The Longreads Blog

The House of Mondavi: How an American Wine Empire Was Born

Julia Flynn Siler | The House of Mondavi | 2007 | 14 minutes (3,328 words)

 
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to feature an excerpt from The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler’s book about a family that turned a Napa Valley winery into a billion-dollar fortune. Thanks to Siler and Gotham Books for sharing it with the Longreads community.

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We Are More Dangerous to Sharks Than They Are to Us

In the Toronto Star, Sandro Contenta travels to the Bahamas to attend “SharkSchool” where a man named Erich Ritter teaches a one-week course on how to swim safely with sharks. Over the course of his reporting, Contenta learns that 63 people have been killed by sharks in the past decade, while scientists have estimated that 97 million sharks have been killed by humans during fishing-related activities in 2010 alone:

The scientists concluded that dozens of species of sharks were being killed at unsustainable rates. “The consequences of these unsustainable catch and mortality rates for marine ecosystems could be substantial,” they wrote. “Global total shark mortality, therefore, needs to be reduced drastically in order to rebuild depleted populations and restore marine ecosystems with functional top predators.”

Scientists warn of a “trophic cascade.” That’s when the disappearance of a top predator causes a cascading and dramatic impact on organisms at lower levels of the food chain until an entire ecosystem is transformed. The loss of sharks, for example, contributes to the death of coral reefs, because coral-eating fish that were part of a shark’s diet suddenly boom in numbers.

Worm and his colleagues echoed concerns by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, published in a landmark analysis by 23 leading scientists including B.C.’s Nick Dulvy, who co-chairs the union’s shark specialist group. Released in January, the 34-page report is based on the work of more than 300 scientists. It is the first systematic analysis of the global population status of more than 1,000 species of sharks, rays and chimaeras.
It found that one in four of these fish are threatened with extinction due to overfishing, either targeted or unintended, what the fishing industry calls bycatch. That amounted to 107 species of rays and 74 species of sharks, including angel and thresher sharks.

“There isn’t a part of the ice-free ocean surface that doesn’t contain a threatened shark,” Dulvy says. “That’s a lot of real estate with threatened biodiversity.”

As for what you should do if you ever found yourself being attacked by a shark? The answer is obvious: Fight for your life:

“In sharks you want to fight and fight like hell because they respect power,” Burgess says. “If you pop them in the nose, they veer off almost always, and then will come back around.

“I equate it to the neighbourhood bully: if you pop them in the nose first, more often than not they’ll back off because they weren’t expecting it. After the initial surprise wears off he’ll probably come back and beat the hell out of you, and you’d be smart to get out of the water while you’ve got your opening.

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Photo: Jeff

Making the Magazine: A Reading List

Magazine nerds, here we go: A starter collection of behind-the-scenes stories from some of your most beloved magazines, including The New Yorker, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, plus now-defunct publications like Might, George, Sassy and Wigwag. Share your favorite behind-the-magazine stories with us on Twitter or Facebook: #longreads. Read more…

Why So Many Teams at the World Cup Have Players Who Share a Birthday

At BBC Magazine, an examination of the “birthday paradox” using the World Cup as an example.

The birthday paradox goes like this: Mathematically, in any group of 23 people there is a 50% chance that two people will share a birthday. At the World Cup, there are 32 squads with 23 players on each team. Does the birthday paradox prove true there? It does:

“People think it’s an amazing coincidence that two people in a class of 30 share the same birthday,” he says. “Actually, with 30 people it’s a 70% chance.”

Or consider your favourite social media site. If you’ve got 70 friends, you’ve got a 99.9% chance that at least two of them will share a birthday.

But perhaps the best data-set of all to test this on is the football World Cup. There are 32 teams, and each team has a squad of 23 players. If the birthday paradox is true, 50% of the squads should have shared birthdays.

Using the birthdays from Fifa’s official squad lists as of Tuesday 10 June, it turns out there are indeed 16 teams with at least one shared birthday – 50% of the total. Five of those teams, in fact, have two pairs of birthdays.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Tony Gwynn: 1960-2014

“The best thing for me has just been the passion of wanting to play. The challenge of stepping in the box, the challenge of trying to be successful. When I started out, I guarantee you nobody figured I would be where I am today. Nobody. Not even myself. Maybe there’s something that makes you want to go out and prove people wrong, but for me, it’s just the passion of loving to do what I do.”

-Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, in Sports Illustrated, 1999. Gwynn died of salivary gland cancer June 16, at the age of 54.

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See also:

Sports Illustrated’s First Profile of Gwynn (1984)

(via Howard Riefs)

Vera Nabokov, Eugen Boissevain, Leonard Woolf: On Spouses Who Supported Their Famous Partner's Writing Careers

At the Atlantic, Koa Beck writes about the spouses of famous writers who supported their partner’s writing careers, often devoting their lives to it. Vera Nabokov epitomized this: She not only performed the duties of cleaning and cooking expected of her as a wife in her era, but also worked as her husband’s “round-the-clock editor, assistant, and secretary”:

To some writers, Vera Nabokov remains much more than “just a wife,” but rather a template for an enviable asset. It’s undeniably easier to prioritize one’s art with a 24/7 writing coach who also manages “the mini-country that is home,” to quote novelist Allison Pearson.

As Laura Miller recently pointed out in Salon, Virginia Woolf and Edna St. Vincent Millay each benefited greatly from truly anomalous marriages of their time, in which their respective husbands assumed a Vera-esque role. Millay’s husband, Eugen Boissevain, reportedly described himself as a feminist and “married the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay with the express purpose of providing her with a stable home life and relieving her of domestic tasks so she could write.” By the time Millay died, she had written six plays and more than a dozen books of poetry. While Leonard Woolf cared for Virginia during her bouts of mental illness, he also managed the household, tended to the garden, and co-founded the couple’s literary press. Throughout his dedication to his wife’s craft—and her general well-being—he also managed to have a literary career of his own, producing both novels and stories while maintaining editorships at several journals. Claire Messud wrote in The New York Times that the Woolf partnership was one of “extraordinary productivity.” In her lifetime, Woolf published nine novels, two biographies, and several collections of essays and short stories—among other works.

