The Longreads Blog

Why So Many Bottled and Canned Coffee Drinks Taste So Bad

It took Blue Bottle a year and a half to get to the point where they could regularly produce iced coffee at this scale. The seed of the idea was a can of cold cappuccino that James Freeman had on a plane to New York in late 2011. “I got this canned cappucino for, like, six dollars or something. And I opened it and I was like, ‘This is so horrible. This is so horrible,’” he said. He started trying every ready-to-drink cold coffee on the market. “The range of tastes is somewhere between terrible and horrible.” (He makes two exceptions to this general rule: products from Portland’s Stumptown and Oakland’s Black Medicine.)

He tried to figure out how these beverages had gone so bad. “You think about the psychology. Nobody is like, OK, let’s have a meeting and let’s invest millions of dollars because we want to develop this horrible product. Nobody does that,” he said. “It’s always with the best intentions.”

So what was going on? Freeman found a source who had worked with big beverage companies, who could explain the problems. First, making a shelf-stable product is hard, and it is hard in ways that are particularly bad for coffees.

“It was sort of a spooky story around a campfire, like, ‘Gather around kids, I’m gonna tell you how a frappuccino is made. No, no! That’s too scary!” Freeman said. He learned about a machine called a retort, a supercharged, industrial-scale pressure cooker, into which bottled coffee is inserted, pressurized, and heated to 240 degrees.

“Basically what survives that…” Freeman’s voice trails off. “It’s the same way that canned chili is made, you know?”

— In the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal profiles James Freeman, the CEO of Blue Bottle, an Oakland and Brooklyn-based specialty coffee roaster that is trying to mass-produce coffee drinks that even coffee snobs would buy. Writes Madrigal after sipping a Blue Bottle iced coffee drink from a carton: “This coffee was the real deal.”

Read the story

Photo: Voxfx

How Joe Cocker’s Version of ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ Ended Up as the Theme Song for ‘The Wonder Years’

Dan Lauria (Jack Arnold): I’ve heard it a couple times now that The Beatles had never allowed any of their music to be used on television. They did not own the rights at that time. It wasn’t Michael Jackson; I think it was Apple Records who owned it when we did The Wonder Years. But the story I got was that they showed Paul McCartney the pilot with them singing their version of it, and Paul McCartney made a call to Apple Records and said, “If you’re ever going to let The Beatles be used on television, this is the show,” and Apple Records said, “Ya know what, we’ll let them use the song, but we’re not going to let them use the version of you singing it.” So they got Joe Cocker to sing it. Now, I don’t know if Paul McCartney recommended Joe Cocker, but supposedly, and I’ve heard this a couple times, that he [McCartney] was the one that made the call after seeing the pilot before it was put on the air. I’ve always wanted to meet him to find out if that was true and to thank him.

Paste Magazine has an oral history of The Wonder Years with some of the actors from the show. The Wonder Years is finally being released on DVD this fall, after years of delay due to music rights issues. (Cocker originally performed “With a Little Help From My Friends” at Woodstock in 1969, and that version ended up being used for the show.)

Read the story

What It Was Like to Hear Nina Simone Live

Nina Simone’s explosiveness was well known. In concert, she was quick to call out anyone she noticed talking, to stop and glare or hurl a few insults or even leave the stage. Yet her performances, richly improvised, were also confidingly intimate—she needed the connection with her audience—and often riveting. Even in her best years, Simone never put many records on the charts, but people flocked to her shows. In 1966, the critic for the Philadelphia Tribune, an African-American newspaper, explained that to hear Simone sing “is to be brought into abrasive contact with the black heart and to feel the power and beauty which for centuries have beat there.” She was proclaimed the voice of the movement not by Martin Luther King but by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose Black Power philosophy answered to her own experience and inclinations. As the sixties progressed, the feelings she displayed—pain, lacerating anger, the desire to burn down whole cities in revenge—made her seem at times emotionally disturbed and at other times simply the most honest black woman in America.

Claudia Roth Pierpont, in The New Yorker, on the life and career of Nina Simone.

Read the story

Photo: scarlatti2004_images, Flickr

How Many People Does It Take To Power Times Square?

Times Square is one big, busy machine. Powered by American ingenuity and more than a few megawatts of electricity, these six square blocks stay bright 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ve seen Times Square in movies and on TV a million times. A lot of you have probably seen it in real life, teeming with chaos and glowing with capitalism. But how exactly does all that work? The shops and restaurants are one thing, but what exactly makes Times Square such a functional, perpetual spectacle?

That’s a complicated question. Obviously there are the workers themselves. Times Square supports some 385,000 jobs, a little over half of which are in that bright sliver of Midtown, while the other half are strewn across the country supporting Times Square operations from designing the content on the signs to keeping the power plants that power them on line. All together, they help generate about 11 percent of New York City’s economic output, or about $110 billion annually, according to the latest figures. These are the men and women who man the ticket booths, who sell the T-shirts, who clean the hotel rooms, and who keep everyone safe. And since about 350,000 pedestrians pass through Times Square on an average day—that number jumps to 460,000 on the busiest days—that’s no small task.

Adam Clark Estes, writing in Gizmodo about how Times Square—”New York City’s biggest gadget”—operates.

Read the story

More stories from Gizmodo

Photo: Chalky Lives, Flickr

The Novel That Was a Key to Solving a Polish Murder Mystery

Bala had since moved abroad, and could not be easily reached, but as Wroblewski checked into his background he discovered that he had recently published a novel called “Amok.” Wroblewski obtained a copy, which had on the cover a surreal image of a goat—an ancient symbol of the Devil. Like the works of the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, the book is sadistic, pornographic, and creepy. The main character, who narrates the story, is a bored Polish intellectual who, when not musing about philosophy, is drinking and having sex with women.

