Search Results for: New York Times

Why Do We Judge Virgins?

Jessica Gross | Longreads | August 2015 | 14 minutes (3,532 words)

 

Rachel Hills’ first book, The Sex Myth, presents a radical deconstruction of our cultural narratives about sex. Hills, an Australian journalist and blogger who lives in New York, argues that we have imbued sex with undue meaning, treating it as one of the most important markers of our identities. This overemphasis, she writes, is the root of both our fear of sex as a dangerous force and our lionization of it as a vital act. Moreover—and this is the part I found most revelatory—Hills describes how we have moved from decrying promiscuity as dirty to treating sex as a source and symbol of liberation to, now, upholding sexual adventurousness as the ultimate good. Being promiscuous and adventurous in bed, she argues, has transformed from being an option to an obligation. Conversely, having vanilla tastes, or a seemingly less-than-exciting sex life, has come to be regarded as a badge of shame. Hills’ wish: that we treat all sexual appetites and practices (including not having sex) as legitimate and, further, that we deemphasize sex’s role in our self-definition.

Hills and I—who work in the same writers’ co-working space in downtown Manhattan—wandered to Washington Square Park on a hot afternoon in June. We discussed her writing process, delved into the theory of her book, and talked about grade school crushes.

This book was seven years in the making. Could you start by telling me how the idea first came to you, and whether it then took a while to get the guts to pursue it as a project?

When I was 24, I was walking home from a party with a friend one night in Sydney, having a casual conversation. My friend is a very outspoken, forthright person, so she just turns to me and says in this kind of outraged-at-herself way, “Rachel, can you believe that next month it’ll be two years since I’ve had sex and one year since I’ve kissed anyone?”

I think I tried to play it cool at the time, but it was a revolutionary moment for me. I had, to some extent, bought into this idea that we have about people in their twenties, and single people, and the kinds of sex lives that they have. Even though my sex life was very barren—nothing to write home about, or to write about in a book—I assumed that most other people I knew had sex lives that were very different. So the fact that this girl, who I considered to be really cool, was admitting she had a sex life that did not fit our culture’s idea of what cool is, was really interesting to me and unexpected. Read more…

Bona-Fide Celebrities: Nikki Finke on the Late ’80s ‘Literary Brat Pack’

Cover image from Bright Lights, Big City via jaymcinerney.com

In 1987, a young Nikki Finke profiled the “Literary Brat Pack” (choice Brat Pack members included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, of Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City fame, respectively) for The Los Angeles Times. Read more…

Olive Oil Trouble

Olive-oil fraud was already common in antiquity. Galen tells of unscrupulous oil merchants who mixed high-quality olive oil with cheaper substances like lard, and Apicius provides a recipe for turning cheap Spanish oil into prized oil from Istria using minced herbs and roots. The Greeks and the Romans used olive oil as food, soap, lotion, fuel for lamps and furnaces, a base for perfumes, and a cure for heart ailments, stomach aches, hair loss, and excessive perspiration. They also considered it a sacred substance; cult statues, like the effigy of Zeus at Olympia, were rubbed regularly with oil. People who bathed or exercised in Greek gymnasiums anointed their bodies as well, using oils that were scented with pressed flowers and roots. Some scholars link the central place of olive oil in Greek sports, which were performed in the nude, with the rise of bronze statuary in the sixth century B.C. “A tanned athlete, shining in the summer sun, covered with oil, would really resemble a statue of the gods,” Nigel Kennell, a specialist in ancient history at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, said. Belief in the sacred, health-giving properties of olive oil continued in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. “Christ” is from the Greek christos, meaning “the anointed one”—anointed with olive oil.

—From “Slippery Business,” Tom Mueller’s 2007 story for the New Yorker about olive oil fraud. The recent spike in olive oil prices due to a disease in Italy nicknamed “olive ebola” and drought in Spain could spur more fraud: “When prices are high and supplies reduced, there is more incentive for fraud and for criminals to get involved,” a lawyer who specializes in food told the Financial Times last month.

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E.L. Doctorow: 1931-2015

INTERVIEWER

Isn’t there an enormous temptation as a fiction writer to take scenes out of history, since you do rely on that so much, and fiddle with them just a little bit?

DOCTOROW

Well, it’s nothing new, you know. I myself like the way Shakespeare fiddles with history; and Tolstoy. In this country we tend to be naive about history. We think it’s Newton’s perfect mechanical universe, out there predictably for everyone to see and set their watches by. But it’s more like curved space, and infinitely compressible and expandable time. It’s constant subatomic chaos. When President Reagan says the Nazi SS were as much victims as the Jews they murdered—wouldn’t you call that fiddling? Or the Japanese educators who’ve been rewriting their textbooks to eliminate the embarrassing facts of their invasion of China, the atrocities they committed in Manchuria in 1937? Orwell told us about this. History is a battlefield. It’s constantly being fought over because the past controls the present. History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. So to be irreverent to myth, to play with it, let in some light and air, to try to combust it back into history, is to risk being seen as someone who distorts truth. I meant it when I said everything in Ragtime is true. It is as true as I could make it. I think my vision of J. P. Morgan, for instance, is more accurate to the soul of that man than his authorized biography … Actually, if you want a confession, Morgan never existed. Morgan, Emma Goldman, Henry Ford, Evelyn Nesbit: all of them are made up. The historical characters in the book are Mother, Father, Tateh, The Little Boy, The Little Girl.

