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Editor’s Roundtable: Just Put Some Eyes On There (Podcast)

Cynthia Breazeal, roboticist and social robotics pioneer, is pictured with Jibo, a personal assistant robot. (Matthew Cavanaugh for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On our June 14, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Books Editor Dana Snitzky share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Grub Street, The New Yorker, Gay Magazine, and The Verge.


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0:20 How a Cash-Strapped Start-up Became the Internet’s Food-Nerd Utopia. (Chris Crowley, June 18, 2019, Grub Street

“The ultimate distillation of a conversation going on with all the slow bits cut out and all the best parts included.” – Aaron Gilbreath

In 2006, Ed Levine launched Serious Eats, which quickly became a go-to place on the internet for the food obsessed. To coincide with Levine’s memoir, Grub Street created a “meta-food experience” by speaking with writers involved in the early days of the website. The Longreads team discusses how the oral history format seems to get people to lower their filter and allow personalities to come to the forefront. They also talk about the ambitious lengths people went to to get a story during this period of the blogging internet, and how that ambition often wasn’t reflected in the low rates and long hours they worked. 

8:20 The Strange Story of a Secret Literary Fellowship. (Daniel A. Gross, June 16, 2019, The New Yorker)

The Optics of Opportunity. (Hafizah Geter, June 19, 2019, Gay Magazine)

“Racism isn’t a revelation, it’s ever-present and we’re always dealing with it.” – Dana Snitzky
“And it’s not a surprising reveal at the end of a story.” – Catherine Cusick

The team discusses the New Yorker’s story about a secret literary fellowship funded by Barnes & Nobel owner Leonard Riggio’s family foundation and a rebuttal companion piece to the story from Gay Magazine.

Geter is a main character in Gross’s piece and both writers were participants in the fellowship but, as our editors discuss, the structure and framing of the pieces differ greatly. In Gay Magazine, Geter asks who gets to tell a story and critiques the New Yorker’s editorial choice to frame Gross’ piece as a story about wealth. The editors question the down-the-rabbit-hole structure, which posits racism as a mystery’s big revelation, rather than, as Geter shows, the glaring center of the story, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. The team talks about how opportunity and predation are intertwined, and the difference between people who feed hope and those who feed on it.

24:08 They Welcomed a Robot Into Their Family, Now They’re Mourning Its Death.  (Ashley Carman, June 19, 2019, The Verge)

“I didn’t expect my friendly home robot to die.” – Catherine Cusick

Jibo was one of the first social robots engineered to normalize the notion of “a robot in every home,” to appeal to children, and to become part of the family. Jibo’s eyes, facial recognition responsiveness, and personalized greetings fostered a bond with owners, who developed pet-like affection for the dancing digital personality. Now, the company that makes Jibo has been bought out, and Jibo owners have been put on notice. His servers are shutting down “soon,” but no one knows exactly when.

The editors talk about how to say goodbye to a robot you didn’t expect to “die,” the challenge of trusting the reliability of something that corporations can unplug at will, and how consumer relationships to home assistants are complicated by their intentional emotional appeal.

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

An Ode to Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘Unwritten’

MTV, Sony BMG

I don’t quite remember the first time I heard Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten.” It had to be at some point in 2006, when the record was in the midst of a meteoric 42-week rise through the Billboard Hot 100 charts, but the pop ballad with a catchy beat and tantalizing first line (“I am unwritten, can’t read my mind, I’m undefined”) could have wiggled its way into my hippocampus even earlier and I wouldn’t have realized it. “Unwritten” was arguably the song of the 2000s; the record was inescapable, and even as background music, I’d start to hum along subconsciously, stimulating the cerebellum before I caught myself right before the chorus kicked in 47 seconds into the track: Read more…

Took You By Surprise: John and Paul’s Lost Reunion

Illustration by Homestead

David Gambacorta | Longreads | June 2019 | 20 minutes (5,128 words)

