The Longreads Blog

Lust in the Golden Years

“Still, I decided, age alone was no basis for rejection. That’s exactly the basis on which I have been rejected many times. The bank, given my age, refused my request for a loan when, in my first year of renting, I found a small house I wanted to buy. The loan I could get—based on my future earning power—would have been a very small one and the down payment would have had to be enormous. On the street, the eyes of the young and not so young slid by me. I look my age. Nobody but someone even older than I wants to look my age. Nobody wants to be my age. I am too close to death for younger people to want to pay attention to me. People think it a great compliment to say to me, ‘You certainly don’t look your age.’ Well, what should my age look like? And if I did look my age, would I be unbearably ugly? Should I stay inside the rest of my life? Because I wasn’t going to look better, not ever. So, really, was I going to do the same with the men who answered my ad? No. It would take more than the age of the writer for a letter to hit the no pile. So it wasn’t Herb’s ‘Have Viagara, Will Travel’ that consigned him to the no pile; it was its brevity.”

-From A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance by Jane Juska, a memoir based on a simple ad taken out in The New York Review of Books: “BEFORE I TURN 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Read more on romance.

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Photo: killerciao, Flickr

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On Grieving: ‘If you think you’re doing okay, then you’re doing okay’

Grieving

“Bonanno doesn’t pretend that smiling is a magical elixir or that laughing will cure the hardest-suffering patients. Grief isn’t a single track, he’s found, but a long private journey that splits along three rough paths. Ten percent of us experience ‘chronic’ and relentless grief that demands counseling. Another third or so plunges into deep sadness and gradually begins recovery. But most of us—’between 50 and 60 percent,’ Bonanno said—quickly appear to be fine, despite day-to-day fluctuations. Scientists used to consider these patients tragic actors, shoving their feelings into the core of their bodies, where they would only explode with volcanic violence in dreadful ways later in life. But this, Bonanno says, might be the biggest myth of all. ‘If you think you’re doing okay,’ he said, ‘then you’re doing okay.'”

At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson talks about losing his mother to cancer and about the new science looking at the way we grieve.

Read the story
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Image: George Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness

The Alienation of Norman Rockwell

“[Rockwell’s world] is a place of safety and security, and it’s a place where there can be problems but where problems have solutions and the solutions are often provided by the people who live next door to you; if not the girl next door, then maybe the old man next door, and a doctor will take time to hear you out and will not ask you for paperwork, and will not ask you who is paying your health insurance. It’s a world where Americans will stop and pause and listen to one another and basically take care of one another. It’s a very caring place.

“I see a lot of him in the paintings. I know a lot of people keep saying to me, oh, his life was so different from his art, but I see some of his alienation in the art. If we talk about the Thanksgiving picture, for instance, ‘Freedom from Want.’ It’s interesting to me that no one in that painting is looking at anyone else. … It’s toasty warm but it also, I think, raises questions about why none of the figures are connected to one another …”

-Deborah Solomon, author of American Mirror, on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth talking about the life of Norman Rockwell. Read more from our podcast picks.

(h/t @contextual_life)

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Longreads Best of 2013 Postscript: Monica Potts on the Homeless Families of 'The Weeklies'

The Weeklies

Monica Potts | The American Prospect | March 2013 | 29 minutes (7,360 words)

Monica Potts is a senior writer for The American Prospect.

I did the reporting for ‘The Weeklies,’ about homeless families living in a suburban hotel outside of Denver, Colorado, a year ago. I lived with in the Ramada Inn alongside the weeklies during December 2012, and five of the families there shaped my story. Two of them are still living in hotels.

In May, the Ramada Inn was upgraded and converted into a Super 8 Motel. It became more expensive. Bonnie, Andy, and their son Drew, the main subjects of the story, moved into an Extended Stay closer to Drew’s school in Denver. Bonnie and Andy have been telling me since last spring that they’re doing renovation work on a rental property owned by a family friend, and that they will move in when it’s done. They don’t have a firm date, however.

After the story was published, I heard from a lot of people who said they saw school buses in their towns picking up school kids in hotel parking lots. Schools nationwide have reported a rise in student homelessness: some states have seen it double. The housing crash and the recession that followed had the odd effect of creating both vacant housing and a homelessness crisis, neither of which is likely to be solved soon.


Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

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Photo: dno1967b, Flickr

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What Happened When We Discovered What Mattered

“Besides nearly killing me, college taught me several things. Namely, that external identity mattered. Being black mattered. It determined where to get off the Boston subway without receiving a baseball bat to the head. Being the biracial child of a single, white mother determined which whites would beg me, breezily to integrate certain spaces and which black would turn their back, stage-whispering about ‘messed-up Oreos.’ Being female determined the number of times I would cross my professors’ minds, and the number of men who would grope me, curious for integration of a sort. Being from the rural Northwest encouraged peers to smile at my accent and unfamiliarity with the New York Times. Being on financial aid meant I spent my vacations huddled in dormitory rooms with the heat turned off, my afternoons serving Faculty Club highballs to pinstripe-suited recruiters who placed their tips wearily in my hand with a whispered confession: ‘You’re probably better off where you are.’ Yes, the outside mattered, and it all mattered more than what I believed did.”

From Meeting Faith: An Inward Odyssey, the award-wining memoir by Faith Adiele, who venures to Thailand on a Harvard scholarship in order to fully understand—well, everything. Read more memoirs.

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Photo: adiele.com

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The Philosophy of French Society

“Of course, since Descartes and the 17th Century there have been other French philosophers and many of them have turned their attention to the processes of human thought but the Cartesian legacy is still very important in the French intellectual tradition. In a Cartesian society, everything is ordered according to clear, precise, mathematical, scientific principles, and everything is in hierarchy.”

