Search Results for: Medium

A Woman In Love Is a Woman Alone

Photo by Zach Guinta

Francesca Giacco | Longreads | July 2019 | 16 minutes (4,341 words)

Who isn’t fascinated by desire? Who isn’t drawn to it, frightened by it? Who doesn’t want to know more?

Who we want and how and why is individual and intrinsic. We hold those proclivities close, share them rarely, and often struggle to understand them ourselves.

In Three Women, Lisa Taddeo works to inhabit the very concept of desire ⁠— female desire, in particular. And that work is significant. In reporting and writing this book, she spent eight years chronicling the sex lives of three American women, spending thousands of hours with them. She drove across the country six times, lived in their towns, read their local papers, listened to their neighbors’ conversations, and transformed her life to better understand theirs.

Like Truman Capote and Gay Talese before her, Taddeo immerses herself in her subject matter, writing almost entirely from the perspectives of the three women she’s chosen to follow, making herself known only through stylistic detail and turns of phrase. To write this book, she needed to know everything about these women: their wants, fears, embarrassments, traumas, victories, and disappointments. She required access, and they gave it to her, in the form of memories, correspondence, text messages, emails, diaries, and, in one case, court records.

While this process is rightfully described as a serious and consuming journalistic undertaking, I also see it as a quintessential example of close female friendship. Connection between women can be like that: quick, unquestioning, and without boundaries. We challenge, reassure, and understand each other. We say to one another, here is my whole life. Read more…

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | July 2019 | 21 minutes (5,409 words)

In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the objects and substances we adorn ourselves with.

Previously: the grisly sides of perfume, angora, and pearls.

* * *

Eight thousand years ago, a craftsperson sat inside their mud-brick house in Turkey and rubbed a piece of obsidian with their hands, smoothing the surface carefully, polishing the stone until it shone darkly in the hot sun, burning a piece of volcanic rock into something miraculous. In this piece of black stone, they could see their reflection, surrounded by the walls of their dwelling, built on the bones of their ancestors, the painted plaster walls rendered colorless by the obsidian’s deep gloss. But they weren’t done. They took white plaster and applied it to one side of this stone disk in a conical shape. Eventually this stone came to rest in a grave, alongside a woman from the early agricultural society. There it stayed until archeologists found it in the 1960s. It is, as far as we know, one of humankind’s first mirrors.

According to archeologist Ian Hodder, who oversees the hilly, 34-acre archeological site at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, there have been “five or six” obsidian mirrors found there, all located in the northeast corners of tombs belonging to women. “They are beautiful things,” he says of the Neolithic mirrors. “Nobody really expected there would be things like mirrors in those early days. These are the first sort of settlements after people have been living as hunters and gathers. In many ways, these were quite simple societies, so it is odd.” Yet these early proto-urban people clearly wanted to look at themselves — or at something. It’s possible they were used in rituals by shamans or other religious figures. “One of the most commonly suggested for the time period is that they’re something to do with predicting the future or understanding the spirit world through reading images in the mirrors,” says Hodder. We just don’t know. We’ll probably never know.

With a name taken from the Latin mirare and mirari (“to look at” and “to wonder at, admire,” respectively), a mirror can be any reflective surface created for the purpose of seeing oneself. They can be made of stone, metal, glass, plastic, or even water. Throughout history, we’ve constructed mirrors from all those substances, to a varying degree of efficacy, for various reasons. Some were used as ceremonial items, others were used to repel malevolent spirits, and still others were used for the simple pleasure of examining one’s countenance.

But no matter what they’re made of, mirrors are objects of mystery, obsession, and fear. They’re simple yet complex. They’ve been used for purposes both sacred and profane. We love them, yet we’re loath to admit it. Even their creation has been shrouded in secrecy and aided by willful ignorance and sometimes outright violence; mirror making was once a toxic affair, and its secrets were guarded by laws and punishable by death. Long reserved for the wealthy few, we now walk around with compact mirrors in our pockets, and even if you left yours at home, there’s always a cell phone screen that can function, if you want it to, if the light is right, as a mirror.

Often, when objects become mundane, they lose some of their luster. But mirrors retain their ability to hold our attention, and they retain a certain amount of power over us. We’re still interested in seeing our reflections, and we still want to know what the future holds. Yet we’ve lost the reverence we once had for them. We no longer bury our dead with hand mirrors, and we don’t often speak of the control a mirror can exert over a person. Instead, we allow this force to alter our perceptions, to diminish our happiness, while denying its power. Looking in a mirror is just something you do — just something women do. We’re so used to seeing this impulse as vanity that most of us have forgotten the innate sense of awe that comes with looking. We’ve forgotten how to face our reflections not with judgment or fear, but with a sense of joyful discovery, a sense of hope. We can see our reflections anywhere, yet still face the mirror with a certain amount of suspicion, as though desiring knowledge of how the world sees you is somehow wrong. Read more…

Putin’s Rasputin

St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square; Moscow, Russia. (Rickson Liebano/Getty)

Amos Barshad | An excerpt adapted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World | Harry N. Abrams | 17 minutes (4,490 words)

 

In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working “in the field of geopolitics.” She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: “This is what will save us from the terrorists.”

