Search Results for: Andrew Rice

Longreads Best of 2019: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2019. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

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Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis

Richard T Nowitz / Getty

Kelli María Korducki | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,786 words)

 

Not long ago, I noticed a woman reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at my Manhattan yoga studio as we both waited for our Ashtanga class to begin. The sight took me aback. Despite the 2018 book’s many weeks as a nonfiction bestseller, I’d somehow never considered that the scope of Peterson’s audience might extend beyond sulky white men who like to outsource their thinking. That it might include women with the disposable income and leisure time to spend their Saturday afternoons doing sun salutations, whose lives probably look a lot like mine.

Peterson, a once-unassuming psychology professor at my Canadian alma mater (I’d never heard of him during the years we were both there), has emerged in the last few years as a puzzling figurehead among men’s rights aficionados and self-help enthusiasts alike. Wielding a trademark pastiche of literary references and cherry-picked sociological data points, his writing and, to a greater extent, public lectures broadcast via YouTube deliver what is, for many in this age of ‘toxic masculinity’ and #MeToo, a reassuring story: that men are natural rulers, white privilege is a farce, and if millennial men would just make their beds and assume their kingdoms, we’d all be better off.

Peterson speaks to a constellation of loosely connected concerns that have, in the last several years, dominated popular discourse on where boys and men fit into a society in which gender norms play less and less of a role in determining how people fit together. Conversations about rape culture and damaging gender constructs take place alongside global reports of female students outperforming their male classmates. We hear of a workforce that, at least in theory, rewards the “soft skills” women are purportedly socialized to possess. Meanwhile names like “Dylann Roof” and “Elliot Rodger” have become shorthand for an epidemic of male isolation and rage. A New York Times story that followed shortly after the deadly February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, included the observation that “about the only thing” nearly all U.S. mass shooters have in common “is that they are men.” Read more…

When It Comes to the Climate Crisis, Don’t Forget the Power of the States

Photo by Juniper Photon, Icons by Greer Mosher

Livia Gershon | Longreads | November 2019 | 7 minutes (1,863 words)

My family’s natural gas-fired furnace is 23 years old. That’s aged; the average lifespan of a system like ours is 15 to 20 years. I live in New Hampshire, which gets awfully cold in the winter and, every October, I wonder whether we’ll make it to March. If the furnace fails this year and we replace it with another one like it, we’re committing to burning fossil fuels until about 2042. If my household switches to electricity, which is better for the environment than what we’ve got, our gas bills will nearly double, to around $2,800 every year. Recently, I called Bill Wenzel, who owns a geothermal heating business the next town over from me.

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Hard Shell Tacos Aren’t As Hardcore Gringo As You Think

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Growing up in Arizona, eating Sonoran-style Mexican food with a family raised on Mexican food, I developed embarrassingly strong opinions, and what I thought of as a discerning palate, by my teen years. Opinion 1: Tex-Mex was trash. Opinion 2: Mission-Style burritos were an affront to all burritos, stuffed with worthless lettuce and rice. Opinion 3: Do not put sunflower seeds or squash blossoms inside my tamales. Opinion 4: Hard shell tacos weren’t true tacos, they were more vertical tostada sandwiches, a Frankenstein abomination that Taco Bell unleashed to give white America something “exotic” to eat without leaving the comfortable confines of its white world. Opinion 5: I was an asshole. Actually, #5 was a fact. I also still stand behind Opinion 2, but as an adult I can see that, like so many teenagers, I hadn’t read much food history. I ate. I opined. I talked out of my behind. Thankfully age has softened my opinions and high self-regard, and I have read what author Gustavo Arellano calls “taco history.” To that history Andrew Fiouzi at MEL Magazine has added an oral history of the hard shell taco that examines its origins, authenticity, and the way fast food appropriated it. Turns out, Taco Bell is still culpable, but hard shell tacos started as authentic Mexican cuisine, though certain details are hazy.

Arellano: Now, if you’re trying to talk about who created the taco shell in terms of mass marketing them, you could make the argument that George Ashley of Absolute Mexican Food did that, because in the late 1930s, way before Glenn Bell or Juvencio Maldonado [the first guy to apply for a patent to do hard shell tacos in mass quantities], he was selling these metal taco molds for making your own taco kits at home.

Pilcher: Of course, the next step was transferring the taco to the taco shell. Glen Bell, who becomes the founder of Taco Bell, claims that he invented this Mexican-American version of a Mexican dish for a fast food audience in the 1950s in San Bernardino, California. But in fact, we have the patent application for various versions of this taco shell that were filed in the 1940s already by Mexican entrepreneurs.

