The Longreads Blog

A 1,000-Year History of Laughing Games

“Laughter games, though seemingly unconventional, are not new. The Canadian Inuit have been practicing them for thousands of years. Their version is called Iglagunerk and consists of two individuals facing each other, grasping hands, and—at an agreed upon signal—beginning to laugh. The one who laughs the hardest and longest is declared the winner. Nerenberg says this, and an observation that mixed martial arts fighters often laugh during their pre-fight stare down, formed the genesis of competitive laughter. But there’s also some science behind it.”

– At Pacific Standard, Sam Riches goes to the Canadian competitive laughing championship in Toronto, where “laughletes” compete in laughter challenges like “the Diabolical Laugh” and “the Alabama Knee-Slapper” to win a title and trophy. Read more about competitions.

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Photo: Stewart Black

The Couple Who Started the Textbook Wars

“Mel and Norma Gabler founded Educational Research Analysts in 1961. Funded through donations, they hired serious-minded believers like Neal Frey, a professor at a small Christian liberal arts college in New York, to help them page through mountains of material. In a 12-by–15-foot bedroom next to the garage in the Gablers’ house, Frey and a colleague spent as much as two months sifting through each textbook, searching not just for purely factual errors, but keeping an eye out for what they deemed relativist erosions of traditional, Judeo-Christian morality, free-market principles, patriotism and abstinence-only sex education. They decried a history textbook that paired Martin Luther, the 16th century theologian who sparked the Reformation, with Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights icon. ‘Martin Luther was a religiously dedicated, nonviolent man,’ the Gablers complained in one objection.

“Adoption by the state board at the time was vital to the success of a textbook, and publishers were willing to make almost any changes to earn a spot on Texas’ restrictive list of five approved textbooks per subject. With Texas, publishers could recoup the cost of production in a single state. Everything else after that was profit. It also meant that the peccadilloes of special interests like Mel and Norma Gabler reverberated not just through the Lone Star State but through much of the country.”

Brantley Hargrove, in the Dallas Observer, on how Texas creationists once changed the textbook industry, and how they’ve since lost power.

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One Thing We'll Miss About Blockbuster

“The death of Blockbuster is the death of the employee favorite shelf. With Netflix and Hulu and Amazon having rightfully eclipsed video rental stores, the recommendation is now largely accomplished by algorithm. If you didn’t agree with my taste in movies, there was definitely another employee you would agree with. There was someone for every customer to talk about movies with working at every video store in the country. Now we have Neflix’s ‘Top Picks for Erik,’ nearly always insultingly off-base. There’s some human involvement behind the scenes for these streaming services—at Netflix, 40 freelancers tag metadata, making associations between movies and TV shows that no computer can yet make on its own—but that person is so buried behind the work of 800 engineers that he or she doesn’t exist for modern consumers in any meaningful sense.”

Erik Bryan, in the Awl, on his early years working for Blockbuster and the death of the video-store chain (via Maria Bustillos). Read more from The Awl.

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Photo: dno1967b, Flickr

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Early Technologies That Were Supposed to Disrupt Education

“The dream that new technologies might radically disrupt education is much older than Udacity, or even the Internet itself. As rail networks made the speedy delivery of letters a reality for many Americans in the late 19th century, correspondence classes started popping up in the United States. The widespread proliferation of home radio sets in the 1920s led such institutions as New York University and Harvard to launch so-called Colleges of the Air, which, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, prompted a 1924 journalist to contemplate a world in which the new medium would be ‘the chief arm of education’ and suggest that ‘the child of the future [would be] stuffed with facts as he sits at home or even as he walks about the streets with his portable receiving-set in his pocket.’ Udacity wasn’t even the first attempt to deliver an elite education via the Internet: In 2001, MIT launched the OpenCourseWare project to digitize notes, homework assignments, and, in some cases, full video lectures for all of the university’s courses.”

Max Chafkin, in Fast Company, on the difficulties of online education and the struggles of Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun. Read more from Chafkin in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: 29908091@N00, Flickr

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How Far We're Going to Save Youth Football

“You’re talking about putting accelerometers in equipment. Equipment specialists to outfit our children. Having independent observers of coaches on the sidelines at practices and games to monitor what’s going on. At what point are we kidding ourselves about youth football, that this is not a sensible proposition when you need this superstructure for every game in the country?”

A quote from journalist Stefan Fatsis, from Patrick Hruby’s latest Sports on Earth story about parents, youth football and an important decision. Read more on concussions.

