The Longreads Blog

Who’s Resurrecting the Vinyl Market? Millennials and Their Parents

So who’s buying? Anecdotally, it’s a broad range. On a recent visit to Columbus shop Lost Weekend Records, owner Kyle Siegrist had just helped three customers who were purchasing vinyl for themselves and also for their dads for Father’s Day. The cycle seems to have gone something like this: Twenty years ago, diehard vinyl fans were still buying LPs and saying, “The kids don’t get it.” Then, about five years ago, the younger generation started buying vinyl, and their parents were flummoxed. Now, millennials and boomers are all together in the same stores buying LPs.

Marc Weinstein, the 57-year-old co-owner of California’s Amoeba Music stores, has seen many of his friends dust off their old turntables as vinyl sales at Amoeba have doubled over the last half decade. Simultaneously, young buyers are purchasing new releases alongside a handful of classics. (“College kids still listen to Bob Marley and Pink Floyd, and they probably will forever,” Secretly’s Blandford says.) Demographics can trend even younger than that: Teens are buying vinyl, too. “I coach a high school wrestling team,” says Dayton-based Misra Records manager Leo DeLuca, “and freshmen are buying record players and asking if we press vinyl.”

— Joel Oliphant in Pitchfork reporting on the dramatic increase in vinyl sales in the last few years, which has been driven by limited edition releases by artists like Jack White and Sharon Van Etten. Vinyl producers have had a difficult time keeping up with demand.

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Photo: Matthias Rhomberg

‘She’s Good, With a Capital G’: A Roxane Gay Reading List

A reading list could never do author Roxane Gay justice. For one thing, she’s incredibly prolific. She writes, edits, teaches and tweets. Within the past few months, she’s garnered acclaim for her intense novel, An Untamed State, and her collection of essays, Bad FeministThese are just the facts.

I don’t remember discovering Gay’s work. I remember requesting to follow her on Twitter and the elation I felt after receiving her approval. I remember reading her stark personal essays for The Rumpus. I remember reading one my favorite stories of hers out loud to an ex while he listened obligingly. He didn’t love it, but I did. I had never read anything like it in my life. I was obsessed. Her commentary on current events, her appreciation of pop culture, her honesty and nuance—she’s Good, with a capital G.

If you haven’t had the privilege of reading Gay before, let this be a primer. She has written dozens and dozens of essays and short stories, many of which she lists on her website. I’ve included two wonderful recent interviews, a smattering of short stories and more. Longreads recently featured an excerpt from Gay’s novel, An Untamed State. If that doesn’t hook you, nothing will.

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Calvin Trillin on Eating Pimientos de Padrón

We all used the same method for eating peppers. We picked them up by the stem, bit off the pepper, and, encouraged by Agustin, threw the stem into the garden—a mulch operation, in a manner of speaking. But just about everybody on the patio had a different method of eating sardines, plus a persuasive rap about why it was the best method available. Everyone began by peeling off the skin, in quick strokes meant to avoid burnt fingers, and everyone put the sardine on a piece of coarse white bread. Then came the division in tactics: Should you just put the sardine on the bread and eat around the bone, flipping the bread over halfway through the sardine to allow the dark sardine residue to soak into both sides equally? Should you remove the bone, put the sardine on the bread in lumps, and add roasted peppers on top? Or how about pimientos de Padrón on top instead of roasted peppers? Eager to be a good guest, I tried every method at least once. Then I said quietly to Alice that a family that has serious discussions about how best to consume sardines is my sort of family.

Calvin Trillin in a 2005 Gourmet article on his favorite Spanish delicacy.

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Photo: Jessica Spengler

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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The Remnants of Maycomb: What Happened to Harper Lee’s Hometown

Maybe it wasn’t just Nelle’s insecurity that held her back from becoming “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” but also the dismaying decline of the “small-town middle-class” idyll she’d staked her career on documenting. She had, after all, written a historical novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed not in Monroeville but on an L.A. lot. There were — still are — remnants of Depression-era Monroeville, not least the old Federal-style courthouse. But even as the film came out, a drab new courthouse was being built next door. Downtown’s only movie theater burned down not long after Mockingbird had its first run, and was never rebuilt. In 1997, the city was dubbed “The Literary Capital of Alabama,” prompting Lee, who wasn’t consulted on the nickname, to remark, “The literary capital of Alabama doesn’t read.”

Harper Lee’s assisted-living apartment is on Highway Bypass 21, just a couple of blocks from the town’s real commercial center, a series of malls. There’s a place called Radley’s Fountain Grill down that way, and an old stone wall that once separated Lee’s childhood home from Capote’s — both long gone, replaced by a takeout shack called Mel’s Dairy Dream. Lee prefers the more generic places by the lingerie factory outlet (a remnant of the old Vanity Fair plant). Before her stroke, she could be found at Hardee’s, or better yet at McDonald’s, gulping down coffee during long chats with friends. (There were higher-end expeditions to the local golf club and to casinos on the Gulf coast.) When she watched an advance screening of the biopic Capote at a neighbor’s house — the Lees had no television — she opted for Burger King.

