Search Results for: Collectors Weekly

How One Magazine Shaped Investigative Journalism in America

The following story comes recommended by Ben Marks, senior editor for Collectors Weekly:

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s most recent history, The Bully Pulpit, chronicles the intertwined lives of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, often in excruciating detail, from Roosevelt’s struggles with the bosses of his Republican party to the fungal infections that plagued Taft’s groin. But the most illuminating aspect of Pulpit is the spotlight it shines on the muckraking journalism of the early 20th century, particularly as practiced by a monthly magazine called McClure’s. There, writers such as Ida Tarbell, Ray Baker, and Lincoln Steffens held the feet of the powerful to the fire. In one landmark issue, January 1903, articles by all three were featured, including the third installment of Tarbell’s 12-part exposé of Standard Oil and Baker’s counter-intuitive, sympathetic portrait of coal miners, whose dire circumstances had forced them to cross picket lines. Read more…

The Real History of Love & Marriage

“Though the murky concept known as ‘love’ has been recorded for all of human history, it was almost never a justification for marriage. ‘Love was considered a reason not to get married,’ says Abbott. ‘It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate. You could have love or lust for your mistress, if you’re a man, but if you’re a woman, you had to suppress it. It was condemned as a factor in marriage.’”

Collectors Weekly on the non-romantic origins of marriage. More in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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“Bill Cassidy—the second owner of Pretzel—told us before he passed away that that was one of the gimmicks that he was most proud of. It was just a spool of thread. It would hang from a rafter in the ceiling, and it would rub up against people’s faces and creep them out. It’s supposed to be cobwebs, I guess, but it wasn’t an actual web. It was just a string, but you couldn’t see it. It seems to me that just about every dark ride I rode in the 1960s had that. If it didn’t come factory-installed, I’m sure the park owners themselves would tack it up.”

Collectors Weekly on the history of amusement park “dark rides” and haunted houses. Read more from Collectors Weekly in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Longreads Guest Pick: Digg's David Weiner

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Today’s guest pick comes from David Weiner, editorial director for Digg and a frequent contributor to the Longreads community. Here’s what he’s reading right now:

LA Review of Books

LARB really came out of nowhere for me. I was vaguely aware of them for the last year or two, but either they really started hitting their stride this past fall or I just wasn’t paying enough attention. A recent piece by Tom Dibblee, ostensibly on the history of Anheuser-Busch but really an exploration into the pitfalls of nepotism and the writer’s unabashed love for Bud Light Lime, is easily one of the best things I’ve read so far this year. It’s a bold statement, I know, but I really think the LA Review of Books is as close to the perfect literary review for this generation and these times as it gets.

Collectors Weekly

Don’t let the boring name fool you: Collectors Weekly has some of the more creative and bizarre stuff out there. The editorial arm of the site publishes one or two long reads a week, and almost all of them are worth reading from top to bottom. From an in-depth look at the return of the “Cosby sweater” (featuring an interview with the pudding-loving comedian himself) to a political history of the prosthetic limb to the tale of how an obsessive antique collector got hooked on opium, they’re constantly putting out content that scratches my itch for the weird.

Arguably, by Christopher Hitchens

Yeah, I’m that asshole reading Hitchens on the subway these days. And there’s no hiding it with the big, bright yellow cover. I was of course bummed when Hitchens died (partly because I naïvely thought he’d somehow escape his death sentence), but it’s really only after reading through this selection of his work that I realized how impactful a loss that was. The breadth of topics and his ability to make nearly any subject digestible is astounding. It’s basically like reading an opinionated Wikipedia, albeit a better and more inflammatory one.

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Longreads Best of 2020: Writing on COVID-19

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors featured many COVID-19 stories from across the web, and below, we’ve narrowed down 11 picks that really resonated with us. This roundup is focused on reported features; we initially included a few pandemic essays in this category, but those will instead appear in the upcoming Best of Essays list. 

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday.

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How the Pandemic Defeated America (Ed Yong, The Atlantic)

The Atlantic‘s coverage of COVID-19 was exceptional this year, and Yong’s deep, thoughtful September feature lays it all out. How did the U.S. get here? Everything that went wrong was predictable and preventable, and despite all of its resources and scientific expertise, America’s leaders failed monumentally to control the virus at every turn.

The coronavirus found, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID‑19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a “great equalizer,” the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nation’s history.

Inside the Nightmare Voyage of the Diamond Princess (Doug Bock Clark, GQ)

Another devastating read, “The Pariah Ship” by Michael Smith, Drake Bennett, and K. Oanh Haat, recounts the nightmare journey of Holland America’s MS Zaandam.

