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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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This Is Living

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Charles D’Ambrosio  | Loitering | November 2014 | 25 minutes (5,836 words)

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Loitering: New & Collected EssaysFor our latest Longreads Exclusive, we are delighted to share “This Is Living,” an essay from Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering: New & Collected Essays, published by Tin House. Subscribe to Tin House and check out their book titles. Buy the book

I was seven and had a leather purse full of silver dollars, both of which, the purse and the coins, I considered valuable. I wanted them stored in the bank. At the time, the bank had an imposing landmark status in my map of the world, in part because it shared the same red brick as the public school, the two most substantial buildings in our town. As a Catholic school kid I did a lot of fundraising in the form of selling candy bars, Christmas stamps and fruitcakes, and my favorite spot for doing business was outside the bank, on Friday afternoons, because that was payday. Working men came to deposit their checks and left the bank with a little cash for the weekend. Today, that ritual is nearly gone, its rhythms broken, except for people on welfare, who still visit banks and pack into lines, waiting for tellers, the first of every month. But back then I’d set my box of candy on the sidewalk and greet customers, holding the door for them like a bellhop. Friends of mine with an entirely different outlook on life tried to sell their candy at the grocery store, but I figured that outside the supermarket people might lie or make excuses, claiming to be broke; but not here, not at the bank, for reasons that seemed obvious to me: this was the headquarters of money. Most of the men were feeling flush and optimistic, flush because they were getting paid and would soon have money in their pockets, optimistic because the workweek was over and they could forget what they had done for the money. On their way in I’d ask if they wanted to buy a candy bar and they’d dip a nod and smile and say with a jaunty promissory confidence that I should catch them on the way out. And I did. I sold candy bars like a fiend. Year after year, I won the plastic Virgin Marys and Crucifixes and laminated holy cards that were given away as gifts to the most enterprising sales-kids at school. I liked the whole arrangement. On those Friday afternoons and early evenings, I always dressed in my salt-and-pepper corduroy pants and saddle shoes and green cardigan, a school uniform that I believed made me as recognizable to the world as a priest in his soutane, and I remember feeling righteous, an acolyte doing God’s work, or the Church’s. Money touched everyone in town, quaintly humanizing them, and I enjoyed standing outside the bank, at the center of civic life. This was my early education into the idea of money. Read more…

How to Fake a Medieval Fresco in Third Reich Germany

Down in the schwahl, Malskat and the Feys set to work, attempting to reclaim history by scraping away the paint with which Olbers had tried to recapture the past. But subtracting what their predecessor had done—whether on account of Olbers’ pigments or the Feys’ incompetence—left almost none of the original paint. A nearly 700-year-old national treasure had vanished, and Ernst Fey was legally responsible for the disappearance.

Most likely Fey was the one to think of a fix. Unquestionably Malskat was the one who achieved it. Over the next several months, the erstwhile housepainter whitewashed the brick, discoloring his lime with pigment to give the walls an ancient tint. Onto this fresh surface he painted freehand his own version of the murals. Necessarily these were based on Olbers’ 19th-century restorations, reverse engineered to approximate the early medieval originals by reference to period examples in the professor’s catalogues. Drawing his figures in earth tones, Malskat took up the spare 14th-century style with preternatural ease and an utter lack of inhibition. He rendered his father as a prophet, and gave Christ the face of an old classmate. For the Virgin Mary, he had to look farther afield to find a suitable model, choosing a woman already widely worshipped—the Austrian movie star Hansi Knoteck. (Apparently 20th century art forgers had a thing for actresses. For the Dutch forger Han van Meegeren, it was Greta Garbo.) Ernst Fey then aged the contour drawings using a procedure he called zurückpatinieren—a fancy word for rubbing them with a brick.

Jonathon Keats writing in Art & Antiques Magazine about how Lothar Malskat crossed the line between art restoration and forgery in a bombed-out church in wartime Germany.

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When Mary Martin Was the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up

Ben Yagoda | Longreads | December 2014 | 12 minutes (3,094 words)

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One day early in 1954, Mary Martin and her husband, Richard Halliday, were driving on the Merritt Parkway, near their home in Norwalk, Connecticut. On the car radio came Frank Sinatra’s new hit, “Young at Heart.” It was perfect! That is, the song had the exact sentiment and feel they wanted for the pet project they’d long been planning, a musical version of J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan (original subtitle: “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up”). Right on the spot, they decided they’d hire whoever had written the song to compose the score for their production.

It turned out that the words were by a young New Yorker, Carolyn Leigh, and the music by the veteran West Coast jazzman Johnny Richards. The next morning the phone rang in Leigh’s apartment, and a man who identified himself as Richard Halliday said that he and Martin wanted her to write the lyrics for Peter Pan. “Naturally, I thought somebody was kidding,” Leigh told a reporter. “That sort of thing just doesn’t happen. So I arranged to call him back at his office, and I did and it was him all right.”

