The Longreads Blog

The Way Theater Worked in 1955

In 1955, playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman, published the essay “The American Theater” in the American travel magazine HolidayHoliday ran from 1946 and 1977. Joan Didion’s “Notes from a Native Daughter” first appeared in Holiday. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Paul Bowles and John Steinbeck wrote for it. Though E.B. White’s Holiday magazine essay “Here Is New York,” and Truman Capote’s “Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir,” were later published as slim, stand-alone books and have assumed canonical status, “The American Theater” is a compelling analysis of Broadway system, and many of Miller’s observations still ring true. Holiday folded in 1977 and just relaunched in France this year. I found Miller’s essay in the 1956 anthology Ten Years of Holiday, though the essay appears in The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Below is a short excerpt from “The American Theater”:

All over the country there are nine-year old girls, for instance, who are walking around the house as my daughter is at this very moment, in high-heeled shoes with the lace tablecloth trailing from their shoulders. If mine doesn’t recover before she is sixteen she will wake up one morning and something will click inside her head and she will go and hang around some producer’s office, and if he talks to her, or just asks her what time it is, she may well be doomed for life.

The five blocks [in New York City], therefore, are unlike any other five blocks in the United States, if only because here so many grown people are walking around trailing the old lace tablecloth from their shoulders.

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The Art of Running from the Police

Photo by Joe Thorn

Alice Goffman | On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City | University of Chicago Press | May 2014 | 45 minutes (12,478 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from On the Run, by sociologist Alice Goffman, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Goffman spent six years living in a neighborhood in Philadelphia. In her groundbreaking book, she explains how the young black men in her neighborhood are ensnared in a Kafkaesque legal system which makes running from the police their only option, and how these men have made running into an art. Read more…

The Mountain Carver

Parviz Tanavoli. Photo by Kamil Bialous

Nadim Roberts | Maisonneuve | Spring 2015 | 12 minutes (2,885 words)

 

The following Longreads Exclusive comes from journalist Nadim Roberts and Montreal-based Maisonneuve magazine.

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One morning in March 2014, shortly after returning to his home in Iran, sculptor Parviz Tanavoli awoke to the sound of his daughter’s screams. About twenty men had broken the locks on his front door and entered his house. It looked like the clumsiest art heist in history, but this ragtag group worked for the municipality of Tehran. They were there on strict orders to confiscate Tanavoli’s artwork. Read more…

The Art of the Con: Four Stories About Scams

This morning, as I filed folders at my day job, I turned to the podcast Criminal for comfort. Today’s episode was Gil From London, the story of a strange man posing as a British sixty-something who almost seduced an American widow named Karen. There are lots of well-told stories about con men, Craigslist hoaxes and financial scams—here are a few of my favorites.

1. “Crowded House.” (Tad Friend, The New Yorker, May 2013)

Mix cutthroat New York real estate, a too-good-to-be-true apartment, an unstable photographer to the stars and dozens of international tenants. Read more…

‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His First Encounter with Michael Cera

“Michael Cera, I had seen him in a pilot and I reached out through the casting director, like, ‘there was this kid in this pilot, can you please try to track him down.’ Two weeks went by, and we’d seen all these — you know, kid actors in Hollywood, a lot of them come up through that Disney channel, or through — back then it was Barney. So you get really, like, these hammy kids. Precocious, you know. So I’m waiting to hear, and finally the casting director says to me, ‘great news, Michael Cera likes the script.’ And I’m like, ‘who’s Michael Cera?’ ‘The kid that you wanted us to get.’ ‘That was Michael Cera? We’ve been waiting to see whether this 12-year-old likes the material? Good, uh, I’m glad he likes the material.’ And, you know, that’s Michael Cera — you know what I mean? Only Michael Cera would be as a 12-year-old, ‘Yeah, I like this. This is good.’ It’s such an important part — television is so much about continuing to work with people, and I mean, that was just fortune. All of them.”

Mitch Hurwitz, creator of Arrested Development, in a conversation with New York magazine (2013).