The pandemic has exposed the flaws of tourism, and cruise ships are a symbol of the disastrous effects that COVID-19 has had on the travel industry as a whole. Princess Cruises’ Diamond Princess, which departed on January 20 this year from Japan’s Port of Yokohama, was the first ship to suffer a major outbreak. Clark’s account of the voyage and subsequent quarantine of the ship’s 3,711 passengers and crew is riveting yet terrifying. He weaves stories of numerous people on board, from the more-privileged (a pair of traveling couples called the “Four Amigos”) to the overworked and underprotected (like security crewmember Sonali Thakkar). His reporting of the U.S. government’s response is superb, especially from the perspective of Dr. James Lawler, the infectious-disease expert called in to lead the evacuation of American passengers back to the U.S. We also get a glimpse of what the experience is like for the ship’s captain, Gennaro Arma, who was eventually the last person to disembark.

The Amigos, reduced now to three, along with the 325 other American evacuees, were still waiting on the buses. They had spent three hours idling on the pier and then, once they drove to the airport, sat on the tarmac for two more hours. Now, as the delay extended into a sixth hour, the passengers were nearing revolt. They were exhausted. And more problematically for the largely elderly passengers: The buses had no bathrooms.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., where it was still Sunday afternoon, the fate of the waylaid evacuees was being decided. Around the time the passengers were exiting the Diamond Princess, Japanese officials had blindsided their American counterparts with the news that some of the passengers boarding the buses had actually tested positive several days before. Soon many of the highest-level members of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response team, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, were arguing about what to do. Representatives from the CDC continued to fear spreading the virus. William Walters, the deputy chief medical officer for the State Department, wanted to bring everyone home anyway. Those urging the evacuation noted that the planes had been prepared with isolation units to contain the sick.

As the debate raged, the evacuees were demanding to be let off the buses, quarantine be damned, to find a bathroom. Carl was breathing so hard his masked breath fogged his glasses as he strained to control his bladder. Some seniors were crying. Finally, a few were allowed to relieve themselves in bottles beside the bus or were brought to a nearby terminal.

Read more…

The Enduring Myth of a Lost Live Iggy and the Stooges Album

Iggy and the Stooges performing at the Academy of Music, New York City, December 31, 1973. Photo by Ronnie Hoffman.

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2019 | 48 minutes (8,041 words)

 

In 1973, East Coast rock promoter Howard Stein assembled a special New Year’s Eve concert at New York City’s Academy of Music. It was a four-band bill. Blue Öyster Cult headlined. Iggy and the Stooges played third, though the venue’s marquee only listed Iggy Pop, because Columbia Records had only signed Iggy, not the band. A New York glam band named Teenage Lust played second, and a new local band named KISS opened. This was KISS’s first show, having changed their name from Wicked Lester earlier that year. According to Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop biography, Open Up and Bleed, Columbia Records recorded the Stooges’ show “with the idea of releasing it as a live album, but in January they’d decided it wasn’t worthy of release and that Iggy’s contract would not be renewed.” When I first read that sentence a few years ago, my heart skipped the proverbial beat and I scribbled on the page: Unreleased live show??? I was a devoted enough Stooges fan to know that if this is true, this shelved live album would be the only known full multitrack recording ever made of a vintage Stooges concert.

The Stooges existed from late 1967 to early 1974. They released three studio albums during their brief first life, wrote enough songs for a fourth, paved the way for metal and punk rock, influenced musicians from Davie Bowie to the Sex Pistols, popularized stage diving and crowd-surfing, and were so generally ahead of their time that they disbanded before the world finally came to appreciate their music. Their incendiary live shows were legendary. Iggy taunted listeners. He cut himself, danced, posed, got fondled and punched, and by dissolving the barrier between audience and performer, changed rock ‘n’ roll.

Read more…

Where Have All the Music Magazines Gone?

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Aaron Gilbreath| Longreads | December 2018 | 25 minutes (6,357 words)

When other writers and I get together, we sometimes mourn the state of music writing. Not its quality — the music section of any good indie bookstore offers proof of its vigor — but what seems like the reduced number of publications running longer music stories. Read more…

Hellhound on the Money Trail

AP Photo/Justin M. Norton

Robert Gordon | Memphis Rent Party | Bloomsbury | March 2018 | 32 minutes (6,304 words)

 

This story first appeared in LA Weekly in 1991.

