The Longreads Blog

Tell Me A Story: A Reading List

These four fantastic fiction pieces will take you far away from this perpetual winter.

1. “Lost in Transit.” (Leon, The Swan Children Magazine, March 2014)

This story is a beautiful, haunting example of the work produced by the Swan Children, a collective of artists expressing their experiences under “homeschooled, Quiverfull, and conservative Christian upbringing.” The first issue debuted March 1. It is not to be missed.

2. “Touchdown!” (Jerad W. Alexander, Pithead Chapel)

An afternoon of watching football is disrupted by the implications of a kitchen injury.

3. “Conversion.” (Sara Novic, Guernica, February 2014)

Carter isn’t sure what to make of his mother’s fascination with the local evangelical congregation — until it’s too late.

4. “The Unraveling.” (A.N. Devers, Electric Literature, 2013)

A mysterious real estate agent promises a young Brooklyn couple that his unorthodox methods will find the perfect apartment — if they cooperate, that is.

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Photo: Sergey Yakunin

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Showtime, Synergy: Exclusive Early Access to a New Story from The Awl and Matt Siegel

This week, we are excited to give Longreads Members exclusive early access to a new story from Matt Siegel, to be published next week on The Awl. Here’s more from The Awl co-founder and editor Choire Sicha:

“Matt Siegel’s very funny nonfiction story of love, deceit and betrayal (oh my God, I know!!!) comes on all unassuming and conversational. Unlike many citizens of the MFA world (Matt’s a recent graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program), he keeps his techniques hidden. We’re really looking forward to publishing this at The Awl, but we’re more thrilled to share it with Longreads Members—like ourselves!—first.”

Siegel (@thatmattsiegel) has previously written for The Huffington Post, The Hairpin, Flaunt Magazine, and The Advocate.

Become a Longreads Member to get the story

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What Silicon Valley Is Really Selling Us

Wired senior editor Bill Wasik on the public’s changing relationship with both Silicon Valley and the technology it creates and promotes:

One of the most toxic memes to waft out of the industry recently has been the idea of quasi-secession, whether it was Peter Thiel’s dream of floating hacker communities or Tim Draper’s plan to make Silicon Valley its own state or Balaji Srinivasan’s vision of an “ultimate exit” to someplace where engineers could build a world “run by technology.” But they’ve got it entirely backward. People don’t crave technology like drugs, wanting it so bad they’ll wire bitcoins to the offshore plutocracy of Libertaristan just to get it. They adopt technology when they’re seduced by the communities that grow up around it, often for love rather than money. If inventing new modes of communication or collaboration was seen as a mercenary act—as no nobler than drilling a well or devising a mortgage-backed security—then such platforms would never thrive, because their value tends to arise from a long, slow, unprofitable process of experimentation.

If anything, the public love affair with Silicon Valley is more crucial today than ever.

There’s a reason why web giants adopt slogans like “Don’t be evil” or endorse “the Hacker Way”: The entire business models of Google and Facebook are built not on a physical product or even a service but on monetizing data that users freely supply. Were either company to lose the trust and optimism of its customers, it wouldn’t just be akin to ExxonMobil failing to sell oil or Dow Chemical to sell plastic; it would be like failing to drill oil, to make plastic.

When William Gibson envisioned cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination,” he was right. Unsettle the consensus about the social web and you don’t just risk slowing its growth or depopulating it slightly. You risk ending it, as mistrust of corporate motives festers into cynicism about the entire project.

Read the full story at Wired

Read more on Silicon Valley

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Photo: itia4u, Flickr

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Read more…

On The Benefits of “Leaning Out”

Soon, the rewards of leaning in doubled.

Then they quadrupled. Then they began to increase exponentially.

I leaned in some more. I ate protein bars and made important telephone calls during my morning commute. I stopped reading novels so I could write more articles and memos and make more handicrafts to contribute to the school auction. I put in extra hours at work. When I came home, I did radio interviews over Skype from my living room while supervising the children’s math homework.

And I realized that I hated Sheryl Sandberg.

Because, of course, I was miserable. I never saw my friends, because I was too busy building my network. I was too tired to do any creative, outside-the-box thinking. I was boxed in. I wondered if foreign-policy punditry was just too much for me. I wondered if I should move to Santa Fe and open a small gallery specializing in handicrafts made from recycled tires. I wondered if my husband and kids would want to go with me.

—Rosa Brooks, The Washington Post.  Brooks’ piece looks at what happens when a woman takes Sheryl Sandberg’s advice and leans in (spoiler: good things at work and exhaustion at home). She posits that maybe the answer lies in a different kind of feminism manifesto, a “Manifestus for the Rest of Us,” wherein women fight for the right to “lean out,” relax a little, and maybe even find time “for the kind of unstructured, creative thinking so critical to any kind of success.”

