The Longreads Blog

Making Periods Green To Topple Tampax

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With 4.5 billion boxes of Tampax sold worldwide last year, the brand is so well known, it’s almost a synonym for tampons. But recently some up and comers have been trying to edge the giant out of the lucrative period market. As  Sophie Elmhirst writes for The Guardian “the common strategy is to offer more ethical and ecological options to replace Tampax’s simple single-use plastic applicators and a marketing strategy that often emphasizes discretion, as though a period should be something to hide.”

“You’ll love the Quiet Easy Reseal Wrapper,” goes the current marketing blurb for Tampax Radiant. As a narrative, it seems increasingly at odds with the times. Why should we hide tampons up our sleeves on the way to the bathroom, or worry that someone might hear us unwrap one once we’re there? (In a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, Phoebe Waller Bridge riffed on all the possible items – a copy of Mein Kampf, a neatly folded Confederate flag, a dog shit – within which you could more acceptably conceal a tampon and its associated deep shame.) 

Tampax has had to play catch-up. In such moments, multinationals can resemble the I’m-your-mate teacher with a tone-deaf enthusiasm for trends to which they are fatally late. (Women’s empowerment and period pride are in, you say? We’ll see you there, just after we’ve intensely focus-grouped the issue and come up with a hashtag.) 

As period startups multiply, so do the number of options, from organic cotton tampons, to absorbent pants, to a reusable applicator, to a “pain-relieving, CBD-infused, biodegradable cotton tampon.” Although the truth is a Swiss manufacturing firm called Ruggli has a near-monopoly on tampon-making machines, so almost every new tampon, is in fact, a  Ruggli tampon. 

The harsh reality remains that most startups will fail, and in order to have a chance against the global force that is Tampax, these new companies will have to diversify their products away from just the mighty tampon.

Many of the new brands look to the future of their customers, too, and the fact that they will not always have periods. The menopause approaches, another area of women’s health previously shrink-wrapped in shame but now becoming commercially ripe. Following the menstrual example, the menopause is now undergoing its own cultural rebranding. Multiple books have been written (The Good Menopause Guide, Confessions of a Menopausal Woman, Making Friends With the Menopause, and so on); Mariella Frostrup made a BBC documentary; Gwyneth Paltrow made a Goop video. “I don’t think we have in our society a great example of an aspirational menopausal woman,” said Paltrow, presumably nominating herself, the high priestess of expensive aspiration, for the job.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Mary Ann Mobley of Mississippi is crowned Miss America 1959 in Atlantic City. (Slim Aarons / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lyz Lenz, Molly Young, Hannah Dreier, Maddie Stone, and Richard Cooke.

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1. The End of Miss America

Lyz Lenz | Jezebel | February 20, 2020 | 15 minutes (3,814 words)

If only the actual Miss America were as gorgeous and erudite as this essay about the decrepitude of a stagnant pageant in a changing world.

2. Garbage Language: Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?

Molly Young | New York magazine | February 20, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,188 words)

Let’s drop a pin in this and take it off-line so we can futureproof the intiative with these key learnings and co-create innovative win-wins that require an omni-channel push but no critical ask. Actually, let’s not.

3. Trust and Consequences

Hannah Dreier | The Washington Post | February 20, 2020 | 22 minutes (5,600 words)

The government required him to see a therapist. He thought his words would be confidential. Now, the traumatized migrant may be deported.

4. The High-Stakes Fight Over Bolivia’s Lithium

Maddie Stone | Protocol | February 16, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,296 words)

“Bolivia has the largest known resources of lithium. Can it build an industry to supply the world’s growing demand?”

5. Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet

Richard Cooke | Wired | February 17, 2020 | 17 minutes (4,445 words)

What happens when you give thousands of pedants a place online to let loose the full force of their passions? Something flawed, but beautiful.

