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Meals Behind Bars: A Reading List

Alcatraz Dining Hall by Carl Sundstrom. (Public Domain)

Food is everywhere — we eat at home, at work, at school, on the go, and while traveling. Many of us are able to eat what we choose, when we choose; for some, deciding what to eat, obtaining it, and preparing is enough of a burden that we’re turning to meal-replacements like Soylent in such numbers that orders are backlogged for weeks. That all changes in jail, where you eat what you’re given — or you don’t eat at all. Among the many freedoms prison limits, where does losing the ability to choose the timing, quantity, and, most importantly, flavor of your food rank? Pretty high.

Three of these pieces look at what mealtime is like on the inside, from an examination of chow hall food to stories of inmates’ ad-hoc cell-made meals to an in-depth look at a commissary food that’s both dietary supplement and currency for thousands of inmates. A fourth adds a different dimension, revealing how some of the foods on our own tables are the product of prison labor.

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How Karina Longworth Is Reimagining Classic Hollywood—and the Podcast—in ‘You Must Remember This’

Scott Porch | Longreads | March 2015 | 14 minutes (3,624 words)

 

Almost a year ago, former LA Weekly film writer Karina Longworth began producing You Must Remember This, a podcast about the inner worlds of Hollywood icons of the past and present. The characters and stories range from familiar, to unknown, to just plain weird. (Episode 2 is about a Frank Sinatra space opera that you never knew existed.) Longworth, 34, has also written for publications including Grantland about everything from the history of the Super Mario Bros. movie to the stories of Harvey Weinstein’s ruthlessness in the editing room.

We recently talked by phone about her interest in the stories of classic Hollywood, the unique format of podcasting, and how her roles as a journalist, critic, and historian have informed her storytelling.


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Why the Porn Industry Can’t Beat the Pirates

Photo by Pixabay

Keeping porn from getting ripped and posted is impossible. After having free pornography clips easily accessible for years, nobody expects that customers will ever buy DVDs in the numbers they once did. The porn industry’s sales figures are disputed; estimates range from a few billion to as high as $14 billion, a widely cited figure from a 1998 Forrester Research report that Forbes easily dismantled. But no one disputes that the percentage of revenues from DVDs has shrunk dramatically, and that piracy on the Internet shot up after the early 2000s. Takedown Piracy, which Glass founded in 2009, focuses on containing the damage.

Glass, who is dressed like an accountant, talks about the 2007 adult film financial crisis in terms of the broader recession. “It was really kind of a perfect storm of events there,” he tells me. “There was always piracy in general. But at least for adult, it went from being something in the back-shadowy corners of the Internet, or something that required a certain level of technical knowledge to acquire … [to] ‘push the little triangle button and the movie plays.’” With the accessibility came the assumption that porn should be accessible — that it wasn’t worth paying for. “People might have a certain guilt about pirating Guardians of the Galaxy or whatever, but porn — ‘ah, that’s porn,’” Glass says. “It’s considered ‘less than.’ And porn doesn’t have the revenue channels that a Guardians of the Galaxy might have. We’re not doing theatrical release. There’s not really merchandise.” Other barriers to marketing and fighting piracy are particular to porn. PayPal won’t do porn transactions, and Apple doesn’t allow any porn apps. Lawmakers are unlikely to support pornographers, and it’s difficult to legislate against piracy because many of the major tube sites are located outside the U.S.

Molly Lambert writing in Grantland about the Adult Video News awards.

‘A Taste of Power’: The Woman Who Led the Black Panther Party

Photo: Platon

Elaine Brown | A Taste of Power, Pantheon | 1992 | 30 minutes (7,440 words)

 

Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, lecturer and singer. In 1968, she joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member. Six years later, Huey Newton appointed her to lead the Party when he went into exile in Cuba. She was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Party.  She is author of A Taste of Power (Pantheon, 1992) and The Condemnation of Little B (Beacon Press, 2002)She is also the Executive Director of the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee and CEO of the newly-formed non-profit organization Oakland & the World Enterprises, Inc.

