Search Results for: Brooklyn

My Lower East Side

Longreads Pick

A young transplant is drawn to the lively and fast-changing New York neighborhood a great-great-grandfather left behind.

Cringe if you want, but we wouldn’t have been the first to turn a shiva into an open house. We’d all like to believe that our legacies are larger than a rent-controlled apartment, but this is New York, where mortality and mortgages are intrinsically linked. The sad truth is when your lease on life is up, your family members will whisper, possibly over your cold, dead body, about what will happen to that Brooklyn Heights brownstone you purchased in the 1960s for $80,000.

Published: Jun 20, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,631 words)

Kendrick Lamar, Hip-Hop’s Newest Old-School Star

Longreads Pick

The young M.C. is on a quest to become the best rapper in the world.

‘Everybody just wants to have fun, be with the scene,” Kendrick Lamar said when we met in his cramped quarters inside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn last fall. “Certain people get backstage, people that you would never expect. . . . You ain’t with the media! You ain’t into music! You ain’t into sports! You’re just here.” The rapper, now 27, had just finished his set as the opening act on this stretch of Kanye West’s Yeezus tour, and he was sitting low in an armchair in his trademark black hoodie surrounded by exactly those people.

Published: Jun 25, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,978 words)

Woo Cho Bang Bang

Longreads Pick

In Brownsville, Brooklyn kids are joining gangs whose territories are based on the housing projects where they grew up. The warring gangs have helped made Brownsville the “murder capital of New York”:

Prosecutors and detectives still don’t know when the battle of Brownsville started or what it was over. Some think it grew out of a perceived slight at a dance-hall party in one of the warring projects, whose turf is separated by about ten blocks. But the authorities did establish a connection to the current group of principals by the summer of 2010, when a series of shootings, allegedly by Hoodstarz members, wounded two associates of the Brownsville Fly Guys (a gang aligned with the Wave Gang). In October, one of them died from the injuries.

Two days later, in what was likely B.F.G. retaliation, the purported Hoodstarz leader, 16-year-old Hakeem (“OCC”) Gravenhise, was ambushed in front of his apartment building with a fatal barrage of gunfire. His mother witnessed the shooting. There have been no arrests in his murder.

Published: Jun 19, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,179 words)

Common Core, in 9-Year-Old Eyes

Longreads Pick

A fourth grader at Public School 397 in Brooklyn struggles as he prepares for the exams aligned with the Common Core standards.

Ms. Alcindor did not know what to do about his academic difficulties. Her English was too limited to be of much help with homework, and she had never heard of the Common Core. She was away from the house most days, working a $10.50-an-hour job as a nursing assistant, and the triplets’ father no longer lived with them. But Ms. Alcindor knew that Haelleca (pronounced HALL-UH-kuh) was doing something right, judging by her pile of awards and her zeal for reading. “You must help your brothers,” she told her daughter.

Published: Jun 14, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,098 words)

Vera Nabokov, Eugen Boissevain, Leonard Woolf: On Spouses Who Supported Their Famous Partner's Writing Careers

At the Atlantic, Koa Beck writes about the spouses of famous writers who supported their partner’s writing careers, often devoting their lives to it. Vera Nabokov epitomized this: She not only performed the duties of cleaning and cooking expected of her as a wife in her era, but also worked as her husband’s “round-the-clock editor, assistant, and secretary”:

To some writers, Vera Nabokov remains much more than “just a wife,” but rather a template for an enviable asset. It’s undeniably easier to prioritize one’s art with a 24/7 writing coach who also manages “the mini-country that is home,” to quote novelist Allison Pearson.

As Laura Miller recently pointed out in Salon, Virginia Woolf and Edna St. Vincent Millay each benefited greatly from truly anomalous marriages of their time, in which their respective husbands assumed a Vera-esque role. Millay’s husband, Eugen Boissevain, reportedly described himself as a feminist and “married the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay with the express purpose of providing her with a stable home life and relieving her of domestic tasks so she could write.” By the time Millay died, she had written six plays and more than a dozen books of poetry. While Leonard Woolf cared for Virginia during her bouts of mental illness, he also managed the household, tended to the garden, and co-founded the couple’s literary press. Throughout his dedication to his wife’s craft—and her general well-being—he also managed to have a literary career of his own, producing both novels and stories while maintaining editorships at several journals. Claire Messud wrote in The New York Times that the Woolf partnership was one of “extraordinary productivity.” In her lifetime, Woolf published nine novels, two biographies, and several collections of essays and short stories—among other works.

