The Longreads Blog

Really Good Shit: A Reading List

Edited and cropped image by Quinn Dombrowski (CC BY-SA 2.0)

As the Japanese children’s book author Tarō Gomi once wrote: everyone poops. But we don’t talk about this openly or often enough. In fact, talking and reading about poop might make you want to hold your nose — but it’ll also open your eyes. Here are nine pieces about shit, from a DIY mixture a woman used to treat her life-threatening infection, to prehistoric poo that brings us one step closer to understanding the origins of life after the dinosaur age.

“The Magic Poop Potion” (Lina Zeldovich, Narratively, July 2014)

Suffering from a recurring intestinal infection called C. diff, Catherine Duff decided to take matters into her own hands. Using healthy stool from her husband, they concocted an unconventional cocktail — using a plastic enema, blender, and a cheese cloth — which he then transferred into her. This procedure, known as fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), saved her life. Duff advocated for FMT as a viable treatment when the FDA considered regulating it as an “investigational new drug,” and founded the Fecal Transplant Foundation to educate the public and to connect patients, doctors, and stool donors. Read more…

‘Garbage Comments Cheapen My Work’: Journalist Eva Holland on Freelancing and Commenters

Eva Holland

Eva Holland is a journalist based in the Yukon who has written for publications including Pacific Standard and SB Nation. Her latest Longreads Original, “‘It’s Yours’,” explores the life (and maybe death) of an internet commenter community, “the Horde,” that Ta-Nehisi Coates helped foster at The Atlantic. I spoke with her via email about her own relationship with internet comments as a freelance journalist, and whether there’s hope for building sustainable communities that are not inevitably dragged down by vitriol and spam. Read more…

Using the British Railway Mania of the 1840s to Explain the Beanie Baby Craze

https://www.flickr.com/photos/23488805@N02/

Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician and bubble expert, proposes a simpler theory explaining speculative panics in his study on the British Railway Mania of the 1840s. Odlyzko credits Railway Mania in part to a “collective hallucination,” an extreme form of groupthink wherein a significant chunk of society feverishly buys into a shared dream with no regard for the skeptics and naysayers. (Some scholars think Jesus’ resurrection might have been an acute instance of collective hallucination.)

The existence of groupthink has been confirmed in a rich assortment of studies, and Odlyzko’s theory expands the idea to economic bubbles. Under his analysis, the initial coterie of Beanie Baby collectors comprised an in-group that shared the great secret of Beanie Babies’ worth. As more people discovered the toy, they yearned to learn this secret and partake in the impending financial success of the Beanie Babies market. Soon, millions of Americans were gripped by the conviction that they had discovered an easy path to personal wealth. And thanks to their collective hallucination of Beanie Babies’ worth, none of these collectors ever realized that the only thing driving the Beanie Babies market was their own conviction that the toys were valuable.

These theories may explain the mass delusions that enabled a large chunk of the country to believe that a $5 Beanie Baby could eventually be worth thousands. What they never quite get at, however, is that initial spark of fascination: how the ineffable appeal of Beanie Babies turned them, and not one of a thousand other 1990s trends, into a collective mania. That allure can probably never be quantified.

Mark Joseph Stern writing in Slate about the economics and psychology of the Beanie Babies craze.

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How a $1B E-Commerce Site Found Its Market on a Trip to Babies “R” Us

They had a small inkling of what they wanted to do. At the time, flash-sale startups like Gilt were just beginning to make some noise, and Cavens and Vadon seriously considered aping the model for the home and beauty space (a la One Kings Lane) before scrapping the idea. “What we came to realize in the health and beauty space, there’s a lot of vendor concentration,” Cavens says. “Many of the top 50 brands are owned by three large companies. If you don’t have the supply there, it’s hard to go after.” They ruled out fashion as well because they deemed it too unwieldy. “What we felt like there is you couldn’t control the supplier dynamics if you’re going after high fashion,” he says, especially “if you were trying to get new freshness every day.”

