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Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 4

Longreads Pick

Here are 10 of our favorite stories right now from Gangrey, The Hairpin, Carrying the Gun, The Washington Post, Slice Magazine, and more.

Author: Mike Dang
Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 3, 2014

‘The Muse Only Shows Up When You Put Your Ass in the Chair’

In my twenties I realized that the muse is a bum. The muse only shows up when you bait her by putting your ass in the chair. She can only be lured to your side by the sound of pounding keys, the smell of paper and ink. At some point (I imagine it was when the telephone company cut off our service) I realized it was time for me to start taking my life and my writing seriously. People who are serious about their work show up to work, day or night. So I started setting myself little goals and deadlines. That helped. When I had a project I was excited about, I was manic. I worked mornings, afternoons, nights—whenever I could steal the time. I became infatuated with my writing, obsessed, in love. Perfection was writing all day in bed until I was spent. When it was going exceptionally well, any time I wasn’t writing I was thinking about writing. It was bliss. Until, of course, it burned out, or blew up sometimes with the same degree of passion with which it had begun. All it took was time and distance, some sleep and a few square meals, and suddenly I couldn’t stand it.

My writing was so tedious, so phony, so wrongheaded and stupid. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with it. I wanted it gone. It was just a reminder of how tedious, phony and wrongheaded and stupid I was. And then I wouldn’t write for weeks and weeks. There is nothing like having a baby to enforce routine. It quickly became clear that the only way I could get time to write was to ask for it. The only way that worked was for other people—my husband, babysitters, friends—to know when I was going to work so there would be someone to care for the baby. I found that when I told people that I was going to write, and then actually did it, they made space for me to do it. (Here I must say that I am married to an extraordinarily generous, supportive man and blessed with great family, friends, and babysitters. Also it should be said that I am not particularly pleasant to live with when I’m not writing.) In order to get that time alone—which I craved and needed—I had to keep writing. So I got into a routine.

Elissa Schappell, author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls, in an interview with Slice.

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Photo: YouTube

‘Yours Lovingly’: A Collection of Stories About Writing Letters

A man writes to a convicted killer. Fan letters to a troubled country star. Letters by parents. Here are five stories about the letters we write to one another.

1. “Please Don’t Stay Long.” (Eva and Mark Raphael, Brick, Winter 2014)

Excerpts from love letters written by a couple in 1928, who corresponded between London and Łódź:

My boy, my darling what two silly children we are, to part willingly and condemn ourselves to this state! How good, that this month has fewer days! You know I forgot about Nora’s birthday on the 23rd. I can’t forgive myself. I am writing to your parents. I did not know the address, till you sent it.

Yours lovingly Eva

2. “How a Convicted Killer Became My Friend.” (Gary Rivlin, Mother Jones, June 4, 2013)

The writer on his friend Tony Davis, a middle-aged man who was convicted of killing a 13-year-old boy when he was 18:

I first met Tony Davis in the early 1990s, when I was a young reporter for an Oakland-based alternative weekly. The city was a hot spot in the nation’s crack epidemic, and turf warfare had sent its homicide rate soaring. I wanted to put a human face on the issue of teens killing teens, which is how I met Tony, who was two years into an 18-to-life sentence for Kevin Reed’s murder. That shooting would become the focus of my 1995 book, Drive-By.

We kept in touch, and somewhere along the way, Tony ceased to be my subject and became my friend. Over the years, we have exchanged probably a couple hundred letters and shared countless phone calls. Inmates sometimes ask him about the white man whose picture is on his cell wall. ‘He’s like the only real best friend that I’ve had in years,’ Tony tells them.

3. “I Was A Love-Letter Ghostwriter.” (Bonnie Downing, The Awl, Jan. 30, 2014)

The writer on working on an art piece called the “Love Letter Project,” in which she ghostwrote love letters for strangers:

I listened until he was finished talking. Then I arranged the sentences he’d spoken on the page. It was more like transcribing than writing.

