Search Results for: City Journal

Theorizing the Drone

Grégoire Chamayou | A Theory of the Drone | The New Press | January 2015 | Translated by Janet Lloyd | Originally published in France as Théorie du Drone by la Fabrique Editions, Paris, 2013 | 28 minutes (7,693 words)

 

Below are four chapters excerpted from the book A Theory of the Drone, by French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

 

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Pattern-of-Life Analysis

Enemy leaders look like everyone else; enemy combatants look like everyone else; enemy vehicles look like civilian vehicles; enemy installations look like civilian installations; enemy equipment and materials look like civilian equipment and materials.

—American Defense Science Board

 

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The Boy Who Loved Transit

Photo via mtaphotos (Edited)

Jeff Tietz | Harper’s | May 2002 | 35 minutes (8,722 words)

 

This essay by Jeff Tietz first appeared in the May 2002 issue of Harper’s and was later anthologized in The Best American Crime Writing: 2003 Edition. Tietz has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Livingston Journalism Award. His work has appeared in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Writing, Best American Business Writing, and The CAFO Reader. Our thanks to Tietz for allowing us to reprint it here. For those interested in an update on Darius McCollum’s story, see this 2013 The Wall Street Journal piece (subscription req’d).

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Before leaving his girlfriend’s apartment in Crown Heights, on the morning of his nineteenth arrest for impersonating and performing the functions of New York City Transit Authority employees, Darius McCollum put on an NYCTA subway conductor’s uniform and reflector vest. Over his feet he pulled transit-issue boots with lace guards and soles designed to withstand third-rail jolts. He took transit-issue work gloves and protective goggles. He put a transit-issue hard hat on his head. In his pockets he carried NYCTA work orders and rerouting schedules and newspaper clippings describing his previous arrests: for driving subway trains and buses and various other vehicles without authorization, possessing stolen property, flagging traffic around NYCTA construction sites, forging documents. He also carried a signed letter on NYCTA letterhead:

To: All Concerned Departments

From: Thomas Calandrella Chief Track Officer

Re: Darius McCollum Effective this date of January 10, 2000, Darius McCollum is a member of a special twelve member Special Study Group; and will analyze the operations of track safety and track operations. SSG will report directly to this office and will be issued all related gear for the respected purposes of this department and will receive assistance of any relating department.

To his belt Darius clipped a flashlight and a key ring the size of a choker. From this ring six smaller rings hung like pendants. Along the curves of the small rings, 139 keys climbed symmetrical and fanlike. Each key granted access to a secure area of the train, bus, or subway system of the New York City Transit Authority. The collection was equivalent to the number of keys an employee would acquire through forty years of steady promotions. Just before he left the apartment, Darius picked up an orange emergency-response lantern.

Six weeks earlier, Darius had been paroled from the Elmira Correctional Facility, near Binghamton, New York, where he had served two years for attempted grand larceny—”attempted” because he had signed out NYCTA vehicles for surface use (extinguishing track fires, supervising maintenance projects) and then signed them back in according to procedure. Darius has never worked for the NYCTA; he has never held a steady job. He is thirty-seven and has spent a third of his adult life in prison for victim-less offenses related to transit systems. Read more…

The Perils of Writing About Your Own Family: A Conversation with George Hodgman

George Hodgman and his mother Betty.

Sari Botton | Longreads | April 2015 | 15 minutes (3,752 words)

 

Sometimes life’s most inconvenient surprise detours ultimately yield great rewards we never could have predicted. For writer George Hodgman—who’s been whisked away indefinitely from his tidily self-contained life in New York City to care for his ailing mother—one of those rewards was a chance to better know and appreciate Betty (now 94) before she’s gone. Another benefit: the conditions he hadn’t even known he needed to finally, at 55, write and publish his first book. The New York Times Bestselling memoir, Bettyville, is the result. Read more…

Celebrating Singlehood and Reclaiming the Word ‘Spinster’

Photo: Willy Somma

Jessica Gross | Longreads | April 2015 | 19 minutes (4,797 words)

 

In 2011, Kate Bolick charted the sea change in our cultural attitudes toward marriage in her Atlantic piece, “All the Single Ladies.” Interweaving personal experience—she was 39 and single at the time—with reporting, Bolick posited that we are marrying later or not at all, with many women exercising their ability to have children without partners or, again, not at all.

