Search Results for: Details

The Soundproof Room

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Lacy M. Johnson’s memoir The Other Side, which details Johnson’s experience of being held prisoner in a soundproofed room by her ex-boyfriend and what followed after she escaped:

The Detective follows me to my new apartment in the unmarked car. He offers to come inside, to stand guard at the door, but I don’t want him to see that I have no furniture, no food in the fridge, nothing in the pantry, or the linen closet, or on the walls. I ask him to wait outside. I call my boss at the literary magazine where I am an intern and leave a message on the office voice mail: Hi there. I was kidnapped and raped last night. I won’t be coming in today. I call My Good Friend’s cell phone. I call My Older Sister’s cell phone.

While I’m in the shower, the apartment phone rings and callers leave messages on the machine: My Good Friend will stay with her boyfriend; she’s delaying her move-in date. Of course she hates to do this, but she’s just too scared to live here, with me, right now. You should find somewhere to go, she says. My Handsome Friend’s message says he heard the news from My Good Friend. He’s leaving town and doesn’t think it’s safe to tell me where to find him. The message My Older Sister leaves says she wants me to come stay at her place, which sounds better than sleeping alone in this apartment on the floor.

Source: Tin House
Published: Mar 12, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,918 words)

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.

* * *

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.

Read more…

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.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

Read more…

How In-N-Out Withstood Competition By Not Changing Anything and Taking Care of Employees

Under her three-year tenure, In‑N‑Out has expanded—cautiously—into Texas, a move she says has been in the works for a decade. That foray brought one rare, considerably less-than-daring change to the company’s formula: It added iced sweet tea to the menu. “We knew that everybody loves sweet tea there,” Snyder explains. “It’s not that hard. We just need to bring sugar in.” But don’t expect to see it on the menu in Orange County anytime soon, because, she says, “Texas is so separated from here.”

Instead, Snyder concentrates on subtle improvements. While she’s an iced-coffee lover, she has never considered adding that or any other fancy coffee drinks to the menu as McDonald’s has. Instead, she set out to improve In‑N‑Out’s basic brew. “I went to the [supplier’s] plant, and did the taste test, and learned about the beans, all the things related to coffee,” she says. “So now I feel like an educated coffee-ist.”

Similarly, she often takes a hand in what would seem like branding details too minor for the involvement of a CEO, such as supervising radio ads and overseeing the design of the classic car T-shirts the company sells in its gift store, in restaurants, and online. She runs teamwork-building workshops and conferences that, at another company, would be the province of a human resources subordinate.

Instead of focusing on the size of her restaurant chain, “I put more thought into how we’re going to maintain the family atmosphere and the closeness,” she says. “We do a lot more that we weren’t doing, getting everyone together more.” Indeed, In‑N‑Out Burger has a reputation for taking unusually good care of its workforce. According to the Web publication Business Insider, In‑N‑Out ranked highest among 13 fast-food chains in pay, with workers starting at $10.50 an hour—nearly $2 more than its next-closest competitor.

In Orange Coast magazine, Patrick Kiger profiles Lynsi Snyder, the 31-year-old president of In-N-Out Burger who is maintaining the legacy of the company her grandparents founded in the 1940s. Read more profiles at Longreads.

***

Photo: Jeremy Hall

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Grief Has No Deadline

Longreads Pick

She spent two decades as a local reporter covering L.A.’s grisliest crimes. But when the victim is a member of her own family, she learns what hard news feels like from the other side:

Memories of that night are a mosaic: the flashing lights, police cars, yellow tape, and Lil Bit’s car, stopped in the middle of the intersection of Century and San Pedro, where the shooting took place. Then to the lobby of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where we multiply—more family, more friends. We form an entourage. A guard directs us to the hospital’s chapel, where the matriarchs of the family are sitting—Lil Bit’s grandmother, Alberta, and my mother, Ida. The room fills with us: aunts, uncle, sisters, brother, stepmother, cousin. Then his twin walks in, not knowing what has happened—until he looks around the room at everyone who has gathered, at everyone’s faces, and he knows. “No!” he says, and I remember wanting to make this go away, to bring Lil Bit back for all of us, but especially for him.

