The Longreads Blog

Dating in the 21st Century: A Reading List

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. “Love Me Tinder.” (Emily Witt, GQ, January 2014)

The denizens of Tinder in all their weird, wild, witty glory.

2. “Dating While Trans: The Doldrums.” (Audrey Arndt, The Toast, May 2014)

For a long time, Audrey openly described herself as transgender in her OKCupid profile.

3. “Forever Single: DATING WHITE PPL.” (Soleil Ho, Infinite Scroll, January 2014)

Or “11 Challenges of Having a White Partner” as a person of color.

4. “Dating on the Autism Spectrum.” (Emily Shire, The Atlantic, August 2013)

For many autistic teens and adults, the flirting, dating and the rest of the romance rigamarole don’t come easy. That’s where programs like PEERS come in.

Photo: David Goehring

Britney Spears's Lost Album

A decade ago, Britney Spears worked on an album called “Original Doll” that she hoped would prove herself as a songwriter. Her record label denied the album existed even though Spears did a radio interview where she previewed one of the songs. At Buzzfeed, Hunter Schwarz writes about Spears’s lost album:

On “Take Off,” Spears sang about tolerance, love, and peace. Bell called it her version of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White.” “It was about being tolerant about gay people. It was gay people, discrimination, basically loving yourself and being connected,” Bell said. “I think it was ahead of Lady Gaga. I think people would have looked at her and thought she had something to say. It was ahead of its time. She talked about war and how war is wrong.” In 2013, Bell tweeted some lyrics from the song: “They say get ready for the revolution / I think we oughta find some sorta solution.”

But Jive wasn’t impressed. “I think maybe they thought it was not close enough to her brand,” Bell said. She called In the Zone “the filtered-down version of Original Doll, or the more pop version.” She “wanted to make a record that was more vibey and more personal and honest,” Bell said. Ultimately, Spears still hoped her songs would have their day. “I think she knew, I can come back to these songs later,” Bell said.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Confronting the Top Brass at The New York Times About Pay Discrepancy

Jill Abramson left the New York Times’s executive editor position today and was replaced by Dean Baquet, the managing editor at the newspaper. At The New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes about what happened behind the scenes:

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”

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Read Ken Auletta’s October 2011 profile of Jill Abramson

Finding a Life in the Details: Our College Pick

Learning to capture the details that matter can take years. Beginning writers rely on physical traits to explain subjects, or do a notebook dump of descriptions that tell the audience nothing much at all. Connor Radnovich’s profile of Mike White, a Gulf War veteran with ALS, demonstrates a studied use of detail. Radnovich tells us how tall White is when standing, “which he does only with help, and rarely.” He finds out how much White’s wheelchair costs. He notes that White’s shoes are “out-of-the-box clean.” He mixes observant reporting with a novelist’s turn of phrase to offer a memorable picture of White’s life. This story earned Radnovich, a recent graduate of Arizona State University, a second-place win in the personality/profile category of the 2013-2014 Hearst Journalism Awards.

Mike White’s War

Connor Radnovich | Phoenix New Times | March 25, 2014 | 19 minutes (4,723 words)

The Healing Power of Human Fat Tissue

In Aeon, Jalees Rehman, an associate professor of medicine and pharmacology at the University of Illinois, discusses the potential healing power of stem cells found in human fat tissue:

The discovery of regenerative cells within our fat has opened up new doors. As adult stem cells, they can be converted into tissues such as bone and cartilage and might provide long-sought relief for debilitating diseases such as chronic joint pain. As stromal cells, they are able to build and regenerate blood vessels, and could provide relief for millions of patients affected by poor blood flow to their vital organs. With scientists starting to engineer organs such as the heart, lungs, pancreas and liver from scratch, they are realising that ensuring blood supply to newly engineered organs is critical. The ability of cells derived from fat to grow blood vessels might make them central players in the future of organ engineering.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Last Living Recipient of VA Benefits from the Civil War

Ms. Triplett’s pension, small as it is, stands as a reminder that war’s bills don’t stop coming when the guns fall silent. The VA is still paying benefits to 16 widows and children of veterans from the 1898 Spanish-American War.

The last U.S. World War I veteran died in 2011. But 4,038 widows, sons and daughters get monthly VA pension or other payments. The government’s annual tab for surviving family from those long-ago wars comes to $16.5 million.

Spouses, parents and children of deceased veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan received $6.7 billion in the 2013 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Payments are based on financial need, any disabilities, and whether the veteran’s death was tied to military service.

Those payments don’t include the costs of fighting or caring for the veterans themselves. A Harvard University study last year projected the final bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would hit $4 trillion to $6 trillion in the coming decades…

A declaration of war sets in motion expenditures that can span centuries, whether the veterans themselves were heroes, cowards or something in between.