But not all gifted writers are blessed with Veras (or Leonards or Eugens for that matter). At a promotional reading of Bark at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, [Lorrie] Moore clarified to me—and a room’s worth of fans—that she absolutely does not have a Vera. “I do every little thing myself,” she said.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

For a Respected Prosecutor, An Unpardonable Failure

Longreads Pick

Evidence of a convicted murderer’s possible innocence sat buried in a case file for more than two decades. Now, a prosecutor in Brooklyn will have to answer for the mistake.

On the afternoon of July 18, 1990, James Leeper, a newly minted homicide prosecutor in Brooklyn, had to make a challenging closing argument. The man he had charged with murder had mounted a substantial defense—offering plane tickets and video footage indicating he had been vacationing at Disney World when a man named Darryl Rush was shot dead in front of a Brooklyn housing project. Leeper acknowledged to the jury that it seemed like the “perfect alibi.”

Source: Pro Publica
Published: Jun 4, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,960 words)

A Fight Is Brewing

Longreads Pick

They’re identical twins, both world-renowned beer makers, and they hate each other:

The Danish press has caught the conflict’s biblical whiff, casting Mikkel and Jeppe as sworn enemies. Thomas Schon, Mikkeller’s first employee, told me that the twins suffer from a pronounced personality clash: “It was a big relief for Mikkel when Jeppe moved to Brooklyn. It was like the Danish beer scene wasn’t big enough for the two of them.” Mikkeller’s operations manager, Jacob Gram Alsing, said that the subject of Jeppe “is very sensitive for Mikkel to talk about.” Mikkel himself put it this way: “You know Oasis? The Gallagher brothers? They were one of the most successful bands in the world, but those guys had problems with each other.” With twins, he said, “it’s a matter of seeing yourself in another person, and sometimes seeing something you don’t like.”

Published: Mar 26, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,681 words)

How a Barista Deals With Bad Customers

Over at The Awl, Molly Osberg examines the service economy and recounts her experience working as a barista at various coffeehouses. Here, she discusses dealing with difficult customers:

I transferred stores twice, and though I wouldn’t recognize it until later, there was already something uniquely banal about my interactions with the customers at Starbucks. The robotic and infinitely scaleable details, our uniforms and employee numbers, the pre-calibrated automatic espresso machine, all contributed to a general sense of interchangeability. I had exhausting customers, but their demanding nature didn’t feel personal. I had no doubt the pudgy businessman would have told any woman where to put that whipped cream, or that the undergraduate with the fancy handbag, detailing last night’s party to a friend on the phone, was the kind of girl who would’ve shouted down any one of her servers for ostensibly placing a half-pump more white mocha in her beverage. If a customer was particularly bad we exercised one of the only powers we possessed and “decafed” them. To covertly rob a caffeine-addicted asshole of their morning jolt was truly one of the sweetest pleasures of baristahood, and one that my subsequent professions haven’t come close to replicating.

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Photo: BigBirdz

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Remembering The Man Who Brought Helvetica To The Masses

This post comes via Longreads contributor Laura Bliss:

In this week’s Economist, a remembrance of “font-god” Mike Parker, the typographer who developed more than 1000 fonts in his 50+ year career. Parker, who died last month at age 84, was a champion of great type: never drawing fonts himself, but rather coaxing others into perfection. His faculty for shape, space, and fine gauge of cultural currents changed the industry, and much more, when Parker brought Helvetica to the masses:

In contrast to the delicate exuberance of 16th-century types, Helvetica was plain, rigidly horizontal – and eminently readable. It became, in Mr. Parker’s hands, the public typeface of the modern world: of the New York Subway, of federal income-tax forms, of the logos of McDonald’s, Microsoft, Apple, Lufthansa and countless others. It was also, for its clarity, the default type of Macs, and so leapt smoothly into the desktop age.

Not everyone liked it. He did not always like it himself; as he roared around Brooklyn or Boston, opera pumping out at full volume from his car, he would constantly spot Helvetica being abused in some way, with rounded terminals or bad spacing, on shopfronts or the sides of trucks. But far from seeing Helvetica as neutral, vanilla, or nondescript, he loved it for the relationship between figure and ground, its firmness, its existence in “a powerful matrix of surrounding space.” Type gave flavour to words: and this was a typeface that gave people confidence in swiftly changing times.

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