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Photo: t_fern, Flickr

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Reading List: Flannery O'Connor's Prayer Journal

Flannery O'Connor
Photo credit: AP Images

Known for her grotesque short stories, mythic personality and Southern Catholic faith, O’Connor’s prayer journal ends in her 22nd year, before, as Casey N. Cep writes in The New Yorker, “the literature itself was a prayer.”

“Flannery O’Connor’s Desire For God.” (Jen Vafidis, The Daily Beast, November 2013)

O’Connor believed that any fiction that revealed her own character would be inherently awful writing. In her prayer journal, she critiques her own ideas of love and faith and success, covering oatmeal cookies and metaphysics.

“God’s Grandeur: The Prayer Journal of Flannery O’Connor.” (Carlene Bauer, The Virginia Quarterly Review, November 2013)

Intermixed with excerpts from O’Connor’s letters, this tender review focuses on her seemingly one-dimensional attitude toward human love and clarifies its nuance.

“Inheritance and Invention: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal.” (Casey Cep, The New Yorker, November 2013)

Casey N. Cep has fast become one of my new favorite writers. In this excellent review, Cep emphasizes that O’Connor’s prayer journal was a highly internal affair, both a way to get at a more authentic relationship with God and work through her blossoming writing career.

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Photo by Brent Payne

Doris Lessing on What It Means to Be a Writer

“I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on.

“It’s just habits. When I was bringing up a child I taught myself to write in very short concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I’d do unbelievable amounts of work. Now those habits tend to be ingrained. In fact, I’d do much better if I could go more slowly. But it’s a habit. I’ve noticed that most women write like that, whereas Graham Greene, I understand, writes two hundred perfect words every day! So I’m told! Actually, I think I write much better if I’m flowing. You start something off, and at first it’s a bit jagged, awkward, but then there’s a point where there’s a click and you suddenly become quite fluent. That’s when I think I’m writing well. I don’t write well when I’m sitting there sweating about every single phrase.”

Doris Lessing (1919-2013), in the Paris Review. Read more on Lessing from Hilary Mantel in the London Review of Books.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Growth of Financial Services in the U.S.

“The financial services sector as a whole accounts for more than 20 percent of US GDP, and this share has grown by around 10 percentage points since the 1970s. Additional expansion has taken place in the business services sector, encompassing law and accounting firms and other outgrowths of a financialized economy. Overall, it seems reasonable to conclude that Wall Street in its various forms accounts for around 20 percent of total US income, a share comparable to that of the US government.”

John Quiggin, in Jacobin, on whether the growth of the financial sector has paid off for America. Read more on banking.

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The Secret to a Successful Career, According to Cyndi Lauper's Makeup Artist

“It was for a new singer and it was for an Italian TV show called Popcorn, which was a music show. So they rented a flat and I walk in the next morning, and there’s this huge king-sized bed. And there’s Lou Albano and these other wrestlers and Cyndi and her mom. And I’m like, ‘Ugh, Jesus, what am I doing here? Who are these people?’ And then they start playing the song, ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,’ and I’m like, ‘Ohhh, that’s… it.’ I just knew it was gonna be a hit. So I made myself indispensable. I mean, doting, putting her shoes on, everything. I really laid it on thick because I really wanted it. Two months before that, while I was still in school, I was watching MTV one night — which was just a few years old — and I thought that’s what I really want to do. I was telling people — trying to get the word out, put out some feelers — and they were like ‘That’s impossible, it takes years.’ And I wouldn’t hear it. People that I knew knew other artists who were just getting labels or trying to get labels, so I just thought I’d start there. But then I got the call from Cyndi.”

Patrick Lucas, on recognizing an opportunity and hanging onto it, in a conversation with Jane Marie in The Hairpin. Read more on music from the Longreads Archive.

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Casey N. Cep on Ariel Levy’s ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

There is a kind of loss that our culture does not yet understand. The death of a child is the worst tragedy we can imagine, yet we lack understanding for the hundreds of thousands of women who miscarry every year. Miscarriages are an invisible loss for most women, one they suffer by themselves. Imagine the courage, then, that Ariel Levy summoned to write “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” She not only shares her experience of pregnancy, but also her miscarriage and the sorrow that followed it. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part grief narrative, the essay is remarkable from its opening memories of Levy’s own childhood to its heartbreaking ending: “But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic.”

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