Her 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power is a story of what it means to be a black woman in America, tracing her life from a lonely girlhood in the ghettos of North Philadelphia to the highest levels of the Black Panther Party’s hierarchy. The Los Angeles Times described the book as “a profound, funny and…heartbreaking American story,” and the New York Times called it “chilling, well written and profoundly entertaining.” Our thanks to Brown for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here. Read more…

How Paul Rand Made Companies Care About Design—And Influenced Steve Jobs

NeXT Poster by Paul Rand: Flickr, Graham Smith

It was the success of [Paul] Rand’s corporate communications for IBM in the ‘50s that inspired future businesses, including Steve Jobs’s NeXT, to put design first. When Thomas Watson Jr. took over IBM in 1956, he was struck by how poorly the company handled corporate design. The aesthetic was inconsistent across various platforms–for example, “branches in different regions would use different stationery,” Albrecht says… “Watson Jr. was one of the first to say ‘good design is good business,'” Albrecht says.

Led by design consultant Eliot Noyes, previously of the New York Museum of Modern Art, this program ultimately hired Charles and Ray Eames to do IBM’s exhibitions and books, architect Errol Saarinen to design buildings, and Paul Rand to design new logo and graphics. “Rand made everyone use his logo and branding,” Albrecht says. At the time, this sort of visually cohesive communication across all platforms of a brand was just gaining traction as a business strategy.

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In the ’80s, the power of IBM’s visual communications program inspired Steve Jobs, a longtime admirer of Rand’s work, to hire Rand as a designer for NeXT, his educational computer company. “Rand was the first and only designer Jobs looked to,” Albrecht says. One reason for Rand’s success with clients, aside from the sheer beauty of his visual work, was that he was “one of the guys,” Albrecht says. “He wasn’t coming into boardrooms acting like an artiste. He was very down-to-Earth, and fit into this Brooklyn boys’ world of corporate advertising in New York.”

“In a way, what Apple does today with design is what IBM was doing in ‘50s,” Albrecht says. “It was about simplification and cohesiveness across all platforms of the brand–products, ads, stores. These are all ideas in the modern vein that came about with Rand’s work with IBM. It set a precedent.”

Carey Dunne, writing for Fast Co.Design about how the legendary graphic designer Paul Rand pioneered the era of design-led business. Rand created some of the most iconic American corporate logos, many of which are still in use today. László Moholy-Nagy described him as “an idealist and a realist,” fluent in both “the language of the poet and the businessman.” There is currently an exhibit of Rand’s work at the Museum of the City of New York, and Dunne spoke with Donald Albrecht, the exhibit’s curator for her piece. As a side note, Rand’s seminal—and famously hard to find—book Thoughts on Design is back in print for the first time since the 1970’s.

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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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The Shape of Things to Come

Longreads Pick

A profile of Apple designer Jonathan Ive.

Author: Ian Parker
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 16, 2015
Length: 66 minutes (16,540 words)

Giving Visibility to the Invisible: An Interview With Photographer Ruddy Roye

Lucy McKeon | Longreads | February 2015 | 18 minutes (4,489 words)

 

With over 100,000 Instagram followers, photographer Ruddy Roye came of age in Jamaica, and has lived in New York City since 2001. He has photographed dancehall musicians and fans, sapeurs of the Congo, the Caribbean Carnival J’ouvert, recent protests in Ferguson and in New York, and the faces of the many people he meets and observes every day. Roye is perhaps best known for his portraits taken around his neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn—pictures of the homeless, the disenfranchised, and those who Roye believes aren’t often fully seen.

In Roye’s Instagram profile, he describes himself as an “Instagram Humanist/Activist,” and when looking at his portraits, the phrase that comes to mind is “up close.” Roye is closer to his subjects—who he calls his “collaborators”—than is typical in street photography, in terms of actual proximity as well as identification. Each picture, he says, contains a piece of him. With this closeness, Roye creates images that can be harrowing, disturbing, joyful and striking. If they are sometimes difficult to look at, one has more trouble looking away. Read more…

Friendship Is Complicated

Illustration by Pat Barrett

Maria Bustillos | Longreads | January 2015 | 15 minutes (3,706 words)

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Autistic and Searching for a Home

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Genna Buck | Maisonneuve Magazine | Winter 2014 | 28 minutes (7,101 words)

MaisonneuveThis week we’re proud to feature a Longreads Exclusive from the new issue of Montreal’s Maisonneuve Magazine, about a young autistic woman who needs a home.
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