-Book critic Robert Adams discusses the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery on TVO’s “Big Ideas.” See more recent podcast picks.

(h/t @contextual_life)

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How Russia Began Using Poison in Assassinations

“The idea of poisoning — radioactive or otherwise — is not new to Russian intelligence. According to former Russian intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky, now a historian and one-time associate of Litvinenko, the Russians have a history of substance assassination going back nearly a century. It was Lenin who ordered the establishment of their first laboratory, known simply as the ‘Special Room’, for developing new lethal toxins.

“‘There is also a long succession of poisonings by Russian intelligence services in different countries, starting in the early 1920s,’ he says.

“At its height, says Volodarsky, the Soviet Union had the largest biological warfare program in the world. Sources have claimed there were 40,000 individuals, including 9,000 scientists, working at 47 different facilities. More than 1,000 of these experts specialized in the development and application of deadly compounds. They used lethal gasses, skin contact poisons that were smeared on door handles and nerve toxins said to be untraceable. The idea, at all times, was to make death seem natural — or, at the very least, to confuse doctors and investigators. ‘It’s never designed to demonstrate anything, only to kill the victim, quietly and unobtrusively,’ Volodarsky writes in ‘The KGB’s Poison Factory’. ‘This was an unbreakable principle.'”

At Matter, Will Storr tells the story of a Russian dissident who was murdered with radioactive poison. Read more about poison.

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Pictured: The grave of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko

Photo: Wikmedia Commons

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Longreads Best of 2013: Best Listicle By Another Name

A Pianist’s A-V

Alfred Brendel | New York Review of Books | July 2013 | 17 minutes (4,233 words)

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Robert Cottrell is editor of The Browser.

The best writers about classical music are professional musicians: think of Jeremy Denk, Stephen Hough, Nico Muhly. (The exception that disproves the rule is Alex Ross.) Charles Rosen, whose contributions were one of the many reasons for reading the New York Review of Books, died this year; Alfred Brendel, another Review contributor from the very highest end of the keyboard, thrives still, though he has given up playing piano publicly. His absence from the stage makes his presence on the page all the more precious: and his “Pianist’s A-V” is evidence of the sensibility, intellect and capacity for delight needed to underpin great interpretative art. His note on Liszt is worth a hundred pages from a lesser hand; he brings Beethoven’s piano concertos to life in a single sentence.

 

Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

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Photo: freeparking, Flickr

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How Oil Money From Texas Fuels Hollywood

“The story begins in the 1930s, with Glenn McCarthy striking oil in Beaumont. McCarthy—who was the inspiration for the Jett Rink character in Edna Ferber’s Giant—used his millions to bankroll the 1949 drama ‘The Green Promise’, starring Natalie Wood and Walter Brennan. The movie was almost immediately forgotten, but McCarthy established a much-repeated role: the Texas oilionaire eager to rub shoulders with the stars.

“Fast-forward to the early 2000s, when Tim Headington, the CEO of Dallas-based Headington Oil, hooked up with Graham King, a British-born producer whose first credit was on the Dallas-shot film ‘Dr. T. and the Women’. The duo has since produced ‘Hugo’, ‘The Tourist’, and last year’s Best Picture winner, ‘Argo’. (The famously press-shy Headington has said little of his attraction to Hollywood, other than to tell Forbes, in 2012: ‘[M]ovies have intrigued me for many years, both as a fan and as a possible participant in the process.’

“Fort Worth-based John Goff, chairman and CEO of Crescent Real Estate Holdings, invested a reported $2 million in the 2012 Glenn Close drama ‘Albert Nobbs’. Businessman Bob Kaminski led a group of approximately a dozen area investors to put up a third of the $12 million budget for the Navy SEAL thriller ‘Act of Valor’. According to Variety, at least one high-profile Hollywood producer, Brian Oliver (‘The Ides of March’, Ron Howard’s ‘Rush’), has been putting together financing packages ‘with coin coming mostly from oil and real estate investments in Texas.'”

— In D Magazine, Christopher Kelly examines the rise of Christian entertainment in North Texas, which is being funded in part with oil money. See more stories about movies.

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Photo: A Scene from the film Hugo

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What the Greek Tragedy Told Us About Modern Life

“What’s so interesting about tragedy is even as it confirms what we sort of think is true about life, which is most of us just want to have a medium life, without attracting the ire—or the jealousy—of the Gods, it nonetheless is crucial to look at stories about people who go to the extremes, because it simultaneously satisfies our desire to see the great while confirming the rightness of our choice not to be one of them.

“As someone who was trained as a classicist, it’s basically how I see [contemporary political spectacle], you know. So, these things occur to me. But then there are some things that happen which are so strongly reminiscent of actual Greek material—like the Tamerlan Tsarnaev burial controversy. It’s the first thing you think of as a classicist. The refusal to bury the body of the enemy is a culturally fraught situation that calls into question essential cultural values about what it means to be an enemy and whether there is a transcendent morality that applies even to one’s enemies; and this is of course is the central animating question of Sophocles’ Antigone, and so when that started to happen—the Tsarnaev thing—I just thought, I have to write about this. Because it just shows that the Greeks is not just old stuff that we curate because we think it’s good for you. Greek civilization continues to be vibrant because it’s just that they happen to write or make their art in a very elemental way about questions that are animating to all cultures, and so when these things happen today it seems worthwhile pointing out that this has been dealt with in a sort of incredibly distilled way by a great culture, which happens to be the culture to which we are heirs.”

Writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn, on The New Yorker’s Out Loud podcast, talking about Greek tragedy.

(h/t @contextual_life)

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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