Search Results for: The Nation

When Corporate Beer Hits Seattle

In Seattle Met, Allecia Vermillion writes about how three friends grew their craft brewery into a Seattle icon, recognized internationally for the quality of its brews, and what happened when the Elysian Brewing Company was acquired by Anheuser-Busch after two decades of proud independence. The reaction in their home city was not kind:

While Elysian’s staff processed the news, word of the deal spread outside the brewery’s walls. The drinking public would spend the coming weeks going through its own range of emotions. Some Seattle bars immediately removed Elysian tap handles. Things got especially rough at the company’s original Capitol Hill brewpub. People called just to yell at the bartender. A server approached a couple to take their order only to have one of them respond, “Why would I want to drink here?” There’s also the story of the guy who purchased a beer from the bar for the sole purpose of pouring it on the floor, leaving a trail behind him as he walked out the front door. Everyone loved pointing out the newfound irony in Elysian’s Loser Pale Ale, conceived as a tribute to Sub Pop Records on its 20th anniversary in 2011; labels bore the tagline “Corporate Beer Still Sucks.”

In Seattle, after all, beer is personal. People who drive Toyotas, text on iPhones, buy Diet Coke at Fred Meyer, and draw paychecks from Amazon swore off Elysian as soon as they heard the news, unable to stomach an IPA now associated with a multinational corporation.

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Stud: How to Have 106 Babies (and Counting)

Longreads Pick

Ed Houben is 46 and has fathered 106 children “of whom two-thirds were made the natural way (i.e., by sexual intercourse) and a third made via artificial insemination.” Women and couples come to him because they haven’t been able to have children on their own, and he offers his services to them for free.

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 1, 2015
Length: 24 minutes (6,000 words)

You’ve Been Singing It All Wrong

A common cause of mondegreens, in particular, is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you’re not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error. In similar fashion, Bohemian Rhapsody becomes Bohemian Rap City. Children might wonder why Olive, the other reindeer, was so mean to Rudolph. And a foreigner might become confused as to why, in this country, we entrust weather reports to meaty urologists or why so many people are black-toast intolerant. Oronyms result in not so much a mangling as an incorrect parsing of sounds when context or prior knowledge is lacking.

Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In their absence, one sound can be mistaken for the other. For instance, in a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. “There’s a bathroom on the right” standing in for “there’s a bad moon on the rise” is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives. (Peter Kay offers an auditory tour of some other misleading gems.)

Maria Konnikova, writing in The New Yorker about the “mondegreen,” or a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your mind, but is actually incorrect. The piece ran in December 2014.

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The Radical Pippi Longstocking

In this 2014 piece for Der Spiegel, Claudia Voigt looks at the life of Astrid Lindgren, a Swedish author best known for her Pippi Longstocking books. If you haven’t revisited the books recently, the exuberant Pippi lives on her own, does as she pleases, and describes herself as “the strongest girl in the world.” In short, she’s a radically independent, fabulously liberated leading lady, particularly for a children’s book published in 1945. But what inspired Lindgren to create such an iconoclastic protagonist?

There has been a great deal of research and academic discussion on what induced Lindgren to develop such a revolutionary and modern children’s book character. [Lindgren’s daughter] Karin Nyman remembers all too well that “there was a permanent sense of fear hanging over all of our lives,” even in Sweden. “The world was gripped by horror, and Pippi was a reaction to it. The stories were a way to oppose it, to give us a chance to come up for air.”

Lindgren was an avid reader. The novel “Hunger” by Knut Hamsun helped her endure the poverty she experienced as a young woman in Stockholm. She later claimed that the novel’s wry humor spurred her to create her radical Pippi character. The author read many children’s books to her children, Karin and Lars, including classics like “Tom Sawyer” and many fairy tales. She would later mention having been familiar with the writing of Alfred Adler, the progressive teaching theories of A.S. Neill and Bertrand Russell’s thoughts on education.

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The Complicated Business of Placemaking in a Place That Already Exists

Longreads Pick

At its peak in 1960, Gary boasted a population of 180,000. Today, there are 100,000 fewer people spread across a city footprint slightly larger than Boston’s, and investment is desperately needed. Can an innovative Chicago artist, armed with a large grant from the Knight Foundation, develop the city into a culinary destination?

Source: Next City
Published: Sep 21, 2015
Length: 16 minutes (4,236 words)

‘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…

The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett

The Thin Man

David Lehman | The American Scholar | Fall 2015 | 19 minutes (4,696 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Exclusive comes from the new issue of The American Scholar. Our thanks to them for sharing this essay with us.

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The Jeopardy category is Opening Lines, and the literary answer is “Two Bars, 52nd Street.” You need to ask what works begin in such venues. One comes to mind quickly enough, but if you have only an out-of-towner’s awareness of New York City and you have not paid close enough attention to W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” you may misread yourself 10 blocks down past Times Square. Read more…

Making More Magazines: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This reading list includes an archived examination of Ms. and an update regarding Tiger Beat; a feminist-food magazine; a defunct magazine for sex workers and their supporters; and a lesbian/queer magazine for denizens of D.C. and beyond.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 20, 2015

Making More Magazines: A Reading List

Photo: Sharon Terry

Last year, Longreads published a list with behind-the-scenes stories about magazines. Last week, Anne Helen Petersen published an article about the state of Tiger Beat for BuzzFeed News. Inspired, I decided to create an addendum to Making the Magazine. This reading list includes bigger names, like an archived examination of Ms. and Petersen’s update regarding Tiger Beat; a feminist-food magazine; a defunct magazine for sex workers and their supporters; and a lesbian/queer magazine for denizens of D.C. and beyond. Read more…

When Your Grandparents Are Intellectuals: A Family’s History Through Books

Shelves containing Communist histories, including Chimen and Henry Collins’s book on Marx. This bookcase was just to the right of the bed. Photo courtesy of Sasha Abramsky and his family.

All of that mid-century Marxist devotional intensity was concentrated in Mimi and Chimen’s bedroom. There were Socialist and Communist books in Russian, German, Yiddish, French, English, Hebrew. There were old pamphlets so yellowed by time that one risked their disintegration simply by touching them. When Chimen and his close friend Henry Collins, who had collaborated on a number of articles about Marx beginning in the early 1950s—they had met through the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party—decided to write their book Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement: Years of the First International, the books and documents in Chimen and Mimi’s bedroom provided the nucleus for their research. It was, as Chimen had always intended it to be, a working library.

—From journalist Sasha Abramsky’s account of his grandparents’ intellectual lives, The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a tour of Chimen and Miriam Abramsky’s massive book collection of Jewish history and socialist literature.

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