The Longreads Blog

Fancy Dogs and Empty Bank Accounts

Photo: Fouquier ॐ

I know that I won’t be getting a Frenchie this week, or even this year, but I also know that I am not going to give up. In all the time I’ve spent blustering about my plan, researching breeds, and ending up disappointed, I’ve never allowed myself permission to get this dog just because I want it. I want it because it will comfort me when I feel nervous. Because it will be someone to talk to, and who will talk back to me in that uncanny, silent way that dogs do. Because it will force me to focus on caring for something else, and pull me out of my inescapable self-absorption—a student with two jobs trying to carve out an identity. Because people who don’t have a lot of money but work their asses off need things—comforts, love—as much as anyone. We are experts at saving, scrimping, and sacrificing. We should be able to have fancy dogs, too.

— How do our desires shape our identity? In the Morning News, Poet Amanda Williams is facing this question head-on: she is a graduate student with limited finances, but all she wants is a purebred French Bulldog.

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Lightnin’ Hopkins Gets Your Head Tore Up

In the summer of 1960, Dallas, Texas journalist Grover Lewis went to Houston’s Third Ward in search of Bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lewis found him in an old ’54 Dodge. The resulting essay, published in the Village Voice in 1968, is a small masterpiece of personal music writing, offering a snapshot of artistic endurance, 1960s race relations, and the daily life of one of the pivotal figures in the ’60s Blues revival. It’s also a shining example of how to blend first-person interiority with reporting in a way that shows the effect music can have on our lives. Lewis isn’t as well known as his New Journalism counterparts Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, but he’s just as good. You can read the essay in the book Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader:

The head-tearing up process, which was enacted in a succession of piss-smelling little beer parlors, wore on for days, at the end of which I knew considerably more about sour mash whiskey than I had counted on. But in the end, I also knew considerably more about myself, and the South (and that knowledge ultimately freed me to leave it forever), and my own forebears, who, like Hopkins in his young manhood, had been sharecroppers Somewhere along in there, too, in those feverish, rushing days and nights of sweet, raw whiskey fumes and mournful guitar cadenzas ─ even as we shyly began to feel each other out over the clattering racket of the Dodge’s hoarse engine ─ I realized with a dawning sense of wonder that the quest I’d initiated in looking for Lightnin’ had begun long before.

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The Three Immutable Rules of Chicken Tenders

A true connoisseur of the chicken tender knows that there are three immutable rules.

The first is the rule of physical integrity. A tender has a proper shape: flattish, oblong, and gradually tapering from a wide front to a narrow end. Unlike nuggets, which are largely made from processed, re-formed scraps, the chicken tender takes its name from an actual piece of the chicken: the pectoralis minor, a muscle located under the breast, against the sternum. The tenderloin. It’s rare nowadays to get actual tenders when you order them (hence the rise of “fingers” and “strips,” terms of art that veil all manner of creative butchery), but integrity demands that a wedge of breast put at least some effort into mimicking the actual part of the chicken it is trying to be.

The second rule of chicken tenders is that, contra any advice your mother may have given you, what’s on the outside matters infinitely more than anything on the inside. A chicken tender lives or dies by its exterior: batters, breadings, the disappointing faux-sophistication of panko. The subtlety or intensity of its spice and salt. The crispness of the exterior is what creates the tenderness of the interior, its structural cohesion when submerged in hot oil helps the chicken inside stay juicy and good. But it can’t adhere only to itself: a good chicken tender’s breading stays connected to the chicken inside once you take a bite, not slipping off like a silk stocking or the bullshit batter on an onion ring.

The third rule of chicken tenders is that sauce is a last resort. You shouldn’t have to dip your chicken tenders in anything. If you want a vehicle for ranch dressing, order the crudités.

Helen Rosner writing in Guernica about her deep love for chicken tenders.

 

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Mr. and Mrs. B

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Alexander Chee | Apology Magazine | Winter 2014 | 19 minutes (4,822 words)

 

This essay by novelist Alexander Chee first appeared in Apology magazine’s third issue (Winter 2014). Apology is a semiannual print journal of art, interviews and literature, created by ex-Vice editor-in-chief Jesse Pearson. The fourth issue is available for preorder. Our thanks to Alexander Chee and Apology for allowing us to reprint this essay here.

* * *

How could you, my friends would ask, when I told them. How could you work for someone like him? Do you ever want to just pick up a knife and stab him in the neck? Poison his food?

You would be a hero, one friend said.