Read the story

NPR's Nina Totenberg On What It Was Like To Be The Only Woman In The Newsroom

How did sources treat you differently than your male colleagues?

The bad news was you weren’t one of the guys so you didn’t chum it up with them and go drinking. The good news was they assumed you were young and stupid. I was young. I wasn’t stupid. They would very often say the most incredible things to me because they weren’t concentrating on the fact that I was concentrating on them.

I probably scored a number of scoops that way. It’s just hilarious. One time I was doing a story about junkets on Capitol Hill. I think Northwest [Airlines] had inaugurated a new line to Japan and Korea. They had taken on their maiden voyage most of the members of the Senate Commerce Committee, which of course controlled regulation of the airline industry.

So I did a bunch of interviews with people who went, and then I asked the people who didn’t go why they didn’t. I remember [Montana Democrat] Mike Mansfield said something of great integrity. He just said, “Don’t do that kind of thing.” But there was a senator, [New Hampshire Republican] Norris Cotton, who said, “Oriental food gives me the trots.” And that was the subhead in the story! It was just too good.

Nina Totenberg, interviewed by Adrienne LaFrance. Nina Totenberg’s tenure at NPR began nearly forty years ago, and since then her voice has become one of the most familiar on public radio. As LaFrance put it, “her work is so well known that NPR even sells a “Nina Totin’ Bag,” which pays homage to the legal affairs correspondent and pokes fun at public broadcasting for its classic pledge-drive gift.” Read more about public radio in the Longreads archive.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Jazz's Influence on the Beat Generation

These principal writers in various ways all tried to capture something of the flavor of jazz. Certainly Ginsberg and Kerouac. Kerouac wanted to write lines of prose or poetry that captured something of, say, the saxophonist art. He was interested in extemporization; he was interested in improvisation. And when he heard figures like Lester Young, Thelonius Monk, and so on, he had this idea that if he could write lines that felt like the one long breath of an improvising saxophonist, he was capturing something very special.

Beat scholar Simon Warner on WBEZ’s Sound Opinions podcast, talking about jazz’s influence on the writers of the Beat Generation. See more podcast picks.

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Photo: exquisitur, Flickr

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Are You In A Haruki Murakami Novel?

An elephant mysteriously vanishes. A giant frog is waiting in your apartment. Your cat mysteriously vanishes. Two moons hang in the sky. Your wife mysteriously vanishes. A strange man comes to you and asks you to find a sheep, or a woman calls and asks for ten minutes of your time. You might be the protagonist in a novel or short story by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Look around you. If any of these things sound familiar, you might want to get a new collar for your cat:

1. You drink your coffee black.

2. You have a deep and abiding love for old jazz records.

3. You find it easy to have emotionless sex with strangers. If you were to describe the sex to a friend you would use the most abstract language possible, but you never do because you have no friends.

4. You worship the 1960s and the simple comforts in life: black coffee, old jazz records, emotionless afternoon sex. If, however, you are actually living in the 1960s, you mostly just keep to yourself.

If some—or all—of these things apply, you might want to read the rest of the list at The Toast. And if the mere thought of Murakami leaves you hankering for a short story, you can find more fiction in the Longreads archive.

Photo: Smithsonian, Flickr

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The Big Problem with Financial Journalism

One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Andrew Ross Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explaining finance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it.

The modern finance industry is at a loss when it comes to justifying its own existence. Its finest minds can’t explain why we wouldn’t be better off with a much simpler and more heavily circumscribed model of capital formation. Sorkin likewise can’t make his readers fully grasp why the current system—which turns large amounts of other people’s money and even more people’s debt into huge paper fortunes for a small super-elite, and in such a way as to regularly imperil the entire worldwide economic order—is beneficial or necessary. But the New York Times and Wall Street each need him to try.

Alex Pareene, in The Baffler (2014).

Read the story

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Two Perspectives on the Duke University Porn Star: Our College Pick

Young women in college have joked for decades about “working their way through school” via pornography. And as with every tired old joke, there’s some truth behind it. The Duke Chronicle profiled a first-year student named “Lauren,” a woman who identifies as a feminist, libertarian, and porn star as “Aurora.” The student who wrote the piece, Katie Fernelius, opted not to go with a straight profile and instead made the story just as much about her as she did about Laura. The article reads more like an essay, as Fernelius struggles not only with reconciling what Laura does, but also articulating her own reaction. It also critically examines the sexual culture at Duke, which is similar to other schools (Duke just gets more press.). Consequently, the piece at times veers into a reaction paper for Women’s Studies 101. But that’s what college, and college media, gives you: the time to think about the big stuff, and a platform to express it.

Portrait of a Porn Star
Katie Fernelius | The Duke Chronicle | February 14, 2014 | (3,526 words)

 

I’m The Duke University Freshman Porn Star And For The First Time I’m Telling The Story In My Words
Lauren A. | xoJane | February 21, 2014 | (1,701 words)

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Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.

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