Closing the Loop on Diabetes

Mali Maeder / Pexels

Writing for The Walrus, lifelong diabetic Jonathan Garfinkel explores a world where the hackers, not the scientists, are forging ahead with advances in diabetes management.

Monitoring Type One diabetes is a full-time job — a constant juggling act of how much insulin to take when blood glucose goes too high, and how much sugar to consume when it goes too low. A misjudgment means feeling terrible, slipping into a coma, or even dying. Essentially, a diabetic has to manually do the job normally performed by a pancreas — but some ingenious coding has created a shortcut on the road to creating an “artificial pancreas.”

“Artificial pancreas” isn’t a term I’d heard before. I ask Riddell to explain. “So, you have your insulin pump and your continuous glucose monitor,” he says. “Great technology. But these devices don’t talk to each other. You’re the one who’s still making the decisions. You have to interpret the numbers, analyze the trends, predict what you’ll be doing later in the day, and figure out how much insulin to take. What if a computer could do that for you?”

…a few years ago, a group of amateur coders, most of them type one themselves, were independently fiddling around with insulin pumps and CGM transmitters on their off hours, looking for ways to improve the devices. They eventually met, pooled their discoveries, and after a few more years of tinkering, created an iPhone program called Loop. It’s not available in the App Store or through any official channels—no doctors will prescribe it. Users need to find the instructions online and build the Loop app themselves. This bit of free code, Farnsworth tells me, paired with a hacked-together insulin pump and CGM, is an artificial pancreas.

“Is this legal?” I ask, imagining some dark alley where hooded hackers hand out instructions and tiny radios to desperate diabetics.

“Of course,” Farnsworth says, laughing. “It’s open-source software. It’s also a Facebook group. You can find everything you need online.”

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Sight and Insight

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Liane Kupferberg Carter | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (4,092 words)

I was born with strabismus, an imbalance in the muscles that position the eyes. Strabismus: from the Greek strabismós, meaning “to squint.” People sometimes call it cross-eyed, wall-eyed, or lazy-eyed.

I was still a toddler when my mother started taking me to doctors. They prescribed drops, eye exercises, and, eventually, glasses when I was 4. Mom chose blue and white striped cat eye frames for me. “These are adorable,” she said. If she said they were pretty, I assumed they must be. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wear them. But my mother wore glasses too, and I wanted to please her.

When the glasses didn’t help enough, the doctor instructed her to put a patch over one lens to force my weaker right eye to work better. That afternoon I went down the street to play with the neighborhood kids. There was a new girl with them. She asked, “Why are you wearing that patch?”

“I’m a pirate,” I said.

“That’s stupid,” she replied. “Girls can’t be pirates. You look ugly.”

I pushed her. She tumbled back onto the lawn and started to wail. A door flew open, and an enormous dog bounded at me, nipping and snapping. Frantic, I tried to get away, but a woman who must have been the girl’s mother grabbed me, her nails digging into my shoulder. She wrenched my arm behind my back and hissed in my ear, “Who’s your mother? You’re a very bad little girl.”

Sobbing and ashamed, I stumbled down the sidewalk, desperate for my mom. By the time I burst through the back door I was panting. Mom looked angry. The scary lady must have telephoned. “You know better than that,” Mom scolded. “I’m disappointed in your behavior.”

I was awash in incoherent misery. Why wasn’t she taking my side?

But I knew. It was because I was bad. An ugly, bad girl.
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When It’s Time to Tell

Roman Krompolc (CTK via AP Images

For The Rumpus, writer and book publisher Laura Stanfill movingly details the traumatic story of domestic abuse and male violence that she kept to herself for 25 years. A week-long writing retreat helped her to see that silence no longer protected her, talking openly did. At the retreat, she was surrounded by story, so she decided it was time, as she put it, to “add my voice to the chorus of women who have said, I survived.” The trouble started in college, when her boyfriend bought a pistol and quickly revealed who he really was.