I did not want to stab him, and I did not want to poison him. From our first meeting, it was clear, he was in decline. And as for how could I, well, like many people, I needed the money. Read more…

Reinventing One of Scotland’s Most Unpronounceable Whiskies

No one knows why Bruichladdich whisky tastes the way it does, but plenty of people think they do. In Reynier’s view, the distillery’s proximity to a shallow bay makes a difference. (Bruichladdich is Gaelic for “raised beach.”) When the tide goes out, across the road, algae are exposed to the air, which influences the spirit as it matures, giving it a maritime tang.

Officially, the company also credits its distinctive tall, narrow pot stills, the oldest of which has been in use since 1881. But McEwan differs sharply. “The shape of the pot is not significant, in terms of flavor—this is a kind of fairy story,” he says. “It’s the artisanal skills of the whisky-maker.”

Kelefa Sanneh, writing in The New Yorker about a London wine dealer’s mission to revive the revered  Bruichladdich distillery, on the Scottish island of Islay. Sanneh’s piece ran in February 2013.

 

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Corruption–and Copulation–in the Baltimore City Detention Center

Photo by Martin

Joyce Mitchell, alleged accomplice to two murderers on the loose from Clinton-Dannemora correctional facility in New York, is hardly the only prison employee to ever have allegedly aided—and had sex with—detainees. From Jeffrey Toobin’s “This Is My Jail” in the April 14, 2014 issue of The New Yorker:

Many relationships between guards and inmates appear to have been consensual, and initiated by the inmates. “When they started having these really young girls as guards, that’s when it really went downhill,” the former inmate Kevin said. “They get infatuated with the gang members.” In a way, the more serious the charges against an inmate, the more deference he would be accorded by the guards. “Most of the C.O.s, they was young,” Vernon, another former inmate, told me. “If you came in with high-profile charges, they would treat you with more respect. The big-time drug kingpins would be more likely to get what they want. The guards would worry about the repercussions if they didn’t. There were relationships in there. I saw a C.O. used to bring McDonald’s to this dude. That’s cause she was his baby mama.”…

…According to the government, Tavon White had sexual relationships with four guards and fathered five children by them. (One of the guards had “Tavon” tattooed on her wrist; another had the name on her neck.) An inmate and gang member named Jamar Anderson was involved with five guards. Female guards smuggled the contraband into the facility, concealing it “in their underwear, hair, internally and elsewhere,” according to a government filing. The guards were subject to cursory or nonexistent searches when they entered the premises, and they also brought in the cell phones for the inmates to use, even though correctional officers were forbidden to carry phones while working.

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Chewing, We Hardly Knew Ye: A Soylent Reading List

Image: Bryan Ward.

Meal-replacement mix Soylent had a wildly successful Kickstarter, a year of massive growth where demand far outpaced supply, and has now raised $20 million in funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Some hail it as the health-ensuring time-saver we’ve all been waiting for. Others lament it as the latest harbinger of our Silicon Valley-enfoced dystopian future. But what’s it actually like to drink the stuff, physically — and emotionally? These five writers muse on what it feels like — and means for us as a food-centric society — to be free from food.

1. “Freedom from Food” (Nicola Twilley, Aeon, October 2014)

In the end, the time and money saved by switching to drinkable meals couldn’t make up for one fundamental drawback for Twilley: taste. “The only real upside to replacing food with Soylent was that my first real food after five days – half a proper New York bagel with butter, Cowgirl Creamery Mt Tam cheese, a perfect Jersey tomato, and a pinch of Maldon Sea Salt – tasted so utterly, incredibly good that the hand with which I lifted it to my mouth started shaking uncontrollably.” Read more…

Quitting the Internet, Cold Turkey

The base of Solitude Mountain, Utah. Photo by Krista

The advice offered to me by people when I explain I am going to live by myself in the woods for a week varies from the sensible (“Develop a routine”) to the frankly awful (“Take some weed!”).

But it is Michael Harris, the Canadian author who published a book in 2014 called The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, who I pay most attention to.

Like me, Harris decided to try and face his fears. He gave up the internet and his phone for an entire month, though not, it must be said, human contact altogether. Nevertheless, “crushing loneliness,” is how he describes the initial effects of his experiment.

“You have to remember, people who design our online experiences have devoted enormous resources toward making them as addictive as possible,” Harris says. “Walking away from it makes you feel like shit, because suddenly all your magic powers are gone.”

He is talking about the way email alerts and social media notifications are rewiring us by triggering endorphins in our brains.

