Search Results for: Internet

The Nine Lives of Cat Videos

Photo: Children posing with life-size Lil Bub. This photo first appeared on Hyperallergic. Courtesy Jillian Steinhauer.

Jillian Steinhauer | Longreads | September 2015 | 15 minutes (3,800 words)

 

The following essay is excerpted from Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong, in which 14 writers address the following question: Why can’t we stop watching cat videos?

* * *

The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself.

—Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament”

The spectacle creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: memory ceases to be necessary or desirable.

—John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”

The Grandstand filling up with people early in the night. This photo first appeared on Hyperallergic. Courtesy Jillian Steinhauer.

The Grandstand filling up with people early in the night. This photo first appeared on Hyperallergic. Courtesy Jillian Steinhauer.

1.

One evening in the summer of 2013, I joined 11,499 other people—give or take—at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand to sit and watch cat videos. I had spent the day leading up to the Internet Cat Video Festival (or CatVidFest, as it’s nicknamed) wandering the fair in extreme heat, eating assorted fried foods on sticks, watching butter sculptors, and paying money to take off my shoes and traverse an artsy blow-up castle with “rooms” of saturated color (think Dan Flavin goes to the fair). Hours later, dehydrated and probably sunstroked, I met up with a journalist from Minnesota Public Radio for a brief interview. He wanted to talk to me because I was an art critic, and because I had served as a juror for that year’s CatVidFest. Read more…

How Billionaires Do Burning Man

Like all people who hate Burning Man, I enjoy nothing more than reading articles about Burning Man. In February, Felix Gillette chronicled the semi-clad class warfare at last year’s Burning Man for Bloomberg BusinessweekDespite being a festival based on radical self-reliance, Black Rock City is seemingly overrun with tech billionaires setting up their own exclusive festivals-within-a-festival; ultra-luxe camps that are fully built and staffed by paid “sherpas.” In his piece, Gillette described plans for an over-the-top camp hosted by Jim Tananbaum, a former member of Burning Man’s governing board:

 In the spring [Tananbaum] and his team sent out a detailed invitation, enticing potential guests with an early vision of the camp, named Caravancicle. Anyone concerned about living in a hot, unforgiving wilderness could rest assured. There would be no roughing it at Caravancicle. Accommodations would consist of a series of cubical tents with carbon fiber skeletons. Each cube would have 9-foot ceilings, comfortable bedding, and air conditioning. The surrounding camp, enclosed by high walls, would be safe and private. Amenities would include a central lounge housed in a geodesic dome, private showers and toilets, solar panels, wireless Internet, and a 24-hour bar. Guests could count on a “full-service” staff, who would among other things help create “handcrafted, artisanal popsicles” to offer passers-by. To help blend in with the Burning Man regulars, who tend to parade around the commons in wild, racy outfits (if anything at all), the camp would include an entire shipping container full of costumes.

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See Also:
1. “The Old Man at Burning Man” (GQ, Feb. 2013)

Wells Tower’s legendary 2013 GQ account of attending the aforementioned festival with his father.

2. “Why the Rich Love Burning Man” (Jacobin, Aug. 2015)

An essay by Keith A. Spencer about why business leaders, particularly in Silicon Valley, are so enamored with Burning Man:

 This is the dark heart of Burning Man, the reason that high-powered capitalists — and especially capitalist libertarians — love Burning Man so much. It heralds their ideal world: one where vague notions of participation replace real democracy, and the only form of taxation is self-imposed charity. Recall Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s op-ed, in the wake of the Obamacare announcement, in which he proposed a healthcare system reliant on “voluntary, tax-deductible donations.”

