The Longreads Blog

Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats

Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words)

 

1st

Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training.

Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the coming season. Each year it is another variation on the same theme: “This is Our Year” or “Is This Our Year?” or “Can the Royals Win it All?” or “Our Time” or “How Good are these Royals?” or “How Good are these Royals” or or or. It gets tiresome after growing up hearing it year after year, because the answer has always been the same. The answer is no. It’s not our time. It’s not our year. No, the Royals aren’t going to win it all. These Royals are not very good. No. Read more…

Brian Eno and the Power of Negative Ambition

Though Eno drew and painted at both Ipswich and Winchester, he left school with no plans to become a fine artist. “I thought that art schools should just be places where you thought about creative behavior, whereas they thought an art school was a place where you made painters,” he said later.

“I think negative ambition is a big part of what motivates artists,” Eno told me. “It’s the thing you’re pushing against. When I was a kid, my negative ambition was that I didn’t want to get a job.”

-Sasha Frere-Jones, in The New Yorker, on the musical genius of Brian Eno.

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A History of Scorpion Venom in Medicine

The new issue of Wired has a story about Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can help detect cancer cells in our bodies. Injecting our bodies with scorpion venom may sound somewhat outlandish, but it’s been used in medicine for quite a long time:

Ancient practitioners of medicine were well aware that scorpion venom could heal as well as harm. In imperial China, for example, the cloudy fluid was used to treat ailments ranging from mumps to tetanus. And in certain rural corners of India, whole scorpions were dipped in mustard oil and then rubbed on arthritic joints. Scorpion venom has more recently become an object of fascination for developers of pesticides, who dream of protecting crops using the neuro­toxins that scorpions employ against locusts and beetles.

Today pharmaceutical companies regularly obtain venom for commercial use by milking deathstalkers—that is, jolting the yellow arachnids with electricity, then collecting the droplets that dribble forth from their tails. Courage is an essential trait for the technicians who handle this sort of work, for the deathstalker is among the most dangerous scorpions in the world: In certain instances, L. quinquestriatus venom can cause cardiac arrest.

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David Rakoff on the Downsides of Childhood

I had a beautiful childhood and a lovely childhood. I just didn’t like being a child. I didn’t like the rank injustice of not being listened to. I didn’t like the lack of autonomy. I didn’t like my chubby little hands that couldn’t manipulate the world of objects in the way that I wanted them to. Being a child for me was an exercise in impotent powerlessness. I just wasn’t—and I was never terribly good at that kind of no-holds-barred fun. I mean, you know, I’ve essentially made a career on not being good at no-holds-barred fun.

But, you know, I was just never sort of like, hey, yes, let’s go play. I was always more sort of like, does everybody know where the fire exit is and let’s make sure there’s enough oxygen in this elevator.

-The late David Rakoff, in a 2010 Fresh Air interview.

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Why Tim Howard Doesn't Enjoy Soccer Games

“In goal, you’re taking in all the movement, all the runs,” Howard said. “You see everything. You’re yelling. You’re tense. You’re so wired-in. To tell you the truth, I don’t enjoy the game—I’ve never actually had fun within the course of those ninety minutes.” Because the object is always a shutout—a “clean sheet,” as the British call it—he can never relax. “As long as there’s time on the clock, there’s still danger,” he says. “When the whistle blows, I’m completely exhausted, physically and mentally. I get in the locker room and I sit down and I just exhale. Finally, the danger is over.”

-Tim Howard, U.S. men’s national soccer team goalkeeper, in The New Yorker (2010). Howard had a World Cup record 16 saves in the U.S.’s 2-1 loss to Belgium.