The sun was beginning to set over a mostly deserted expanse of beach in Malibu, casting long shadows behind a pair of visitors as they strolled a few feet from the water’s edge. They had the innocuous, no-particular-place-to-go demeanor of average beachgoers, except for the fact that their every step was being recorded by a local news cameraman. One was a guy who was intimately familiar with being filmed, photographed, analyzed, idolized, ridiculed, and praised: John Lennon. Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: From WeEarth to The Aunt-o-Sphere (Podcast)

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

On our June 14, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Mike Dang, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Senior Editor Kelly Stout, and Books Editor Dana Snitzky shared what they’ve been reading and nominated stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Outline, and CrimeReads.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


0:36 The I in We. (, June 10, 2019, New York Magazine

“I have said it once, I will say it again: I want nothing to do with colonies on other planets run by start-upy white dudes.” – Kelly Stout

New York Magazine’s look at WeWork founder Adam Neumann and how, like other start-up founders before him, he has built a company based on cultural hegemony and a cult of personality. The team discusses the absurdity of late-stage capitalism as it is depicted in the piece, as well as the seemingly capitalist communism ideology behind WeWork, which seems to take all of the bad of communism, but none of the good. They also consider the jargon of start-ups and venture capital and question the use of the word ‘community’ as a misleading placeholder for the idea of a network.

12:05 The Making of a YouTube Radical. (, June 8, 2019, The New York Times)

“How to get someone to revert or… I guess blue-pilling isn’t a thing?” – Mike Dang

“Throw up the red pill.” – Kelly Stout

How do you use the Youtube algorithm against right-wing radicals? That’s the question answered by this piece from The New York Times. It follows the story of Caleb Cain, a young, white 20-something who considered himself liberal, but then found himself falling prey to the entertaining tactics used by right-wing Youtubers to gain audiences.

The team discusses the now common refrain that Youtube’s algorithm is dangerous and questions whether it is possible to use it for good. They talk about how we can’t wait around for Youtube to fix the problem and how the left-wing Youtubers who emerge in the piece, mimick the successful aesthetic choices of the right-wing to win back audiences. The team also talks about the strange feeling of watching people you know change their political views drastically and about the challenges of having constructive conversations about privilege in our ‘shut down’ culture.

21:19 There is nothing more depressing than “positive news.” (Joanna Mang, June 12, 2019, The Outline)

“I feel like the question underneath it all is what do I do with mental health management in my news consumption?” – Catherine Cusick

The team weighs the dangers of the trend toward positive news as examined in this critique from the Outline. They talk about Mang’s observation that those who are making money off of “unlikely animal friends” and “dads who beatbox with their babies” are also passively encouraging distrust of news outlets that publish stories about society’s problems, and turning viewers away from having to do anything substantive in response. They consider the idea that bad news encourages a liberal world view by compelling readers to action whereas a retreat from this type of news is a retreat into conservatism. Lastly, they touch on how awareness of this plays into Longreads‘ weekly recommendations.

31:44 The Rise and Fall of the Bank Robbery Capital of the World. (Peter Houlahan, June 11, 2019, CrimeReads)

“I do really love pieces that can teach me something in that tone… in an entertaining way while still covering all the bases. That’s like the sweet spot.”  – Catherine Cusick

In the ’80s in Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour of every day, reads the subhead to this book excerpt published by CrimeReads. The piece lays out the lesser-known history of a string of polite bank robberies in the ’80s and the convenience-oriented banks that located themselves next to freeway on-ramps, inadvertently creating the perfect getaway route for criminals. The team discusses using entertainment as an engagement technique and how when this is done in concert with sound reporting, it makes for an ideal Longreads pick.

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

Remembering Dr. John

Ronald C. Modra/Sports Imagery/Getty Images

The first Dr. John died in August 1885. He was known by many names, as New Orleans chronicler Lafcadio Hearn noted in his obituary.

“Jean Montanet, or Jean La Ficelle, or Jean Latanié, or Jean Racine, or Jean Grisgris, or Jean Macaque, or Jean Bayou, or ‘Voudoo John,’ or ‘Bayou John,’ or ‘Doctor John’ might well have been termed ‘The Last of the Voudoos,’” Hearn wrote for Harper’s Weekly that November, “not that the strange association with which he was affiliated has ceased to exist with his death, but that he was the last really important figure of a long line of wizards or witches whose African titles were recognized, and who exercised an influence over the colored population.”