On Beauty: Franzen’s Shallow Male Problem

I had many problems with Purity, Jonathan Franzen’s new novel. The book had me hooked and turning pages from the first. There’s plenty of intrigue–a murder; the mystery of the title character’s parentage; unfolding backstories that link assorted melodramatic subplots, far-flung over geography and time. But to a large degree I was racing through it in search of some comment that might show the author to have a less shallow, more mature and nuanced perspective on women than his male characters exhibit. The absence of that was one of my biggest disappointments. In an essay at Salon, Lyz Lenz echoes and perfectly crystallizes one of my issues with Franzen’s depictions of women:

Pip, the main character, is often described as “pretty” and herself describes other women in terms of their beauty. Pretty faces, pretty fingers, beautiful women and beautiful weeping clog the pages of the book. After page 70, I began counting every time I saw the words “beauty,” “beautiful” and “pretty.” By page 412 I had reached 50 and all of them related to women. The problem with calling a woman beautiful is that it is not a description. Beauty is a judgment. With the exception of Anabel, none of the female characters in the book are allowed to move beyond this judgment. In the over 500 pages, Pip, Annagret and the rotating cast of ancillary women are never allowed more than their shades of beauty…

…the women of the novel lay flat on the page, subject to the whims of the male gaze that created them.

This is also a misstep Franzen has made off the page — he once famously declared that Edith Wharton’s greatest disadvantage was that she wasn’t pretty. Franzen, it seems, can’t see women beyond the binary of beautiful or not. It would seem to be both a personal problem and a writing problem. As Dickens and Wolfe learned, every kind of person should be allowed to be fully actualized on the page. Holding female characters under the thumb of narrative judgment denies them humanity. And this is a contrast to the thesis of “Purity,” which argues rather that the modern, digtal world of Facebook, Twitter and web journalism is alienating — bodies, though confounding, are the conduit to redemption. Yet, by not allowing female bodies to be truly seen, Franzen undercuts his own thesis. It is not the Internet that is the alienating force in his novel, but a writer who can see a dog better than his own protagonist.

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The Harsh Realities of Being a Woman in the Music Industry

On Monday, Jessica Hopper (music writer, culture critic, author of the recent and wonderfully titled The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic) asked her Twitter followers a simple question:

“Gals/other marginalized folks: what was your 1st brush (in music industry, journalism, scene) w/ idea that you didn’t “count”?”

Needless to say, more than a few people responded. After a short period of writing back encouraging, personal responses, Hopper started retweeting the stories en masse.

Over the past 48 hours, Hopper’s timeline has filled with hundreds of individual stories; specific events, conversations, and aggressions, relayed in 140 characters or less. If you were hanging around the internet yesterday—or at least certain corners of the internet—you probably heard people talking about what was going on, and urging you to head over to Hopper’s page for a look.

A Twitter user named Laupina put together a Storify of Hopper’s timeline from the period in question. It’s a brutal, intimate, moving, difficult to read, and also inspiring testament to what it’s like to a be woman in the music world.

And what’s it like to be a woman in the music world? You will be mercilessly hit on, sexually harassed, endlessly accused of being the girlfriend/sister/mom, treated like an imposter, made to justify your presence, possibly threatened with violence, and constantly on the lookout for whatever fresh hell (and/or groper in the mosh pit) might be coming your way next. And that’s just the very short version.

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Why Would Two Girls Attempt Murder for Slender Man?

Photo: MDL70

In 2014, two 12-year-old girls stabbed a friend, arguing that they did it for a fictional internet horror creature named Slender Man. Lisa Miller tries to understand why in New York magazine:

By the age of 8 — and definitely by 12 — psychologists agree, most children are as able as adults to sort out what’s real from what is not. What sets children and adolescents apart from adults is a mental task psychologists call “discounting” — the rational inner voices that can subdue overheated emotional responses to the imagination’s powerful projections and that come with the maturing of the frontal lobe by around age 25. That’s why a 50-year-old can finish rinsing her hair even as she recalls the shower scene from “Psycho,” while a 16-year-old will find herself with a racing heart, soapy and dripping on the mat. But the feeling of being in the thrall of a fantasy (even a morbid one) can be seductive as well, as comforting as getting high, as mesmerizing as Minecraft.