Boris Kachka for Vulturewriting about Harper Lee and her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

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Photo of the Monroe County Heritage Museum

The Painful Business of Running a Franchise

It’s not just the workers who get a lousy deal. Over the years, Bob Baber, the Quiznos franchisee, became increasingly frustrated by the terms of his contract. One of the issues that galled him the most was that Quiznos was allowed to (and did) place additional sub shops in his franchise area, creating what he felt was direct competition that cut into his profits. Baber formed the Quiznos Subs Franchise Association, a sort of franchisees’ union, through which he hoped to leverage better terms. A month later, the Denver-based company terminated Baber’s franchise, claiming his restaurants were not being maintained properly, and other contractual defaults. When a franchise agreement is terminated, all investment by the franchisee—including acquisition cost, equipment, and fees—is effectively flushed away. Baber and Quiznos became enmeshed in a protracted legal struggle, with Baber refinancing his house and spending nearly $100,000. (A public relations spokeswoman representing Quiznos told us it is the company’s position to not comment on any litigation past or present.)

Despite such stories, people still buy into the franchise dream.

Timothy Noah, in Pacific Standard, on the increasingly difficult economics of running your own franchise.

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Photo: thomashawk, Flickr

The Wrong Reason to Write a Book

I kept thinking of what the book was about: What it would say? What was its point? Why did it exist? People would ask me and I would say that it was about choices. Choices and their consequence. They would look at me like they didn’t understand.

The book would have been about power—power in institutions, of social structures. Of wars and who wielded them. Of personal agency and people with none. I thought that I could impose a structure of order upon chaotic personal histories and reckon things right. The book would have been about memory. How memory is porous, fallible, tensile, illusory. It would have been a book of fiction even if it were, in the reportorial sense, true.

I thought that the book might be about becoming, perhaps mine. I thought that if I looked hard enough into the past that something would be revealed. I thought it might have been a cleansing fire. But it wasn’t; it was a yoke. I had been seduced by the idea of being a writer, a writer of books. I imagined the book might advance my career, legitimize my tinkering. That isn’t a reason to write a book.

At the Awl, Elmo Keep talks about the book about her father she considered putting together, but decided not to write.

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Photo: Nathan O’Nions

‘The Artist’s Memory Is a Dangerous, Necessary Thing’

Memory is your greatest ally and your primary source material, because memory is your body as it was in the world and the world as it was and will be; memory is the people you have loved or wanted to love in the world, and what are we if not bodies filled with reminiscences about all those ghosts in the sunlight?

The artist’s memory is a dangerous, necessary thing. Never disavow what you see and remember—it’s your brilliant stock-in-trade: remembering, and making something out of it. Artists remember the world as it is, first, because you have to know what it is you’re reinventing; that’s a rule, perhaps the only one: being cognizant of your source material.

-Hilton Als, in a commencement speech for Columbia University’s School of the Arts, republished at the New York Review of Books.

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Photo: The New School, YouTube

The Hidden Truth About the Cold War Roomba

Over at Paleofuture, Matt Novak looks back at the 1959 Cold War cultural exhibitions hosted by both the United States and the Soviet Union. For the United States, the Moscow exhibition was a chance to show off the newest products and technology from companies like IBM, Sears and Kodak—and perhaps the most important innovation of all when it came to highlighting America’s high-tech future:

Today the autonomous robot vacuum cleaner is passé. Or at the very least, no longer representative of something terribly futuristic. iRobot, the Boston-based company that makes the Roomba, has been churning those things out for over a decade. But in 1959, there was nothing more techno-utopian. The Exhibition had one, thanks to RCA/Whirlpool and a little bit of trickery.

The Exhibition had four demonstration kitchens, but the RCA/Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen was by far the most futuristic. It promised super-fast meal preparation, push-button everything, and automatic robot cleaners. There were even large TV monitors for monitoring different parts of the home, which reportedly impressed Khrushchev. But not everything worked exactly as the exhibitors claimed.

“They had a two-way mirror with a person sitting behind it that could see the room,” Joe Maxwell told me over the phone in his light southern drawl. “And they radio-controlled the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher.”

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Photo: Library of Congress, via Shorpy

How to Make Friends and Win Over Bodega Owners

Grabbing the attention of consumers was a big part of the game. Vita Coco bought a van, painted it ocean blue and loaded it with free samples and with women who would jump out and Hula-Hoop on the streets. Zico hired college students to roll coolers around the city.

Bodega owners were often the toughest audience. To make inroads faster, Vita Coco hired a ringer, a former Vitaminwater salesman named Michael Goldstein, identified on his business card and known to almost everyone as Goldy. One name. Like Prince.

“You’ve got to be a little bit of a psychopath,” says Goldy of life as a beverage salesman in Manhattan. “You’ve got to love pain, love being yelled at.”

He and his team memorized phrases in Spanish, Arabic, Korean and Hebrew and quickly learned to tailor their pitches to different ethnicities. Owners from the Middle East wanted to haggle. Dominicans wanted to know why they needed anything other than Goya. When all else failed, $20 was slapped on the counter, though that didn’t always work.

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Photo: Benben, Flickr