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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Canada’s National Magazine Award Winners: A Reading List

Canada's Magazine of the Year Gold winner, Nouveau Projet

Below is a guest reading list by Eva Holland, a writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory, whose work we’ve featured on Longreads many times in the past.

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Canada’s magazine industry recently threw its biggest party of the year: the National Magazine Awards. The Canadian event differs from the American Ellies, with more categories and more nominees per category: this year’s awards were up for grabs among 326 nominees from 80 publications, spread across 43 categories. “Gold” and “silver” winners get awards, and the balance of the nominees receive honorable mentions. That spawns the occasional joke about how in Canadian magazines, everyone gets a medal for participation, but—go ahead, call me biased (I was a nominee/honorable mention in the “society” category, for “The Forgotten Internment”)—I like the way our format lets us celebrate many different sorts of work, not just the “biggest,” most ambitious features.

Here are a few of my favorites from among this year’s winners: Read more…

The Art of Running from the Police

Photo by Joe Thorn

Alice Goffman | On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City | University of Chicago Press | May 2014 | 45 minutes (12,478 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from On the Run, by sociologist Alice Goffman, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Goffman spent six years living in a neighborhood in Philadelphia. In her groundbreaking book, she explains how the young black men in her neighborhood are ensnared in a Kafkaesque legal system which makes running from the police their only option, and how these men have made running into an art. Read more…

A Woman on the Margins

Photo: Mitchell Bach

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)

 

I first encountered the work of the memoirist, critic, and journalist Vivian Gornick in graduate school when we were assigned The Situation and the Story, her handbook on personal writing. Gornick explains that the writer must create out of her real self a separate narrative persona. The narrator has wisdom and distance the writer may not, and can craft a meaningful story out of the raw details of life. This slim book cracked open my understanding of what it means to write.

In Fierce Attachments, her 1987 memoir, Gornick wields her narrative persona to construct an incisive, nuanced portrait of her conflicted bond with her mother. She describes the Bronx tenements where she grew up, the early death of her father, the complex relationship with their neighbor Nettie and, at the center of it all, a struggle with her codependent maternal bond. Her new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a collage of interactions in the New York City streets and with her longtime friend Leonard, is a meditation on friendship, her status as an “Odd Woman”—a second-wave feminist—and her place in urban life.

We met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Gornick was staying for spring break before she returned to the University of Iowa where she teaches at the nonfiction program. It was sleeting out, and Gornick asked me if her mascara was running, then ordered a mezzo plate and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She began by telling me how much she hates teaching.

Why do you teach so much?

I don’t do it often at all anymore. In this case, they offered me too much money, and I felt I couldn’t say no. But I was wrong: I should have said no.

Why is that?

I can’t live for four months in a place like Iowa City anymore. I’m really too old for that. I’m not even sure I do need the money, but you always feel you need the money. I always taught just to make a living, and I made myself a good teacher of writing; I certainly made myself a good editor. But this time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach. Read more…

Between Generals: A Newly Translated Short Story by Antonio Tabucchi

Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, via Wikimedia Commons

Antonio Tabucchi | from the collection Time Ages in a Hurry | Archipelago Books | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,194 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a newly translated short story from Time Ages in a Hurry, a collection by Antonio Tabucchi, as recommended by Longreads contributor A. N. Devers

“A result of living in a place as inescapably public as New York City is that its people are deeply private in public spaces — eye contact on the street and subways is actively discouraged and conversation between strangers is kept to a minimum — making it easy to forget that its greatest asset is the stories of its people. We’re reminded of this in “Between Generals” a quiet and nuanced portrait of a man by the late Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, in which we learn about the complicated history of one of New York City’s immigrants, a former Hungarian General who realizes he spent one of his best days with his worst enemies. Newly translated into English by novelist Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani  for Archipelago Books, Tabucchi’s stories in Time Ages in a Hurry are careful, nuanced, and smartly skeptical of memory and experience.

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The Man Who Became Big Bird

Photo courtesy of Debra Spinney

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,430 words)

 

Caroll Spinney has performed Big Bird and Oscar on Sesame Street since the show launched in 1969, almost half a century ago. A new documentary, I Am Big Bird, follows Spinney’s journey from a somewhat difficult childhood—his father had abusive tendencies, and he was picked on in school—to becoming a childhood icon, not to mention a man in an almost absurdly happy marriage. Spinney’s wife, Debra, sat nearby (laughing and interjecting sporadically) as we discussed the film, the physical and emotional reality of playing these characters, and what kind of guy a grouch really is. Big Bird and Oscar made cameo appearances.

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The film features a lot of old footage that you and your wife, Debra, gathered over the years. What was it like to go through all those old tapes?

We didn’t look at any of it, although Deb had categorized it all. We gave the filmmakers many boxes of videotapes, literally hundreds of hours of television, because we’ve been taking videos since 1978. Before that, starting in 1954, I was taking eight millimeter movies, which is that blurry stuff in the film. An eight millimeter picture is just a little more than a quarter inch wide, so you can imagine when that’s blown up a million times it looks pretty soft. But it kinda makes nice footage for the story.

What was it like for you to watch the film after all that time?

It was interesting to see what they had picked out. We first watched it at home on the flat screen. But the next time I watched it, we were in Toronto in a theater with 300 people on a 60-foot-wide screen, and it’s a very different experience to watch it with other people than with just the two of us. You could hear their emotions, and you could tell they were using Kleenex at certain times. There’s about three moments in the thing that are quite emotional, I think partly due to the wonderful music that was composed for it. Read more…

Rest in Peace: Stories About Death Care

I. I’ve been thinking: What would my life look like if I were not afraid of death? Thinking too closely about not existing, not having a consciousness, sends me spiraling into a panic attack. Protestant Christians believe in an afterlife—a heaven, a hell. I did, too, for a while. I was confident, fervent, about heaven. I was no longer afraid to die. Now I’m not so sure. Nothingness scares me, but so does an eternity spent somewhere else.