As they tell it, they decided to focus on boutique products for young moms shortly after Vadon and his wife, who at the time was five months pregnant, made their first trip to Babies “R” Us. Overwhelmed by the mountain of crap that young parents never knew they needed, they made one loop through the store and headed for the exit to get lunch.

The experience would prove to not so much be a moment of clarity as a conversation starter. Vadon brought the ovum of his mom-driven business to Cavens, and they soon realized that the total addressable market for new mothers was both underserved and enormous: Some 4.5 million kids are born in the U.S. every year, and the only discount retailers in the space were, like, T.J. Maxx. If they could subvert a legacy diamond seller like Tiffany & Co., they could do something here. In mid-2009 they chose the name “Zulily” with the help of a branding agency because it was easy to say and just as important, it wouldn’t limit what they could sell. (Some of the too-cute runner’s-up included: ItsyBtsy, Tumble Up, Tip Toe, Katroo, Toodle, and Pitter-Patter.)

And so, two new dads began building an online retail store for new mothers.

Chris Gayomali writing about the e-commerce company Zulily for Fast Company.

 

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‘If You Think The Internet Is Terrible Now, Just Wait a While’

Photo by CLUC

I have previously shared with you Balk’s Law (“Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people”) and Balk’s Second Law (“The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything”). Here I will impart to you Balk’s Third Law: “If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.” The moment you were just in was as good as it got. The stuff you shake your head about now will seem like fucking Shakespeare in 2016. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I have a hard time seeing a future where anything gets better. Do you know why? Because everything is terrible and only getting worse. We won’t all be dead in twenty years, but we’ll all wish we were. I used to have hopes that once the Internet got completely unbearable some of the smart people would peel off and start something new, but with each passing day it seems ever less likely. (If anyone peels off to start something new it’s going to be teens, and we know what idiots they are.) No, the Internet is going to keep getting worse and there will be no chance for escape. It’s a massive torrent of sewage blasted at you at all hours and you pay handsomely for the privilege of having a hand-held cannon you carry with you at all times to spray more shit-sludge at yourself whenever you’re bored or anxious. Some of you sleep with it right next to your head in case you wake in the middle of the night and need to deliver another turgid shot to your wide-open mouth.

-From a short post by The Awl’s Alex Balk offering advice to young people.

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Glamorous Crossing: How Pan Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s

Meredith Hindley | Longreads | February 2015 | 18 minutes (4,383 words)

 

In August 1936, Americans retreated from the summer heat into movie theaters to watch China Clipper, the newest action-adventure from Warner Brothers. The film starred Pat O’Brien as an airline executive obsessed with opening the first airplane route across the Pacific Ocean. An up-and-coming Humphrey Bogart played a grizzled pilot full of common sense and derring-do.

The real star of the film, however, was the China Clipper, a gleaming four-engine silver Martin M-130. As the Clipper makes its maiden flight in the film, the flying boat cuts a white wake into the waters off San Francisco before soaring in the air and passing over a half-constructed Golden Gate Bridge. As it crosses the Pacific, cutting through the clouds and battling a typhoon, a team of radiomen and navigators follow its course on the ground, relaying updated weather information. The plane arrives in Macao to a harbor packed with cheering spectators and beaming government officials. Read more…

Jenny Holzer on the Difficulties of Being a Successful Female Artist

Photo of Jenny Holzer's "Truisms": Nadja Robot, Flickr

I would describe [my career] as a slow incline with various dips rather than a steep trajectory, but I was relatively young when I did a show at DIA, then the Guggenheim, and represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. During that time, I also had a baby. Those three shows all took place within a few years, and that was an insane time. I worked on DIA when I was pregnant, had a young child for the Guggenheim, and my daughter celebrated her second birthday at the Venice Biennale. I don’t recommend that. I see why guys don’t do it. Although it was a great period for learning-realising, art is hard (and it should be). The rest of my life was desperately difficult at moments.