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A Single Dad Takes a Fatherhood Development Class

The last student to arrive for fatherhood class was the only one holding a baby, and a dozen men looked up from their desks to stare. Paul Gayle, 19, had a pink diaper bag hanging off a shoulder decorated with tattoos of marijuana leaves, and a crying 7-month-old in his arms. “Come on, girl, chill out,” Paul said, carrying the baby to a seat in the corner. He offered her a rattle, and she swatted it away. He gave her a bottle, and she only cried louder. Finally, he reached into the diaper bag and took out a pacifier for her and a shot of Goody’s Headache Relief for himself.

“Sorry for the noise, y’all,” he said. “We’re both a little mad at the world today.”

“No problem,” the teacher said. “I’m up here talking about being a dad, and you’re doing it.”

“I’m trying,” Paul said. “But damn.”

— Paul wants his baby girl to have the world, and he’s participating in the President’s 16-part fatherhood course to get there. But his girlfriend won’t return his calls, he can’t hold down a job and he lives in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Eli Saslow has the story at the Washington Post.

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A Visit to the Outer Banks

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There are small shifts from year to year, variations that are traditions in themselves: We alternate who gets first pick of the bedrooms, which duo makes the expedition to the Food Lion to buy a car-load of groceries, which family hosts the mid-week covered dish supper, who cooks what and when. The first night we always pick up pizza from the place down the road. At some point all the women convene at The Top Dog for a “long ladies lunch,” followed by a stop at the Pea Island Gallery. There are trips to pick up more beer, wine, chips, bread and cream cheese (a top five of Things We Always Run Out Of), a wild goose chase or two in search of some hard-to-find ingredient for dinner. Inevitably someone will need to drive to the far-away state-run liquor store to re-up. One day will probably be consumed by rain.

There is a short list of things we could do that we haven’t done before, that we talk about doing while knowing we probably will not do them.

-At Vela, Eryn Loeb returns to the shores of North Carolina, juxtaposing the subtle changes to the landscape with the familiarity of her family’s routine.

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Photo: James Jordan

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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Limits, or How to Avoid the Precipice Between Courage and Humility

Photo by Gary Bremner

I need to tell you about the Cirque of the Unclimbables. Ever since I went there, I’ve tried to describe it to friends and family, tried to explain its power and its perfection. It is, I tell people, the best natural campsite I have ever visited. It’s also among the most beautiful eyefuls of landscape I’ve ever seen — its rock walls more overpowering than Zion’s, in Utah, its evening light more perfect than Hawaii’s, its peaks more menacing than Denali, and its stillness more complete than the deep rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s a place that forces me to reach for comparisons from fiction: It’s “Lord of the Rings,” I tell people. It’s Mordor crossed with the Shire.

Their friend had died while climbing, they said, and now here they were: climbing. They weren’t here because of his death, and they weren’t here despite it. They would continue to live their lives in the face of risk, just as he had lived his. But it was clear that the avalanche that had taken Cole’s life added another emotional layer to their journey, another bit of weight on their shoulders as they climbed.

In SBNation, writer Eva Holland explores what it means to comprehend and embrace your limits — to know yet avoid the precipice between courage and humility — on a climbing expedition to the Yukon Territories’ famed Cirque of the Unclimbables.

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Signs of Change on the Streets of Baghdad

Indeed, for a city that only last summer feared it would be overrun by jihadis, Baghdad feels uncannily lacking in trauma. Perhaps Iraqis have learned how to live with their fears, but ISIS feels more threatening in European capitals than it does in Baghdad. Too complacently, Iraqis talk about ISIS in the past tense, as if its defeat was a foregone conclusion. Young men drive through the streets, playing a pop song mocking ISIS’s “feminine” fighters at full volume on their car stereos. Cafés spill onto sidewalks, their tables filled with families late into the night. Hip eateries have opened around Baghdad University where dressed-up girls go to smoke water pipes. Closed by Saddam Hussein’s faith campaign in the early 1990s, the bars that tentatively reopened in 2010 are now jammed. Bartenders cheer the greater margin of freedom they have gained since Sunni and Shia militias turned their guns on each other instead of on their customers.

In the New York Review of Books, Nicolas Pelham examines two very different worlds—while ISIS destroys antiquities in northern Iraq, Baghdad sees signs of reconstruction in the south.

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