The fact is, my teenage years were fueled as much by Taco Bell tacos as by traditional red chile burros. But Enchiritos? I mourned the day the chain discontinued this weird, enchilada-like Tex-Mex item smothered in cheap red sauce. Nachos? Done right, they were divine, and by “right” I meant anything using shredded cheese instead of that liquid bowling alley cheese gringos pump from a metal drum. I eat Tex-Mex now, but I also know that taste is too subjective to hold over people, and comfort food and trash are universal loves that we must respect. Find your own liquid nacho cheese and claim it. I will: I love hard shell tacos, the kind filled with simmered ground beef, anemic iceburg lettuce, and waxy cheddar cheese. As much as I looked down on them as a snobbish teen and college kid, and as much as I still prefer real street tacos filled with birria, carnitas, and even — snort — pig snout, once in a while I want a shitty, white-as-rice hard shell. 

My wife grew up in parts of the Midwest with fewer authentic Mexican restaurants. She loves hard shell tacos, and her love reminded me how much I used to, too. The first time I went to Chicago, I sought out Chicago dogs and beef sandwiches. On our last day, we found a hot dog place that sold hard shell tacos, and we ordered a bunch of them instead of char-dogs. They were as cheaply made as we like, and it reminded me that I had always loved the tacos dorados that certain Phoenix Mexican restaurants sold, which where often made with corn tortillas and fried whole, individually, and tasted like the fried tacos my parents made, based on a recipe my Granny picked up somewere in southern Arizona. Sorry. I’m going on and on about myself, but what I’m tryin to say is that before I read Fiouzi’s piece, I knew where my culinary snobbery came from, but I didn’t know where hard shell tacos came from, and how they became associated with gringo fast food. Reading this brief piece will inform you as much as make fellow cheap-taco-eaters feel seen, though surely others will feel more justified in their snobbish hatred of the hard shell. We don’t care what those people think.

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Regarding the Interpretation of Others

Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet via Getty Images

Patrick Nathan | Longreads | September 2019 | 30 minutes (8,235 words)


“The only review of Under the Sign of Saturn would be the eighth essay — an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.”

Susan Sontag, journal entry, May 1980


 

1:

Differently, we buy and borrow, and steal, our ongoing educations. American writers tend to forget this, even dissuade it. There is an assumption — general, if not unconscious — that “we” have all read Raymond Carver and Joan Didion, seen Dazed and Confused and The Princess Bride, and exhausted “prestige” television from Lost to Big Little Lies. That these works are canon in a post- or anti-canonical culture highlights the need for inexhaustible and pluralistic inspiration against the deprivation of that need. What’s worse, if you are labeled — black, queer, immigrant, disabled, trans, or a woman — those expectations constrict; the canon tightens. To be a gay writer means one must have read Edmund White and seen Mean Girls; to write as a black woman means one must have read Angela Davis and seen Kara Walker’s silhouettes. What was supposed to liberate our literary sensibilities has reduced us, clinically, to trained specialists. Under this pressure, so carefully curated and categorized, it’s difficult to will one’s own work into being. To learn passively, and ultimately write passively, is the great cultural temptation.

Yes, I have been reading — and reading about — Susan Sontag. There is nothing passive in her legacy. In her combined erudition, ambition, and seriousness, she has few peers, and for several years she has symbolized my aspirations as a writer — the uncompromising rigor with which she approached her essays; her self-proclaimed interest in “everything”; an urgency in dissenting, when ethically necessary, from received opinion; her energy in consuming art constantly; and the esteem, to the end of her life, in which she held literature, above all fiction. Her passion is contagious. Sontag’s narcotic approach to art and experience is, for a provincial writer with little access, renewably invigorating; and because Sontag’s lifetime of work is willed, Nietzscheanly, from her passions, reading about her life is its own invigorating project. In this, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work, at 832 pages, is certainly her legacy’s largest complement. Read more…

The Geography of Risk

AP Photo/The Philadelphia Inquirer, Clem Murray

Gilbert M. Gaul The Geography of Risk | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2019 | 24 minutes (4,833 words)

 

It is the peculiar nature of hurricanes that they are both uncommon and utterly predictable. Depending on an island’s geography, it may have a one-in-ten chance of being hit, or a one-in-a-thousand chance. Those are only odds, of course, but they are important because hurricanes are best understood as numbers and probabilities. Some areas are simply more vulnerable than others — Southeast Florida, Puerto Rico, the Florida Panhandle, and the Gulf states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. While you may reassure yourself that you have only a one-in-a-hundred chance of being leveled by a devastating storm in a given year, it’s highly likely that there will be a hurricane in one of these geographies, and someone’s house will be destroyed.

