Search Results for: Capital New York

What Ever Happened to Planet Vulcan?

An orrery, or mechanical model of the solar system. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas Leveson | The Hunt for Vulcan: … And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe | Random House | November 2015 | 27 minutes (7,305 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The Hunt for Vulcan, by Thomas Leveson. In light of recent theorizing about a mysterious new Planet X, this story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Not everyone follows a straight course to the person they might become.

In the 1830s (and still) number 63 Quai d’Orsay turned an attractive face toward the river. In the guidebooks already being read by that novel nineteenth-century species, the tourist, number 63 is described as a “handsome house”—one, the writers warned, that concealed a much more plebeian reality. Visitors—by appointment only, no more than two at a time, welcome only on Thursdays—would be ushered into a courtyard, and then on to the rooms where workers, mostly women, took bales of raw tobacco through every stage needed to produce the finished stuff of habit: hand-rolled cigars, spun strands of chew that became “the solace of the Havre marin,” gentlemen’s snuff. Most of the campus was turned over to laborers serving the machines—choppers, oscillating funnels, snuff mills, rollers, sifters, cutters, and more. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the works at the Quai d’Orsay would turn out more than 5,600 tons of finished tobacco per year, and was, according to the ubiquitous Baedeker, “worthy of a visit”—though indulging one’s curiosity carried a price: “the pungent smell of the tobacco saturates the clothes and is not easily got rid of.”

A spectacle, certainly, and as an early palace of industry clearly worthy of the guidebooks (themselves novelties). By any stretch of the imagination, though, the Manufacture des Tabacs was an odd place to look for someone who would become the most celebrated mathematical astronomer of his day—but not everyone follows a straight course to the person they might become. Thus it was that in 1833 a young man, freshly minted as a graduate of the celebrated École polytechnique, could be found every working day at the Quai d’Orsay, reporting for duty at the research arm of the factory, France’s École des Tabacs.

No one ever doubted that Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier had potential: he had been a star student in secondary school, winner of second prize in a national mathematics competition, eighth in his class at the polytechnique. But his early career offered no hints to what would follow. Funneled into the tobacco engineering section in university, he was more or less shunted directly toward the Quai d’Orsay and the task of solving French big tobacco’s problems.

It’s not clear whether Le Verrier actively enjoyed the life of a tobacco engineer—or merely tolerated it. Nothing in his later career remotely suggests he was a born chemist. But he was consistent: if given a task, he got down to it. Never mind all that early training in abstract mathematics; if required, he could be as practical as the next man, and so turned himself into a student of the combustion of phosphorus. That was useful research—tobacco monopolists care about matches. But whether or not he relished his job, he certainly got out as soon as he could. A position back at the École polytechnique opened up in 1836 for a répétiteur— assistant—to the professor of chemistry. Le Verrier applied, and as an until-then almost uniformly successful prodigy, had every hope. . . until the post went to someone else.

Le Verrier would prove to be a man who catalogued slights, tallied enemies, and held his grudges close. But he never accepted a check as a measure of his true worth. A second assistantship became available, this time in astronomy. He applied for that too. Never mind his seven years among the tobacco plants; Le Verrier seems to have believed that he could simply ramp up his math chops to the standard required at the highest level of French quantitative science. As he wrote to his father, “I must not only accept but seek out opportunities to extend my knowledge. [. . . ] I have already ascended many ranks, why should I not continue to rise further?” Thus it was that Le Verrier came into orbit around the great body of work left by that giant of French astronomy, Pierre-Simon Laplace. Read more…

Six James Beard Finalists You Might Have Missed: A Reading List

James Beard
James Beard, photo by Paul Child.

The James Beard Foundation announced the finalists for its 2016 food media awards last week, so it’s a great time to make a cup of tea and cozy up to some excellent food writing. You might have already read some of the nominees featured here throughout 2015 — “The Brief, Extraordinary Life of Cody Spafford,” “Straight-Up Passing,” “Corn Wars,” “The Second Most Famous Thing to Happen to Hiroshima,” “The Chef Who Saved My Life,” and “On Chicken Tenders,” which features some of the most passionate writing about fried snack foods to hit the internet’s tubes — but here are six more you might have missed:

1. “Ham to Ham Combat: A Tale of Two Smithfields” (Emily Wallace, Gravy, December 2015)

Worth it for the title alone, Emily’s piece wends from 350-year-old pro-pig promotional literature to the interstate tensions at the 1985 Ham & Yam Festival — with a pit stop to visit The Oldest Peanut in the World — in service of a single question: is the ham capital of the U.S. in Virginia, or North Carolina?  (And a runner-up question: Why does it matter?)

