Search Results for: Brooklyn

‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jeff Sharlet | Sweet Heaven When I Die, W. W. Norton & Company | Aug 2011 | 37 minutes (9,133 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Quebrado,” by Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and bestselling author. The story was first published in Rolling Stone in 2008 and is featured in Sharlet’s book Sweet Heaven When I Die. Thanks to Sharlet for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

My Life As a Young Thug

Longreads Pick

Mike Tyson reflects on a childhood spent on the streets of Brooklyn, being bullied, getting into fights and stealing—and then meeting a man who would change his life:

"We sat down, and Cus told me he couldn’t believe I was only 13 years old. And then he told me what my future would be. ‘If you listen to me, I can make you the youngest heavyweight champion of all time.’

“Fuck, how could he know that shit? I thought he was a pervert. In the world I came from, people do shit like that when they want to perv out on you. I didn’t know what to say. I had never heard anyone say nice things about me before. I wanted to stay around this old guy because I liked the way he made me feel. I’d later realize that this was Cus’s psychology. You give a weak man some strength, and he becomes addicted.”

Author: Mike Tyson
Published: Oct 20, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,061 words)

Transport: On Leaving New York for Rehab in Minnesota

Emily Carter Roiphe | Seal Press | 2013 | 10 minutes (2,409 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, a collection of essays edited by Sari Botton. We’d like to thank Seal Press for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

The Time Jason Zengerle and a Gorilla Stalked Michael Moore for Might Magazine

Photo by Jimmy Hahn

Jason Zengerle | Might magazine | 1997 | 19 minutes (4,685 words)

 

Introduction

Thanks to our Longreads Members’ support, we tracked down a vintage story from Dave Eggers’s Might Magazine. It’s from Jason Zengerle, a correspondent for GQ and contributing editor for New York magazine who’s been featured on Longreads often in the past. Read more…

Easy Money

Longreads Pick

The writer on his experience being on the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”:

“Did I mention on my questionnaire that I could perform a serviceable impression of Chewbacca? Did I offer that up to them as proof of my willingness to give them whatever they wanted in exchange for a chance at their money? Yes. Yes, I did. The rest of my interview in the cramped bowels of the Apollo Theatre was merely a formality. I would be good on the show because of X, Y, and Z. When I was twelve, I was an actor in a sex-ed video starring Bill Nye the Science Guy. I would spend a million dollars on the world’s greatest first-anniversary present for my wife. Can I do the Chewbacca now? Of course I can. It is a great and unholy sound, and for several seconds all talk in that room came to an end. A guy who recognized the noise for what it was clapped from somewhere back in the line. I boarded the train back to Brooklyn, uncertain that I had succeeded, though I needn’t have doubted the Wookiee’s allure. Two weeks later, I received a postcard informing me that I was part of the ‘contestant pool,’ and a week after that a producer called to tell me that my episode would shoot in seven days’ time.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 21, 2013
Length: 23 minutes (5,816 words)

On Muppets & Merchandise: How Jim Henson Turned His Art into a Business

Photo by Eva Rinaldi

Elizabeth Hyde Stevens | Make Art Make Money | September 2013 | 17 minutes (4,102 words)

 

In 2011, Longreads highlighted an essay called “Weekend at Kermie’s,” by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens, published by The Awl. Stevens is now back with a new Muppet-inspired Kindle Serial called “Make Art Make Money,” part how-to, part Jim Henson history. Below is the opening chapter. Our thanks to Stevens and Amazon Publishing for sharing this with the Longreads community. Read more…

‘He’s Our Baby’: What Happens When a Child Is Placed in Foster Care

Cris Beam | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | August 2013 | 23 minutes (5,787 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, by Cris Beam, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick. Thanks to Cris and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sharing it with the Longreads community.

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The Producers: A Reading List on Musical Masterminds

From Matt Graves: Here are six of his story picks on the topic of music producers, the often-overlooked architects of the music we hear and love.