The second Dr. John just died on June 6, 2019. In a way he, too, was a wizard — at least in the sense that anything done wonderfully well cannot be told from magic. This latter Dr. John was also associated with New Orleans and exercised his own influence as a singer, songwriter, and musician.

Born as Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., Dr. John was part of the third wave of influence — first jazz, then rock, and then funk — to emerge from the Crescent City, a place more responsible for American popular music than any other. His career took off while he was in exile, trying to preserve the music he grew up with. It ended with the world acknowledging his efforts to broaden our vocabulary, musically and otherwise.

“I been in the right trip,” he once sang — a line written for him by Bob Dylan, “but I must have used the wrong car.”

Born on November 20, 1941, “Mac” Rebennack grew up attending gigs and recording sessions with his music aficionado father, who turned him on to New Orleans jazz greats King Oliver and Louis Armstrong.

“Well, my father’s records were what they called ‘race records,’ which was blues, rhythm and blues, traditional jazz, and gospel,” Rebennack told Smithsonian Magazine in 2009. “He owned a record shop and had a large black clientele. They would come by and play a record to decide if they liked it. I got the idea as a little kid that I wanted to be a piano player, because I remember hearing [boogie-woogie pianist] Pete Johnson. I thought why not just be Pete Johnson?”

Fats Domino’s guitarists taught the young Rebennack some stuff. Meeting the great New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair inspired him to become a professional musician. Rebennack was present when Little Richard cut “Tutti Frutti” at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Music Shop and Studio on North Rampart street. By the early 1960s, he was playing professionally, doing session work for such local luminaries as Art Neville and Allen Toussaint. Ace Records made him an A&R man at the age of 16.

By this time, Rebennack was also hooked on heroin and subsequently busted for possession. After his release from prison in 1965, he returned to a different world. It was already more difficult to play in mixed groups. “When the civil rights movement heated up, it became more dangerous to travel as part of these package shows,” he remembered. “Before then, we used to travel all over the South with no problem — me, Earl King, Guitar Slim, Chuck Berry, people like that — but then suddenly, we started getting hassled.”

Moreover, New Orleans was trying to clean up its seedy image, and many of its music venues, according to Rebennack, were “buckets of blood joints. It was not a wholesome atmosphere where you could bring your family along. There were gang fights. The security and the police would fire guns into the crowd. … Later [New Orleans District Attorney] Jim Garrison padlocked and shut down the whole music scene.” It was time to go.

Rebennack moved to Los Angeles, where he was soon playing sessions with Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Frank Zappa. “They recruited about half of New Orleans one time to go out and do The Sonny and Cher Show,” remembered Rebennack’s friend Coco Robicheaux. “They were all out there doin’ that, and Sonny was always after [Rebennack], ‘Man, I got a state-of-the-art studio, it’s there for you any time you want it. Y’all just lay around here, why don’tcha go do somethin’?”

Rebennack had an idea about a character someone could play, based on Jean Montanet. But he didn’t want to be Dr. John. He wanted his singer friend Ronnie Barron to do it. “I was never fond of front men,” Rebennack told the Smithsonian. “I didn’t want to be one.”

Barron was the reason Rebennack switched from guitar to piano. Years before, at a gig in Jacksonville, Florida, Barron was being pistol-whipped. “Ronnie was just a kid and his mother had told me, ‘You better look out for my son,’” Rebennack remembered. “Oh god, that was all I was thinking about. I tried to stop the guy, I had my hand over the barrel and he shot.”

“It just went right through my finger,” Rebennack said. “And my finger was hanging by a piece of skin. … They put it back on in the hospital and they sewed it back on very poorly and it never did work right.” When asked how he was able to play piano with a crooked finger, Rebennack quipped, “I try to avoid that finger when I play the piano.”

Barron was also responsible for creating a stage persona early on that inspired Rebennack.

“”I met Mac Rebennack when I was 15.” Barron once said.

