Reading List: 21 Outstanding Stories from Women’s Magazines and Websites
Are women’s magazines avoiding “serious journalism”? Guess it all depends on who’s deciding what’s serious.
The New Republic asks that question in a new article, and our biggest problem with this debate (and, to be honest, the term “longform journalism”) is that it can often run everything through a male-skewed filter of what counts as “serious journalism.” We’ve seen serious storytelling in both.
Gagged by Big Ag
Meat industry lobbyists are attempting to push through legislation that would make it difficult for whistle-blowers to report animal abuse at farm facilities. Many states already have so-called ag gag provisions:
“Recognizing that, in the era of smartphones and social media, any worker could easily shoot and distribute damning video, meat producers began pressing for legislation that would outlaw this kind of whistleblowing. Publicly, MowMar pledged to institute a zero-tolerance policy against abuse and even to look into installing video monitoring in its barns. And yet last summer, at the World Pork Expo in Des Moines, MowMar’s co-owner Lynn Becker recommended that each farm hire a spokesperson to ‘get your side of the story out’ and called the release of PETA’s video ‘the 9/11 event of animal care in our industry.’
“As overheated as likening that incident to a terrorist attack may seem, such thinking has become woven into the massive lobbying effort that agribusiness has launched to enact a series of measures known (in a term coined by the New York Times’ Mark Bittman) as ag gag. Though different in scope and details, the laws (enacted in 8 states and introduced in 15 more) are viewed by many as undercutting—and even criminalizing—the exercise of First Amendment rights by investigative reporters and activists, whom the industry accuses of ‘animal and ecological terrorism.'”
The Prism
Our expectations with regard to privacy and secrecy. In 1844, the British government was accused of opening people’s mail. Lepore compares the case to the NSA’s alleged digging into our digital lives:
“The particular technology matters little; the axiom holds. It’s only a feature, though, of a centuries-long historical transformation: the secularization of mystery. A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe. Immortality, in this sense, is a mystery. So is the beginning of life, which is a good illustration of how much that was once mysterious became secret and then became private. Anciently invoked as one of God’s mysteries, the beginning of life was studied, by anatomists, as the ‘secret of generation.’ Finally, citizens, using the language of a constitutional ‘right to privacy,’ defended it against intrusion. Theologically, the beginning of life, the ensoulment of new flesh, remains a mystery. Empirically, uncovering the secret of generation required tools—microscopes, lenses, cameras—that made the creation of life both visible and knowable. Only after it was no longer a mystery, and no longer a secret, only after it was no longer invisible, did it become private. By then, it was too late: contraception was already in the hands of the state.”
Reading List: Where the Witty Things Are
Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.
Share your favorite stories in the comments.
Promises of an Unwed Father
His pregnant girlfriend’s father had abandoned her and her mother when she was young, and the writer is determined to prove to them that he’ll be a different kind of man and father:
“When Kenyatta was 2, her father walked out on his family. He never returned, but his ghost walks with Kenyatta and Camille, dredging up ancient issues of trust between black men and women. And so for their mutual protection, Camille has forged a secret pact with her daughter—it’s the two of them against the world. Nobody, especially not a man, can save them.
“I want to believe that I’ve given both Camille and Kenyatta reason to think differently about me. I don’t close down the clubs or run the streets. I have a passion for cooking and reading, which makes me a natural homebody. Most important, I love Kenyatta. And I also feel bound by her pain. Her father’s sin of abandonment, so common among black men, feels like some sort of burdensome family debt. On my honor, I’ll have that debt paid. But I want to do it as I see fit—without fanfare and pomp, without grandiose titles and pronouncements, without marriage.”
The Making of a Mole
Homeland Security agent Jovana Deas was a rising star at her agency, “an exemplary example to her peers,” according to supervisors. She was also doing favors for family members with ties to the Sinaloa drug cartel:
“Agents are allowed to search for people in the government database only when it’s relevant to an assignment. They’re suspended if caught using the system for their own, extracurricular purposes. Each search is recorded electronically, so misuse of the system rarely goes undetected. Jovana knew the rules — she was her office’s database security officer — but she had no interest in following them. She looked up her father, Antonio. She looked up Uncle Oscar’s granddaughters, who had been arrested for carrying marijuana across the border. She used the database when she needed to confirm a relative’s birthday to buy a plane ticket so that she and her daughter could fly to Los Angeles for a special procedure at Shriners Hospital. Family was more important to her than DHS’ arbitrary rules. Jovana had an ethical flexibility informed, perhaps, by growing up in her father’s household; she seemed to believe that abusing the system was an unmentioned perk of the job. When Dana planned a trip into Arizona with a new boyfriend, Jovana checked that he wasn’t on a government watch list — she didn’t want Dana to be stopped at the port. Jovana was subtly protective of Dana — the perfect younger sister, allowing Dana to maintain the illusion of power.”
A Closed Letter to Myself About Thievery, Heckling and Rape Jokes
The comedian reflects on how we rationalize the decisions we make in our life—from stealing other people’s material to defending rape jokes:
“Well, I stole a joke. Not consciously. I heard something I found hilarious, mis-remembered it as an inspiration of my own, and then said it onstage. And got big laughs.
“Here it is: ‘Whenever I’m sitting on a bus, and someone asks me if the seat next to me is free, I have an answer that guarantees no one will want that seat. I look up and smile and say, “No one but…The Lord.”‘
“Huge laugh on that one. Pow! Bigger than anything else in my set at the time, that’s for sure.
“I came off stage and Blaine Capatch, a comedian friend of mine who’s a never-miss machine gun in terms of quantity and quality when it comes to jokes, took me aside and said, ‘That’s a Carol Leifer joke, man.'”
Longreads Member Exclusive: The Skies Belong to Us (Chapter 5), by Brendan I. Koerner
This week’s Member Pick is a chapter from Brendan I. Koerner‘s new book The Skies Belong to Us, the story of Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who in 1972 hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 headed from Los Angeles to Seattle. Koerner, a contributing editor for Wired who’s been featured on Longreads in the past, explains:
Dragon Ladies
The writer reflects on the difficult relationship between her grandmother and mother, and how it has shaped her relationship with her mother:
“No wonder I’ve preferred not to think too much about what my grandmother and I share, but listening to all those eulogies, and spending three days with my mother in a tiny Swiss hotel room, I had to. She was Eurasian; I’m Eurasian. She was a writer; I’m a writer. In one of her memoirs, published when I was twelve, she writes, ‘Karen is so very much like me in some ways that it is almost unbelievable.’ What could she possibly have observed in pre-teen me to allow her to make that claim? Since her death, it’s occurred to me that those aspects of a mixed-race identity — her protean nature, her desire to control information and the narratives made from it — that served her have served me, and may have enabled the least appealing parts of ourselves. Turns out it’s not just my grandmother who deserves my ambivalence.”
“Weaponize the Media”: An Anonymous Rapper’s War on Steubenville
The story of the man who led the Anonymous campaign against the Steubenville rapists:
“As KYAnonymous, Lostutter had already won some renown for KnightSec by attacking revenge-porn king Hunter Moore and helping shut down a Westboro Baptist Church protest. But the decision to take on the Steubenville case unleashed more powerful forces than he had ever encountered before: international outrage, legions of vigilante followers, and a glaring media spotlight.
“It was KnightSec that would obtain the video of a Steubenville teen joking about the rape, turning an alcohol-blurred local crime into a visual that cable news could loop like disaster footage, crystallizing public opinion against the offenders. It was also KnightSec that helped create a toxically false, conspiratorial dossier on innocent parties surrounding the case.”
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