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The sun did not shine, but it was hot as hell the day a memorial stone was unveiled for bluesman Robert Johnson near a country crossroads outside Greenwood, Mississippi. About seventy-five people filled the tiny Mt. Zion church, a row of broadcast video cameras behind the back pew and a bank of lights illuminating a hoarse preacher as he praised a man who reputedly sold his soul to the devil.

There was no finality in setting the stone. The attention came fifty years too late, and even if his memory is more alive today than ever before, Johnson’s rightful heirs still have nothing but the name. This service was not about the body of the bluesman, which lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in the vicinity; it was about the guitar-shaped wreath provided by Johnson’s current record label, and about the video bite that would be beamed into homes around the country that April 1991 evening.

Read more…

An Elegy for Bette Howland, a Writer Who Was Nearly Forgotten

Jacob Howland

This past Sunday, The New York Times reported that Bette Howland, a writer most contemporary readers have never heard of, died at the age of 80, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Howland was the recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ prize. She had a prolific decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, first publishing her memoir, W-3, in 1974, which documented her stay in a mental hospital following a nervous breakdown; it was followed in 1978 by Blue in Chicago, a collection of largely autobiographical stories; and then by Things to Come and Go, a collection of three long stories, published in 1983. When Johanna Kaplan reviewed it in the Times, she called Howland, “a writer of unusual talent, power, and intelligence.”

Howland received the MacArthur in 1984 and never published another book, only sporadically contributing to literary magazines and journals, often responding to editors with resistance to the idea of publishing her work.

Despite having a champion, friend, and sometimes lover in the writer Saul Bellow, who encouraged her spiritedly after meeting her at a writing conference on Staten Island in 1961, Howland was often overcome by a lack of confidence, particularly after winning the MacArthur.

In 2015, Brigid Hughes, editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Spaceplucked Howland’s first book, W-3, off the $1 cart at Housing Works Bookstore in New York City and became intrigued upon reading its very first sentences. Hughes had never heard of Howland, but she took the book home and read it in a night. She had earlier in the year begun to think about an issue of the magazine focused on women writers — perhaps, she had thought, there might be something to include of Howland’s.

Hughes, with the help of Laura Preston, an editor at the magazine, began to sleuth for more information about Howland in order to contact her and see if she had more work. The internet offered few breadcrumbs. There was a Wikipedia page with a photo that was not Howland, and there were a few press clippings, but Hughes said at the time, “She had just vanished.”

Hughes and I talked about Howland during the production of her issue focused on underappreciated women writers at a time when I was renting a desk in the magazine’s office. I also became intrigued with Howland and started to read W-3 myself, as well as excerpts from a large stash of letters between Bellow and Howland that Hughes was publishing after their discovery by Howland’s son. Hughes had tracked down Jacob Howland to enquire after his mother’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, Bette Howland had a tragic car accident only the year before. She was suffering from dementia and not healthy enough to correspond with Hughes, but Jacob stepped in and began to work with A Public Space.

As a freelance writer, I thought Howland’s story and Hughes’s rediscovery would make for a good piece for LitHub. So I began to read and assemble everything I could about Hughes’s discovery, which included the letters. I reached out to her son by email to ask more about her, as well as his interaction with Hughes. “Brigid,” he wrote me at the time, “is the reason we found the letters, My wife and I started looking through Bette’s papers for unpublished material, and that’s when we ran across the letters.”

At some point, as I was reading a draft of that issue of A Public Space and working on my own piece about Howland, I went online and ordered first editions of all of her books. They were all under $10 and easy to acquire. I had recently been introduced to the rare book trade, through rare and antiquarian book dealer Heather O’Donnell, owner of Honey and Wax Books, and had caught the collecting bug. Then realizing I would never be able to afford to become a serious collector of any kind, despite being an excellent hoarder of books, I began to dream that I might start a business of my own focused on women writers.

The idea came about after I visited numerous rare book fairs, which I had begun to realize were run primarily by male dealers, male collectors, and predominantly filled with books by men (this is very broadly speaking), and as a result many women writers’ books were priced far lower than those of their male contemporaries

Howland became the inspiration for a new business I’ve just launched, The Second Shelf, and hers were the first books I acquired to sell, if I can bring myself to part with them. Since I bought them, and since Howland began receiving some attention again, thanks to Hughes, her first editions have increased in value and are difficult to come by at all — a copy of Blue in Chicago costs around $80-100 online.

Earlier this year, Hughes announced a new literary imprint, A Public Space Books, and will begin publication with Howland’s experimental novella, A Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, which was originally published in TriQuarterly in the 1990s.

