Search Results for: Brooklyn

The Immigration-Obsessed, Polarized, Garbage-Fire Election of 1800

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Images via Wikimedia Commons

A. Roger Ekirch | American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution | Pantheon | February 2017 | 33 minutes (8,149 words) 

Below is an excerpt from American Sanctuary, by A. Roger Ekirch.

For background, it is important to know that a seaman named Jonathan Robbins participated in a mutiny on the HMS Hermione in 1797, the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history. Afterward, he joined the American navy, but he was eventually recognized and jailed. To justify his actions, Robbins claimed he was an American citizen who had been impressed—that is, captured and forced into servitude—by the British navy. However, his American citizenship was disputed. The British sought his extradition, which the president, the Federalist John Adams, granted—an action which had disastrous political consequences for his party. Robbins was found guilty by a British naval court and hanged from the yardarm of the HMS Acasta in 1799.

This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

A Culinary Legend’s Next Fight

Paula Wolfert
Paula Wolfert in 1978.

Emily Kaiser Thelin | Longreads | March 2017 | 9 minutes (2,256 words)

The following is a Longreads exclusive excerpt from Unforgettable: The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert’s Renegade Life, the new book by author Emily Kaiser Thelin about the extraordinary life of culinary legend Paula Wolfert, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2013. Our thanks to Thelin for sharing this story with the Longreads community.

***

In an impossibly narrow lane in the crowded ancient medina of Marrakech, a motor scooter zipped past, a horned ram bleating between the driver’s legs, bound for sacrifice for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. I jumped to get out of the way and promptly collided with a family headed home for the holiday, a small lamb chewing on weeds while straddling the shoulders of the man. I cinched my coat tighter against the wet, cold December day and pushed on against the crowds.

It was December 2008. I had come to Morocco on an assignment for Food & Wine to profile legendary cookbook author Paula Wolfert, a longtime contributor to the magazine whom I had edited as a staffer there since 2006. This was the culinary equivalent of a journey through the Arabian dunes with T. E. Lawrence or a trip to Kitty Hawk with the Wright Brothers—the chance to tour the place where a titan of my field first made her name. She and I had met in person only twice before, once at a food conference and then for lunch at her house in Sonoma. She had returned to Morocco because her publisher, HarperCollins, had suggested she update her first book, the 1973 landmark Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. Read more…

A Heart-Shaped Life: Twelve Ways of Looking at Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Amy Krouse Rosenthal
John J. Kim/Chicago Sun-Times via AP Images

“What constitutes a life worthy of being remembered? How do you want to be remembered?” These are the kinds of questions Amy Krouse Rosenthal always asked in her work. When Amy died this week at 51, her obituary described her as a “children’s author, memoirist, and public speaker” who found “an extraordinarily large readership this month with a column in the New York Times titled “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” But Amy was far more than her final, heartbreaking column. Amy Shearn details what Amy did with her brief, inspired time, and how she came to inspire others. Read more…

‘I Am Not a Role Model’ and the Resurgence of Athlete Activism

Extending gloved hands skyward in racial protest, U.S. athletes Tommie Smith, center, and John Carlos stare downward during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner after Smith received the gold and Carlos the bronze for the 200 meter run at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City on Oct. 16, 1968. (AP Photo)

“Republicans buy sneakers too.”

That’s what Michael Jordan reportedly said when, in 1990, he was asked to endorse Harvey Gantt, a black politician who was running against Jesse Helms, a racist and divisive senator, in Jordan’s home state of North Carolina. Arthur Ashe was one of those who had reached out to Jordan, hoping to convince the then-ascendant GOAT to take a political stand, to use his position for something that mattered off the court. Jordan’s reputed answer wasn’t unusual—it was just three years later that Charles Barkley, a future NBA Hall of Famer, infamously proclaimed that he was “not a role model.” Read more…

The Ban, the Wall: Bearing Witness

Rose Marie Ascencio-Escobar's husband was detained when he went to check in with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Feb 22. Her husband has been in the United States since 2001 when he came from San Salvador without documents. (Marie D. De Jesus /Houston Chronicle via AP)

