Search Results for: New York Magazine

The Politics of Poetry

David Orr | Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry | HarperCollins | 2011 | 18 minutes (4,527 words)

The essay below is excerpted from David Orr’s 2011 book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. Orr writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and an earlier version of this essay appeared in Poetry Magazine. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Caroline Whiting

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Grimes and the Changing Face of the Music Industry

In the newest issue of The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote about Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, whose history in underground experimental music led her to making homemade electronic bedroom pop. Last year, Pitchfork named her song “Oblivion” the best song of the decade to date, and as she’s preparing to release her second proper album, she and artists like Lana Del Rey are redefining what pop music and independent musicians are.

Boucher has a hard time censoring herself in interviews, or on social media, which means that she provides a steady stream of content for music Web sites, whose readers love to express their sharply differing opinions of her. “I feel like if I read about myself from the media I would hate me,” she says. “I’d be, like, ‘Fuck that bitch!’ ” Online, she has shared not only her enthusiasms but also her frustration with the music industry, where “women feel pressured to act like strippers and its ok to make rape threats but its not ok to say your a feminist.” Her outspokenness has helped to make her something of a role model. Musicians are now expected to advertise their political beliefs, but Boucher is unusually thoughtful and passionate about social injustice and environmental degradation. (She travels with a canteen, and has essentially banned plastic water bottles from her tour bus.) One particularly trenchant Tumblr post, from 2013, earned a vigorous endorsement from Spin, under the headline “GRIMES’ ANTI-SEXISM MANIFESTO IS REQUIRED READING (EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT A FAN).” That last phrase hints at what is, for Boucher, a disquieting possibility: that her online presence might be even more popular, and more influential, than her music.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photograph by Will Mebane for The New Yorker

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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‘We Value Experience’: Can a Secret Society Become a Business?

Absolute Discretion
Photo by Bill Gies

Rick Paulas | Longreads | September 2015 | 31 minutes (7,584 words)

 

The bespectacled man with short-cropped hair stood up.

“Can I ask a question!” the man shouted, vocal cords straining. The audience turned. They were all members of The Latitude, a secret society based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more…

Reality TV and the Rise of Celebrity-CEOs

Sometimes it seems like everyone’s selling something. They’re selling their jewelry. They’re selling their book, selling their snack line, their natural cosmetics, their Etsy shop and blog and, ultimately, themselves. In The New Yorker‘s 2015 Style Issue, Lizzie Widdicombe writes about Bethenny Frankel, who turned her slot on The Real Housewives of New York City into an opportunity to sell her cocktail brand for $120 million dollars. Widdicombe examines Frankel and other “celebreneurs” who leverage visibility and idolatry to build their own commercial empire.

Frankel’s twin vocations are, in some sense, the same. “I’m a marketer,” she told me, explaining her role in business and in television. “I know how to communicate to people, and I think that’s what marketing really is.” It’s also an apt definition of celebrity. In 1944, the German sociologist Leo Löwenthal coined the phrase “idols of consumption” to describe the burgeoning celebrity culture. With their clear skin and fabulous wardrobes, stars give us something to aspire to─and an excuse to buy stuff we don’t really need.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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How Michael Cunningham Writes About the Pains, Pleasures, and Psychedelia of Childhood

Michael Cunningham’s short story “White Angel” (The New Yorker; paywalled) is a vibrant masterpiece in miniature about two young brothers in suburban Cleveland pursuing the promises and pleasures of the sixties. Told through the eyes of 9-year-old Robert, the story travels an elegant curve – from the wonder, joy, and power imbalance of the brothers’ collusion, to a crashing and tragic denouement – that is at once funny, insightful, and utterly heartbreaking. “White Angel” was originally published in The New Yorker in 1988, and later became a key chapter in Cunningham’s novel A Home at the End of the World (1990):

Here is Carlton several months before his death, in an hour so alive with snow that earth and sky are identically white. He labors among the markers and I run after, stung by snow, following the light of his red knitted cap. Carlton’s hair is pulled back into a ponytail, neat and economical, a perfect pinecone of hair. He is thrifty, in his way.

We have taken hits of acid with our breakfast juice. Or rather, Carlton has taken a hit and I, considering my youth, have been allowed half. This acid is called windowpane. It is for clarity of vision, as Vicks is for decongestion of the nose. Our parents are at work, earning the daily bread. We have come out into the cold so that the house, when we reenter it, will shock us with its warmth and righteousness. Carlton believes in shocks.

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‘Writing Is Selection’: John McPhee on the Art of Omission

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got.

-John McPhee, writing in the The New Yorker, on the art of “greening,” or whittling down your writing, and deciding what to leave out.

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The Walkable Multiverse According to Charles Jencks

Alina Simone | Atlas Obscura | September 2015 | 23 minutes (5,747 words)

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Alina Simone, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura. Read more…