Read more…

Into the World of Mushrooms: A Reading List

Is it weird I’ve been planning a mushroom-themed reading list for a long time? Probably. But mushrooms are intriguing. What other substance on earth is sustenance, poison, psychedelic drug, medicine and delicacy? There are approximately 1.5 million kinds of mushrooms (I Googled it). They survive via underground communication networks called mycelium. The biggest recorded mycelium is over 2,000 acres across, in Oregon. In the following five pieces, you’ll meet foragers, hikers, researchers, anthropologists, drug dealers and puppies. You’ll have a newfound appreciation for the men and women who devote themselves to studying these weird, wild fungi. Read more…

To Consider Myself a Human Being

Ji Xianlin | The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution | New York Review Books | Jan. 2016 | 26 minutes (6,690 words)

 

What follows are three excerpts from Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed, courtesy of New York Review Books. As the publisher notes:

In contemporary China, the Cultural Revolution remains a delicate topic, little discussed, but if a Chinese citizen has read one book on the subject, it is likely to be Ji’s memoir. When The Cowshed was published in China in 1998, it quickly became a bestseller. The Cultural Revolution had nearly disappeared from the collective memory. Prominent intellectuals rarely spoke openly about the revolution, and books on the subject were almost nonexistent. By the time of Ji’s death in 2009, little had changed, and despite its popularity, The Cowshed remains one of the only testimonies of its kind. As Zha Jianying writes in the introduction, “The book has sold well and stayed in print. But authorities also quietly took steps to restrict public discussion of the memoir, as its subject continues to be treated as sensitive.”

The Cowshed is invaluable in its own right as a harrowing story of how the Cultural Revolution played out on an urban campus, but perhaps even more importantly as a glimpse into how those years of turmoil are remembered in mainland China. Read more…

When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman

Robert Owen's vision of New Harmony, Indiana. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Chris Jennings | Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism | Random House | January 2016 | 29 minutes (7,852 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Paradise Now, Chris Jennings’ look at the history of the golden age of American utopianism, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. 

* * *

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. . . .
—OSCAR WILDE

*

Mistaking day for night, they took wing.

At noon, darkness spread across the sky. It was the nineteenth of May 1780, a Friday. On the rolling pastureland of western New England, sheep and cows lay down one by one in the damp grass. As the darkness became total, finches and warblers quieted and returned to their roosts. Above the white pines and budding oaks, bats stirred. Mistaking day for night, they took wing.

The fratricidal war for American independence was grinding into its fifth year. A week earlier, the Continental army had surrendered the smoldering port of Charleston to the British navy after more than a month of heavy shelling. In New England, with so many young men off fighting, gardens went unplanted and the wheat grew thin.

For many colonists the war with Great Britain aroused a stolid nationalist piety, a consoling faith in “the sacred cause of liberty”—the belief that providence would guide the rebels to victory and that the fighting itself constituted an appeal to heaven. But in the hilly borderland between New York and Massachusetts, the anxiety and austerity of the long conflict inspired frenzied revival meetings. This was the New Light Stir, an aftershock of the Great Awakening of radical Protestantism that had coursed through New England in the 1740s. From makeshift pulpits, the New Light evangelists shouted an urgent millenarian message: These are the Latter Days; the Kingdom is at hand.

Standing at the crack of American independence, these backwoods Yankees believed that they were living the final hours of history. It is written: He will come back and the righteous will be delivered from sin for a thousand years of earthly peace and happiness. The New Lights believed that the time had come and that their small revivals, held in fields and cowsheds, would trigger the return of Christ and the millennium of heaven on earth. Looking up from their plows and their milking stools, these hill-country farmers scanned the horizon for signs of His approach. Read more…

Talking to Alice Driver About Violence Against Women in Juárez

Schoolgirls walk in front of a mural painted with the faces of disappeared girls. Local artists and families of the disappeared have been working together to raise awareness about disappearance in Juárez; they paint the faces of missing girls on the donated walls of schools, churches, and homes around the city. Photo: Alice Driver