Leigh told Halliday she had a new partner, a young composer named Morris “Moose” Charlap, and in short order the two had a meeting with Martin, Halliday, and Jerome Robbins, who was to direct and choreograph the show. Leigh, who at that point had only seen one musical in her life, recounted years later, “I remember singing a line to Jerry, ‘If I can live a life of crime, and still be home by dinnertime,’ and we got a nod of approval from him.”

She and Charlap went on to write the score (with a little help from some songwriting veterans), and on October 20, 1954, Peter Pan—with Martin as Peter—opened on Broadway to enraptured audiences and rave reviews. Several months later, NBC broadcast the production live on television. It was an even bigger sensation, attracting 65 million viewers—still the fourth biggest audience of all time for a scripted TV show. Read more…

What Lurks in the Dark Corners

The mothers don’t know where I am. I see them occasionally turning in circles, looking for me. They lean their heads close together and talk behind their hands, and I know they are wondering. But like I always tell them, they won’t see me. If they do, it’s because something happened.

“What would happen?” they always ask, and “Monsters,” I tell them.

It’s strange that they don’t believe in monsters, don’t believe anything will happen to their children, and yet they hire me anyway. It’s something my grandfather figured out long ago, when he started this company, and it’s held true since.

From my hidden spot I see one of the kids—a girl, long black hair lifting in the breeze— inching closer to the creek. I’m not paid to keep them from falling into creeks, but I tense anyway. I raise the rifle and scan the treeline along the creek bank, even though I know I won’t see anything until they begin to move—monsters hide too well. They can hide in plain sight, where you can even see them and not know they are near. Until it’s too late, of course.

– You’ll hug your loved ones a little closer after reading Paul Crenshaw’s eerie story about the dissolution of a man who hunts monsters. Finish reading “Monster Corps” at Story Magazine.

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Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

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Sci-Fi Is for Everyone: Six Stories About Marginalized Groups in Science Fiction

Genre literature has power. Mainstream science fiction, historically, has a representation problem. (Why are there no black people in the future? Or, better yet, why is there only one black person in the future?! Did LGBTQ people disappear, too?) Where does that leave us? When I see a white-dominated cast in a sci-fi movie, or read a novel laced with not-so-subtle homophobia, it’s hard for me to believe that our imaginations cannot see beyond the basic power structures influencing our lives today and create something new. That’s why I’m intrigued by African sci-fi and Afrofuturism. I’ve included essays about women in sci-fi, as well as queer representation in the genre, because it’s a thrill to see traditionally marginalized groups take on a genre that has so much to offer them. Sci-fi should be for everyone.

1. “Women Rise in Sci Fi (Again).” (Rose Eveleth, The Atlantic, November 2014)

Women have been writing sci-fi for hundreds of years. Maybe you haven’t been paying attention.

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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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Interview: Former ‘Matilda’ Star Mara Wilson on Leaving Hollywood and Becoming a Writer

Adele Oliveira | Longreads | Nov. 2014 | 15 minutes (3,798 words)

In 1994, when she was seven years old, Mara Wilson appeared on The Today Show with Katie Couric to promote a remake of Miracle on 34th Street, in which she starred.

Right away, it’s easy to see why Wilson, who’s also known for her work in Mrs. Doubtfire and Matilda, is a successful and endearing child actor. She wears a red-checked gingham shirt underneath a wooly red cardigan, and her feet stick straight off the armchair on which she sits, too short to reach the ground. Wilson is missing teeth, and despite lisping, her diction is perfect and she’s polite and sincere with Couric, who mispronounces Wilson’s first name. Couric asks Wilson if she’d like to be like Natalie Wood someday—Wood played Wilson’s role in the original 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street. Wood started acting as a child, and in Couric’s words, grew up to be “a very famous, well-known, talented actress.”

Wilson hesitates, and you can see her thinking as she wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know,” she shrugs. “I might not want to be an actress all of my life.” Wilson says she wants to be a “script writer” and that while she hasn’t yet written down any of her stories, “I have a lot of them in my head.”

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The Meaning We Put Behind Our Passwords

Perhaps my biggest surprise has been how willing, eager actually, people are to openly discuss their keepsakes. The friends I queried forwarded my request, and before long I started receiving passwords from complete strangers. There was the former prisoner whose password includes what used to be his inmate identification number (“a reminder not to go back”); the fallen-away Catholic whose passwords incorporate the Virgin Mary (“it’s secretly calming”); the childless 45-year-old whose password is the name of the baby boy she lost in utero (“my way of trying to keep him alive, I guess”).

Sometimes the passwords were playful. Several people said they used “incorrect” for theirs so that when they forgot it, the software automatically prompted them with the right one (“your password is incorrect”). Nicole Perlroth, The New York Times’s cybersecurity reporter, told me about the awkward conversation she had not long ago, when, locked out of her account, she was asked by the newspaper’s tech-support staff to disclose her password: a three-digit code plus an unpublishable epithet — a reference to a funny exchange she overheard years earlier between a store clerk and a thief.

— Ian Urbina, in the New York Times Magazine, on how we instill meaning into the passwords we create.

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