Search Results for: LA Weekly

Reading List: A Little Help From My Friends

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

One of my favorite things about the Longreads community is the dialogue among readers. I know each of the readers below personally. They are all exquisitely well-read. They all have different interests; they all read different publications, and I get so, so excited whenever they email or tweet me a piece they love. This week, we present Joss Whedon and Wikipedia and David Byrne and a cross-dressing not-so-Everyman from Wyoming. (I told you these were good.)

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1. “The Decline of Wikipedia.” (Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review, October 2013)

Recommended by Jordan. Can Wikipedia’s bureaucratic policies and shrinking volunteer team stay afloat?

2. “David Byrne: Will Work For Inspiration.” (David Byrne, Creative Time Reports, October 2013)

Recommended by Elena. What makes a city inspiring? Byrne critiques New York’s increasingly exclusionary nature and longs for a future where aspiring artists can afford to express themselves.

3. “In Wyoming, He’s Tough Enough to be a Sissy.” (John M. Glionna, LA Times, October 2013)

Recommended by Hännah. Sissy Goodwin, a cross-dressing cowboy, reclaimed a derogatory epithet, stands up to bullies, and inspires his students and family daily.

4. “Serenity Now! An Interview with Joss Whedon.” (Jim Kozak, InFocus, August 2005)

Recommended by Elizabeth, who sends me biweekly reading recommendations and introduced me to Firefly and Lost. It’s no surprise she passed along this vintage Whedon interview.

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Photo of David Byrne: Wikimedia Commons

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Tupac Shakur and the Origins of Thug Life

“My mother was a woman, a black woman, a single mother raising two kids on her own. She was dark-skinned, had short hair, got no love from nobody except for a group called the Black Panthers.

“I don’t consider myself to be straight militant. I’m a thug, and my definition of thug comes from half of the street element and half of the Panther element, half of the independence movement. Saying we want self-determination. We want to do it by self-defense and by any means necessary. That came from my family and that’s what thug life is. It’s a mixture.”

Tupac Shakur, in a 1994 interview with Entertainment Weekly, resurfaced by Blank on Blank. Read more on Tupac.

What Happened to Tech Jobs in Silicon Valley

“Google is visually impressive, but this frenzy of energy and hipness hasn’t generated large numbers of jobs, much less what we think of as middle-class jobs, the kinds of unglamorous but solid employment that generates annual household incomes between $44,000 and $155,000. The state of California (according to a 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California) could boast in 1980 that some 60 percent of its families were middle-income as measured in today’s dollars, but by 2010 only 48 percent of California families fell into that category, and the income gap between the state’s highest and lowest earners had doubled. In Silicon Valley there has actually been a net job loss in tech-related industries over the past decade. According to figures collected by Joel Kotkin, the dotcom crash wiped out 70,000 jobs in the valley in a little over a single year, and since then the tech industry has added only 30,000 new ones, leaving the bay region with a net 40,000 fewer jobs than existed in 2001.”

Charlotte Allen, in the Weekly Standard, on income inequality in the Bay Area, and signs of what’s happening to the middle class in the United States. Read more on tech in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: ucdaviscoe, Flickr

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Reading List: Religion Gone Extreme

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Each of these stories this week is about a facet of religion gone extreme, and each is an example of why these pieces of longform journalism are important. There is detailed, professional storytelling, gripping subject matter, the opportunity to delve behind-the-scenes and try to get at the truth. It’s so easy to make assumptions about folks who don’t take their sons to the doctor, or the daughters of cult leaders, or the woman who studies the daughter of cult leaders, but good reporting forces us to reassess our assumptions.

1. “The Fall of the House of Moon.” (Mariah Blake, The New Republic, November 2013)

Though his espoused family values and extreme legalistic moralism attracted the Republican Party, Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church enforced harmful sex rivals and fostered an environment of bitter sibling rivalry, drug abuse, and adultery. I’m in awe of Blake’s thorough investigation. I read most of this article to a friend of mine as she gaped.

2. “Why Did the Schaibles Let Their Children Die?” (Robert Huber, Philadelphia Magazine, October 2013)

Herbie and Cathy Schaible lost two young sons to treatable illnesses because their independent Baptist denomination does not believe in man-made medicine. They believe unacknowledged sin, not lack of medical treatment, caused their sons’ deaths.

3. “Caught Up In the Cult Wars: Confessions of a New Religious Movement Researcher.” (Susan J. Palmer, University of Toronto Press, 2001)

Cult-lover or sympathetic scientist? In courts of law, Susan Palmer is summoned to explicate her studies of New Religious Movements (NRMS). In this (delightful!) bear of an essay, she discusses the ethical dilemmas of investigating NRMs.

4. “A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?” (Tom Bartlett, Religion Dispatch Magazine, May 2012)

When your leader’s prophecies don’t come true, what do you do? Bartlett interviewed followers of doomsday herald Harold Camping. It’s a solid companion to Palmer’s essay about NRMs.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Longreads has featured each story included my list this week, and is in the midst of its Member Drive. Our goal is 5,000 subscribers, who’ll receive weekly updates and exclusive access to some of the best journalism today. I’m a member, and I hope you will consider becoming one as well.

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The Real History of Love & Marriage

“Though the murky concept known as ‘love’ has been recorded for all of human history, it was almost never a justification for marriage. ‘Love was considered a reason not to get married,’ says Abbott. ‘It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate. You could have love or lust for your mistress, if you’re a man, but if you’re a woman, you had to suppress it. It was condemned as a factor in marriage.’”

