The Longreads Blog

The Questions We Don’t Ask Our Grandparents

Photo by Jay Gorman

“We see our parents aging before our eyes, but we regard our grandparents as such oaks, their mortality not once entering our thoughts because they have always, to us, been old. By the time I began to realize the urgency of learning about him, he was gone. I never had the chance — or, to be perfectly honest, I had the chance but never took it — of asking him straight out about his life. I should have asked him about what drove him, what angered him or misled him, how he handled his inner conflicts, what lessons he had derived from the mistakes he had made. If we were as similar in temperament as we were made out to be, I might have benefited from his hindsight and his advice. But I never put any of these questions to him.”

— Samanth Subramanian, in Aeon magazine, on the life of his grandfather, and the questions that remained after his death.

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How a San Francisco Startup Dies

“In meetings on Sand Hill Road, Latour says, nearly everyone expressed enthusiasm for Everpix’s product. But one by one, they turned him down. After two meetings with one well-known firm, a partner sent Latour an email. ‘You guys seem to be a spectacularly talented team and some informal reference checking confirmed that, but everyone here is hung up on the concern over being able to build a >$100M revenue subscription business in photos in this age of free photo tools.’ Said a partner at another firm: ‘The reaction was positive for you as a team but weak in terms of whether a $B business could be built.’

“As time ran out, hopes diminished. ‘It succeeded in every possible way,’ said Jason Eberle, who built the web version of Everpix, ‘except for the only way that matters.’”

Casey Newton, for The Verge, on the life and death of Everpix, a beloved product that failed to stay afloat. Read more on tech.

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An Encounter With a Serial Killer

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“You blink. You look again. You look at other photos. You wonder if you’re being melodramatic, if your memory is faulty. You wonder if people will believe you, or simply think your imagination has run away with you. You wonder if there is a class of neurotic people who make up false accounts of run-ins with serial killers. You realize that to be true to your story and yourself, you can’t let what you are reading create false memories.”

– In Orange Coast Magazine, a former Marine describes what it’s like to come to the realization that he may have met a notorious serial killer many years ago. See also: Vanessa Veselka’s 2012 GQ story about her possible run-in with a serial killer.

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Photo by: Dick Uhne

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Ingenious

Jason Fagone | Ingenious, Crown Publishing Group | November 2013 | 20 minutes (4,972 words)

 

Below is the first chapter from Jason Fagone’s book, Ingenious, about the X Prize Foundation’s $10 million competition to build a car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas. Thanks to Fagone and Crown Publishing for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book here. Read more…

Why Children of Immigrants Often Involuntarily Lose a Language

Photo by: Clever Claire

“First-language loss occurs almost across the board by immigrants’ third generation, Light says. That is, Daniel’s children would most commonly be the ones experiencing this issue, with Daniel as a bilingual father. Factors such as home life, the concentration of an immigrant community and the length of time away from a native-speaking environment determine the rate at which first-language attrition occurs. But Light blames one overriding cause in U.S. immigrant children. ‘The largest factor that I can see is the attitude here of Americans. … They think of [immigrants] maintaining their language and culture as being un-American,’ she says.”

– In The Washington Post, Patrick Marion Bradley writes about how the children of immigrants often lose their parents’ native language once they’ve assimilated to life in the U.S. and in English-only situations in school, and how that affects the way these children communicate with their parents.

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The Vanity Fair Gossip Column That Wasn't

“Senior editor Walter Clemons recruited Truman Capote to write a gossip column for the magazine, which created more turbulence at 350 Madison Avenue—Condé Nast headquarters at the time—and more fodder for the press. ‘Capote finally consented and wrote one,’ Lawson recalls. ‘And at one of the meetings everybody except me said, “Oh, we can’t publish this. It’s just not up to Truman’s quality!” I said, “I think it’s much better than the other stuff that’s coming in.” But it was definitely voted down. He was asked to rewrite a portion of it, which he did. It was still turned down. And then he went right down the street and sold it to Esquire. It’s always been a regret of mine that we did not publish that thing, because we would have had the last significant published report by him.’

“In a Washington Post article timed to coincide with Vanity Fair’s maiden issue, the publicity-mad Capote gleefully laid out his side of the story: ‘I didn’t hear from Mr. Locke for weeks, and then one day this messenger boy shows up at my apartment with my copy, and there are red pencil marks everywhere! You can’t rewrite a stylist. So I just sent it over to Esquire. They don’t touch my copy there. I hope nobody ever attributes Vanity Fair to anybody but Thackeray.’”

From the history of the revived Vanity Fair, which had originally stopped publication in 1936. Read more from Vanity Fair in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Jack Mitchell, Wikimedia Commons

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What It's Like to Be in Solitary Confinement

“I place a stack of 18 postcards in front of me and write on each of them a question that has been on my mind since I left Pelican Bay: ‘Do you think prolonged SHU confinement is torture?’ I send them to prisoners across the state and 14 write back, all with the same answer: ‘yes.’ One tells me he has developed a condition in which he bites down on his back teeth so hard he has loosened them. They write: ‘I am filled with the sensation of drowning each and every day.’ ‘I was housed next door to…guys who have eaten and drank their own body waste and who have thrown their own body waste in the cells that I and others were housed in. I cry.’”

Shane Bauer, for Mother Jones, on solitary confinement in America. Read more on the subject from the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: DieselDemon, Flickr

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Russia's Battle with Alcoholism

“You can still see Russia’s drinking problem everywhere—in its cities and especially in its rural, less populated provinces. A 2011 report from the World Health Organization estimated that Russians were drinking an average of about 4 gallons of pure alcohol per year—about 70 percent more than their American counterparts. In 2009, the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that more than half of all Russians dying between the ages of 15 and 54 were dying from excessive drinking. More than half the children in a typical Russian orphanage, another study found, suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome.”

Leon Neyfakh, in the Boston Globe, explores Russia’s alcoholism epidemic and why Alcoholics Anonymous has failed to take hold in the country. Read more on Russia in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: askthepixel, Flickr

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On Publicly Grieving

“Stories circulate among the 26 of those who, in stabs at empathy, have said entirely the wrong thing: ‘Move on,’ or ‘This too shall pass,’ or ‘Will you hug me for me?’ The rest of the town, even those very close to the grieving, find themselves on eggshells, constantly worried they’ll misspeak, or misstep. Nelba Márquez-Greene can feel how much other people in town want her to be better. ‘We are the face of every parent’s nightmare,’ she says. But nothing makes her feel better. ‘I feel terrible, and I’m giving myself permission to say I feel terrible.’ She is a tiny, neat person, with a dispassionate way of talking, and is working for Sandy Hook Promise now, busily giving keynote speeches and a TED talk, but the idea that her work life might console her, or ease her pain, is laughable. It’s as if, she tells me evenly, you needed a liver transplant and someone came up and gave you a heart.”

Lisa Miller, New York magazine, on the grieving families in Newtown, 11 months later—and the complications that have arisen from the money and sympathy that poured in from around the world.

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Photo: billmorrow, Flickr

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On Early Puberty

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“I stepped out of the bathroom, walked over to my mom, and placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Mom, I have something to tell you.’ I paused, letting the world slow down for one last moment. ‘I’m hemorrhaging.’

“She didn’t burst into tears, faint, or tear at her hair. She snorted. I was aghast. How could my mother respond so casually to the news of my mortality? When she stopped laughing, she turned to me and said, without preamble: ‘It’s your period.’”

Natasha Gardner, in 5280 Magazine, on early puberty in girls and what happens when they grow up. Read more from 5280 Magazine.

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