But not all gifted writers are blessed with Veras (or Leonards or Eugens for that matter). At a promotional reading of Bark at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, [Lorrie] Moore clarified to me—and a room’s worth of fans—that she absolutely does not have a Vera. “I do every little thing myself,” she said.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

‘I Got to Know a Father’s Love for the First Time at Age Thirty’

In 2013, Mark Warren wrote in Esquire about how, at age 30, he finally experienced a father’s love through Dieter, his father-in-law:

A few years ago I was working on a book project, and the deadline was crushing me. I hadn’t given myself enough time to write, and I was panicking, so I left Jessica and the kids in New York and moved out to Princeton with Dieter for a month, to race the clock. I quickly established a routine of working day and night, and without a word being said, Dieter made himself my twenty-four-hour valet. Every morning as I awoke, he’d bring me a cup of coffee. “Would you like to see the menu?” he’d ask. “Or shall we just have the chef whip up something for you?” If I fell asleep on the couch, he would cover me with a blanket. It was the fall, and every morning he and I would take a walk in the changing colors, and we would talk through the day’s writing, and every couple days, Dieter would read pages for me and tell me what he thought.

He knew that I’d given up on my own father, and he looked on me with a kindness for which I was not at all prepared, that it seemed he had been waiting for just this moment to bestow. Sometimes it was almost too much for me to bear. As he made us dinner, he would ask me about my life and say such encouraging things with love and without qualification, and I would look at him and think, Are you real?

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Photo: kwanie

The Culture of Video Games: A Reading List

Videogames fascinate me. I’m not very good at the majority I’ve tried to play, but, like kickball and baking, I still play, because they’re fun, and I don’t have to be good at everything. (Except Pac-Man World 2 for PS2. I rule that. Especially the ice-skating levels.) Friends have helped me play Bioshock Infinite and introduced me to Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? I like to read How Games Saved My Life. In these voices, I hear passion. Not defense or argument, but thoughtfulness and joy. It’s the same joy I express when I rant about a particular book or marvel at a stunning piece of longform journalism. I am not going to be the person who ranks media’s promise or power or worth, who turns up her nose at YA literature or One Direction or Zelda.

1. “Video Games: The Addiction.” (Tom Bissell, The Guardian, March 2010)

Don’t let the cliched title fool you. This isn’t an indictment of video games. Tom Bissell is a fantastic writer, whose pieces I’ve included in the past, but his past includes a cocaine addiction and a Grand Theft Auto IV addiction. “Any regrets? Absolutely none.”

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Beverly Cleary on Fatherhood, via 'Ramona and Her Father'

At Avidly, Stephanie Lucianovic rereads the ‘Ramona’ books from Beverly Cleary and gains a new appreciation for Cleary’s writing, as well as a new perspective on the theme of parenting found within the books. Here’s Lucianovic on Ramona’s father:

Running throughout the entire Ramona and Beezus oeuvre, and illustrated by Mr. Quimby’s ill-fated career, is the recognizably adult theme that quite often, parents set aside pre-kid dreams for post-kid necessities because making their kids’ dreams come true is the new dream.

What we learn in the Ramona books is that Mr. Quimby was once an art major, but when Mrs. Quimby got pregnant with Beezus, he dropped out of school and got a job. We can acknowledge that some of the Ramona books were a product of their time (Cleary wrote them between 1955-1999) when getting married while in college was not as mind-boggling as it might be today, yet also still recognize that having a baby at any stage of life forces a family to completely change their life around in order to accommodate it. Dropping out of college and not finishing his art degree is the first data point in Mr. Quimby’s realistic if depressing career trajectory.

Bit by bit we find out about all the jobs Mr. Quimby has held. In Beezus and Ramona, he has an unnamed position at Pacific Gas & Electric, and in Ramona and Her Father he loses his job in an office of a small moving and storage company, and everything appears to go downhill from there. For what feels like a painfully extended time (all of Ramona and Her Father), Mr. Quimby is standing in line at unemployment, waiting by the phone for interviews and job offers, and smoking. By the close of Ramona and Her Father, Mr. Quimby has finally secured a job as a checker at a grocery store chain with management potential. In other books, we’ll learn how much he hates his checker job — once again a concept which may not mean much to the kids for whom the books were written but one which resonates far too loudly for adults — and how he’ll leave that checker job to go back to art school and then get a teaching certificate while also working part-time at another hated job in a frozen foods warehouse.

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The Science of Suppressing Traumatic Memories

I had come to his house, in this sunny spot between Ben Gurion Airport and the Mediterranean coast, for an unlikely reason: not long ago, after decades of unwavering silence, Sigmund Schiller spoke about his Holocaust experience.

“People talk about ‘Sophie’s Choice’ as if it were a rare event,” he said. “It wasn’t. Everybody had to make Sophie’s choice—all of us. My mother left behind a four-year-old with the maid. You don’t think I was beaten and shot at? There are no violins in my story. It is the most common thing that happened.”

Nobody moved in the Schillers’ living room while the film continued. At times, Daniela hid her eyes with her hands, and so did her father. For the most part, they were immobile. On camera, she asked him if he had consciously suppressed this information.

“Yes,” he said. “You must suppress. Without suppression I wouldn’t live.”

Michael Specter, in The New Yorker, on the neuroscience of our own memories.

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More Specter in the Longreads Archive