I’d been aware of him since I was 12, and he had a good working band that played on the west side where I lived, in Algiers. New Orleans was a real fly-by-night town, where there was a big tourist crowd and people wanted to drink. They didn’t care about the music that much, just wanted to be entertained. So I created my “Reverend Ether” character, almost by accident. I made up this mythology about the voodoo and the gumbo. I’d shake the tambourine and say, “I’m gonna drop the truth on you!” I made up all this shit. This was before I worked with Mac, when I was working in a club on Bourbon Street. He’d come in and kind of watch what I was doing. … Mac realized the value in it, and after he hired me he wanted me to be the original Dr. John, because I already had a handle on the thing.

When Barron was hired by Sonny and Cher and moved west, he gave the Reverend Ether character to Rebennack.

Back in Los Angeles, Barron wasn’t interested in adopting Rebennack’s Dr. John persona. “Ronnie was like this good-lookin’ guy, liked to wear suits, he didn’t want to be no swamp thing,” Robicheaux said. “So they talked Mac into doin’ it. ‘You be Dr. John.’ And everybody loved it.”

Rebennack’s conga player told him, “Look, if Bob Dylan and Sonny and Cher can do it, you can do it.” And so Dr. John was returned to earth and put on a mission.

“I did my first record,” Rebennack said, “to keep New Orleans gris-gris alive.”

The first Dr. John was also a gris-gris man. According to Lafcadio Hearn, Jean Montanet claimed to be a prince’s son from Senegal, of the free-born Bambara tribe. As a youth, he was kidnapped by Spanish slavers. Given back his freedom, he traveled the world as a ship’s cook, finally settling in New Orleans. He became wealthy through fortune-telling and the folk magic practices that we now know as rootwork and hoodoo.

“By-and-by his reputation became so great that he was able to demand and obtain immense fees,” Hearn wrote. “People of both races and both sexes thronged to see him — many coming even from far-away creole towns in the parishes, and well-dressed women, closely veiled, often knocked at his door.” Before long, Montanet was worth $50,000 — enormous wealth for the mid-19th century.

The gris-gris originated in West Africa, and Montanet brought the practice with him. It takes the form of a fetish, carried by the user, for protection or benefit. They are often composed of an uneven number of bones, colored objects and stones, graveyard soil, salt, and other exotic ingredients such as bird nests. Gris-gris culture was already a part of Louisiana voodoo, brought to the state by enslaved West Africans, where it syncretized with elements of Catholicism. Hearn, a white man, described Montanet’s religion as “primitive in the extreme.”

If during his years of servitude in a Catholic colony he had imbibed some notions of Romish Christianity, it is certain at least that the Christian ideas were always subordinated to the African — just as the image of the Virgin Mary was used by him merely as an auxiliary fetich in his witchcraft, and was considered as possessing much less power than the “elephant’s toof.” He was in many respects a humbug; but he may have sincerely believed in the efficacy of certain superstitious rites of his own.

Rebennack had his own “notions of Romish Christianity”: He attended New Orleans’s Jesuit High School until kicked out for his musical preoccupations. Other forces connected him to Jean Montanet. “There was a guy the name of Dr. John, a hoodoo guy in New Orleans,” Rebennack once said. “He was competition to Marie Laveau. He was like her opposite. I actually got a clipping from the Times-Picayune newspaper about how my great-great-great-grandpa Wayne was busted with this guy for running a voodoo operation in a whorehouse in 1860. I decided I would produce the record with this as a concept.”

That record was 1968’s atmospheric, ominous, and thoroughly funky Gris-Gris. “One thing I always did was believe,” Rebennack told Mojo magazine. “I used to play for gigs for the Gris-Gris church. I dug the music, and that’s what I was trying to capture.”

“They call me Dr. John, known as the Night Tripper,” he sings on “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya,” in a raspy voice predictive of Tom Waits. (Rebennack once told a New Orleans paper, “I’m tripping through the shortcuts of existment to feel it and that’s good.”)

