Search Results for: Los Angeles Times

‘Women Can Be Required To Wear Something That’s Painful.’

Virginia Gonzalez / Getty

Victoria Namkung | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,283 words)

 

From Cinderella’s glass slippers to Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolo Blahniks, Summer Brennan deftly analyzes one of the world’s most provocative and sexualized fashion accessories in High Heel, part of the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury. Told in 150 vignettes that alternately entertain and educate, disturb and depress, the book ruminates on the ways in which society fetishizes, celebrates, and demonizes the high heel as well as the people, primarily women, who wear them.

She writes: “We’re still sorting out the relationship between glass ceilings and glass heels. For now, the idea of doing something ‘in high heels’ is a near-universally understood shorthand meaning both that the person doing it is female, and that in doing it, she faces additional, gendered challenges.” Whether you see high heels as empowering or a submission to patriarchal gender roles (or land somewhere in between), you’ll likely never look at a pair the same way again after reading High Heel.

Brennan, an award-winning investigative journalist and author of The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America, has written for New York Magazine, The Paris Review, Scientific American, Pacific Standard, Buzzfeed, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. A longtime communications consultant at the United Nations, she’s worked on issues and projects ranging from the environment and nuclear weapons to gender equality and human rights. Read more…

Behind the Writing: On Research

Type by Katie Kosma

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | February 2019 | 29 minutes (7,983 words)

In December, I turned in the first draft of my second book. I assumed that when I finished it, I would stand up and scream. Actually scream “YES!” followed by a stream of sundry obscenities, then collapse on the floor and make my husband take a picture for Instagram.

Instead, I was in a quiet back room of Hillman Library, on the University of Pittsburgh campus, drinking a 99¢ mug of coffee, googling Erich Fromm quotes, when I suddenly realized I was done, and I just sat there mildly stupefied, then caught the bus and went home. It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap. It sucked, but in the way most serious creative endeavors suck, with a lining of deep gratification that afterward allows one to pretend that it was all in the service of a mystical something and not really, at base, insane.

It was an appropriate end to a writing process that felt a lot less like glorious creation and a lot more like survival and persistence: just getting through one day, one page to the next, trying to keep the pyramid of information, ideas, and sentences from collapsing into a wet heap.

What made this second book so difficult was research: not the process of doing it, not compiling and organizing it, but the quandary of how to make it creative. How to write a book that felt like it spoke to huge questions — the meaning of life, what matters and why, all the things one gets misty-eyed about around a bonfire — via gobs of information.

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‘I Spent Two Years Researching Before I Wrote a Single Line’: Geeking Out With Marlon James

Mark Seliger / Penguin Random House

Adam Morgan| Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (1,962 words)

I understand why Marlon James calls his new trilogy “an African Game of Thrones” — it builds the right expectations for an epic fantasy with dozens of characters spread across warring kingdoms. However, judging by the first book in the series, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, another apt comparison, especially when it comes to style and structure, might be “an African Gormenghast.”

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series (1946-1959), if you’ve never read it, is a dense literary labyrinth that makes A Game of Thrones and its sequels look downright old-fashioned. The story of a wealthy heir who lives in a vast, crumbling castle, Gormenghast has never been wildly popular thanks to its challenging style, but it does hold cult status among scholars and writers like Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Sofia Samatar, even Harold Bloom. “Reading it at the age of 13,” Samatar has written, “I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language.”

Growing up in the suburbs of Kingston, Jamaica, Marlon James didn’t have access to many fantasy novels, but he did stumble upon Gormenghast as an adult. “It was like a blueprint for how the fantastical grows up,” he says, echoing Samatar, adding that it’s the one book that “continues to rule his life.”

Perhaps that’s why Black Leopard, Red Wolf takes so many narrative risks. It’s a sprawling series of stories within stories that fold back on themselves, a hypnotic spoken-word fable full of sex, violence, and magic. It’s not quite what you’re expecting — and it’s all the better for it. Read more…

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

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David Treuer | an excerpt from The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present | Riverhead Books| January 2019 | 24 minutes (6,491 words)

 

What follows is the prologue to David Treuer’s new book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, in which he explains what drove him to write it. That book is the one referenced throughout.