A month ago, I shared a reading list about architecture. My pick from The Stranger was about Katrina Spade, an  archeologist from Seattle interested in environmentally friendly, community-centered death care: city centers dedicated to composting human beings and reuniting their bodies with nature. It’s called the Urban Death Project. A few days ago, Spade debuted her fundraising campaign to make the project a reality.

I studied artist Iris Gottlieb’s drawings of plants and fungi and Spade’s architectural plans. I liked the idea that the composting hubs would be unique to each city—much like libraries, which take on aspects of their communities while serving the same essential purpose worldwide, Spade explained. Reading the details of Spade’s proposal, I felt genuinely moved, and, for the first time in a decade, peaceful. Read more…

For the Love of Lettering: Stories About Typography

I didn’t pay attention to font until I worked for my college newspaper. After months of poring over proofs in InDesign, I realized I was learning the differences between fonts, their specific names, where they fit best. I’m no typographer—I don’t have the patience—but I’m fascinated by the subtle ways type entrances us and the absolutely grueling work that goes into its design and placement. Now, not only do I know the difference between type design and typography, but I try to make an effort to appreciate the work that goes in to the books I love, the gig posters for my favorite bands, the fonts on my blog.

1. “Praise the Colophon: Twenty Notes on Type.” (Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions, March 2015)

Colophon: a statement at the end of a book, typically with a printer’s emblem, giving information about its authorship and printing. You know: the details about the typeface, the typographer, the publisher, the who, what and where of the book’s creation. Nick Ripatrazone researches the colophon’s history and its artistic purpose. He concludes, “I call for the return of colophons. The battle of the book is not to be won or lost in preferences of print or digital. The page will always remain. Letters will always remain.” Read more…

The King’s Last Game

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Steven Church | Ultrasonic: Essays | 2014 | 15 minutes (3,655 words)

 

 

Imagine this: It’s early in the morning at the Graceland estate, well before dawn on August 16, 1977, just a few hours before the end, and the crickets and cicadas are thrumming in the Memphis heat. The sun is on the rise somewhere in the east, but the light hasn’t yet reached this place. In the distance a small dog barks sharp, rhythmically, and steady. A siren wails and fades. All else is quiet, all except for the strange noise emanating from an outbuilding behind the main house. It’s a cacophonous noise. Unexpected. So you creep up closer. Tiptoeing now like a trespasser, a voyeur into the past. You shouldn’t be here at all. Yet in this lucid dream you press your ear against the locked door and listen, straining to catch the strands of a voice. The voice. His voice. Perhaps you’re hoping that he might be playing a guitar, jamming with his band. But instead you hear unexpected but familiar noise. You hear the sound of a different kind of playing. It’s the squeaking of shoes on hardwood, the pop and twang of a blue rubber ball rocketing off simulated catgut, followed by the resonant crack of it against a wall; and a different sort of music, that telltale pop and pong ringing out as the ball smacks off the back glass. You linger a while, listening to the high-pitched slap of a well-hit shot, and a short volley of forehand smashes going off like firecrackers. Boom, boom, boom. And laughter. Lots of laughter. Because Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is playing racquetball. And the King loves racquetball. You know this game but not this side of Elvis, not this part of the story. This is your game, your father’s game, a game of noise and speed. And more than anything you wish you could push the door open on that night and join the play. Read more…

What Columbia University’s Investigation Reveals About the Rolling Stone UVA Rape Story

Columbia University’s School of Journalism has released its report investigating what went wrong with Rolling Stone’s story of a rape at UVA, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Among its conclusions:

Rolling Stone’s senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems. “It’s not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” Dana said. “We just have to do what we’ve always done and just make sure we don’t make this mistake again.” Coco McPherson, the fact-checking chief, said, “I one hundred percent do not think that the policies that we have in place failed. I think decisions were made around those because of the subject matter.”

Yet better and clearer policies about reporting practices, pseudonyms and attribution might well have prevented the magazine’s errors. The checking department should have been more assertive about questioning editorial decisions that the story’s checker justifiably doubted. Dana said he was not told of reporting holes like the failure to contact the three friends or the decision to use misleading attributions to obscure that fact.

Stronger policy and clearer staff understanding in at least three areas might have changed the final outcome:

Pseudonyms. Dana, Woods and McPherson said using pseudonyms at Rolling Stone is a “case by case” issue that requires no special convening or review. Pseudonyms are inherently undesirable in journalism. They introduce fiction and ask readers to trust that this is the only instance in which a publication is inventing details at its discretion. Their use in this case was a crutch – it allowed the magazine to evade coming to terms with reporting gaps. Rolling Stone should consider banning them. If its editors believe pseudonyms are an indispensable tool for its forms of narrative writing, the magazine should consider using them much more rarely and only after robust discussion about alternatives, with dissent encouraged.

Checking Derogatory Information. Erdely and Woods made the fateful agreement not to check with the three friends. If the fact-checking department had understood that such a practice was unacceptable, the outcome would almost certainly have changed.

Confronting Subjects With Details. When Erdely sought “comment,” she missed the opportunity to hear challenging, detailed rebuttals from Phi Kappa Psi before publication. The fact-checker relied only on Erdely’s communications with the fraternity and did not independently confirm with Phi Kappa Psi the account Rolling Stone intended to publish about Jackie’s assault. If both the reporter and checker had understood that by policy they should routinely share specific, derogatory details with the subjects of their reporting, Rolling Stone might have veered in a different direction.

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