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The Problem With Strong Female Characters in Hollywood Right Now

At the Dissolve, Tasha Robinson discusses why having a Strong Female Character in a film isn’t good enough if her presence is superficial. Robinson cites Valka from How To Train Your Dragon 2 as an example, as well as Strong Female Characters from other recent films:

And Valka’s type—the Strong Female Character With Nothing To Do—is becoming more and more common. The Lego Movie is the year’s other most egregious and frustrating example. It introduces its female lead, Elizabeth Banks’ Wyldstyle, as a beautiful, super-powered, super-smart, ultra-confident heroine who’s appalled by how dumb and hapless protagonist Emmet is. Then the rest of the movie laughs at her and marginalizes her as she turns into a sullen, disapproving nag and a wet blanket. One joke has Emmet tuning her out entirely when she tries to catch him up on her group’s fate-of-the-world struggle; he replaces her words with “Blah blah blah, I’m so pretty.” Her only post-introduction story purpose is to be rescued, repeatedly, and to eventually confer the cool-girl approval that seals Emmet’s transformation from loser to winner. After a terrific story and a powerful ending, the movie undermines its triumph with a tag where WyldStyle actually turns to her current boyfriend for permission to dump him so she can give herself to Emmet as a reward for his success. For the ordinary dude to be triumphant, the Strong Female Character has to entirely disappear into Subservient Trophy Character mode. This is Trinity Syndrome à la The Matrix: the hugely capable woman who never once becomes as independent, significant, and exciting as she is in her introductory scene. (Director Chris McKay sorta-acknowledged the problem in a DailyMail interview presented as “The Lego Movie filmmaker promises more ‘strong females’ in the sequel,” though his actual quotes do nothing of the sort.)

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'Friendship': The Full First Chapter from Emily Gould's New Novel

Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book from WORD Bookstores

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Philip Levine’s Advice for ‘Making It’ as a Writer

When I was about nineteen I showed my poems to one of my teachers at Wayne. He said these were incredible poems, poems that should be published. I said, “Oh really?”—I was thrilled—“How would I go about doing that?” He walked over to his bookshelf and brought back a copy of Harper’s. He wrote down the name of the editor and said, “Send the poems to him. I met him once at a party, he may remember me. It doesn’t matter, the poems are so good. Just send them.” So I sent them. A month later they came back with a little printed note telling me they didn’t suit their present editorial needs. I was just shocked. I took it to the teacher and said, “Why, you assured me.” He said, “I don’t understand it.” He was a very sweet man, but he didn’t know the first thing about publishing. …

Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able.

-Philip Levine, in the Paris Review (1988).

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The Story of H.M.: The Amnesiac Who Profoundly Changed the Way We Think About Memory

Sam Kean | The Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons | 2014 | 12 minutes (3,008 words)

 
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, a new book from science reporter Sam Kean looking at stories about the brain and the history of neuroscience. Here’s Kean:

In our minds, we more or less equate our identities with our memories; our very selves seem the sum total of all we’ve done and felt and seen. That’s why we cling to our memories so hard, even to our detriment sometimes—they seem the only bulwark we have against the erosion of the self. That’s also why disorders that rob us of our memories seem so cruel.

In the excerpt below, I explore one of the most profound cases of amnesia in medical history, H.M., who taught us several important things about how memory works. Perhaps most important, he taught us that different types of memories exist in the brain, and that each type is controlled by different structures. In fact, H.M. so profoundly changed our ideas about memory that it’s hard to remember what things were like before him.

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When Creativity Comes in Pairs—Then Comes Apart

What ultimately brought their work together to a halt was not creative disagreements but business ones. During his power grab, John was sweet-talked by a canny, dubious manager named Allen Klein, with whom he promptly signed. George and Ringo followed—pure primate politics there. But Paul would not.

And so legend has it that the Beatles broke irrevocably apart.

Except that they never really did.

It’s tempting to think that a partnership ends like some scene in an opera, where two people come to dramatic conflict, sing emotionally in each other’s faces, and decide to separate, weeping. But more often a split happens like it does in one of those country songs about a person leaving home and never coming back, in which no one—not the one who left, not the one who was left, not the listener—really knows why.

Joshua Wolf Shenk, in The Atlantic, on the power of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s collaboration, and how it ended.

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