring Whore and The Wandring Whore Continued, and A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, which defines, among other things, the 24 types of vagabond.  Read more…