Moreover, the chances appear to be increasing, though not necessarily for the reasons you might imagine. Even accounting for years with lots of hurricanes, including 2004, 2005, 2017, and 2018, the number of hurricanes has held relatively steady for centuries, dating back to the founding of the nation. What has changed is the amount of property at the coast, which amplifies the opportunities for damage and the likelihood that federal taxpayers will spend ever-larger sums to help coastal towns rebuild after hurricanes.

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It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

T-Neck Records, 4th & B'way, Jive, Profile Records, Ruffhouse Records

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)

 

Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.

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Fashions Fade, But Fleabag Is Forever

Steve Schofield, Amazon / Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 | 8 minutes (2,150 words)

This is a love story. A dangerously elegant woman (noble stock) in lips the color of a dying rose (not a lipstick, but a blend of oils, waxes, and pigments based on MAC’s Dare You), hair a roaring bob, a cigarette perched on her Erté fingers, stands pensively against a brick wall (real?), the burnished light (not real?) casting the kind of shadow that fills in the blanks — and the cleavage. This is Fleabag (of the Amazon series of the same name, written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge), taking a breather behind a restaurant during a fraught family dinner, a fourth-wall-demolishing millennial café owner who could pass for a femme fatale in a film noir. A big part of that latter fantasy is the navy blue jumpsuit she’s wearing (Love, $50), or, more accurately, embodying. The keyhole at the front is more like a door ajar, two strips of material like curtains begging to be parted while threatening to close. Her shoulders jut out, her back is exposed — this is as naked as chic is allowed to be. It is a sleeveless, backless, armless, chestless (well, sort of) number that requires legs for days. To wear it the way Fleabag does, you basically need to be Fleabag, which means you basically need to be Waller-Bridge, whose androgyny (she dressed as a boy when she was a kid), sexiness (she dressed what we think of as the opposite of a boy when she discovered them), and sylphlike stature are as impossible to mimic as the rest of her.

When everyone ran out to buy that jumpsuit last week, that is what they wanted: everything it entailed, from the lights illuminating the scene right down to the It Girl inside. In her ode to the jumpsuit, The Cut’s Kathryn VanArendonk — who bought two sizes just to be sure — wrote not so much about how it looked as what it meant: “It’s revealing in a way that feels like a choice rather than a plea.” A British fan then polled Twitter: “Will buying the Fleabag jumpsuit solve my emotional problems AS WELL as making me look bomb?” The only answers she provided were “Yes” and “Absolutely.”   

“I think people don’t always view contemporary costuming as hard, and it’s really hard,” says Emma Fraser, creator of the TV Ate My Wardrobe blog. “It’s not just about throwing together an outfit,” she explains, it’s using clothes as “an extension of who that character is.” The last time a television star’s style migrated en masse into off-screen culture may have been The Rachel in the ’90s: the shaggy hairdon’t of the Friends everywoman played by Jennifer Aniston, whose face was normal enough that every woman thought a mere haircut could be a conduit for a New York City life that didn’t suck. Fleabag gives us an updated version of that same generational aspiration — the bold red lip, the navy jumpsuit, the “achievable” look and life. Describing the character’s allure, Fraser inadvertently defines the millennial: “Everything can be a mess, but you can still kind of be put together.” Watching television can be like window-shopping, shallow characters being little more than clothes horses for pricey brands, so seeing a layered antiheroine whose affordable accoutrements are inseparable from who she is feels revolutionary. And who, these days, doesn’t want to be part of a revolution? As Waller-Bridge herself texted Fleabag costume designer, Ray Holman, (referencing Twitter): “The jumpsuit is a movement.”

