Search Results for: New York Times

The Mysteries and Truths of Illness: A Reading List

Photo: NVinacco

In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work.” What happens when that long work is disrupted, when an irregularity appears? What if the irregularity is chronic, terminal, fatal? Here, I’ve collected 10 stories about authors reckoning with illnesses—some without cause or cure. Read more…

Cod Roe Paste: It Ain’t Popular Here, Boo Boo

Cecilia Sajland, marketing manager for Kalles, said, “We wanted to show other nationalities’ incomprehension when it comes to very Swedish tastes like Kalles,” adding, “We wanted Swedes to feel unique and proud of the brand and the taste.”

The recipe for Kalles was sold by a peddler to Abba Seafood, a defunct Swedish company, in the early 1950s, for 1,000 Swedish kronor, or less than $200 at the time. It was originally sold in plain tubes, according to an account on Orkla’s website. But the tubes were soon made over to feature Swedish colors — blue and yellow — and a picture of the son of the chief executive of Abba Seafood. The son, now grown up, receives a free lifetime supply.

Danny Hakim writing in The New York Times about the cheeky ad campaign for Kalles Kaviar, the popular Scandinavian pink goo you squeeze from a tube onto crackers and bread.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Liz West

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

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Pirates on the ‘Postmodern Ocean’ Are Getting More Professional

Piracy and armed robbery at sea are on the rise, according to Deutsche Welle, which noted “the increasing professionalism of the pirates” in a recent report focused on Southeast Asia. “The Outlaw Ocean,” Ian Urbina’s ongoing New York Times series chronicling lawlessness at sea, says many merchant vessels have been hiring private security as protection. William Langewiesche captured pirates’ sophistication in his 2003 story for The Atlantic, “Anarchy at Sea,” part of his coverage that led to his 2004 book The Outlaw Sea:

The pirates involved are ambitious and well organized, and should be distinguished from the larger number of petty opportunists whose presence has always afflicted remote ports and coastlines. The new pirates have emerged on a postmodern ocean where identities have been mixed and blurred, and the rules of nationality have been subverted. Scornful of boundaries, they are organized into multi-ethnic gangs that communicate by satellite and cell phone, and are capable of cynically appraising competing jurisdictions and laws. They choose their targets patiently, and then assemble, strike, and dissipate. They have been known to carry heavy weapons, including shoulder-launched missiles, but they are not determined aggressors, and will back off from stiff resistance, regroup, and find another way. Usually they succeed with only guns and knives. Box cutters would probably serve them just as well. Their goal in general is to hijack entire ships: they kill or maroon the crews, sell the cargoes, and in the most elaborate schemes turn the hijacked vessels into “phantoms,” which pose as legitimate ships, pick up new cargoes, and disappear.

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Love, Identity, and Genderqueer Family Making

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,137 words)

Published to great acclaim earlier this year, The Argonauts blends memoir and critical theory to explore the meaning and limitations of language, love, and gender. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making. 

A note: In the print edition of The Argonauts, attributions for otherwise unattributed text appear in the margins in grayscale. We’ve tried to recreate those marginal citations here. However, due to the limitations of digital formatting, if you are viewing this excerpt on a mobile device the citations may appear directly above the quotations, as opposed to alongside them.

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October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark of the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles, as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.

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The First Five Chapters of ‘Saint Mazie’ by Jami Attenberg

UK website The Pool has an excerpt of Saint Mazie, the much-lauded new novel by Jami Attenberg, author of the New York Times Bestselling The Middlesteins. They’ve got not just one chapter, but the first five from this book of historical fiction about legendary “Queen of the Bowery” Mazie Phillips—an irreverent but kind figure known for handing out money and advice to men on the skids in Jazz Age New York City, and who was profiled by Joseph Mitchell in the December 21, 1940 issue of The New Yorker (see his collection, Up in the Old Hotel):

Mazie’s Diary, January 4, 1918
I wasn’t ready to go home yet but there was nobody left in the bar worth talking to. Talked to a bum on the street instead, an old fella. We split whatever was in his bottle and I gave him a smoke. I was feeling tough. I asked him how long he’d been on the streets.
He said: Longer than you’ve been alive, girlie. You gotta be tough to last that long.
He beat his chest.
I said: I could survive out here.
He said: You don’t want to try.
I said: I could do it. You wanna see me?
He said: You got a home, you’re lucky.
I said: Why don’t I feel that way?
Then he got gentle with me.
He said: If someone loves you, go home to them.
A bad wind blew in and I grew suddenly, terribly cold. I couldn’t bear the night for another minute. I handed him the rest of my smokes and wandered home.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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Gravity

"Views of a Foetus in the Womb" (c. 1510 - 1512), drawing by Leonardo da Vinci.

Elizabeth Bachner | Hip Mama | June 2015 |  8 minutes (1,874 words)

 

This essay, recommended by Longreads contributor Maud Newton, is by the writer Elizabeth Bachner and appears in the current issue of Hip Mama magazine. The first issue of Hip Mama was published in December, 1993, by the founding editor, Ariel Gore, as a multicultural forum for radical mothers. Our thanks to Elizabeth Bachner and Hip Mama Magazine for allowing us to reprint this essay here. Read more…

Another Supreme Court Death Penalty Ruling, Issued 43 Years Ago Today

Executions in the United States from 1930 to 2009. Graph via Wikimedia Commons

In a headline-making decision issued earlier today, the Supreme Court ruled against three Oklahoma death row inmates in Glossip v. Gross, upholding the use of a sedative called midazolam for lethal injections. Interestingly, Glossip v. Gross isn’t the first time the court has issued a major death penalty decision on June 29.

43 years ago today, the Supreme Court issued another 5-to-4 death penalty opinion, albeit one with very different results: 1972’s Furman v. Georgia ruling found a number of death penalty statutes to be unconstitutional, effectively halting executions in America for four years. Some context on the landmark case, from a 2013 New York Times article by David Oshinsky:

Furman v. Georgia is among the oddest Supreme Court cases in American history. Decided in 1972, it struck down every death penalty statute in the nation as then practiced without outlawing the death penalty itself. The ruling, based on the constitutional protection against “cruel and unusual punishment,” stunned even the closest court watchers. The death penalty seemed impregnable. It was part of the bedrock of America’s legal system, steeped in the intent of the founders, the will of most state legislatures and the forceful — if occasional — rulings of the courts.

The 5-4 vote in Furman reflected a striking political split: all five members of the majority were holdovers from the Warren Court, known for its liberal decisions, while all four dissenters were recent appointees of Richard Nixon, who had won the White House with a carefully orchestrated law-and-order campaign. And notably, each justice wrote his own opinion in Furman, meaning there was no common thread to the case, no controlling rationale. The decision ran to several hundred pages, the longest handed down by the court at the time.

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More on the death penalty from the Longreads Archive

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Interior of the United States Supreme Court. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle 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…