Reading List: Mother’s Day
Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.
Share your favorite Mother’s Day stories in the comments.
Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley’s Elite
Inside the offices—and servers—of the video streaming empire:
“On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined. Traffic to Netflix usually peaks at around 10 p.m. in each time zone, at which point a chart of Internet consumption looks like a python that swallowed a cow. By midnight Pacific time, streaming volume falls off dramatically.”
Miami Cold Case Murder Solved With Recovered Memories
Two sisters are helping police track down their father, who abused them and murdered their mother and younger sister in the 1980s:
“DNA analysis quickly confirmed that Gloria’s mother, Nilsa Padilla, was the murder victim known for decades as “Theresa Torso.” Gloria’s father, Jorge Walter Nuñez, instantly became the only suspect. For Miami-Dade police, it was a breakthrough in one of the department’s oldest and most vexing cases. For Gloria, it was salvation.
“‘They thought I was crazy,’ she says of the cops, foster parents, and caseworkers who ridiculed her claims for years. ‘Now they know I’m not.'”
A Mother’s Story: The Moon to His Sun
From the late Marjorie Williams, the story of her own mother’s life and death:
“It was only in secret that she was queen of her own domain. It was the land of late at night, when I would hear her downstairs, moving quietly around her kitchen, straightening a thing or two in the living room, then back to the kitchen. Clink, went her ashtray on the counter, as she stood at the sink to start the dishwasher. Chrhissshh, went her Bic as she lit another Carlton. She sipped from her glass of cranberry juice and soda, which might or might not also contain an illicit jolt of vodka. It was the world of the kitchen, where she made such bounty that you never thought to wonder at the fact that it required her constant removal to a part of the house where she was alone.”
My Brother, My Mother, and a Call Girl
A mother hires a call girl for her son:
My brother Danny lost his virginity at age 25. To a call girl named Monique. Hired by our mother.
My mother didn’t bother asking Danny for his permission before engaging Monique’s services. She didn’t ask my father to condone the transaction. Nor was she troubled by social mores or laws against solicitation. She deserves a Mother of the Year Award.
The Double Life of a Gay Dodger
A 1982 Inside Sports profile of Glenn Burke, one of the first professional athletes to come out. Burke died in 1995:
“Burke walks out to the sunshine of the patio, where there is enough quiet to reflect. ‘People say I should still be playing,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable, so I faded away. My teammates’ wives might have been threatened by a gay man in the locker room. I could have been a superstar but I was too worried about protecting everybody else from knowing. If I thought I could be accepted, I’d be there now. It is the first thing in my life I ever backed down from. No, I’m not disappointed in myself, I’m disappointed in the system. Your sex should be private, and I always kept it that way. Deep inside, I know the Dodgers traded me because I was gay.'”
Longreads Guest Pick: BKLYNR’s Favorite Brooklyn Stories
Thomas Rhiel and Raphael Pope-Sussman are the founding editors of BKLYNR, a new online publication that features in-depth journalism—including more than a few #longreads—about Brooklyn.
Dead Calm
The writer on working for a chemical company and his suspicions that the chemicals were affecting his health:
“The substance in question is quillaia bark. Quillaia bark is stripped from trees in Chile, bound by heavy wire in bundles the size of washing machines, loosely wrapped in coarse burlap, stacked on pallets, and dropped by the truckload at the chemical company’s loading dock. One of my jobs is to help wrestle, by hand and man-powered machine, the hundreds of scratchy, dusty, unwieldy bales out of the cramped, fetid, airless trailers and pile them in a roomy, fetid, airless space inside the plant. This is the kind of unskilled labor for which my arsenal of unskills is ideally suited.”
The Invention of David Bowie
A brief history of the rock legend’s style and fashions:
“Bowie’s image was as carefully contrived for album covers as for the actual musical performances: Sukita Masayoshi’s black-and-white photograph of Bowie posing like a mannequin doll on the cover of ‘Heroes’ (1977), or Bowie stretched out on a blue velvet sofa like a Pre-Raphaelite pinup in a long satin dress designed by Mr. Fish for The Man Who Sold the World (1971), or Guy Peellaert’s lurid drawing of Bowie as a 1920s carnival freak for Diamond Dogs (1974).
“All these images were created by Bowie himself, in collaboration with other artists. He drew his inspiration from anything that happened to catch his fancy: Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin of the 1930s, Hollywood divas of the 1940s, Kabuki theater, William Burroughs, English mummers, Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol, French chansons, Buñuel’s surrealism, and Stanley Kubrick’s movies, especially A Clockwork Orange, whose mixture of high culture, science fiction, and lurking menace suited Bowie to the ground. Artists and filmmakers have often created interesting results by refining popular culture into high art. Bowie did the opposite: he would, as he once explained in an interview, plunder high art and take it down to the street; that was his brand of rock-and-roll theater.”
Longreads Member Exclusive: My Body Stopped Speaking to Me, by Andrew Corsello
For this week’s Member Pick, we’re excited to share “My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” a personal story from GQ writer and National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello about a near-death experience. The piece was first published in GQ in 1995.
You must be logged in to post a comment.