Got my satchel of gris gris in my hand

Day trippin’ up, back down the bayou

I’m the last of the best

They call me the gris gris man

“I always thought [voodoo] was a beautiful part of New Orleans culture,” Rebennack once said. “It’s such a blend of stuff; African, Choctaw, Christianity, Spanish.” He told the Smithsonian that he’d approached “some of the reverend mothers” and asked if he could perform the sacred songs. “But I couldn’t do them because it was not for a ceremony,” he said. “So I wrote something similar. One we used went ‘corn boule killy caw caw, walk on gilded splinters.’ It actually translates to ‘cornbread, coffee, and molasses’ in old Creole dialect.”

“It’s supposed to be ‘spendors’ but I turned it into ‘splinters,’” Rebennack remembered. “I just thought splinters sounded better and I always pictured splinters when I sung it.”

Coco Robicheaux had a more complex take. “Dr. John, he was very much interested in metaphysics. We had this little place on St. Philip Street. In voodoo they call the gilded splinters the points of a planet. Mystically they appear like little gilded splinters, like little gold, like fire that holds still. They’re different strengths at different times. I guess it ties in with astrology, and influence the energy. That’s what that’s about.”

Gris-Gris didn’t do that well commercially. “What is this record you gave me?” asked Rebennack’s label boss. “Why didn’t you give me a record that we could sell?” Still, the new Dr. John created a cult following by doubling down on the hoodoo visuals. He would appear onstage in a puff of smoke, decked in feathers (or merely body paint), robes, and headdresses. For a while, one of his opening acts was someone named Prince Kiyama, who would bite the heads off live chickens and drink the blood. Sometimes his backup dancers were nude.

It should go without saying that the new Dr. John’s act had as much to do with voodoo as David Seville’s 1958 hit “Witch Doctor” did to African shamanism, which is to say, not at all. When questioned about his Dr. John stage show later in life, Rebennack insisted that “it was very authentic,” and compared the abandonment of his dancers to “things that might happen in voodoo, where they’re taken by a spirit.” It seems more like the act was designed to appeal to his young, libertine audience rather than be an avenue of understanding a different, complex belief system. At any rate, he retired all that by 1976, when Rebennack appeared at The Band’s farewell concert (later immortalized in Martin Scorcese’s documentary The Last Waltz) to sing the charming, if not entirely wholesome, “Such a Night.“

America has always had two prominent cultures: the colonial and the communal. The colonial culture mimics or appropriates the voice of the underclass, manifesting itself in minstrelsy and coon songs, and even affecting civil rights–era folk music.

The communal strain of American cultural expression has been just as strong, but more fruitful. Think of Congo Square, the place in New Orleans where the first Dr. John and Marie Laveaux plied their trades. It was here that slaves were allowed to “gather, roughly by tribe, to play music, sing, and dance” in the 18th and 19th centuries. These rhythms, when combined with blues and European modalities and military marching band instruments, became jazz. Nothing like that had existed before. In the same sense, it’s how Louisiana voodoo was created out of a gumbo of multicultural spiritual and religious expressions to become something unique. Through the centuries, we have all gathered roughly by tribe. Sometimes it’s produced magic.

Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack embodied both of these cultures. His hoodoo schtick had a little of the “bone through your nose” stereotypes typified by artists like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins; it didn’t contribute much to cultural understanding beyond a new vocabulary of exotic words and phrases, which he had appropriated largely for effect.

But Rebennack was a musician — and more than that, a New Orleanian — through and through. He learned from black and white people, was shocked when a New Orleans auditorium wouldn’t let his white band back Bo Diddley, and dedicated himself to preserving that rolling, loose-limbed music he believed was dying. Later on, he often recorded with the Meters, the one band that epitomized New Orleans funk. Rebennack also revered his musical ancestors, recording tributes to Professor Longhair, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, New Orleans’s great ambassador of jazz. “I’m trying to give props to Pops,” Rebennack once said about his Armstrong dedication. “I think we’re all supposed to give props to our elders.”  