“You have to burrow through that discomfort before you start to see the rewards on the other side. When you’re living online, there is a certain apparatus of approval. What you do, what you think and what you believe is governed by certain corporate interests and the interests of your friends—something becomes worthy if it gets 12 retweets, say.

“When you cut yourself off from the internet,” he says, “you’re forced to construct a personal approval system—something that is not beholden to the opinions of others.

In Esquire, Sam Parker quits the Internet cold turkey, experiencing classic withdrawal symptoms including anxiety and panic after traveling to a remote Scottish bothy in a bid to find true solitude.

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Cultural Heritage and the Family Dinner Table

Photo by Pixabay

What is lost when families are not involved in selecting the dishes they cook? For one thing, it means that they are not sharing food drawn from their own store of recipes, their heritage, or even regional specialties. I was born to an Indian father and a Chinese mother, but spent my childhood around the world because of my father’s job in the airline industry. The only time I really felt connected to my culture was at dinner every night, eating rice with chicken curry, fried noodles, vegetables in soy sauce, or coconut chutney with dosa (a kind of Indian crepe). My husband, for his part, felt a link to his Jewish heritage when he was eating his grandmother’s matzo ball soup, brisket, or Saturday-morning bagels and lox. If the two of us don’t move past the meal kits, there is a distinct possibility that many of our family’s food traditions will end with us and instead will be decided by a well-meaning executive chef in an industrial kitchen.

Krishnendu Ray, of NYU’s food studies program, points out that this transmission of food culture has been shifting slowly over the last century. “Knowledge about food was once conveyed in close proximity from mother to daughter or grandmother to grandchild,” he says. “Now we have to learn this from a company or the mass media. But we shouldn’t over-sentimentalize the past: American women have been learning about food from companies since the industrial revolution. For two generations, women have been learning recipes from the back of food packaging—think about the popularity of Jell-O molds or chocolate pound cake.” So I’m mourning a loss of culture and tradition that has already begun eroding.

Elizabeth Segran writing for Fast Company about the boxed-meal phenomenon, and how meal-kit startups like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and Plated could change the way we eat. 

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How Apple’s Transcendent Chihuahua Killed the Revolution

Wreckage of the Zeppelin LZ4 after the crash in Echterdingen. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Ian Bogost | from The Geek’s Chihuahua | University of Minnesota Press | April 2015 | 22 minutes (5,539 words)

 

The following is an excerpt from Ian Bogost’s book The Geek’s Chihuahua, which addresses “the modern love affair of ‘living with Apple’ during the height of the company’s market influence and technology dominance,” and how smartphones created a phenomenon of “hyperemployment.”

***

Think back to 2007, when you got the first iPhone. (You did get one, didn’t you? Of course you did.) You don’t need me to remind you that it was a shiny object of impressive design, slick in hand and light in pocket. Its screen was bright and its many animations produced endless, silent “oohs” even as they became quickly familiar. Accelerometer-triggered rotations, cell tower triangulations (the first model didn’t have GPS yet), and seamless cellular/WiFi data transitions invoked strong levels of welcome magic. These were all novelties once, and not that long ago.

What you probably don’t remember: that first iPhone was also terrible. Practically unusable, really, for the ordinary barrage of phone calls, text messages, mobile email, and web browsing that earlier smartphones had made portable. And not for the reasons we feared before getting our hands on one—typing without tactile feedback wasn’t as hard to get used to as BlackBerry and Treo road warriors had feared, even if it still required a deliberate transition from t9 or mini-keyboard devices—but rather because the device software was pushing the limits of what affordable hardware could handle at the time.

Applications loaded incredibly slowly. Pulling up a number or composing an email by contact name was best begun before ordering a latte or watering a urinal to account for the ensuing delay. Cellular telephone reception was far inferior to other devices available at the time, and regaining a lost signal frequently required an antenna or power cycle. Wireless data reception was poor and slow, and the device’s ability to handle passing in and out of what coverage it might find was limited. Tasks interrupted by coverage losses, such as email sends in progress, frequently failed completely.

The software was barebones. There was no App Store in those early days, making the iPhone’s operating system a self-contained affair, a ladleful of Apple-apportioned software gruel, the same for everyone. That it worked at all was a miracle, but our expectations had been set high by decades of complex, adept desktop software. By comparison, the iPhone’s apps were barebones. The Mail application, for example, borrowed none of its desktop cousin’s elegant color-coded, threaded summary view but instead demanded inexplicable click-touches back and forward from folder to folder, mailbox to mailbox. Read more…