This book tells the story of what Indians in the United States have been up to in the 128 years that have elapsed since the 1890 massacre of at least 150 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota: what we’ve done, what’s happened to us, what our lives have been like.* It is adamantly, unashamedly, about Indian life rather than Indian death. That we even have lives — that Indians have been living in, have been shaped by, and in turn have shaped the modern world — is news to most people. The usual story told about us — or rather, about “the Indian” — is one of diminution and death, beginning in untrammeled freedom and communion with the earth and ending on reservations, which are seen as nothing more than basins of perpetual suffering. Wounded Knee has come to stand in for much of that history. In the American imagination and, as a result, in the written record, the massacre at Wounded Knee almost overnight assumed a significance far beyond the sheer number of lives lost. It became a touchstone of Indian suffering, a benchmark of American brutality, and a symbol of the end of Indian life, the end of the frontier, and the beginning of modern America. Wounded Knee, in other words, stands for an end, and a beginning.

What were the actual circumstances of this event that has taken on so much symbolic weight? Read more…

The Laws of the Awards Podium Protest

Getty Historical, John Shearer / AP, Matt Sayles / Invision / AP, Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 10 minutes (2,437 words)

Imagine Bradley Cooper won the Oscar for A Star Is Born. And imagine that, in his place, a beautiful young Mexican woman in traditional huipil dress — white tunic, floral embroidery — calmly approached the podium and held up her hand to block the award being extended to her. Imagine that woman stood at the microphone and told a room full of Hollywood celebrities and an audience of millions, “Bradley Cooper very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award and the reasons for this are the treatment of Mexicans today by America.” What would the response be? Would they boo like they did in 1973 when Marlon Brando sent activist Sacheen Littlefeather on his behalf and she basically said those same words but swap out Mexicans for Native Americans? Since then the Hollywood awards season podium has increasingly become a place of protest, though not without some parameters. It would not be unexpected over the next two months to see a woman of color holding the industry accountable on stage — Regina King did just that last week at the Golden Globes — but seeing a white man — a representative of the population largely responsible for oppression within Hollywood — addressing not only the problems within his world but his own complicity in it? That’s not the way things are done. But to quote Cooper himself in A Star is Born: “Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.” Read more…

Where Have All the Music Magazines Gone?

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Aaron Gilbreath| Longreads | December 2018 | 25 minutes (6,357 words)

When other writers and I get together, we sometimes mourn the state of music writing. Not its quality — the music section of any good indie bookstore offers proof of its vigor — but what seems like the reduced number of publications running longer music stories. Read more…

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu

Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear | Metropolitan Books | September 1998 | 20 minutes (5,921 words)

 

“Homes, of course, will arise here in the thousands. Many a peak will have its castle.”

—John Russell McCarthy, These Waiting Hills (1925)

 

Late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles. Downtown is usually shrouded in acrid yellow smog while heat waves billow down Wilshire Boulevard. Outside air-conditioned skyscrapers, homeless people huddle miserably in every available shadow.

Across the Harbor Freeway, the overcrowded tenements of the Westlake district—Los Angeles’s Spanish Harlem—are intolerable ovens. Suffocating in their tiny rooms, immigrant families flee to the fire escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. Anxious mothers swab their babies’ foreheads with water while older children, eyes stinging from the smog, cry for paletas: the flavored cones of shaved ice sold by pushcart vendors. Shirtless young men—some with formidable jail-made biceps and mural-size tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe across their backs—monopolize the shade of tienda awnings. Amid hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree.