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Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Jason Stavers

Editor’s Roundtable: Shorthand, Looking Away, Getting It Wrong (Podcast)

Trisha Meile
Trisha Meile, the Central Park jogger. (Duane Braley/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

On our June 7, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Essays Editor Sari Botton, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The Cut, The New Yorker, and The California Sunday Magazine.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


0:53 Before, and After, the Jogger (Sarah Weinman, June 3, 2019, The Cut

“It’s so important to push through your discomfort and watch these things and read these stories. It’s important for us to have episodes like this where we’re paying attention to heavy stories about other people’s difficulties that we don’t have.” —Sari Botton

The Cut revisits the story of The Central Park Five with a look at the experiences of the nine women who were raped, assaulted, and one, murdered, by Matias Reyes. Reyes only admitted to the crime years after Manhattan District Attorney Linda Fairstein had, in 1989, charged five innocent young boys with the crimes.

The team discusses the complicity of Fairstein, the police, and the press in vilifying the wrong people, and the way that the womens’ stories, central to everything, were never properly told. They also talk about Ava Duvernet’s When They See Us Netflix series and how it humanizes the boys from a similarly overdue angle. They address the responsibility we have to engage with tough stories, and how a story like this, about racism and misogyny, has reach far beyond New York City.

9:57 R. Kelly and the Damage Done. (, June 3, 2019, The New Yorker)

“To read these two pieces side by side disturbed me further, because on the one hand, you have somebody who’s being falsely accused of rape, and on the other hand, you have somebody saying I was raped, and not being believed.”  —Kelly Stout

The editors respond to Jim DeRogatis’s memoir of reporting on R. Kelly’s alleged victims, as well as his acknowledgement of his failures, prejudices, and the perspective that he lacked as a white member of the press.

The team discusses the blind spots of whiteness, and how white people fail to see what is directly in front of us when it comes to realities non-white communities have long dealt with. Additionally, they look at how in this particular case, information about R. Kelly’s actions was available for years and ignored by reporters. They also address the way members of privileged communities create scapegoats to recalibrate a sense of security after horrible incidents, including hanging on to the idea that the justice system provides protection more than it exacerbates harm.

25:28 The Billboard (Kathy Dobie, May 30, 2019, The California Sunday Magazine)

“Shorthand isn’t enough… victims don’t get the privilege of shorthand.” —Aaron Gilbreath

Artist Stephanie Montgomery was working in a club in Los Angeles, dancing and trying to get her career started, when one of the customers raped her. She told management and the police, but no one did anything. This is a story about the aftermath of that rape, and how Montgomery went on to tell her story by painting a billboard on the I-10 Freeway.

The team continues their conversation about the shortcomings of law enforcement and the media, as well as the meaning and weight of the word victim. They touch on the importance of permitting people who have suffered a trauma to forge their own path to healing. They reiterate the need for details and going beyond shorthand terms like ‘sexual assault’ in these stories. Readers may not want to read or hear these details, but they need to learn them if anything is going to change.

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Very Beginning

An advertisement depicts a Baker Electric automobile, the Baker Queen Victoria, driven by a young woman, 1909. (Stock Montage/Getty Images)

Dan Albert | An excerpt adapted from Are We There Yet? : The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless | W. W. Norton & Co. | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,750 words)

Most people reasonably expect the story of the evolution of the automobile to begin with the invention of the automobile itself. I’ve disappointed enough people in my life already, so I give you the Jesuit Rat Car of 1672. In that year, missionary Ferdinand Verbiest created a steam wagon to bring the Emperor of China to Jesus, but the car was only big enough to carry a rat.

If you don’t like the Jesuit Rat Car as an automotive first, you might consider Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s cannon hauler of 1769. A product of the French army’s skunk works, it was canceled in beta testing. In 1790, Nathan Read got the first American patent for a steam-powered wagon, a remarkable feat because the US Patent Office itself had yet to be invented. Perhaps that counts. In London, Richard Trevithick set a Georgian coach body atop a steam boiler and eight-foot wheels, creating the first giraffe-less carriage. In 1805, American Oliver Evans drove his harbor dredge, the Orukter Amphibolos, down the streets of Philadelphia in hopes of enticing investors for a car business. Philadelphia cobblestone street paving gave horses purchase but shook the Orukter so violently that the wheels broke. Let’s call his the first amphibious car. Read more…

It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

T-Neck Records, 4th & B'way, Jive, Profile Records, Ruffhouse Records

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)

 

Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.