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico was once known as the global murder capital. It’s no longer the world’s most dangerous city, but violence still haunts the town just over the border from El Paso, Texas. Alice Driver, a filmmaker, writer and photographer whose work focuses on human rights, feminism, and activism, has written extensively about Juárez.  Her searing 2015 book More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico deals specifically with the disappearance and murder of women in Juárez. The work, which grew out of her dissertation, blends theory with stories and interviews to explore not just the violence against women in Juárez, but also how that violence has been represented in media and culture. As Driver writes:

“To talk about feminicide is to talk about violence against women in all its manifestations, and in Juárez one of the most visible of those is disappearance. When women are murdered, their bodies don’t always appear. Often they disappear, and so the violence becomes unregistered, unrecorded, and seemingly invisible. This book is about the ways in which those bodies, whether identified or nameless, have been represented in literature, film, and art.”

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How Gentrification Affects Musicians

Gentrification isn’t simply the process of urban change through the rise in property values. It involves power dynamics between people in control and people at their mercy, and often between the white majority and working-class minorities. One group affected by gentrification is artists. In Radio Silence, Ian S. Port writes about the way musicians continue to get squeezed out of cities like San Francisco, Paris and New York, about how their departure changes the character and economy of the cities that benefited from their cultural contributions, and about the impermanence of bohemia. Complicating the picture is the fact that artists and bohemians are often gentrifiers themselves, moving into lower-income neighborhoods early in the cycle in order to capitalize off of low rent. Not everyone sympathizes with ousted musicians, yet many of us who listen to music benefit from their ability to create it. Port’s piece originally appeared in April, 2015. The magazine says it’s their most talked about story.

This influx of newcomers raised unsettling questions. If San Francisco was already going the way of gentrified Manhattan—as Borsook described it, “a slightly faded kosher butcher shop replaced by an Italian fusion restaurant, what was the rehearsal space for a dance troupe become a lawyer [now tech company] loft”—where would the artists go? There’s a limited supply of dense, thoroughly urban places in the United States, and only a handful of large ones west of the Mississippi. If the newfound tastes of the upper-middle class and the wealthy made it so artists couldn’t afford to dwell in those places, what then? What would happen to bohemia when artists were shunted to more sprawling and affordable cities? A spread-out burg like Los Angeles might foster its own pockets of artistic activity, but there’s a vast difference between that sort of scattered bohemia and the concentrated energy of, say, North Beach in the 1950s.

San Francisco’s dot-com boom went bust in the early 2000s, and as its wealth evaporated, the city was jolted back toward normalcy. “For Rent” signs papered the windows of apartment buildings on Geary Boulevard from the city center out to the Pacific Ocean. Some artists and musicians who had left were able to return, bolstering the bohemian community that remained. Young people still came to San Francisco to find success in creative fields. With a little searching for the right living situation, one could find a room at a price that would leave plenty of time for making art after making the rent. John Dwyer lived on Haight Street in those days, and he could be seen riding his chromed bicycle around town during the hours normal people were at work.

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The Murky Importance of Giving: A Reading List

I have a Facebook “friend”—let’s call him Ken—who does something finance-y for the federal government. What I’m saying is, he has money to burn. Every few months, he’ll post a Facebook status along the lines of “For every ‘like’ I will donate $1 to _______ and for every comment I will donate $3 to ________.” Of course, his thousands of Facebook acquaintances are only happy to oblige. Most of my friends don’t make much more than their car insurance payments, student loans, rent and other bills; maybe that’s why Ken’s altruism seems so novel, almost suspect. In reading for this list, I discovered people who give freely, their generosity intertwined with thoughtfulness at best; carelessness, illness or guilt at worst.

1. “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Giving.”

Sam Kean, The Atlantic, May 2015

Giving, it seems, might become compulsive in some people because they crave the rush of dopamine that accompanies it—a rush that might be similar to the spike in dopamine levels that gets some people hooked on drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines. In a real sense, pathological givers might be addicted to philanthropy.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Essays & Criticism

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism. Read more…

We Are All Compromised: The Access Game Isn’t Dead Yet

Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg, via Wikimedia Commons

John Herrman’s excellent Awl series on the anxious state of the media business (featured in our latest Top 5) should be required reading for anyone who creates or consumes content on the internet. His conclusions—advertising models are sputtering, no one wants to pay for news, Facebook dictates the entire tenor of conversation and its subject matter—do so much to explain why we are inundated by media but largely unsatisfied with what floats to the surface. Come for Herrman’s dystopian vision—a future in which professional journalism is suffocated to death—and stay for the animated robot GIFs. Read more…