Instead of confiding in a friend or alerting the college administration that my boyfriend shot at me, I moved into his dorm room. He wanted me where he could keep an eye on me. It seemed safest to follow his commands. To say, If that’s what you want. I covered the lodged bullet with putty, filling in the hole in the wood, wanting to hide the evidence. I stepped over that mismatched blotch on the way to and from class.

Through the rest of my college years, I hid from friends and classmates, inventing excuses when they extended invitations. I spent hours on the bathroom floor, sick to my stomach at the thought of appearing in public with my boyfriend. He might yell or humiliate or hurt me. He often became more dangerous if a stranger interfered. I wrote false, cheer-filled notes to old friends on other campuses. I lost weight, became bones and savage bile. The doctors couldn’t figure it out; I didn’t give them any context. My parents worried about me and paid the medical bills and never suspected the cause. Or, if they did, they didn’t confront me about him.

When I turned twenty-one, my boyfriend proposed at a fancy restaurant and called me stupid for not noticing the gold ring shining at the bottom of the champagne glass. He had gone to all this effort.

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House of the Century

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Daisy Alioto | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (3,903 words)

“A house is the physical manifestation of the ego”

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, “My Very Own Dream House”

I. Security

I have always harbored suspicions about fire escape windows. When my mother was living in Boston in the 80s, her TV set sat across from the window that opened onto her fire escape. One night she woke up to a hairy leg entering the window and screamed loudly enough to wake her neighbors and scare away the television thief. An acquaintance who lives in Park Slope listened to an intruder pop the glass out of her fire escape window and watched their iPhone light sweep closer to the bedroom as she silently tried to shake her boyfriend awake. After an eternity, he sprung up and chased the intruder out with a hockey stick.

My boyfriend does not harbor suspicions about fire escape windows, so when he moved to a one bedroom apartment, security considerations became my own research project. The acquaintance in Park Slope sent a link to a $20 window alarm on Amazon. I watched a short video about the installation process and began to read the reviews. The top review was 5/5 stars, written by Mary in Florida and it broke my heart more than any thief ever could.

She writes that she debated buying a door alarm but never did, despite the fact that the rest of the house was baby proofed for two children under two years old. One day, after feeding a bird outside, the younger one slipped back out without her noticing — probably to chase the bird, she says. In a few minutes she sensed the lack of noise in the house, the too quietness. She found him in the pond across the street and he died the next day.

The review continues. “I am a good mom,” she writes, listing the other ways she baby-proofed the home. “I am a good mom.” I’ve forgotten why I’ve come to Amazon. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, a manufacturer’s enthusiastic review of their own product gone too far but no… with a little Googling, I find Mary and the local reporting on the tragedy.

I want to reach through my screen and hold Mary. To tell her yes, you are a good mom. It’s not your fault that doors open and babies look at birds. Of course you are a good mother, there’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.

According to Robert Lee’s A Treatise On Hysteria (1871), Greek physician Aretaeus was one of the first thinkers to link hysteria to the female body. “In the middle of the flanks of a woman lies the womb, a female viscus closely resembling an animal.” The womb wanders the body, leaving a slew of undesirable symptoms in its wake. “On the whole it is like an animal within an animal,” Aretaeus writes.
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Shelved: Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk

Frans Schellekens / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,966 words)

 

On the evening of May 29, 1997, singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley and his roadie Keith Foti picked their way down the steep, weedy bank to Wolf River Harbor in Memphis, Tennessee. Buckley, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and heavy Doc Martens boots, waded into the water singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” After about 15 minutes, a boat passed. Concerned about their boom box getting wet, Foti moved it out of harm’s way. When he turned back around, Buckley was gone with the undertow. His body wouldn’t be found for days. He was 30 years old.