Reports say there is going to be another travel ban soon, perhaps even today. And so, standing on the precipice of our next great catastrophe, I have decided to take stock, as far as I can, of this thing we have wrought, which I can only describe as the new American carnage. Moreover (sorry about this) I would like to put forth my own obnoxious “all else is a distraction” theory:

In my opinion, this is the greatest story of the moment, and all else is a distraction. Think-piece-ologists have recently argued that the “real story” is the dismantling of our administrative state, or the lock-out of the free press from the halls of power, or the Russian oligarchy’s new influence on the Republican party, or so on. But, when the people of the future look back at us now, it seems to me that they will “little note, nor long remember” the exact form of our bureaucracy, or whether we took seriously our own promises to ourselves about freedom of the press, or whether Michael Flynn was actually colluding with the Russian ambassador rather than just wishing him a very very merry Christmas. These things will all be seen as incidental: goings-on as curious and inconsequential as Rudolf Hess in a biplane or Marat in a bathtub. I submit that, for the people of the future, all these stories will be incidental to the story of why we allowed our neighbors to be terrorized and rounded up.

So, I am making a small attempt to bear witness.

I am asking six questions.

Who has been detained?
Who has been denied entry?
Who has been rounded up?
Who has been deported?
Who has fled as a refugee from my country?
Who has been killed here? Read more…

Team Plagiarizes Golden State Warriors. Team Is Undefeated.

Longreads Pick

Perennial junior college basketball power South Plains college finished the 2015-16 season with a 21-9 record—too uneven for head coach Steve Green. As Scott Cacciola details in this exhaustively thorough piece about SPC, which is undefeated and about to begin its path to ‘Hutch’ (shorthand for Hutchinson, Kansas, where the juco national title game is held every year), Green remade his squad in the image of the Golden State Warriors. The Texans even have their own version of Draymond Green (Brooklyn’s Jahlil Tripp) and Steph Curry (Jordan Brangers)—but no Kevin Durant (yet). As Green tells Cacciola, “I just want guys who can shoot now. If you have somebody on the floor who can’t score, you’re playing four against five. They just don’t guard them.”

Published: Mar 2, 2017
Length: 7 minutes (1,964 words)

‘I Still Live in a Small Town That I Hate’: Roxane Gay’s Perspective on Her Success

This week, a number of people heard of Roxane Gay for the first time when Simon & Schuster canceled its plans to publish controversial alt-right author Milo Yiannopoulos’s book. (In the weeks prior, Gay had withdrawn her forthcoming book, How to be Heard, from the publisher because they were giving the former Breitbart editor a platform.) For most writers, there’s no such thing as a bad way to be discovered by new readers. But it can be annoying when those who’ve just become aware of your work perceive you as an overnight success, especially when your career has been building for years. In a profile for Brooklyn Magazine, Molly McArdle asks Gay for her perspective on her success.

“A lot of people think it’s been overnight,” Gay says of her success. “In many ways my life hasn’t changed. My friends are still my friends. I still live in a small town that I hate.” But some things have started to shift. “It’s easier to pay my bills, certainly,” she says. “There’s a lot more scrutiny and attention.” There’s also a new apartment in Los Angeles, where she lives when she’s not in Indiana teaching at Purdue. (“It’s a workable compromise.”) There’s new creative projects in new genres: comic books, screenplays, occasional radio. Gay is the first black woman to write for Marvel, and her series, World of Wakanda, spins off from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther, tackling romantic love between queer black women in a way that is both literally groundbreaking and utterly natural. Still, Gay sees herself first as a writer of short fiction. “I’m relatively new to nonfiction,” she says. (I have to respectfully disagree with the bestselling essayist, a phrase so rare it’s practically an oxymoron, on this point.) With only one novel, she adds, “I’m a beginning novelist.” But Gay also sees growth, accomplishment: “My writing is more confident,” she says. “I’ve always taken myself seriously as a writer. Now other people take me seriously.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by SEIU 775 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In this week’s Top 5, we’re sharing stories by Michael Hall, Molly McArdle, Mehreen Kasana, Helen Hollyman, and an interview by Kate Harloe.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Trilby, the Novel That Gave Us ‘Svengali’

