The Longreads Blog

Charlie Chaplin's Lost Novel

“What happened?”

“A nervous breakdown. I almost died.”

“And you’re still drinking?”

“Occasionally, when I think of things.” He smiled, “The wrong things, I suppose. However, I’ve talked enough about myself. What would you like for breakfast?”

“What a sad business, being funny,” she said thoughtfully.

The table was laid and now he was ready to cook breakfast. He stood a moment, deep in thought. “But it has its compensations … It’s a great thrill to hear an audience laugh. Now let me see,” he said, opening the door of the larder, “We have eggs, salmon, sardines … ” He snapped his fingers. “That’s broken my dream! I dreamt we were doing an act together! That’s the trouble, I get wonderful ideas in my dreams, but when I awake, I forget them. This morning I found myself shaking with laughter. Then I got up and rushed to the desk and wrote five pages of screams. Then I awoke and found I hadn’t written a line.”

From Charlie Chaplin’s novel, Footlights, excerpted in the Guardian. At just over 30,000 words, it’s the only work of fiction ever written by Chaplin, and it traces the same narrative as his film Limelight. The work was in Chaplin’s archives for decades, and is now being published by the Cineteca di Bologna and will be available on both Amazon and the publisher’s website. Read more about Chaplin in the Longreads Archive.

Too Poor for Pop Culture?

“What the fuck is a selfie?” said Miss Sheryl.

“When a stupid person with a smartphone flicks themselves and looks at it,” I said to the room. She replied with a raised eyebrow, “Oh?”

It’s amazing how the news seems so instant to most from my generation with our iPhones, Wi-Fi, tablets and iPads, but actually it isn’t. The idea of information being class-based as well became evident to me when I watched my friends talk about a weeks-old story as if it happened yesterday.

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Miss Sheryl doesn’t have a computer and definitely wouldn’t know what a selfie is. Her cell runs on minutes and doesn’t have a camera. Like many of us, she’s too poor to participate in pop culture. She’s on public assistance living in public housing and scrambles for odd jobs to survive.

D. Watkins, writing in Salon, on how class differences influence the consumption of pop culture. Read more from Salon in the Longreads archive.

Photo: Urban Feel, Flickr

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The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words)

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For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press. Read more…

Regulating the $1.5 Billion E-Cigarette Industry

businessweek-ecigs

Even without the combustion, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor that narrows blood vessels and drives up blood pressure. Doing that a dozen times a day is less bad than getting lung cancer, but it’s still not great. Besides, there is no study on what inhaling those “generally recognized as safe” compounds might do to your lungs if you inhale them daily for a few decades. It’s hard to imagine that the health effects could be worse than setting something on fire and deliberately breathing the smoke. But they’re probably not as good as quitting. “The antismokers think we’re going to win—that we can get to zero tobacco,” says Kleiman. If that’s what you believe, then you’re likely to endorse stiff restrictions on e-cigarettes. On the other hand, if you think U.S. tobacco consumption will stay stubbornly stuck between 10 percent and 20 percent of the population for the foreseeable future—which means tobacco deaths will remain in the hundreds of thousands annually—you’re more likely to be agitating for the federal government to take a light hand, even if it means opening the door to the possibility of a renewed national mania for nicotine.

Among the FDA’s most difficult decisions will be determining whether e-cigarettes will be a gateway product, encouraging young smokers to develop a nicotine habit that might lead to tobacco use. After all, many of the things that make e-cigarettes attractive to smokers make them even more attractive to minors. It’s actually pretty unpleasant to start smoking—it causes dizziness, it causes coughing, and it usually takes kids a while to learn to inhale—but anyone can inhale e-cigarette vapor on the first puff. And since e-cigarettes don’t have much odor, they’re harder for parents to detect. During the debate over New York’s policy, a September report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing e-cigarette use on the rise among teenagers was prominently discussed. Spokesmen for Altria Group (MO), Reynolds American (RAI), and Lorillard—the Big Three of tobacco—are in agreement that children should be prevented from buying e-cigarettes, just as they are prevented from buying the regular kind.

Megan McArdle, in Bloomberg Businessweek, on the regulatory and health questions arising from e-cigarettes. Read more from Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Russell Brand on What It’s Like to Be an Addict

Drugs and alcohol are not my problem, reality is my problem, drugs and alcohol are my solution.