-From George Plimpton’s 1986 conversation with E.L. Doctorow, author of books including Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, The March and Billy Bathgate. Doctorow died Tuesday in New York at age 84.

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What Happens When a Doctor Decides to Battle a Drug Cartel

Cartel Land, the new documentary by director Matthew Heineman in theaters July 3, follows Dr. José Manuel Mireles, a small-town physician known as “El Doctor,” who leads the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel in the state of Michoacán in Mexico. The above clip, exclusive to Longreads, features Mireles attempting to gather volunteers and support from one town.

Things have changed for both the Knights Templar and the vigilantes since the film’s completion. As Heineman told Variety: “Very, very quickly I realized that this story was much more complex and much more gray, that the lines between good and evil were not that clear. I became obsessed with trying to figure out what was really happening, who these guys truly were, where the movement was going, what the endgame was.”

More Stories from Mexico’s Drug War:

1. “The Hunt for El Chapo” (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker 2014)

2. “The Murderers of Mexico” (Alma Guillermoprieto, New York Review of Books 2010)

3. “The Mistress and the Narcotraficante” (Ricardo C. Ainslie, Texas Monthly 2013)

Misty Copeland’s Achievement and the Future of Ballet

“My goal is to become the first African-American principal dancer with A.B.T.”

-That’s Misty Copeland, in a 2014 profile in The New Yorker. She was promoted on June 30, becoming the first African-American female principal dancer in the American Ballet Theater’s 75-year history.

Copeland got her start in ballet when she was 13:

Cantine had a background in classical dance, and, after working with Misty for a short time she suggested that she try the ballet class at the Boys & Girls Club. “I wasn’t excited by the idea of being with people I didn’t know, and though I loved movement, I had no particular feelings about ballet,” Copeland said. “But I didn’t want to displease Liz.”

Cindy Bradley, who taught the class, told me, “I remember putting my hand on her foot, putting it into a tendu pointe, and she was definitely able to go into that position—she was able to go into all the positions that I put her into that day—but it wasn’t about that.” Bradley said she had a kind of vision, “right then, that first day, of this little girl becoming amazing.”

Copeland recalls her first class differently: “I was so embarrassed. I didn’t know anything that the other girls in the class knew; I thought I was doing everything wrong.”

In this segment for CBS, Copeland says the ballet world still has a long way to go in terms of embracing diversity:

“It doesn’t matter what color I am, it doesn’t matter what body type I have. … It’s something that’s going to take the ballet world a long time to get used to, and I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime. But it’s starting.”

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Four Stories About Merle Haggard

Merle Haggard, 1975. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Legendary country singer Merle Haggard died today at 79. Here are four profiles of the master, by four master writers, that follow him through the years.

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Everything You Ever Wanted

Jillian Lauren | Plume | May 2015 | 11 minutes (2,636 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Jillian Lauren’s memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, as recommended by Longreads contributor Sari Botton. Read her interview with Lauren about memoir and family.

* * *

In a one-bedroom apartment in West Orange, New Jersey, late winter 1973, my mother, Helene, is home in the middle of the day, dancing to the Hair soundtrack while cleaning the house, when she gets a call from an old college friend named Jillian. Jillian married a fertility specialist after graduation and lives in Chicago now. My mother called her years before, seeking advice. Helene is on a list for a study in experimental fertility drugs, but the process seems to be dragging on forever. After nearly four years of trying to conceive, her diagnosis is unexplained infertility. Read more…

How to Be Aca-Awesome

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,345 words)

 

After getting her start in the Chicago improv scene, Kay Cannon went on to write for 30 Rock—where she was on staff from the very beginning—and New Girl, for which she was also an executive producer. Her debut screenplay, a quirky a cappella comedy, became the hit film Pitch Perfect. The sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, is in theaters now. Cannon and I spoke by phone about why a cappella is so uncool, the movie’s treatment of weight and race, and Cannon’s feelings about her own teeth.

You first got the idea for this movie while you were at 30 Rock, when someone wrote a line about Toofer having been in an a cappella group in college. You thought it was a complete joke. When you found out that nope, a cappella is real, you thought, someone has to make a movie about this! But what I find really interesting is that you started talking about the general idea of a movie about college a cappella without any specific story or plot in mind yet. I feel like some people would be hesitant to broach such an early-stage idea, even to friends. Is that always how you’ve operated?

Yeah, I kind of put it out into the universe. I’m around a lot of creative people, so you start to talk about ideas, and maybe somebody helps spark something. I actually think this one was kismet for me, because I had said something to Elizabeth Banks, who’s my friend, just in conversation. A long while later, and separate from what I’d said to her, her husband found out about this book, Mickey Rapkin’s Pitch Perfect, and thought it would make a great movie. So when I got the call from them to say, “Hey, would you be interested in writing this?,” it was just such a wonderful collision. Read more…

What Happens When Your Writing Professor Is William Zinsser

The weekly writing assignments—thousand-word limit, a safeguard for Bill’s sanity—required us to try our hands at a wide range of forms: humor, interviewing, travel, science, sports, criticism, editorials. This regimen inevitably yielded the occasional face-first failure, soon to be transmuted by pedagogical alchemy into an edifying failure. At the end of class, Bill would return our papers from the previous week, each illuminated with his editing suggestions and provocative marginalia. I still wince at his dead-on appraisal of my travel piece: “You’ll notice that I stopped marking this halfway through. What you’ve written is interesting only to you.”

In The New Yorker, Mark Singer remembers his former teacher, On Writing Well author William Zinsser, who died in 2015.

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