A scene from the 1931 film Svengali. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Emma Garman | Longreads | February 2017 | 6 minutes (1,788 words)

In the fall of 1894, a New Jersey reader wrote to George du Maurier, the Franco-British author and satirical cartoonist whose Harper’s Monthly serial, Trilby, had just come out as a novel. The concerned correspondent asked that his mind be put to rest regarding the decorousness of relations between Trilby, the young heroine, and musical genius Svengali, under whose hypnotic spell she becomes an overnight opera sensation. Du Maurier replied politely but briefly: “I beg to say that you are right about Trilby. When free from mesmeric influence, she lived with him as his daughter, and was quite innocent of any other relation.” His assurance was published in The Argonaut, a San Francisco weekly, thus alleviating any similar fears for the girl’s reputation among that paper’s readership. In Brooklyn, meanwhile, a woman had a disagreement with her husband over Trilby’s morals, culminating in her smashing an earthenware jar over his head. Luckily for the woman, the injured party declined to give evidence in court. Perhaps he appreciated that when it came to Trilby, emotions ran high.

Irish-Scotch-French model and laundress Trilby O’Ferrall was partly based on real women, including a 17-year-old girl, nicknamed Carry, whom du Maurier and his friend Felix Moscheles knew as art students—and amateur mesmerists—in Belgium in the late 1850s. With her “rich crop of brown hair, very blue inquisitive eyes, and a figure of peculiar elasticity,” Carry modeled nude for them and allowed herself to be hypnotized. Her soul, Moscheles later claimed, “was steeped in the very essence of Trilbyism.” Du Maurier’s granddaughter, the novelist Daphne du Maurier, concurred: “Carry . . . had the same camaraderie, the same boyish attraction, the same funny shy reserve.” Another inspiration was Anna Bishop, an opera star reputed to be in sinister thrall to her older lover-manager, the French harpist and composer Robert Nicolas-Charles Bochsa. In 1839, Bishop caused a scandal by leaving her husband for Boscha, and to his musical accompaniment, the legend went, she sang as she never had before. Read more…

Kathleen Hale Hunts the Most Dangerous Game

Illustration by Perri Tomkiewicz for Elle

The animals, it seems, will not be contained. A few weeks ago, Ollie the Bobcat, on the loose from the National Zoo, was found a near the bird house a few enclosures over; a toilet in Texas revealed not a single rogue rattlenake, but dozens; and Sunny, a female red panda, escaped from the the Virginia Zoo and is still on the lam after a reported refusal to mate.

“In the wild, pregnancy makes animals even more vulnerable to predators,” writes Katheen Hale at Elle. Hale’s essay about her own pregnancy intersects with a move to Los Angeles from Brooklyn and a deep desire to go where no pregnant woman has gone before: Into Griffith Park to hunt P-22, the city’s celebrity mountain lion. “For the neurotic, celebrations of life can conjure death,” Hale’s psychiatrist tells her. “Pregnancy is a time of regression. It throws the mind into maturational crisis.”

I’d read laboratory studies on the effect of predator exposure on pregnant mice: expectant mothers that were exposed to rat urine refused to give birth to the litters they were gestating. If they could do that, so could I. I’d hold off giving birth for years if necessary, like an elephant, which cooks its kids for two full years. But my obstetrician said I couldn’t refuse to give birth—apparently that’s physically impossible. I wasn’t a mouse or an elephant, I was a human woman, and I was due on June 2.

The solution was simple: I’d hunt down P-22, and hang his head on the wall of my baby girl’s nursery, so that when she became sentient, she would know that her mother was strong, and that she was safe.

Getting from point A (finding P-22) to point B (decapitation) remained a mystery to me, but in my blurry state of hormonal unbliss, I simply didn’t think about it. Instead, the following day, I laced up my hiking boots, parked my car on the winding road leading to Griffith Park, and set off into the dusty wilderness with only a water bottle, potato chips, and my phone, like a crazier Cheryl Strayed. She’d gone off trying to find herself. I’d find the lion and take it from there.

Like me, he had migrated to Los Angeles. But only one of us could stay.

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