In this way, the friendship of Anissa and Morgan, with its shared obsessions and mutually satisfying imaginary play, was the rather unremarkable effort of two bright, alienated kids to build a world more thrilling than their reality, a private bubble that offered them belonging, excitement, and a sense of their own power. The problem wasn’t that Morgan and Anissa didn’t know they were living in a fantasy world: Ultimately, when pressed by adults, they acknowledged the difference between fantasy and reality. The problem was that they couldn’t — or didn’t — extricate themselves from the ­fantasy. “He does not exist,” Anissa told police on the day of the stabbing. “He is a work of fiction.” Morgan, the more troubled one, had a more enduring attachment to the fairy tale they had told themselves and that had brought them to the woods. But even she admitted, in her interview, that the attack on Bella was “probably wrong,” she said. “I honestly don’t know why we did this.”

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Slender Man Is Watching

Longreads Pick

Two 12-year-old girls stabbed their friend for a fictional internet horror creature named Slender Man. Miller goes through court files to try to understand why.

Published: Aug 25, 2015
Length: 23 minutes (5,990 words)

Eating During the San Francisco Tech Boom

They have astonishingly well-paid jobs that they don’t like. Some plan to stay only until their options are vested. Then they will move on to their “actual” careers. This population of the possessed waiting to be dispossessed spends an inordinate amount of time comparing the gourmet kitchens of different website headquarters. The top digital companies in the Bay Area are famed for putting on lavish buffets and encouraging employees to invite friends from rival firms to join the feasts. The company cafeteria has arguably become the preeminent battleground in local corporate bragging rights. For many young workers in the internet industry, San Francisco is a salaried vacation between college and their careers, a well-earned break before starting their adult lives. So what do they do with their free time during this purgatory? They eat.

Theodore Gioia writing in Virginia Quarterly Review about the food culture that has emerged in San Francisco, fueled by tech money, youth, a sense of transiency and free time, and built on the foundation of conscious-eating laid by people like Alice Waters.

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Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management

Longreads Pick

In 2006, Condé Nast bought a promising information-sharing and online-discussion startup called Reddit. Then they more or less ignored the site, letting it evolve into one of the least manageable media properties on the Internet.

Published: Aug 6, 2015
Length: 13 minutes (3,327 words)

Fox and Friends

Rachael Maddux | Longreads | August 2015 | 21 minutes (5,232 words)

 

The hounds of Shakerag Hounds, the oldest mounted fox hunt in the state of Georgia, are trained as pups to heed every note of their huntsman’s horn. They know a quick double-note means it’s time to head out into the field, three short bursts followed by a sad undulation means they’ve landed on a covert with no quarry, and three long, shimmying notes mean they’ve run their quarry to ground. It’s a fox these hounds are after, in theory—red or gray—but out here, just beyond the furthest reaches of metro Atlanta’s sprawl, they might find themselves on the trail of a coyote, a bobcat, an unlucky armadillo. Whatever they’re chasing, when they hear the horn’s three long, blooming notes, they know what to do. Three means let it go. Three means let it live.

John Eaton, Shakerag’s huntsman, likewise had the horn’s particular vocabulary ground into him at a tender age. He grew up in Somerset, England, the sixth generation of a fox hunting family. His grandfather was a huntsman, too, and his mother was a whipper-in, one of the hunt staff that rides along to keep the hounds (not “dogs,” never just “dogs”) in line. His family did the kind of fox hunting you think of when you think of fox hunting: tall boots, red and black jackets, black helmet, regal horses. The kind about which a character in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance quipped, “The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”

In the Britain of Eaton’s childhood, fox hunts operated pretty much as they had for half a millennium: as a combination sporting event, social gathering, and elaborate means of pest control. Back then, it was unheard of to call hounds off a quarry the way he now does as a matter of course—like a pinch hitter knocking one out of the park and walking off the field, or a fisherman hooking a big one then chucking his rod and reel into the lake. What’s the point of coming so close and giving up at the last moment? Why even bother at all? Read more…

‘The Truth of Life’: Paula Fox on the Re- (Re-) Release of Her 1970 Novel

Paula Fox. Photo by Avery Hudson

Sari Botton | Longreads | July 2015 | 5 minutes (1,250 words)

 

This year, on the 45th anniversary of its publication, W.W. Norton & Company has re-(re-)released Desperate Characters, a novel by Paula Fox first published in 1970 and made into a film the following year, with Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars. We’re thrilled to publish an excerpt here on Longreads. Read more…