Collectors Weekly on the non-romantic origins of marriage. More in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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“Bill Cassidy—the second owner of Pretzel—told us before he passed away that that was one of the gimmicks that he was most proud of. It was just a spool of thread. It would hang from a rafter in the ceiling, and it would rub up against people’s faces and creep them out. It’s supposed to be cobwebs, I guess, but it wasn’t an actual web. It was just a string, but you couldn’t see it. It seems to me that just about every dark ride I rode in the 1960s had that. If it didn’t come factory-installed, I’m sure the park owners themselves would tack it up.”

Collectors Weekly on the history of amusement park “dark rides” and haunted houses. Read more from Collectors Weekly in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Announcing the Longreads Member Drive: Help Us Reach 5,000 Members

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My name is Mark Armstrong, and four and a half years ago, I created Longreads.

What started as an afternoon project has now grown into something much bigger—a global community of readers, sharing what they love, across both nonfiction and fiction. Along the way we’ve built Longreads into a trusted service that recommends the best stories on the web, and tracks down stories never before published online.

Our service is self-funded, built by four people (and many contributors) who have worked nights and weekends to create something we believe in.

Now we need your help to keep this service running. We want to make good on our vision to build Longreads into a truly global hub for readers, writers and publishers.

Today, we’re announcing the Longreads Member Drive: A new way for you to support this service and give the entire #Longreads community a stake in our future.

You can sign up for as little as $3 a month or $30 a year or make a donation via PayPal.

Our goal is to reach 5,000 Longreads Members—right now we’re at just over 1,000 paid members, so if you are thinking about joining, now is the time to show your support.

We can get to our financial goal faster if you contribute more, and Top Contributors to Longreads will also get special recognition for their support.

Here’s what your Longreads Membership pays for:

  • Our site, plus weekly emails, and RSS & Twitter feeds that link directly to the original publishers’ work.
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  • Future expansion of our service—more details coming soon.

Our business model relies on both memberships and advertising, but the bulk of our support needs to come from you, the community.

Your support is critical for our survival.

It would be an honor for us to continue to keep this service running and keep building. Join us.

Mark Armstrong

Founder, Longreads

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Photo by Dorothy Brown; Special thanks to Walden Pond Books in Oakland.

What Life Was Like for an Executioner’s Family in the 16th Century

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad.

Joel F. Harrington | The Faithful Executioner, Farrar, Straus and Giroux | March 2013 | 15 minutes (3,723 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book The Faithful Executioners, by Joel F. Harrington, which was recently featured as a Longreads Member Pick. Thanks to our Longreads Members for making these stories possible—sign up to join Longreads to contribute to our story fund. 

Read more from Harrington on how the book came together. Read more…

Our Longreads Member Pick: Something More Wrong, by Katy B. Olson

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This week’s Member Pick comes from The Big Roundtable, a new site for narrative journalism founded by Columbia University professor Michael Shapiro. And they’re giving Longreads Members early access to a brand new story, which won’t go live on their site until next week.

“Something More Wrong,” by Katy B. Olson, is an in-depth look inside the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, New York. Olson explains:

I had always hoped to write about Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. I grew up in a neighborhood a few miles away from the New York State psychiatric institution, and, with all the whispered local rumors as well as books like Susan Sheehan’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning account, Creedmoor maintained a haunting and mysterious presence in my childhood.

My chance to go inside Creedmoor came in 2010, when my mother began working there part-time as a chaplain. After months of negotiating access to report on my Columbia Journalism School thesis, I began interviewing staff in December 2010; many mentioned Ward 3B and its suicidal ‘wild woman’ patients. Soon I was spending two to four days weekly, for six weeks, with the women of 3B: attending groups, doing arts and crafts, eating together, and, as the patients do, relying on aides and their keys to open every door.

In writing this piece, I wanted to understand what drives people to commit suicide. Alice, my subject, like all of us, searches for a reason to live. For some people, causes understood—chemical imbalances, childhood traumas, drug abuse, alcoholism—and many more undiscovered, the will to continue this search can crack and break. For those who have never battled demons like Alice’s, who have never questioned their desire to live, Creedmoor and the people it cares for are unsettling reminders of instincts we cannot—or do not want to—understand.

Though I’ve not come much closer to understanding what it is that makes the will to live so fragile, Alice herself has stripped the fear from me—the fear of Creedmoor and its historical nightmares, and the fear of confronting the very human instinct to give up, which lives in all of us.

Read an excerpt.

Update: The story is now free for everyone here

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Reading List: Sunrise, Sunset

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Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

A few weeks ago, I was reading my weekly horoscope, courtesy of The Rumblr’s Madame Clairvoyant. The last three words of Leo’s outlook caught in my mind: “Don’t even worry.”

“Don’t even worry,” I whispered over and over. So many people have told me not to worry about the future in one breath, only to interrogate me about my future plans in the next. “Don’t even worry,” I say to myself. These are pieces that make me feel hopeful about the future — not in the naive hope that it will be easy, but with calm assurance that good things will happen to mediate the bad.

1. “The ‘Handicap Icon’ Gets New Life.” (Jennifer Grant, Christianity Today, June 2013)

A philosophy professor and an artist collaborated to create a “symbol of access,” angered by the stigma and ignorance directed toward differently abled citizens.

2. “The Empty-Nest Yard Sale.” (Kevin Sampsell, The Rumpus, June 2013)

Sampsell, a bookseller and independent publisher, considers his son’s teenage tendency toward aloofness and his own desperate, emotional response.

3. “Internship From Hell.” (Michael McGuire, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2013)

Once an intern at El Nuevo Heraldo in Miami, McGuire’s internship sums up a lot of what today’s working youth face: disgust, exhaustion, disillusionment, bouts of hysterical laughter and sweet relief at the end of it all.

4. “Slouching Towards Babylon.” (Anna McConnell, Rookie Magazine, June 2013)

Her hippie peers sneer at her New York upbringing, and sometimes, she does, too. But nature’s sublimity is no match for homesickness.

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Illustration by Kim