* * *

Broadchurch brought Waller-Bridge and Holman together five years ago — she was acting on the series, he was doing costume design. He was too busy to work on the first season of Fleabag so Jo Thompson designed that one, but when Thompson was too busy during the second season, Holman stepped in. He read the script first, of course, because he always does that before accepting a project. And despite only having one episode’s worth of material, he took the job. “Oh my god,” he recalls Waller-Bridge telling him, “I did a little dance in the office when you said yes.” Holman had a limited BBC budget (he wouldn’t reveal it, but they reportedly spend around $1 million total per episode, pocket change next to Game of Thrones$15 million) and didn’t want anything to stand out (oops). Holman purchased a handful of jumpsuits, wide-leg jeans, striped shirts, and canvas shoes — all items he had discussed with Waller-Bridge — for around 12 outfits total. None of it was expensive: Fleabag runs a cafe in London, remember. “She is stylish but completely High Street,” Holman tells me. “It’s quite a generic urban look, really. It’s quite practical, but slightly stylish.” One of his secrets, he says, was dressing Fleabag according to her situation, rather than just her personal style. The flashback to her mother’s funeral was the hardest because it balanced two opposing ideas: Fleabag’s grief, and, more largely, the objectification of women even in their grief. In that scene, Fleabag appears in head-to-toe black, wearing a blouse that would not look out of place in a courtroom.

As much as the first season of Fleabag is about loss, the second is about love. And isn’t it like that messy bitch to fall for the one guy she can’t have sex with. When we first meet the priest (aka “the hot priest,” played by Sherlock’s Andrew Scott), it’s not clear he is one. He’s unknown to Fleabag, just a random sweary guy at the table of her family dinner. He’s not wearing the dog collar (the audience shouldn’t have any preconceived notions, says Holman). Instead, he is rumpled, in a lavender linen shirt designed by Oliver Spencer, master of the relaxed Brit look (as if that isn’t an oxymoron). Father looks good, but not too good. “He’s quite poor,” the costume designer explains. “He’s not a rich Catholic priest so he doesn’t have many clothes and the clothes he has, they’re old.” He’s not the point anyway. This episode belongs to Fleabag. Fleabag and her jumpsuit (and, okay, her priest boner).

“It could be a disaster, it could be absolutely brilliant” is what Holman thought when he first saw the jumpsuit in the basement of the Oxford Street Topshop in London. It was designed by a small local label, Love, which was founded by Teri Sallas and her husband, Toby, in 2003. “I wanted to make something that covered everything up but was still sexy,” Teri told The Guardian. Though the jumpsuit has been identified everywhere as black in color, Holman insists that he bought two versions – one black, one navy – and that the one on screen is blue (he just never corrected anyone, not to mention that Love, according to Toby, hasn’t produced that version “for some time.”) Holman hesitated because he knew a bra couldn’t be worn under it, but that’s also part of its charm — the apostatism of wearing such a thing to a family gathering. Fleabag’s slightly profane clothing choices, by the way, are deliberate. It’s part of her “off-key” character, which is why we find her in a too-short red dress at her dad’s wedding (that one sold out in the U.K. too) and this too-dressy jumpsuit (paired with sneakers). Maybe she hasn’t seen her family for ages and she’s trying a little too hard. Or maybe Waller-Bridge just put on the jumpsuit and fell in love with it. Holman says that when she wore it for the first time, it was a “wow moment” for them both. Waller-Bridge had two words for it: episode one.

The first episode of the second season has Fleabag at a fancy restaurant celebrating her parents’ engagement. Her family hasn’t been together like this in more than a year, since everything blew up between them over various mishaps, a number of them starring Fleabag. This jumpsuit is her, grown-up — elegant, but, still, showing some tit. The struggle within (and without) her continues, but on a more subdued level. At the table she is wry and ramrod straight, her sideboob teasing the holy father beside her. Smoking behind the restaurant, alone, in the dark, the glow of the street lamp bringing out her curves, she is introspectively sultry. “You look strong,” her dad says. And when she and the other father end up back there alone for the first time, instead of asking for his blessing, she keeps her sins to herself. “Fuck you,” the priest calls to her naked back. It’s a Fleabag kind of benediction.

The second season of Fleabag originally aired on the BBC in March, but British site Stylist didn’t track down the jumpsuit until about two months ago, at which  point it sold out. Since the show’s Amazon premiere on May 17, American viewers have been similarly clambering to buy it. Holman was “completely surprised” by the response and bemused by the “jumpsuit as movement,” but thinks it’s great they helped a local indie label boost its sales. Fraser, who is also British, is witnessing the cycle for the second time and offers some prosaic reasons for the transatlantic phenomenon, including availability (shot in advance, shows often come out when the clothes are no longer available) and affordability. Not to mention practicality — per VanArendonk, the jumpsuit “could so easily pass for something much more expensive, but which I can put on without fretting about stains, child smudges, wrinkles, weird crotch lines, or much at all in the way of further styling” — as long as you have a body that approximates Waller-Bridge’s. Fraser provides the contrasting example of Killing Eve (another series developed by Waller-Bridge), with its aspirational “outlandish” costuming, particularly Villanelle’s translucent bubble gum pink pouffe-frock from the first season. “Nobody could afford that Molly Goddard dress,” she says, “and where would you wear that?”