Wroblewski, who read mostly history books, was shocked by the novel’s contents, which were not only decadent but vehemently anti-Church. He made note of the fact that the narrator murders a female lover for no reason (“What had come over me? What the hell did I do?”) and conceals the act so well that he is never caught. Wroblewski was struck, in particular, by the killer’s method: “I tightened the noose around her neck.” Wroblewski then noticed something else: the killer’s name is Chris, the English version of the author’s first name. It was also the name that Krystian Bala had posted on the Internet auction site. Wroblewski began to read the book more closely—a hardened cop turned literary detective.

— This recently unlocked New Yorker story comes recommended by Eva Holland, a writer based in Whitehorse, Yukon who writes:

David Grann’s “True Crime,” is a strange story of a Polish detective who becomes fixated on a disturbing, provocative, postmodern novel that may be the key to a brutal unsolved murder. The story is fascinating and layered, and I’m guessing I’m not the only ex-liberal arts student who will find aspects of the main suspect’s character uncomfortably familiar.

Read the story

* * *

Photo: Via YouTube

Call It Rape

Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words)

The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.
Subscribe to The Normal School

* * *

 

Still life with man and gun

Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high school dorm. It’s near midnight on a Saturday in early autumn, the leaves not yet fallen, the darkness thick. A man steps out of the woods. He is wearing a black ski mask, a hooded jacket, leather gloves. He has a gun. He tells the girls to follow him, that if they make a noise or run he’ll shoot. He makes them lie face down on the ground. He rapes first one and then the others. He walks away. Read more…

The Magnolia Bakery Bouncer Who Hated Your Guts

“Sometimes people act like children,” my boss told me the first day she designated me the cupcake bouncer. “So you have to treat them like children.” That was the motto of Magnolia when I worked there. Nobody cared about their job; I was one of the four people I knew who worked there and had moved to New York to write. Two co-workers were dancers, and one was a girl from Greenwich who was too frightened to ever go into Brooklyn to drink with us. We hated the customers equally and felt nothing but white-hot rage every time one of them said, “Aren’t you getting so fat working here? I would eat everything!”

We hated the ones who waited in line, and when it was time to close, complained if they didn’t make it in—too bad for them, there was no sympathy. I don’t know what it’s like to work at Magnolia now, but back when it had a single owner whom we hardly ever saw, long before she sold it to a buyer that has been working with franchisees all over the world to open up Magnolias, if you bought a cupcake from Magnolia, there is a high probability that the person behind the counter hated your guts.

Jason Diamond, writing in The Billfold about his former job as a Magnolia Bakery cupcake bouncer.

Read the story

Photo: Shimelle Laine

What Does ‘Shareholder Value’ Really Mean?

James Post and others argue that a well-run company can—and should—be managed in a way that benefits not just the investors who own its stock, but a wide range of constituents. As opposed to “shareholders,” they call these people “stakeholders”: a group that includes employees, customers, suppliers, and creditors, as well as the broader community in which the company operates, and even the country that it calls home. According to that view, Market Basket’s employees and customers are essential to the firm’s success and, thus, rightful beneficiaries of its prosperity.

Importantly, it’s not just antimarket leftists who are making this point: It’s pro-business thinkers who want to see a more competitive future for American corporations. Critics like Post argue that the singleminded emphasis on profits and shareholder value—which took hold in the corporate world during the 1980s—has actually hurt corporations in a number of ways, giving their leaders the wrong kinds of incentives, gutting their future in pursuit of short-term profits, and often draining them of their real value and putting them at odds with their communities.

Leon Neyfakh, in the Boston Globe, on the case against “shareholder value” as the lone measure of business success.

Read the story

Photo: walmartcorporate, Flickr

Roger Angell on Baseball, the Game of the Summer

Baseball has one saving grace that distinguishes it—for me, at any rate—from every other sport. Because of its pace, and thus the perfectly observed balance, both physical and psychological, between opposing forces, its clean lines can be restored in retrospect. This inner game—baseball in the mind—has no season, but it is best played in the winter, without the distraction of other baseball news. At first, it is a game of recollections, recapturings, and visions. Figures and occasions return, enormous sounds rise and swell, and the interior stadium fills with light and yields up the sight of a young ballplayer—some hero perfectly memorized—just completing his own unique swing and now racing toward first. See the way he runs? Yes, that’s him! Unmistakable, he leans in, still following the distant flight of the ball with his eyes, and takes his big turn at the base. Yet this is only the beginning, for baseball in the mind is not a mere returning. In time, this easy summoning up of restored players, winning hits, and famous rallies gives way to reconsiderations and reflections about the sport itself. By thinking about baseball like this—by playing it over, keeping it warm in a cold season—we begin to make discoveries. With luck, we may even penetrate some of its mysteries.

Newly-inducted member of the Baseball Hall of Fame Roger Angell, in a Longform excerpt of his book The Summer Game.

Read the story

Photo: gingerbydesign

Why Do So Many People Pretend to Be Native American?

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Russell Cobb | This Land Press | August 2014 | 16 minutes (3,976 words)

This Land PressFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a brand new essay from Oklahoma’s This Land Press, just published in their August 2014 issue. This Land has been featured on Longreads often in the past—you can support them here.
Subscribe to This Land

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

* * *

Read more…