Jeff Buckley had mastered that most singular of instruments: his own voice. Possessing the same incredible range as opera icon Pavarotti, his phrasing could be anguished or exquisite; his breath control was phenomenal. Beyond that, he was the soul of eclecticism: Raised on prog rock, he dabbled in hair metal, gospel, country, and soul. Once, during a live performance, he improvised in the ecstatic style of Qawwali devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — someone Buckley once described as “my Elvis” — over the riff from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

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A Tribute to Lynn Cohen, 1933-2020

Actress Lynn Cohen attends the 2011 Lilly Awards at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. (Bruce Glikas / Getty Images)

Most fans first saw Lynn Cohen 20 years ago in Season 3 of Sex and the City, in an episode called “Attack of the Five Foot Ten Woman.” After rearranging all of Miranda’s mugs, Magda’s first order of business as the new cleaning lady is to advise Miranda to make more pies. Her second is to replace Miranda’s vibrator with a statue of the Virgin Mary

Magda might have been introduced as a loveless scold on paper, but after ten years of playing her on television and in film, Lynn’s performance elevated Magda to an extension of Miranda’s family. Behind the scenes — on sets around the world, and especially at home in New York — Lynn frequently welcomed new friends into an extended family of her own.

I first met Lynn more than a decade ago in Poughkeepsie. I was interning for New York Stage and Film’s 2007 Powerhouse Season, which NYSAF produces every summer to incubate new work in development. I was assisting on a reading Lynn was doing with Sybille Pearson, Leigh Silverman, and Kathleen Chalfant. 

Theater professionals almost always work together on one project and then never again, but you get to know each other fast. Lynn was the queen of that kind of at-will intimacy with new blood. She went straight for the youngest people in the room to get all the gossip, and immediately befriended me and my best friends from college. She called us “my guys.” Lynn would admit the next generation into this posse on a rolling basis. Jennifer Lawrence became one of her guys, too.

Lynn loved her husband Ron fiercely, a devotion she often expressed by teasing him relentlessly. In an interview after their collaboration on Rivka Bekerman-Greenberg’s play Eavesdropping On Dreams in 2012, Lynn describes meeting Ronny 150 years ago, before offering a second opinion on the length of their relationship: “We try to keep it very loose.” 

Actress Lynn Cohen and her husband Ronald Cohen celebrate at a party for the premiere of “The Jimmy Show” on December 12, 2002 at Kanvas Bar & Lounge in New York City. (Myrna Suarez / Getty Images)

Ron and Lynn’s marriage lasted 56 years, which Lynn spent practicing her comedy routine as an incorrigible flirt. “You think you reach a certain age and you never have to worry about wearing a wetsuit,” she quipped on The Couch, winking conspiratorially at CBS New York’s John Elliott. Lynn thought most of her fellow actors were drop-dead gorgeous, and wasted no time saying so. (When her Hunger Games costar Stephanie Leigh Schlund tried to excuse Lynn’s flattery as Lynn just being sweet, Lynn didn’t miss a beat: “I am sweet, yes.”) She was always flirting with someone, and if you were in her crosshairs, it was you. 

Lynn was a commanding presence, a feminine powerhouse with a physical mastery of technique that she refined continuously. Her age contributed to her energy, granting her exclusive access to characters with decades of life experience. She was so youthful and sassy and probing and funny in person, it was sometimes easy to forget that she was also doing next-level work at a breakneck pace well into her 80s. Whether she was playing Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in Spielberg’s Munich or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s mother in Synecdoche, New York, Lynn’s past work steadily earned her offers of future work. IMDB lists half a dozen of her projects that are still in post-production and haven’t been released yet. Right up until the end, she was booking gigs back-to-back-to-back.

Lynn was a born comedian, but her profound range was grounded in critical thinking about the human condition. She would acknowledge humor’s relationship with suffering on a dime. One of our mentors described Lynn as “holding court” whenever she’d join us for lunch, but she’d interrupt her own clowning to stress just how much an education in drama would help us anticipate life’s unforgiving surprises. She’d hug us three at a time, laughing to punctuate her opinions, but she was careful with her advice.