“I will never in my life not regret that we didn’t work things out. I will never let go. I don’t want to.”

4. “Dear Charlie.” (Joe Hagan, Oxford American, Jan. 7, 2014)

Joe Hagan stumbles onto old fan mail sent to 1970s country-R&B star Charlie Rich. The fans share their most intimate secrets with a musician who had his own troubled life:

Tara’s confession to Charlie Rich, a major country star that year, was among forty-two others I discovered in the home of a woman who produced Rich in the 1960s. Unread for nearly forty years, mixed in with yellowing newspaper clips and old drink coasters from a Las Vegas revue, they were the last known remnants of the Charlie Rich Fan Club. Variously handwritten, typed up, set on stationery and notebook paper, the stash contained the intimate pleas and declarations of fans who sought communion with the star known as “The Silver Fox.”

5. “How I Met My Dead Parents.” (Anya Yurchyshyn, Buzzfeed, April 18, 2013)

The writer gains a new perspective on who her parents were after examining old photos and letters they left behind after they died:

As I worked on my blog, I read these and similar letters again and again, and wondered how the man I thought my father was could have written these words, words that are so romantic that I melt on my mother’s behalf when I read them. How could my father have been the person that I knew, the person I was happy to have dead, and the person in these letters, a person who was articulate, generous, and so, so loving? And how could my mother, who never seemed very happy with him, love him so much in return? Didn’t she know he was a monster?

Photo: Liz West

‘Mango, Mango!’ A Family, a Fruit Stand, and Survival on $4.50 a Day

Longreads Pick

Inside the “informal economy”: A new Longreads Exclusive from Douglas Haynes and Orion magazine.

Source: Orion Magazine
Published: Aug 27, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,391 words)

A Family, a Fruit Stand, and Survival on $4.50 a Day

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Douglas Haynes | Orion | Summer 2014 | 22 minutes (5,391 words)

OrionThis Longreads Exclusive comes from the latest issue of Orion magazinesubscribe to the magazine or donate for more great stories like this.
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Morning

“It’s like this here every day,” Dayani Baldelomar Bustos tells me as her dark eyes scan the packed alley for an opening. People carrying baskets of produce on their heads press against our backs. Read more…

An Abstract Symphony of Flavors

As much as [Hervé] This has spent his career chiselling deductions down to the molecular bone of physical chemistry, he is still entranced by the art involved in making something delicious. He talked volumes, veering between the intricacies of the chemistry of emulsions and the delights of a meal prepared with care and served with love. One moment he was frustrated at French chefs who were slow to embrace his Note By Note ideas—“In France people have to move! It is a pity I introduced molecular gastronomy and it was done in Spain; the French chefs said, we don’t need these gesticulations”—at another he described a dish by a chef friend in Paris, “a very simple dish of endive, chestnuts, rosemary and butter and it was perfect.”

With Note by Note cuisine This is attempting to jump (and to get chefs and the rest of us to jump) from the figurative to the abstract, from Rembrandt to Kandinsky. It shouldn’t matter if a flavour is unrecognisable, This argues, you only have to like it or dislike it. This told me that most people cannot differentiate more than seven chemical compounds in a mouthful. Taste is perceived as a chord. After 30 compounds, the mouthful becomes “a white taste, almost like a white noise. In fact, if you have a wine sauce, like my Wöhler sauce, it can be more pure, it is like a single flute or an orchestra. One is pure, the other is richer and harmonic. In my point of view both are beautiful.” His new continent is vast and relatively unexplored. For some time, technicians in flavour companies that create new syntheses of fruit and citrus compounds for shampoo or soft drinks have been working on “white space” flavours, flavours that did not exist before they were manufactured. This pointed out that Coca-Cola and Schweppes tonic water were probably perfect examples of Note by Note that are happily consumed by millions every day. But the food industry is conservative and their confections tend to be marketed as facsimiles of the familiar—lemon-lime, kiwi-strawberry. This believes he must convince chefs—the ultimate arbiters of taste—before the public can widely embrace Note by Note.