Read more…

True Roots

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Ronnie Citron-Fink | True Roots | Island Press | June 2019 | 34 minutes (5.655 words)

 

How’d You do it? Are you doing that on purpose? Are you okay? Ever since I stopped coloring my silver hair, I’ve gotten a lot of questions. One of the most common during my hair transition was Why are you letting it go gray? While my roots didn’t ask permission before they stopped growing in dark brown, it was a complex mix of fear and determination that rearranged my beauty priorities. The question of why — why, after twenty-five years of using chemical dyes, I gave them up-is something I’ve thought about a lot.

My world began to shift four years ago. I was sitting in a meeting about toxics reform in Washington, DC, when an environmental scientist began to describe the buildup of chemicals in our bodies. As she rattled off a list of ingredients in personal care products-toluene, benzophenone, stearates, triclosan — my scalp started to tingle. “We’re just beginning to understand how these chemicals compromise long-term health,” she concluded.

Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: Gossip, Dirt, and Reality (Podcast)

Cannabis seedlings
Cannabis seedling. (Angela Weiss / Getty Images)

On our May 31, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Head of Fact-checking Matt Giles, Senior Editor Krista Stevens, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Kotaku, and The Globe and Mail.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


1:04The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s’ Most Decadent College” (Lili Anolik, May 28, 2019, Esquire

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes somebody a genius at a young age… if I go on to become a genius, I will not be a young one.” —Kelly Stout

The team discusses Esquire’s oral history of Bennington College as told by Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tart, Jonathan Lethem, and their contemporaries at the storied Vermont liberal arts college. They talk about literary celebrity, youthful genius, and reading pieces that feel like they’ve been written specifically for your own cultural touchstones.

4:32 ‘The Hills’ Made Reality TV What It Is. Now It’s Back. (Irina Aleksander, May 23, 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

“The cast members in ‘The Hills’ reboot are the LA Lakers of reality TV.” —Matt Giles

Irina Aleksander goes long on the seminal reality show’s reboot. The team talks about the shift from ’90s reality shows like The Real World to the Reality 2.0 shows that emerged in the early aughts, as well as the tension between being a “serious person” and watching certain reality television. They also speculate about MTV’s bridging of fiction and “real life” by casting The OC’s Mischa Barton, and Matt pulls off a masterful one-to-one comparison of every Hills character to his or her NBA Lakers counterpart. LC is obviously Kobe.

11:06 Lakers 2.0: The failed reboot of the NBA’s crown jewel (Baxter Holmes, May 28, 2019, ESPN)

“Really well-written explanatory journalism, that also happened to be about a workplace drama.” —Catherine Cusick

ESPN’s look at how dysfunction has plagued the Lakers this season breaks down the complexities of team dynamics in a way that makes it accessible beyond the realm of NBA fans. Holmes brings personality clashes, leadership, and management discussions to life in a way that reminds both readers and fans that sports teams are also workplaces for hundreds of people.

15:44 Shady Numbers And Bad Business: Inside The Esports Bubble (Cecilia D’Anastasio, May 23, 2019, Kotaku)

“Who counts as a reader and what counts as a view… is reading something engagement? Is viewing something reading?” —Catherine Cusick

Cecilia D’Anastasio reports on the unregulated world of esports metrics, audience inflation, and who benefits from the narrative that esports is the next big thing. The team discusses the challenges of building and tracking an audience online, the conflict of self-reporting metrics in the absence of trusted third-party standards, and the implications for outsized investments that may have been based on inflated numbers. 

19:21 Canada’s saddest grow-op: My humiliating adventures in growing marijuana (Ian Brown, May 19, 2019, The Globe and Mail)

“Weed, it turns out, is very, very finicky to grow.” —Krista Stevens

After Canada’s legalization of marijuana last year, Ian Brown’s editor proposed that he try growing marijuana. Using a Grobo hydroponic kit that tracks growing conditions and automatically nourishes the plant, Brown decided to run his experiment at work — much to the chagrin of his colleagues, who hounded him about the smell. Was the end product up to snuff? 

The team discusses the generational stigma that can still surround marijuana use, as well as the importance of a journalist’s voice, humor, and personality in writing a successful DIY piece.

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