The news of Howland’s death this past week came with a strange and surreal, nearly uncanny timing. I had only days earlier published a piece here on Longreads reporting on Hughes’s own erasure from literary history — as the first and only female editor of The Paris Review, and the editor to succeed the renowned George Plimpton. The piece was sparked by a series of frustrated tweets I posted upon learning of Lorin Stein’s resignation from The Paris Review, the result of a sexual harassment scandal in which he admitted to taking advantage of women writers and staff in his workplace.  

It was a poignant and emotional bit of news, and adding insult to injury, all the articles about it kept repeating the misreported legacy of the magazine’s editorship. I found myself urgently needing to correct the historical record of Hughes’s erased role at the Paris Review, the sexist treatment she received by the board in ousting her, and the similarly sexist treatment by the news media in its decade-long misreporting.

Although Howland chose to step out of the limelight, I see her disappearance from literary history as evidence of sexism in publishing and literary criticism. Great male writers, whatever their output or mental state, have legacies that far outlast those of women writers because men read books by men and are less interested in books by women. There is a maxim in publishing I have heard dozens of times from publishers and editors: Women buy and read more books. Women buy and read books by both women and men. Men buy and read fewer books. Men read books by men, not women. This is, again, not wholly the truth, but it’s not inaccurate either. Then, you’ve got patriarchal institutions and the academy still supporting a canon that was built by white men. Literary women suffer from this in their own lifetime, as Howland’s disappearance demonstrates, and they suffer even worse in their afterlives.

Hughes has been restored to her place in literary history with a series of corrections in The New York Times and with a correction on the masthead of The Paris Review. Because of Hughes, Howland is back in print in the pages of A Public Space and will soon have new work on the shelves, along with her out-of-print work.

It’s hard to not be discouraged as a woman writer these days. In addition to facing sexual harassment in the workplace, we have the boys’ club to contend with, we have unequal pay, we are asked far more frequently to write only for “exposure.” We are often given gendered book covers, often whether we want them or not. On top of it all, our literary history is written by men who mostly are interested in what men write.

But all is not lost, women are pulling up women, and some of us, like Howland, might be lucky enough to find champions who do not discriminate based on sex. Here is a quote from just one of Saul Bellow’s many letters to Howland, encouraging her back to the writing desk after her nervous breakdown:

I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.

Who knows if we would have Howland’s books at all without Bellow’s constant encouragement? If one reads the small bit known about her personal biography, it seems incredible that she was able to accomplish what she did. She had very little support in her pursuits. Bellow’s mentorship appears to have made a huge difference in her life. How many other women writers are gone to us, or, like Howland, are on the precipice of being lost?

There is a secret history of literature, one full of forgotten women. Let’s honor the work of Howland and Hughes, and women like them. Let’s find them, pull them out from the cracks, and begin to balance the bookshelves.

To Be an Instagram-Ready Restaurant, Don’t Forget Your Selfie-Optimized Lamps

Image by Paulo Valdivieso (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Back in the 1970s, memorabilia-heavy restaurants became popular as they facilitated the loosening-up of sexual mores. These days, colorful tiles, bold wallpaper, and the occasional (ironic?) taxidermy piece can all trace their origins to our need to capture and broadcast our well-curated pleasures. As Casey Newton shows at The Verge, Instagram is the driving force behind the current vogue for easily reproduced, sleek-kitschy idiosyncrasy — including adjustable lighting that allows diners to take the most flattering selfie possible.

Few restaurants have taken photo-friendliness as seriously as Bellota, a Spanish restaurant that opened in San Francisco last year. The entryway is enclosed, creating a pleasing shadowbox effect as you look into the dining room. The kitchen is open, and encourages patrons to take 360-degree videos of the space. Many Instagram posts feature pictures of “the ham wall,” which is just what it sounds like: a window that looks into the temperature-controlled room where Bellota stores $50,000 worth of Spanish jamón ibérico.

The most striking thing about Bellota may be the custom lamps at its 25-seat bar, which let patrons adjust the lighting in order to get the perfect shot. “I’m probably the most avid Instagram user of the group, so I kept bringing it up,” says Ryan McIlwraith, Bellota’s chef. He wanted the lighting to do justice to the restaurant’s tapas plates and signature paellas. “It turned out these lamps we got were just perfect for it,” he says. The lamps can be tilted or turned 180 degrees, and the light’s intensity can be adjusted up and down. An “advanced feature” allows patrons to rest their phones on the lamp’s neck so as to take a selfie. (I did, and must admit the lighting was lovely.)

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