Search Results for: City Pages

Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats

Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words)

 

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Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training.

Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the coming season. Each year it is another variation on the same theme: “This is Our Year” or “Is This Our Year?” or “Can the Royals Win it All?” or “Our Time” or “How Good are these Royals?” or “How Good are these Royals” or or or. It gets tiresome after growing up hearing it year after year, because the answer has always been the same. The answer is no. It’s not our time. It’s not our year. No, the Royals aren’t going to win it all. These Royals are not very good. No. Read more…

The Fight to Find John Wilkes Booth’s Diary in a Forgotten Subway Tunnel

Longreads Pick

The story of an urban explorer in New York city and his decades-long fight to excavate a four-story wall of rocky debris that he believes contains the lost pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary:

Diamond is a plump, 54-year-old New Yorker with kind, sunken eyes and frazzled hair—what’s left of it. Known in the local papers as “the Tunnel King,” he is an indisputably odd and paradoxical fellow. His acquaintances describe him as “brilliant”—he is an obsessive researcher and prodigious Googler whose living room is filled with piles of books, engineering diagrams and newspaper clippings about the tunnel. But they also say he can be “paranoid” and “hyperbolic” regarding his belief that the city has conspired to keep him out of the tunnel; and that if he gets back inside, he might find the missing pages of Booth’s diary that will prove a cabal of high-ranking, pro-Confederate New York officials plotted to kill Lincoln. When asked about this latter, seemingly preposterous claim, Diamond simply replies, “They used to say the tunnel didn’t exist.”

Author: Joe Kloc
Source: Newsweek
Published: Jun 10, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,131 words)

The Good Girls Revolt

Lynn Povich | The Good Girls Revolt, Public Affairs | 2012 | 14 minutes (3,368 words)

 

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“Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint”

On March 16, 1970, Newsweek magazine hit the newsstands with a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement titled “Women in Revolt.” The bright yellow cover pictured a naked woman in red silhouette, her head thrown back, provocatively thrusting her fist through a broken blue female-sex symbol. As the first copies went on sale that Monday morning, forty-six female employees of Newsweek announced that we, too, were in revolt. We had just filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging that we had been “systematically discriminated against in both hiring and promotion and forced to assume a subsidiary role” simply because we were women. It was the first time women in the media had sued on the grounds of sex discrimination and the story, irresistibly timed to the Newsweek cover, was picked up around the world:

• “‘Discriminate,’ le redattrici di Newsweek?” (La Stampa) “Newsweek’s Sex Revolt” (London Times)
• “Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint” (Newsday)
• “Women Get Set for Battle” (London Daily Express)
• “As Newsweek Says, Women Are in Revolt, Even on Newsweek” (New York Times)

The story in the New York Daily News, titled “Newshens Sue Newsweek for ‘Equal Rights,’” began, “Forty-six women on the staff of Newsweek magazine, most of them young and most of them pretty, announced today they were suing the magazine.”

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After Action Report

Phil Klay | Redeployment, The Penguin Press | March 2014 | 24 minutes (5,940 words)

 

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Our latest Longreads Member Pick is from Redeployment, a collection of short stories by Phil Klay, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a Public Affairs Officer.

Thanks to Klay and Penguin Press for sharing it with the Longreads community, and special thanks to Longreads Members, who make this service possible. Join us.

 

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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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Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads

Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)

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In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was committed to an asylum for a month. Society was clearly not ready for such an autonomous practice, especially on the part of a woman. But personal ads quickly became an institution. Heinrich von Kleist’s celebrated novella The Marquise of O, first published in 1810 (and said by Kleist to be “based on a true incident”) opens on the newspaper ad placed by “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children,” to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.” Read more…

David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact

Josh Roiland | Literary Journalism Studies | Fall 2013 | 23 minutes (5,690 words)

Josh Roiland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and a CLAS-Honors Preceptor in the Honors College at the University of Maine. Roiland is a cultural historian of the American news media, who researches and teaches classes on the cultural, political, and literary significance of American journalism. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Literary Journalism Studies. Our thanks to Roiland for allowing us to reprint it here, and for adding this introduction:

David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category. In the years after his death, he has faced charges of embellishment and exaggeration by his close friend Jonathan Franzen and repeated by his biographer D.T. Max. Their criticisms, however, do not adequately address the intricate philosophy Wallace formulated about genre classification and the fact/fiction divide. This article explores those nuances and argues that Wallace’s thinking about genre was complex, multifaceted, and that it evolved during his writing life.

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Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he jotted in very fine print 13 questions. After three innocuous ice breakers, Wallace turned his attention to perhaps the most prominent theme in all his writing: consciousness. Acknowledging the abnormal interview approach, Wallace prefaced these next nine inquires with a printed subhead: “Non-Journalist Questions.” Each interrogation is a paragraph long, filled with digressions, asides, and qualifications; several contain superscripted addendums.  In short, they read like they’re written by David Foster Wallace. He asks Roger Federer if he’s aware of his own greatness, aware of the unceasing media microscope he operates under, aware of his uncommon elevation of athletics to the level of aesthetics, aware of how great his great shots really are. Wallace even wrote, “How aware are you of the ballboys?” before crossing the question out.

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College Football Star Michael Sam on How He Was Treated After Coming Out to His Teammates

Mr. Sam played down any repercussions, saying he had the full support of teammates, coaches and administrators. One teammate, he said, accompanied him to a gay pride event in St. Louis last summer, and others went with him to gay bars.

“Some people actually just couldn’t believe I was actually gay,” Mr. Sam said. “But I never had a problem with my teammates. Some of my coaches were worried, but there was never an issue.”

One lingering issue, Mr. Washington said, was trying to get players to change their casual language in the locker room. Loosely lobbed homophobic remarks suddenly had a specific sting.

Mr. Sam played down that, too. For him, coming out to his football team was a positive step, on a path that seems as if it will lead to the N.F.L.

In The New York Times, John Branch reports about college football star Michael Sam, who came out as gay to his teammates at Mizzou. Sam is on track to become the first publicly gay player in the NFL. See also: “Chris Kluwe Takes a Stand.”

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Photo: Komunews

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The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words)

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For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press. Read more…

A Brief History of Class and Waste in India

Rose George | The Big Necessity, Metropolitan Books | 2008 | 28 minutes (6,900 words)

Below is a full chapter from The Big Necessity, Rose George’s acclaimed 2008 book exploring the world of human waste. The book will be reissued later this year with a new afterword. George’s 2013 book 90 Percent of Everything was featured previously on Longreads, and we’re thrilled to spotlight her work again.  Read more…