The piece generated a huge response. In Bolick’s new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, she approaches single adulthood from a slightly different angle. The book is part memoir: Bolick describes breaking away from a serious, cohabitating relationship in her late twenties, exploring her ambivalence about partnership, and wholly reconsidering her view of marriage. Along the way, she presents the stories of her five “awakeners,” the historical single women who shaped her thinking. These were the essayist Maeve Brennan, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, the columnist Neith Boyce, the novelist Edith Wharton, and the writer and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. By considering these women’s biographies and cultural contexts, Bolick began to better understand her own.

I’ve been single for most of my twenties—I’m almost thirty now—and I’ve tended to think of it as some kind of flaw. Reading Spinster, I not only saw clearly this underlying belief, which wasn’t totally conscious, but also realized that being single was actually a choice I had made. Does that ring true to you as the heart of what this book is about?

Yes, without a doubt. The book started for me when I was in my late twenties and living with my boyfriend and we moved from Boston to New York so that I could go to graduate school. I started wondering, what does a life look like if you’re not married? I was really struck to realize that there were no positive depictions of single women in popular culture. At that moment in time, in 2000, it was either Carrie Bradshaw or Bridget Jones. You were either frivolous and fabulous or desperate. And either way, you were definitely trying to get yourself coupled. Sex and the City was in a way celebrating singlehood, but it was also singlehood as long as it’s a way station to something else. And so it began that way, with becoming interested in at least learning more about a different way of being that I wasn’t seeing reflected around me anywhere. Yet I knew that culture had given us positive examples in the past, particularly during the second wave of the women’s movement. So where did that go?

It was during that sort of amorphous period of wondering that I came across Neith Boyce, who felt like a profound discovery: I hadn’t even known people were talking about this in the late 1800s. The clarity of her voice at a time that I thought of as being so repressive for women made me see how much we’re shaped by the time in which we live and the assumptions that we grow up with.

So that’s a long way of saying yes, but it was more this kind of internal questioning, and then smacking up against this external example from history. Read more…

Tennessee Williams on His Women, His Writer’s Block, and Whether It All Mattered

Maureen Stapleton and Don Murray in The Rose Tattoo. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

James Grissom | Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog | Knopf | March 2015 | 26 minutes (7,038 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book Follies of God, by James Grissom, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Dana writes:

“James Grissom wrote a letter to Tennessee Williams in 1982, when he was only 20 years old, asking for advice. Tennessee unexpectedly responded, ‘Perhaps you can be of some help to me.’ Ultimately he tasked Grissom with seeking out each of the women (and few men) who had inspired his work—among them Maureen Stapleton, Lillian Gish, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Marlon Brando—so that he could ask them a question: had Tennessee Williams, or his work, ever mattered? This is Grissom’s account of their intense first encounters, in which Tennessee explains his thoughts on writing, writer’s block, and the women he wrote.”

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The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much

Ashley Guidry with Sandy, a wild-caught bottlenose dolphin, at Gulf World.

Tim Zimmermann | Longreads | April 2015 | 25 minutes (6,193 words)

 

Panama City Beach, Florida is set on the alluring waters of the Gulf Of Mexico, in northwestern Florida. It’s a town of cookie-cutter condos and sprawling outlet malls, built almost entirely on the idea that blazing sun, a cool sea, white sand beaches, and copious amounts of booze are an irresistible formula for human happiness (or at least a pretty damn good time). Everything about the place—from the ubiquitous fast food, to the endless chain stores, to the Brobdingnagian miniature golf courses—is designed to anticipate and then slake the vast and relentless array of human desires.

Prime among the entertainment offerings is Gulf World Marine Park. It sits on Front Beach Road, the main drag that parallels the seafront, and promises sun-addled or bored families a respite from the nearby beach. By day you can swim with dolphins (“guaranteed”) or watch them perform the standard flips and tricks in a show pool, check out the sharks and stingrays, or watch the sea lions act goofy. By night you can watch “Illusionist Of The Year” (it’s not clear who made the designation) Noah Wells unleash his “Maximum Magic.” “It’s Always Showtime At Gulf World” says the marketing department. And that’s true: The entire place shuts down for only two days a year (Thanksgiving and Christmas).