Thirty miles away, the Malibu coast—where hyperbole meets the surf—basks in altogether different weather. The temperature is 85°F (20 degrees cooler than Downtown), and the cobalt blue sky is clear enough to discern the wispish form of Santa Barbara Island, nearly 50 miles offshore. At Zuma surfers ride the curl under the insouciant gazes of their personal sun goddesses, while at Topanga Beach, horse trainers canter Appaloosas across the wet sand. Indifferent to the misery on the “mainland,” the residents of Malibu suffer through another boringly perfect day.

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When Richard Nixon Declared War on the Media

(Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

More than 40 years ago, Richard Nixon subtly changed the modern presidency. During past administrations, the American news media had always been referred to as “the press,” but Nixon, whose contentious relationship with the nation’s newsrooms was longstanding, tweaked that policy, and began labeling the press as “the media,” a term he felt sounded more ominous and less favorable. As Jon Marshall wrote in 2014 for The Atlantic, Nixon was the first president to exclusively use this term, and while subsequent presidents were similarly at odds with those whose job it is to hold the country’s chief executive in check, none were as vitriolic as Nixon.

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Searching for Insights from Her Father’s Delusions

Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire

After Jean Guerrero’s father tore up his condominium’s walls to find the devices that he believed were monitoring him, her mother diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic. The crack cocaine he’d been smoking certainly exacerbated his condition. For Wired, Guerrero honors her father’s claim that he is a TI, or “Targeted Individual,” by treating his story the way a trained journalist should: she goes searching for answers. She casts a wide essayistic net, examining philosophy and psychology, the biblical prophets who modern people would call bananas. She investigates the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control program and wonders if certain psychological ailments can show us things about the world we might not otherwise see. She’s reaching, but only because she’s searching for unconventional, uncomfortable truths in a country where the CIA did actually dose 10,000 American citizens with LSD without their consent. In an era of data-harvesting, she says, aren’t we all under surveillance?

We can dismiss the targeted individual whose persecutors allegedly tormented her about a breakup. Or we can ask ourselves if her story reveals something we’ve ignored about ourselves: a social media dynamic in which we are actually being watched, in which our most intimate lives are exposed, in which we are sometimes mocked and taunted by remorseless strangers.

There’s no mystery that Facebook knows our gender, ages, hometowns, birthdays, friends, likes, political leanings, and internet browsing habits. Facebook can tell, by analyzing our likes and comments, whether we are going through a breakup or a divorce. It can make predictions about our health. It can algorithmically intuit our fantasies and fears and use that information to target us with messaging so personalized it feels like persecution.

Consider this example from my own life: After the Los Angeles Times published allegations of sexual misconduct by a gynecologist at the university I attended, Facebook started bombarding me with pictures of his face in the form of ads, from plaintiff lawyers offering free consultations and injury checks. I’d had an uncomfortable experience with this gynecologist and had been considering sharing my story with journalists after reading the first article. But seeing his face on my news feed every time I opened Facebook felt invasive, almost nightmarish.

My USC classmates and I were being stalked by lawyers who knew we’d attended the university while the gynecologist worked there. It didn’t feel like the platform was presenting an option to speak up; it felt like harassment. The specificity of the ads, their omnipresence and relation to a very personal incident in my life felt like an assault on my process of deliberation—on the integrity of my free will.

Like my father, I was experiencing a form of gang stalking. And it was real.

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West Across the Sea

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

 Sam Riches / Longreads / October 2018 / 17 minutes (4,328 words)

The first thing you need to know about Iceland is that sheep are everywhere. In the pastures, on top of the mountains, next to the highway. They graze freely and abundantly and peacefully, most of the time. An approaching vehicle can cause them to scatter — bells clanging frantically, fuzzy butts bouncing wildly — into the countryside, where the only predator to worry about, other than humans, is the delightfully cute but sometimes fatal arctic fox.

Icelandic sheep are hardy creatures. They are farmed mostly for their meat but also for their wool, which provides insulated, waterproof protection against Iceland’s damp weather. For centuries, sheep have been fundamental to Icelandic life — so perhaps it is not surprising that one of the most intriguing basketball prospects the country has ever produced was, just four and a half years ago, focused on a more traditional career: sheep farmer. Read more…