But the jumpsuit is more about the story of Fleabag, which it serves to represent. This is the story of a young woman who looks like she has it together but doesn’t, and if you get just close enough, you can see it. This is a woman who knows who she is, but still feels the need to perform, who is constantly wrestling with the push and pull of revealing too much and too little. And in the perfect chiaroscuro, this is a woman who thrives on the frisson of impossible love. But it’s also about the story of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the It Girl whose singularity, which is what everyone keeps trying to imitate, is It precisely because of its indivisibility from her. This is a woman who can be easily conflated with the character she created from elements of her own life. When Slate asks why so many journalists want the jumpsuit, the answer is obvious: because they want to create an award-winning one-woman play (Fleabag) in their 20s, because they want to helm two series (Crashing, Fleabag) by the time they are 30 (and then a third, Killing Eve), because they want to be hired to appear in a Star Wars film and to brush up Bond. If they can’t have Waller-Bridge’s career, at least they can have her clothes.

* * *

The Fleabag jumpsuit actually appeared on the red carpet (the black version, anyway) a full six months before it appeared on the show, but no one remembers that. Waller-Bridge wore it, along with a huge grin, up-swept hair, and patent leather flats to a screening of Killing Eve in September. In that context, without a cigarette, without her flapper do, without the brick wall or the glowing light or the cleavage or the priest, the jumpsuit lost its mystique. In those photos it has reverted back to a, well, black jumpsuit. The same thing happened each time someone posted a photo of themselves in it. Even when it suited them, which was often, it didn’t have the same power without Fleabag’s context. And the more people bought it, the less impact it had. Like the sparkly white dress in Cinderella, the sleek black jumpsuit dissolved in the daylight.

The irony is that these writers would have been better off, you know, writing. Because that’s what they really want — to be this famous writer, to be who she is and what she creates. Of course, that costs a lot more than $50. A jumpsuit is a tangible symbol of the life these women want and the fallacy, as understandable as it is in a culture that silences women as well as writers — why am I doing this, again? — is buying a well-cut piece of dark material as a shortcut to that life. Fraser was actually one of the few women writers who resisted the jumpsuit’s siren song, but it was a close encounter. She was about to buy it before remembering who she was: a woman who had other jumpsuits, and who also needed to wear a bra. A woman who did not have a production company turning her body into a genre, who wasn’t living a fictional romance with a man of God, who didn’t live a real life in which she herself was an idol (well, by Hollywood standards). “I had it in my basket,” Fraser says, and then she asked herself a question that, ironically, is very Fleabag: “What are you doing?”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

True Roots

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Ronnie Citron-Fink | True Roots | Island Press | June 2019 | 34 minutes (5.655 words)

 

How’d You do it? Are you doing that on purpose? Are you okay? Ever since I stopped coloring my silver hair, I’ve gotten a lot of questions. One of the most common during my hair transition was Why are you letting it go gray? While my roots didn’t ask permission before they stopped growing in dark brown, it was a complex mix of fear and determination that rearranged my beauty priorities. The question of why — why, after twenty-five years of using chemical dyes, I gave them up-is something I’ve thought about a lot.

My world began to shift four years ago. I was sitting in a meeting about toxics reform in Washington, DC, when an environmental scientist began to describe the buildup of chemicals in our bodies. As she rattled off a list of ingredients in personal care products-toluene, benzophenone, stearates, triclosan — my scalp started to tingle. “We’re just beginning to understand how these chemicals compromise long-term health,” she concluded.

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The Year of the Cat

Illustration by Homestead

Elisabeth Donnelly | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,392 words)

In an old photo from when I lived in a house in Catskill, New York, on the edge of the Hudson River, I am asleep on the couch with a small cat curled up on my chest. The casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that it was my cat in this still life tableau: snoring woman, mouth wide open, head flung to the side, a red plaid blanket, and a cat in a circle as if it is right at home.

But the thing was, she wasn’t my cat. I didn’t feed her, I didn’t scoop her poop, I didn’t consistently provide her with a home and shelter. She was like a weedy, persistent, besotted lover who wouldn’t listen to the word “no,” who spent every night outside my house with a boombox in the air, playing “In Your Eyes.” Yet to explain it properly — my relationship with my fake cat — we have to back things up slightly.
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