The Longreads Blog

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 Real Life Injuries in 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'

It’s been 40 years since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre hit theaters and shocked moviegoers with its violent scenes. Texas Monthly has resurfaced their story from 2004 by John Bloom about the making of the film, which was made on a budget of $60,000 (about $290K, adjusted for inflation). Here, Bloom describes the injuries the cast members suffered through while making the film, especially by Marilyn Burns, who had the lead role:

Almost every cast member suffered some sort of injury. Neal had his face burned by hot asphalt. Partain had a bruised and cut arm after rolling down a hill in one of the early scenes. For Partain’s dying scene, Hooper and makeup artist Dottie Pearl stood on either side of the camera lens, spitting red Karo syrup into the air, attracting flesh-devouring mosquitoes. Hansen had no peripheral vision while wearing his mask and had a heart-stopping near miss when his boots slipped while he was running and the chain saw flew up in the air and crashed to the ground, inches from his body. But no one was beaten, cut, and bruised more than Burns. By the end of production, her screams were real, as she’d been poked, prodded, bound, dragged through rooms, jerked around, chased through cocklebur underbrush, jabbed with a stick, forced to skid on her knees in take after take, pounded on the head with a rubber hammer, coated with sticky stage blood, and endlessly pursued by Hansen with his chain saw and Neal with his constantly flicking switchblade. “I was afraid to hit her at first,” Siedow told me. “I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t hurt her. But they kept telling me it looked fake and I needed to really hit her. It took me several tries, but by the end of it, I was really hitting her. It actually got to be kinda fun.”

In retrospect, there’s reason to believe that Hooper was manipulating many of the details, to an almost obsessive degree. The heat, the miserable conditions, and the sheer pain of it all undoubtedly added to the atmosphere Hooper was trying to create. He wanted the actors to feel irritable and off-balance. He probably knew $60,000 wasn’t enough money to finish the film but didn’t want Parsley and the other investors to know that. He was doing whatever he could, day by day, moment by moment, to get as many images on film as possible, because he knew that Chainsaw, like any successful horror film, would be perfected in the editing room. “Tobe really did have a vision,” says Bozman now. “He knew exactly where we were at all times. But the rest of us were flying blind.”

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A Brief History of Disney

Walt Disney, from the 1937 trailer for "Snow White," via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a reading list exploring Disney’s more than 80-year grip on popular culture—the animation, the music, the princesses, and the parents killed off in the First Act. Read more…

The History of Literacy, and the Future of 'Code Literacy'

In the latest Mother Jones, Tasneem Raja argues that “code literacy” is becoming just as critical as reading and writing in education. To understand how we as a society might begin to take it seriously, it also helps to understand the history of literacy itself:

Reading and writing have become what researchers have called “interiorized” or “infrastructural,” a technology baked so deeply into everyday human life that we’re never surprised to encounter it. It’s the main medium through which we connect, via not only books and papers, but text messages and the voting booth, medical forms and shopping sites. If a child makes it to adulthood without being able to read or write, we call that a societal failure.

Yet for thousands of years writing was the preserve of the professional scribes employed by the elite. So what moved it to the masses? In Europe at least, writes literacy researcher Vee, the tipping point was the Domesday Book, an 11th-century survey of landowners that’s been called the oldest public record in England.

Commissioned by William the Conqueror to take stock of what his new subjects held in terms of acreage, tenants, and livestock so as to better tax them, royal scribes fanned across the countryside taking detailed notes during in-person interviews. It was like a hands-on demo on the efficiencies of writing, and it proved contagious. Despite skepticism—writing was hard, and maybe involved black magic—other institutions started putting it to use. Landowners and vendors required patrons and clients to sign deeds and receipts, with an “X” if nothing else. Written records became admissible in court. Especially once Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, writing seeped into more and more aspects of life, no longer a rarefied skill restricted to a cloistered class of aloof scribes but a function of everyday society.

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More on tech in the Longreads Archive

Photo: worldbank, flickr

On Watching a Person Deteriorate

In the Guardian, an adaptation of The Iceberg, a memoir by Marion Coutts about her husband’s last months after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. She writes: “There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part.”

13 April 2010

The operation went well. Tom is sitting up, talking, eating, reading. He looks extremely good. All praise to the surgeon.

Tom is home within 10 days but straight away there are fresh difficulties. He has trouble saying the name of the hospital or the name of the friend who came yesterday. He calls me to the study where he is looking up something in the thesaurus. The word is disaster. “They can’t have got rid of it!” he says. “Maddening!” As he has spelled it distaster, he cannot find it. Physically there is a lot of strain. Weakness and muscle failure is starting to sting him and creep again around the joints, fingers and calves and in parts of his arms. This is steroids at their warring work.