Gulf World is not SeaWorld; it’s much smaller, less expensive, (though a family of four will still fork over $96 just to get past the gate), and there are no killer whales. But it is more typical of the 32 marine parks that keep dolphins and do business in the United States, and it’s these local parks which happen to house the vast majority of the captive dolphins (according to Ceta-Base, which tracks marine parks, there are currently some 509 dolphins at marine parks in the U.S.; about 144 are located at SeaWorld). If SeaWorld is the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey when it comes to marine mammal entertainment, Gulf World is one of the many small, local carnivals that do a pretty decent trade out of the limelight. And Gulf World happens to be where Ashley Guidry—a brassy blonde with minimal experience, and a simple application accompanied by a Polaroid—happened to land a job in April 2001, at the age of 27. Read more…

The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg

Elissa Schappell | The Paris Review | 1995 | 63 minutes (15,685 words)

  
We’re excited to reprint Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg.” The piece was first featured on the site in 2013 as a Longreads Member Pick, and originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review. It was later anthologized in the Paris Review’s 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:

Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”
—Elissa Schappell, 2013

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The news that Allen Ginsberg was going to be teaching at New York University was passed around campus like a joint, making some people giddy and euphoric, others mildly confused, and still others paranoid—teachers and students alike. The waiting list to get into the class was extraordinary not only in length, but for the sheer number of times students eagerly checked to see if they had moved up. As a graduate student in the creative writing program I was given first dibs. I was curious to meet Ginsberg, curious to see how he would commandeer the Craft of Poetry class, which in the past had been taught by Galway Kinnell and William Matthews. The following excerpts were culled from a diary I kept during the semester. Read more…

‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker

Photo via simpleinsomnia

Nikil Saval | Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace | Doubleday | April 2014 | 31 minutes (8,529 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book Cubed, by Nikil Saval, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

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I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils…

—Theodore Roethke, “Dolor”

The torn coat sleeve to the table. The steel pen to the ink. Write! Write! Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think.

—Benjamin Browne Foster, Down East Diary (1849)

They labored in poorly lit, smoky single rooms, attached to merchants and lawyers, to insurance concerns and banks. They had sharp penmanship and bad eyes, extravagant clothes but shrunken, unused bodies, backs cramped from poor posture, fingers callused by constant writing. When they were not thin, angular, and sallow, they were ruddy and soft; their paunches sagged onto their thighs. Read more…

The Last Freeway

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Hillel Aron | Slake | July 2011 | 20 minutes (4,888 words)

Hillel Aron’s “The Last Freeway” was published in Slake in 2011 and appeared as a Longreads Member Pick in September 2013. It’s a story about a city (Los Angeles), a freeway interchange (where the 105 meets the 110), and a man (Judge Harry Pregerson). Aron explains:

“Well, my friends Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa had this great quarterly called Slake, and I wanted to write something for them, so we sat down and talked about it… I think maybe I pitched it to them, I can’t remember. I’d was just always fascinated by freeways, growing up in Los Angeles, and I loved that Reyner Banham book, The Architecture of the Four Ecologies. When I was kid, I was completely enchanted by that 105 / 110 interchange, the carpool lane one, which towers above the city. It’s basically like a rollercoaster. Actually it kind of sucks—since I wrote the piece, they’ve turned that carpool lane into a “toll lane,” so normal carpoolers can’t use it anymore without one of those fast pass things. At any rate, I did some research and it turned out that (a) the 105 was the last freeway built in Los Angeles—the end of an era, really. And it was so tough to build that it basically set a precedent of not building freeways anymore. And (b), there was this nutty judge who turned the whole thing into a New Deal-style public works program to benefit the communities that were being bisected by this massive beast of a freeway. And he also ordered them to stick a train in the middle of it, which didn’t quite go to the airport, but that’s a different story…”

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Why the World Is Betting on a Better Battery: A Reading List

Photo from the Henry Ford Collection, via Ford

Nick Leiber | Longreads | March 2015

 

The first battery, a pile of copper and zinc discs, was invented more than 200 years ago, ushering in the electric age. Subsequent versions led to portable electronics, mobile computing, and our current love affair with smartphones (1,000 of which are shipped every 22 seconds). Now batteries are powering electric cars and storing electricity produced by solar cells and windmills, but they don’t last long enough and are too expensive for either use to really go mainstream. To cut the cost, Tesla plans to double the world’s production capacity of the popular lithium-ion battery with its forthcoming $5 billion battery manufacturing plant in the Nevada desert. Tesla’s idea is to use economies of scale to lower prices. Meanwhile, other companies and many industrialized countries, including China and the U.S., are racing to develop batteries that are more advanced than Tesla’s. They’re betting billions that breakthrough battery technologies will help create new industries, juice existing ones, and wean us off fossil fuels because we’ll be able to use the sun and wind in their place. Here is a book, a documentary, and five stories on our battery-powered future. Read more…