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1. “The Song Machine: the Hitmakers Behind Rihanna,” by John Seabrook (The New Yorker, March 2012)

In her ascent to the pop throne, Rihanna had some unlikely help: a singer from Muskogee, Oklahoma and a two-man team of Norwegian producers. Meet Ester Dean and Stargate, pop’s unknown puppeteers.

2. “Disco Architect: 12 x 12 with Brass Construction’s Randy Muller,” by Andrew Mason (Wax Poetics, Fall 2004)

The true story of how one 18-year-old, born in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, became the unsung godfather of 1970s disco.

3. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee,” by Kembrew McLeod (Stay Free! Magazine, 2002)

Public Enemy burst onto the 1980s hip-hop scene with a sound unlike anything the world had ever heard. Their groundbreaking beats were supplied by The Bomb Squad, a two-man team who turned sampling into a complex, noisy and compelling new art form that changed hip-hop forever.

4. “Philippe Zdar: The French Touch,” by Amber Bravo (The Fader, June 2012)

Is Philippe Zdar the best producer you’ve never heard of? From Parisian disco and Phoenix’s “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” to records from Cat Power, Beastie Boys and Cassius, you’ve probably felt his influence, even if you didn’t know his name.

5. “Arthur Baker: From Planet Rock To Star Maker,” by Richard Buskin (Sound on Sound, June 1997)

How Arthur Baker, a failed disco DJ from Boston, made his musical mark on the 1980s—from hip-hop (Afrika Bambaata’s “Planet Rock”) and dance (New Order’s “Confusion”), to pop (New Edition’s “Candy Girl”) and rock.

6. “Rick Rubin: The Intuitionist,” by Will Welch (The Fader, 2004)

From Kanye’s “Yeezus” and Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” to Johnny Cash’s cover of NIN’s “Hurt”, Rick Rubin has been the music world’s (mad)man behind the curtain.

The Summer of Love and Newsweek

Longreads Pick

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg reflects on his early career working as a correspondent for Newsweek in San Francisco, covering Jefferson Airplane, Ronald Reagan and hippies:

“If the S.F. music scene (I quickly learned that ‘Frisco’ was a no-no) was scarcely known outside the Bay Area, and neither was the larger cultural phenomenon it drew strength from. The word ‘hippie’—derived from ‘hipster,’ the nineteen-forties bebop sobriquet revived sixty years later in Brooklyn, Portland, and food co-ops in between—had been coined only a few months earlier, by Herb Caen, the Chronicle’s inimitable gossip columnist. (At the time, as often as not, people spelled it ‘hippy.’) Ralph J. Gleason, the Chron’s jazz critic, was the scene’s Dr. Johnson. (Pushing fifty, he was too old to be its Boswell.) Gleason’s protégé was the pop-music critic for the U.C. Berkeley’s student paper, the Daily Californian, Jann Wenner. But the national press had not taken much notice, if any. So getting something into Newsweek was a coup.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 15, 2013
Length: 8 minutes (2,143 words)

Growing up Muslim in America

Longreads Pick

What it’s like to grow up as a Muslim in America today. Although Muslims embrace their faith while facing discrimination, they also suffer from anxiety as a result from racial profiling:

“For me, this issue is personal. My son was born in America but has an Arabic surname and is growing up bilingual, although we are not religious in any direction. He has my lighter hair but his father’s colouring. Once, in an airport, a woman asked me what he was ‘mixed with’. A look that fell just short of horror passed over her face when I replied, ‘Iraqi.’ I shudder to think of my son being on the receiving end of that look, just because of his name or the way his skin tans at the merest hint of summer.

“I am one of many parents who worry. Arwa Aziz, a 41-year-old mother of two boys, moved her youngest son Adam, now 13, from public school to a private Muslim school in Brooklyn because she was concerned about him being bullied. ‘He got so shy as he was growing up, so I just thought he would be better off there,’ Aziz told me while we talked at the Arab American Association, showing each other photos of our boys. ‘I tell my kids that they’re second-generation Americans, I won’t let them make us feel weak.'”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jul 19, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,850 words)