Lynn happened to be an actor’s actor and a director’s actor, but her fluency with language and nuance hinted that she was in it for the writing. She knew more about new work than most emerging playwrights and screenwriters, and dedicated the better part of her life to workshopping writers’ earliest drafts. She loved female-driven stories almost as much as she loved female-driven creative teams, and she devoted her career to honoring women who were determined to survive. “Women always have to fight for everything,” Lynn would say, hoping to encounter the same traits in scripted characters that she practiced for decades herself: “Intelligence, sexuality, strength, ‘til the day you die.”

I thought of Lynn as my role model for how to age, so I don’t fully know how to describe my first reaction to her death — there’s grief, clearly, but there’s no sadness. I only feel lucky. She lived a towering life, full of achievement and love and joie de vivre, and her legacy requires celebration. 

A proper tribute to Lynn wouldn’t be complete without a nod to her impeccable timing. Of course she died on Valentine’s Day. Of course she died on an unforgettable day to lose someone you love.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music

Michael Tullberg / Getty

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | February 2020 | 12 minutes (3,333 words)

 

Every now and then, in one of her music videos or during a heady, live performance, singer Carly Rae Jepsen will close her eyes, raise her hands above her head, and sway her hips. It’s not choreographed, or at least it doesn’t appear to be. Instead of crisp synchronicity, Jepsen opts for fluid, extemporaneous groove. She is singing to us and moving with us — until those fleeting moments between verses or at song’s end, when she seems to have retreated, not out of reach, but rather into a full-bodied state of emotive receptivity. In this brimful pause, she is both steward and beneficiary, theorist and pupil, basking in the superabundant, prismatic feelings her music elicits.

It might not seem especially illuminating to say that Jepsen’s pop repertoire lays bare the complexity of human emotions. All music does this, although with varying degrees of nuance and success, and one could say the same about every other art form, too. But over the course of Jepsen’s 12-year career, her evocation of big tricky feelings has shifted into something of an intentional artistic inquiry. She is fascinated by the vast, labyrinthine topic of human sentiment, so much so that she organized her 2015 album — the aptly titled Emotion — around it, although her exploration is by no means circumscribed to that particular release. From the time she released her first album, the oft-forgotten Tug of War, in 2008, Jepsen’s music has thrummed with idiosyncrasies. She expresses the extraordinary and the tragic within the day-to-day, whether her premise is unrequited love for someone she knew would never be interested in her (“Your Type”), toying with an illicit sexual fling (“This Kiss”), or solicitude about her emotional intensity and its impact on her relationship (“Too Much”). Any event, especially a romantic one, holds the possibility for maximalist sentiment: Jepsen roams these vistas of the heart, shepherding those of us whose thick, cumbersome emotions render us lonely and overwhelmed.

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Postcard from the (Literal) Edge

Getty / Park Row Books

Erin Khar | Longreads | February 2020 | excerpted from Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me, Park Row Books | 9 minutes (2,436 words)

 

Valentine’s Day 2001

Her mother just looks at her for a long minute, then removes a jade pendant from around her neck and hands it to her daughter. “June, since your baby time, I wear this next to my heart. Now you wear next to yours. It will help you know: I see you. I see you.”

—The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

My mom and I both read The Joy Luck Club when I was seventeen and saw the movie together a few years later. The stories reveal the intricate relationships between mothers and daughters. There was one scene that resonated with us both — one of the mothers finally tells her daughter, “I see you.” Through unspoken words, we understood how this reflected our relationship, or more accurately the hope we had for our relationship. Like the mother in the book, my mother had a jade pendant. It had belonged to her mother. But she didn’t give it to me. Now it was in the pawn shop. She didn’t know it was missing.

What my mom did give me for my twenty-first birthday was a white gold Tiffany ID bracelet that was engraved. It read, I see you. She welled up with tears when she gave it to me and hugged me tighter than she had in years. I loved it but could never bring myself to wear it. I knew she couldn’t see me.

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