Had I been reporting the story, I would have taken notes to remember the details, like the tears in the eyes of the hospital’s social worker as she talks to us.

Source: narrative.ly
Published: Feb 6, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,505 words)

The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

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

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

 

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…

'The Lost Girls of Rocky Mount': A Guest Pick by Douglas Williams

Douglas Williams is currently a doctoral student in political science at the University of Alabama, where his research centers around public policy and politics as it relates to disadvantaged communities and the labor movement. You can find him on Twitter at @DougWilliams85, at a collaborative blog on Southern progressivism called The South Lawn, as well as at The Century Foundation, where he blogs about the labor movement.

The Lost Girls of Rocky Mount

Robert Draper | GQ | June 2010 | 22 minutes (5,382 words)

***

This article, y’all. Whew.

I happened upon this article a couple of years ago while doing some unrelated research, and it is something that has stuck with me ever since. It is hard for a story like this to not have some effect on you, for the author provides the grim details of the murders and their investigation with such vividity as to allow readers to place themselves smack dab in the middle of the story. It was also an article that reinforced a lot of concepts that have lived with me since birth: the gut-wrenching despair of persistent poverty; the lack of importance placed on Black women’s bodies; and the fecklessness of law enforcement when it comes to investigating crimes in communities of color, particularly when there is such a large separation between those communities and the political establishment that represents them. It is all here for you to dissect, with few stones, if any, unturned.

This is one of the easiest recommendations that I have ever been able to make.

***

Photo: Harris Walker

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

A Dangerous Mind

Longreads Pick

Examining the case and trial of Gilberto Valle, AKA the “cannibal cop,” a New York police officer who fantasized about kidnapping, killing, and eating women he knew with strangers, but who never acted on any of his plans:

On August 24, they discussed ways that Valle might kidnap another woman, Kristen Ponticelli, a recent graduate of Valle’s old high school whom he never met personally (Valle’s lawyers assume he just noticed her photo on Facebook). The next day, they moved on to Andria Noble. “If Andria lived near me, she would be gone by now,” Valle wrote. “Even if I get caught, she would be worth it.”

But there was no physical evidence from Valle’s home suggesting he was getting ready to kidnap or cook anyone—no oven large enough for a human, no cleaver, no homemade chloroform. Prosecutors had no proof he had a place in the mountains. They had no proof that Valle knew the identities of the three people he was chatting with. Valle never divulged the last names of any of the people whose photos he passed along (not even his wife’s) and never gave out any of their addresses, even after Moody Blues ­specifically requested one, and he haphazardly switched up details about their life stories and college educations.

Published: Jan 12, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,858 words)

The Race to Save Mali’s Priceless Artifacts

Longreads Pick

A secret operation to save medieval manuscripts in Timbuktu:

The jihadists soon shoved aside the secular Tuaregs, declared sharia law and began attacking anything they perceived as haram—forbidden—according to their strict definitions of Islam. They banned singing and dancing, and forbade the celebration of Sufi Islamic festivals. They demolished 16 mausoleums of Timbuktu’s beloved Sufi saints and scholars, claiming that veneration of such figures was a sacrilege. Eventually the militants set their sights on the city’s ultimate symbols of open-mindedness and reasoned discourse: its manuscripts.

A network of activists was determined to thwart them. For five months, smugglers mounted a huge and secret operation whose full details are only now coming to light. The objective: to carry 350,000 manuscripts to safety in the government-held south. The treasures moved by road and by river, by day and by night, past checkpoints manned by armed Islamic police. Haidara and Diakité raised $1 million to finance the rescue, then arranged for safe storage once the manuscripts arrived in Bamako.

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jan 1, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,883 words)

‘There Is Nothing New in Wall Street’: A Stock Trader’s Life in the 1920s

Longreads Pick

Our latest Longreads First Chapter comes recommended by Michelle Legro:

Long before the “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort made his first million or snorted his first line of cocaine, turn-of-the-century trader Jesse Livermore, the “Great Bear of Wall Street,” accumulated over $100 million short-selling stocks before the crash of 1929. His life and times were immortalized in 1923 by author Edwin Lefèvre in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. The novel became a bible for those looking to get rich quick (though rarely succeeding), and Livermore’s advice became legendary. “There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 3, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,878 words)