It’s tough on relationships when you’re obsessed by art, and to be honest, I think it’s harder for women than for men. Successful male artists appear to attract adoring people while successful female artists tend to make partners and acquaintances angry, and babies (properly) confused. What is considered a good thing in a man is potentially troublesome in a woman but I was determined not to crumble, tempting as it was. It’s almost impossible to balance one’s personal relationships and mothering with the art imperative. I still apologise to my daughter with some regularity.

Conceptual artist Jenny Holzer talking about her creative origins in the March 2010 issue of Dazed.

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How a Great American Theatrical Family Produced the 19th Century’s Most Notorious Assassin

John Wilkes Booth, Edwin Booth and Junius Booth, Jr. (from left to right) in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1864. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Nora Titone | My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy | The Free Press | October 2010 | 41 minutes (11,244 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book My Thoughts Be Bloody, by Nora Titone, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky, who writes: 

“This is the story of the celebrated Booth family in the final year before John Wilkes made a mad leap into historical memory that outdid in magnitude every accomplishment of his father and brothers. When the curtain rises on this chapter of Nora Titone’s book, both Edwin and John Wilkes have already staged performances for President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater; by the time it comes down, one of them will be readying to assassinate him there.” 

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Robert Towne on Finding the Inspiration for ‘Chinatown’ at the Library

It was in Eugene, Oregon, in April of 1971 that I ran across a public library copy of Carey McWilliams’ “Southern California Country: An Island on the Land”-and with it the crime that formed the basis for “Chinatown.”

It wasn’t the compendium of facts in the chapter “Water! Water! Water!” or indeed in the entire book. It was that Carey McWilliams wrote about Southern California with sensibilities my eye, ear, and nose recognized. Along with Chandler he made me feel that he’d not only walked down the same streets and into the same arroyo-he smelled the eucalyptus, heard the humming of high tension wires, saw the same bleeding Madras landscapes-and so a sense of deja vu was underlined by a sense of jamais vu: No writers had ever spoken as strongly to me about my home.

The rapacious effects of a housing development in Deep Canyon nearby, and a photo essay called “Raymond Chandler’s L.A.” in the old West magazine provided, I think, the actual catalyst for the screenplay. The photos in West-a Plymouth convertible under an old streetlight in the rain outside Bullocks’s Wilshire, for example-reminded me there was still time to preserve much of the city’s past on film, just as McWilliams had shown me that it was my past as well.

—Robert Towne, writing for the Los Angeles Times (circa May 1994) about Chinatown, LA literature, and finding remnants of an older version of the city—in junk stores, garage sales, the warm dry itch of the Santa Ana wind, winding streets at dusk, and of course the work of McWilliams and Raymond Chandler. Towne wrote the screenplay for the 1974 film, which was directed by Roman Polanski.

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The Work of Inspiration: Five Pieces about Poetry

How do you write? My best friend might look at her old poems and draw from those. My former newspaper advisor tweeted at me: “Nulla dies sine linea,” or “Never a day without a line.”

“Write something every day,” my English teacher wrote, in blue marker on paper in the shape of a pencil. The best artists of any kind–poet, painter, performer–will inspire awe, not envy. They will make you want to make things of your own. When I’m feeling stuck, I’ll read about poets who inspire me/who are new to me, and today, I’ll share a few with you.

1. “Open Letter: A Dialogue on Race and Poetry.” (Claudia Rankine, Poets.org, 2011)

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric has garnered lots and lots of (well-deserved) praise. Here, several years earlier, she analyzes a poem by having a conversation with Tony Hoagland and through Hoagland’s hostile reaction to (well-deserved accusations) of racism: “I begin to understand myself as rendered hyper-visible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that I am present. My alertness, my openness, my desire to engage my colleague’s poem, my colleague’s words, actually demands my presence, my looking back at him.” Read more…