Wendell Steavenson, writing in Prospect Magazine about french chemist and molecular gastronomy pioneer Hervé This.

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Photo: Exploratorium, Flickr

‘Troll Slayer’ Mary Beard on Internet Abuse Against Women and Its Historical Context

In February, Mary Beard, a classics professor at the University of Cambridge, gave a lecture at the British Museum titled “Oh Do Shut Up Dear!” With amiable indignation, she explored the many ways that men have silenced outspoken women since the days of the ancients. Her speech, which was filmed by the BBC, was learned but accessible—a tone that she has regularly displayed on British television, as the host of popular documentaries about Pompeii and Rome. She began her talk with the Odyssey, and what she referred to as the first recorded instance of a man telling a woman that “her voice is not to be heard in public”: Telemachus informing his mother, Penelope, that “speech will be the business of men” and sending her upstairs to her weaving. Beard progressed to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Tereus rapes Philomela and then cuts out her tongue so that she cannot denounce him. Beard alighted on Queen Elizabeth and Sojourner Truth before arriving at Jacqui Oatley, a BBC soccer commentator repeatedly mocked by men who were convinced that a woman couldn’t possibly understand the sport. A columnist for The Spectator, Beard noted, currently runs an annual competition to name the “most stupid woman” to appear on the current-affairs show “Question Time.”

Finally, Beard arrived at the contemporary chorus of Twitter trolls and online commenters. “The more I’ve looked at the details of the threats and the insults that women are on the receiving end of, the more some of them seem to fit into the old patterns of prejudice and assumption that I have been talking about,” she said. “It doesn’t much matter what line of argument you take as a woman. If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it—it’s the fact that you are saying it.”

In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles Beard, who has helped confront the online and Twitter abuse that women face. (Beard’s full lecture is here.)

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Photo: YouTube

Can Time Inc. Save Itself By Becoming the Next Facebook?

When [Joe] Ripp first discussed taking the CEO job with Bewkes, he said that Time Inc. needed to stop thinking of itself as a magazine company. But what exactly Time Inc. will become depends on who is talking. Ripp tells me it will be a significant player in video. (The company has backed the online channel 120 Sports and has rolled out channels for sports, celebrity news, and business.) Ripp also wants to branch into e-commerce, conferences, and events. Pearlstine praises Forbes’s user-generated content model. He supports “native advertising,” the practice of running sponsored content that looks similar to editorial content, and also said his dream acquisition is LinkedIn. M. Scott Havens, a digital executive Ripp hired from Atlantic Media, recently told The Guardian that Time Inc. needs to build “the next Gilt, the next Facebook.”

None of this talk has eased skeptics’ doubts. “What is this company?” one recently departed editor asked me. “They’ve declared print dead and hastened the end of the magazine business. But they don’t have an idea of what the company is instead.” Given the crushing debt load, roughly two and a half times earnings, that has to be serviced somehow, many inside the company anticipate extreme budget cuts. And Ripp’s finance background has triggered speculation that Time Inc. is being gussied up for a sale. “Private equity could drain the cow until there’s nothing left,” speculated another longtime Time Inc. executive.

Ripp shoots down that idea. “I would not come back to a company that would be bled and drained,” he tells me. “I didn’t want any part of that. This company defined my life.”

— Time Inc., the storied company behind publications like People, Sports Illustrated, and its flagship TIME magazine, is searching for new revenue models after the decline of print-ad revenues in recent years. In New York magazine, Gabriel Sherman talked to Time Inc CEO Joe Ripp to assess what the future of the company might look like.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Matter of Time

Longreads Pick

Time Inc., which includes iconic publications like People, Sports Illustrated, and its flagship magazine, TIME, is struggling to become profitable after being spun off from Time Warner.

Published: Aug 24, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,568 words)

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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