If this seems odd to you it is because you are not an alcoholic or a drug addict. You are likely one of the 90% of people who can drink and use drugs safely. I have friends who can smoke weed, swill gin, even do crack and then merrily get on with their lives. For me, this is not an option. I will relinquish all else to ride that buzz to oblivion. Even if it began as a timid glass of chardonnay on a ponce’s yacht, it would end with me necking the bottle, swimming to shore and sprinting to Bethnal Green in search of a crack house. I look to drugs and booze to fill up a hole in me; unchecked, the call of the wild is too strong. I still survey streets for signs of the subterranean escapes that used to provide my sanctuary. I still eye the shuffling subclass of junkies and dealers, invisibly gliding between doorways through the gutters. I see that dereliction can survive in opulence; the abundantly wealthy with destitution in their stare.

—Comedian and actor Russell Brand, writing in The Guardian  in 2013. His essay explores his past as a heroin addict, and how he has stayed sober for the past 10 years.

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How to Do Oral History the Right Way: Remembering the Baltimore Stallions, Our College Pick

Journalism, like everything else, has its trends. From celebrity guest editors to abundant Upworthian headlines, there’s a lot of replication in our business. So it was with low expectations that I began to read “Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions,” an oral history of a Canadian Football League team by a group of University of Maryland students. Most oral histories are not particularly challenging or innovative – they are, after all, just stitched-together interviews. But this one required some deep reporting to identify, locate, and interview more than 40 sources, including Baltimore Stallions superfans and the team’s former marketing executive. The Capital News Service team went beyond simply interviews and created several interactive graphics to help tell their story in an organic way, not just a tacked-on-for-technology’s sake way. This is the kind of oral history worth repeating.

Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions

Capital News Service | January 24, 2014 | 49 minutes (12,268 words)

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Why Hollywood Will Never Look the Same Again on Film

After Michael Mann set out to direct Collateral, the story’s setting moved from New York to Los Angeles. This decision was in part motivated by the unique visual presence of the city — especially the way it looked at night. Mann shot a majority of the film in HD (this was 2004), feeling the format better captured the city’s night lighting. Even the film’s protagonist taxi needed a custom coat to pick up different sheens depending on the type of artificial lighting the cab passed beneath. That city, at least as it appears in Collateral and countless other films, will never be the same again. L.A. has made a vast change-over to LED street lights, with New York City not far behind…Mann chose to shoot HD because of how the format rendered the story’s setting. Considering that Collateral takes place over the course of a single night, its portrayal of LA’s nocturnal landscape is integral to the film. Due to the city’s recent retrofit of over 140,000 street lights, that nocturnal landscape has changed forever.

Dave Kendricken, writing at NoFilmSchool, on how the city of Los Angeles’s decision to switch to LED lighting will forever alter the way its streets appear on film.

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How to Remain Happy While the Entire World Is Tracking You

The question that I’m asking myself is, when are we going to stop sharing, and how far are we going to go to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there’s no end to how much we can track each other—how far we’re going to self-track, how much we’re going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there’s going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.

How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don’t see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I’m trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can’t stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It’s suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can’t stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there’s no tracking in a temporary basis. I don’t know, but this is the question I’m asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?

-Wired co-founder and Cool Tools author Kevin Kelly on coming to terms with the future of the Internet and privacy, in an interview with Edge.org.

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Photo: docsearls, Flickr

Julian Barnes on Confidence and Calling Yourself a Writer

INTERVIEWER

So you chose novel writing as a profession.

BARNES

Oh, I didn’t choose it as a profession—I didn’t have the vanity to choose it. I can perhaps now state that I am at last a novelist, and think of myself as a novelist, and can afford to do journalism when it pleases me. But I was never one of those insufferable children who at the age of seven is writing stories under the bedclothes or one of those cocky young wordsmiths who imagine the world awaits their prose. I spent a long time acquiring enough confidence to imagine that I could be some sort of novelist.

Julian Barnes, on early career aspirations, in The Paris Review.

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Photo: anniemole, Flickr

Why Good Health Care Depends on Nurses

What personal care hospitalized patients now get is mostly from nurses. In the MGH ICU the nursing care was superb; at Spaulding it was inconsistent. I had never before understood how much good nursing care contributes to patients’ safety and comfort, especially when they are very sick or disabled. This is a lesson all physicians and hospital administrators should learn. When nursing is not optimal, patient care is never good.

Even in the best of hospitals, with the best of medical and nursing care, the ICU can be a devastating psychological experience for patients—as it was for me. Totally helpless, deprived of cohttp://blog.longreads.com/2014/02/04/why-good-health-care-depends-on-nurses/ntrol over one’s body, ICU patients desperately need the comforting presence of family and loved ones. I was fortunate to have that support, but some others in the MGH ICU were not. I can only hope they received extra attention from their nurses.

Arnold Relman, a physician with more than six decades of experience, broke his neck and discovered what it’s like to be critically ill and cared for under today’s health care system. He wrote about the experience for The New York Review of Books.

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Photo: Army Medicine