Tom is speaking to me less. The way his intellect is made manifest through language is being destroyed. Great chunks of speech are collapsing. Holes are appearing. Avenues crumble and sudden roadblocks halt the journey from one part of consciousness to the other. He strings words together like ropes across voids. He never panics. What would it be like if he did?

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Photo: Joris Louwes

College Students: Send Us Your Summer Stories

Student journalists and recent grads! Are you writing for an internship this summer? Share your work with a wider audience via College Longreads. We’ll consider published news or nonfiction articles or essays of 1,500 words or longer. E-mail links to aileen@longreads.com, or post links to Twitter tagged #college #longreads.

Send us your stories

Which Kind of Failure Are You?

Clay Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. (“Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,” the organizers of FailCon, an annual conference, implore, suggesting that, in the era of disruption, innovators face unprecedented challenges. For instance: maybe you made the wrong hires?) When an established company succeeds, that’s only because it hasn’t yet failed. And, when any of these things happen, all of them are only further evidence of disruption.

-From Jill Lepore’s 2014 critical look at the language of disruption and innovation, in The New Yorker.

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More on innovation in the Longreads Archive

Photo: chefcooke, flickr

The Problem With 'Fan Service' in Television

At PopMatters, Anita Felicelli discusses why TV shows get ruined when they’re written and produced with their fans in mind rather than for their own sake as pieces of creative work:

We know that television writers read fan responses on Twitter, that some of them read blogs and speculation. They know what fans want because fans are driven to respond and tell them through these media, and in turn , they may feel the need to pander to the audience. If the writers don’t fulfill fans’ desires, particularly in a season finalé, there’s a good chance these days that the audience won’t follow them to their next project.

Too often in America, fan service, not an inspiring piece of art, becomes the end goal of creative work. Fan service can produce gratifying work, sure, but catering to fans too much squelches innovation. And it may not inspire fans to create or even continue consuming a particular show at the same pace. Even though creating fan response is a major social value of creative works, fan service is a different beast. Veronica Mars (the movie) and the How I Met Your Mother series finalé offer prime examples of why focusing too literally on the satisfaction of fans’ expectations can produce fewer rewards than fans (and writers) might imagine.

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Screengrab from ‘How I Met Your Mother’

The People Who Are Impossible for Lipreaders to Decipher

Rachel Kolb has been deaf since birth and in Stanford magazine, she writes about learning how to lipread and describes what it’s like to read the lips of people with accents or who over-enunciate:

Some people are all but impossible for me to lipread. People with thin lips; people who mumble; people who speak from the back of their throats; people with dead-fish, unexpressive faces; people who talk too fast; people who laugh a lot; tired people who slur their words; children with high, babyish voices; men with moustaches or beards; people with any sort of accent.

Accents are a visible tang on people’s lips. Witnessing someone with an accent is like taking a sip of clear water only to find it tainted with something else. I startle and leap to attention. As I explore the strange taste, my brain puzzles itself trying to pinpoint exactly what it is and how I should respond. I dive into the unfamiliar contortions of the lips, trying to push my way to some intelligible meaning. Accented words pull against the gravity of my experience; like slime-glossed fish, they wriggle and leap out of my hands. Staring down at my fingers’ muddy residue, my only choice is to shrug and cast out my line again.

Some people, though not inherently difficult to understand, make themselves that way. By viewing lipreading as a mysterious and complicated thing, they make the process harder. They over-enunciate, which distorts the lips like a funhouse mirror. Lips are naturally beautiful, especially when words float from them without thought; they ought never be contorted in this way. There are other signs, too: nervous gestures and exaggerated expressions, improvised sign language, a tic-like degree of smiling and nodding.

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Photo: Bill Strain

How the 'Williamsburg Effect' Is Transforming Brooklyn's Jury Pool

Brooklyn’s courthouses are being rocked by the “Williamsburg Effect.”

The influx of well-off and educated white people to trendy neighborhoods such as Williamsburg is rapidly “gentrifying’’ the borough’s jury pool — and transforming verdicts, lawyers and judges told The Post.

It’s good news for prosecutors in criminal cases — and bad news for plaintiffs in civil lawsuits, they said.

“The jurors are becoming more like Manhattan — which is not good for defendants,’’ noted veteran defense lawyer Julie Clark.

“They are . . . much more trusting of police,” Clark said of the jurors. “I’m not sure people from the University of Vermont would believe that a police officer would [plant] a gun.’’

Former Brooklyn prosecutor and defense lawyer John Paul DeVerna said, “The ‘Williamsburg Effect’ affects every case that goes to trial.

Josh Saul, writing in The New York Post, about the effect of gentrification on Brooklyn’s court system.

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More stories about gentrification

Photo: Flickr, Erin