Search Results for: Kathryn Schulz

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Image via The Intercept.

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

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Pond Scum

Longreads Pick

Kathryn Schulz takes down Henry David Thoreau: “It is true that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places. But ‘Walden’ is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 13, 2015
Length: 22 minutes (5,660 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Matt

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

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

* * *

Read more…

On Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’ and the Redemption Narrative

Reese Witherspoon in Wild.

Like Dante, then, Strayed is on a spiritual journey, beginning in damnation, bound for deliverance. That makes Wild a redemption narrative — and that, in turn, helps explain its popularity, because redemption narratives are some of the oldest, most compelling, and most ubiquitous stories we have. We enshrine nature writing in the canon — you were probably assigned Thoreau and Emerson et al. in high school — but it is redemption narratives that dominate our culture. Among other things, you can hear them in religious services all across the land and in AA meetings every day of the week.

Wild embodies this ancient story. Or, more precisely, it embodies the contemporary American version thereof, where the course is not from sin to salvation but from trauma to transformation: I was abject, dysfunctional, and emotionally shattered, but now I see. This version has more train-wreck allure than the traditional one (being a mess is generally more spectacular than merely being an unbeliever), and it is also more inclusive. Identifying with it requires no particular faith, beyond the faith that a bad life can get better.

The American redemption narrative, then, is entertaining, accessible, and privately comforting. And, in the case of Wild, it is culturally comforting as well. Before Strayed sets off on her journey, she embodies much of what America fears about young lower-class women: She does drugs, sleeps around, gets an abortion. Eleven hundred miles and 315 pages later, she has sobered up, sworn off the one-night stands, and become as wholesome and appealing as the girl next door.

In New York magazine, Kathryn Schulz takes a walk with the bestselling author and explores what made her book such a huge hit.

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Talking to Cheryl Strayed About What Made ‘Wild’ Work

Longreads Pick

How did Wild become such a huge bestseller? Oprah helps, but Kathryn Schulz talks to the author about how her story—now a movie starring Reese Witherspoon—resonated with readers.

Published: Dec 8, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,005 words)

A new book explains how “social jet lag” is interfering with our internal clocks:

Modern human beings are not much like mimosas. It’s true that both have biological clocks, but only one of us has culture. And culture, delightful as it is, turns out to radically complicate—“fuck up” would not be an overstatement—our relationship to time.

Among species, we humans are to time what Polish villagers have long been to place: unhappy subjects of multiple competing regimes. The first regime is internal time: the schedule established by our bodies. The second is sun time: the schedule established by light and darkness. These two we share with houseplants and virtually every other living being. But we are also governed by a third regime: social time. That sounds benign enough, like afternoon tea with a friend. But don’t be fooled. Social time is the villain in this drama, out to turn you against health, happiness, nature, sanity, even your own inner self.

“Cuckoo.” — Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine

More #longreads from Kathryn Schulz

My Top 10 Business #Longreads of 2010

My Top 10 Business #Longreads of 2010