Michael M. Phillips, writing in the Wall Street Journal. Phillips profiled Irene Triplett, the last living recipient of VA benefits connected to the Civil War. According to Phillips, Triplett, who is 84, “collects $73.13 from the Department of Veterans Affairs, a pension payment for her father’s military service—in the Civil War,” which ended in 1865.

Read the story here

More stories from The Wall Street Journal

Photo: Library of Congress, Flickr

If 'The West Wing' Were Run By NBC Executives, It Would Have Become 'Schindler's List'

JOHN WELLS, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: I had a deal at NBC because they wanted me to continue to be involved in ER. So we developed West Wing there, but they didn’t want to do it right away. “The American audience isn’t interested in politics” and “there’s plenty of that on Sunday morning television” were some of the things I recall hearing. But I insisted on getting it made if I was going to stay with ER.

AARON SORKIN: Don Ohlmeyer and Warren Littlefield were running NBC at the time the pilot script was delivered. Sitting in a meeting in Warren’s office with John, my sense was that the network executives were respectfully underwhelmed. Referring to one of the stories in the pilot that was about Cuban refugees fleeing to America on inner tubes and should we or should we not send the Coast Guard out to help them, one of the execs suggested that it might be better if [Bradley Whitford’s character] Josh Lyman went out and saved them himself. I tried not to make it an awkward pause before I said, “You mean actually swim?” He said, “No, that would be ridiculous. I mean he rents a boat. A motor boat, a skiff, but the boat’s too small to get all the refugees on board and he has a moment like Oskar Schindler where he’s saying, ’I could have rented a bigger boat! I could have saved that guy over there and those kids over there!” It was hard to avoid the awkward pause then because I honestly didn’t know if I was being messed with or not, and I didn’t want to insult the executive or appear to be difficult to work with (even though I badly needed the network to pass because by this point ABC had ordered 13 episodes of Sports Night) so I said, “That’s worth thinking about.”

From The Hollywood Reporter’s oral history of “The West Wing.” Read more oral histories from the Longreads Archive.

Class, Privilege and Wealth at Two Very Different High Schools

University Heights High School is located in one of the poorest congressional district in America, and six miles away, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School charges $43,000-a-year for tuition and is attended by the children of celebrities. In The New York Times Magazine, students from both schools discuss coming together to share their stories, talk about class and privilege, and find the things they have in common.

ANABEL: “I’m very lucky and privileged to have the parents I have. They’ve never stressed money in my life, which has given me an idea of success that isn’t based on money, but rather happiness and self-fulfillment. This may be because my family hasn’t ever openly struggled financially in my lifetime. I don’t usually think of money in a social context — who has more and who has less — but again, maybe this is due to the fact that I’ve never personally struggled to make money or get by.”

KIANA: “I went in there thinking none of the students at Fieldston would understand what any of the kids from my school go through on a daily basis, because they’re most likely all from rich households. But my partner and I had a lot more in common than I thought we would, and these kids were not stuck up like I thought they’d be. Some of them went through similar things that kids from my school have gone through — in some cases, maybe worse.”

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Education Reform, Spent on Consultants

During the next two years, more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, teacher evaluation. Many of the consultants had worked for Joel Klein, Teach for America, and other programs in the tight-knit reform movement, and a number of them had contracts with several school systems financed by Race to the Top grants and venture philanthropy. The going rate for individual consultants in Newark was a thousand dollars a day. Vivian Cox Fraser, the president of the Urban League of Essex County, observed, “Everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.”

Dale Russakoff, in The New Yorker, on what happened to Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie and Cory Booker’s plan to reform schools in Newark.

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A Professional Writer Never Skips Exercise

Back from dropping off the kids, and ready to write! Except I definitely have to exercise first. It’s going to be 90 degrees out there today and the dogs need to run and I don’t want to kill them—or worse, maim them and then decline chest-cracking at the billion-dollar emergency dog cancer spa.

I know you think I should skip the exercise, and get straight to work already. That shows how much you know. OK, listen the fuck up for once: If there’s one thing you must do as a highly esteemed professional freelance beggar, it’s exercise. Otherwise you will sit and stew in your schlubby juices all day. You’ll pull up Grantland and read a TV review that’s pure brilliance, delightful and peppy, and you’ll think about the fact that you should’ve been a teenage fashion guru making videos on YouTube but you were born at the wrong fucking time so now you have… 8,201 Twitter followers instead of 1.43 million. And you never actually get paid like that high-fashion fuck does.

Heather Havrilesky, in The Awl, on the life of a professional freelance writer.

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Photo: fanofretail, Flickr