We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.

We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.

The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other. Read more…

My Unsexual Revolution

Illustration by Chloe Cushman

Diane Shipley | Longreads | July 2019 | 17 minutes (4,293 words)

In November 1998, I had sex for the first and last time. I was 19, my boyfriend was 21, and we’d been together for 10 months, long-distance. I was at university in Lancaster, a small town in the north west of England, and he lived in Essex, in the south east. I had a week off from classes, so I spent six hours taking two trains to stay in the sporadically-tidied house he shared with friends from work. On Wednesday morning, I walked to the pharmacy down the street to buy condoms and KY Jelly, shaking slightly as I handed over the cash. That night, with Ally McBeal on TV in the background, we lay on his narrow twin bed, kissing and touching each other before we slipped under the covers. I worried it might hurt, or feel awkward, or be over quickly, but it was great. Afterward, we ate chocolates, drank Coke, and swore we’d have sex all the time from then on.

We tried. Later that night; the next day; a couple of months later, on vacation in Florida. Each time, it was as if my vagina had snapped shut and no matter how hard he pushed or how vividly I pictured a tulip’s petals unfurling, nothing could convince it to open. Eventually, we gave up and went back to the heavy petting and blowjobs we’d each enjoyed, respectively, before. We were best friends, we were in love, we both had orgasms. In theory, I knew that penis-in-vagina intercourse wasn’t the only way to define sex. But it seemed like the most important, and I felt like a failure for not being a “proper” girlfriend; for being unfuckable.
Read more…

Tom Petty’s Problematic Album Southern Accents

Michael Montfort/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Michael Washburn | Southern Accents | Bloomsbury Academic | April 2019 | 20 minutes (3,222 words)

 

Around 10 p.m. on September 25, 2017, Tom Petty told the audience at the Hollywood Bowl, “We’re almost out of time,” and struck three D chords in quick succession. “We’ve got time for this one here.”

In six minutes Petty’s public career will be over. Petty and the Heartbreakers will finish the song, thunderously and to thunderous applause. Petty will wish a good night on his audience, and then he’ll linger on stage after the band retreats. Seven days later his life will be over.

But before that we have four minutes of music.

Read more…

Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55

Mick Hudson / Getty, istock / Getty Images Plus, Michael Ochs Archive / Getty, Vinnie Zuffante / Getty, pidjoe / Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | July 9th, 2019 | 24 minutes (6,539 words)

It’s hard to tell whether Thurston Moore is being sarcastic or sincere. It’s probably a bit of both. “The biggest star in this room is Courtney Love,” says the Sonic Youth singer and guitarist in a scene from 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The documentary follows Sonic Youth’s summer 1991 European tour and features performances and backstage antics from their tourmates, including a pre-Nevermind Nirvana, Babes in Toyland, and Dinosaur Jr.

Moore comments during an interview with 120 Minutes, an MTV program that spotlighted alternative music in the days before the music channel became the home of teen moms and spoiled Laguna Beach brats. As Moore declares his love of English food to the host — most definitely sarcasm — Love is behind him trying to get the camera’s attention. She waves and appears to stand on something to make herself taller. Her efforts pay off and soon she is in front of the host, all brazen, blond, and sporting blue baby doll barrettes.

Tongue-in-cheek or not, Moore was right. Love’s band Hole wasn’t on the European tour bill that summer and their debut album Pretty on the Inside hadn’t even been released yet, but Love was already on MTV.

Read more…

Out of Toon

Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | July 2019 |  8 minutes ( 2,193 words)

 

More than 11,000 people retweeted Michael de Adder’s controversial cartoon of Donald Trump next to a golf cart, asking the drowned bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria if he could “play through.” Had each of those people paid the cartoonist the same $100 reprint fee as the daily comic site The Nib, de Adder would have made at least $1.1 million off a single drawing. As it stands the cartoon was shared widely and the cartoonist did a slew of press spots, but probably did virtually no business, maybe only that $100. “They rush to grab it and post it and get the traffic, but they don’t pay for it,” says Matt Bors, founder of The Nib. “Never would they consider actually paying the cartoonist.” The Nib did.

But it’s apparent how people with money feel about The Nib. At the end of June, First Look Media, owned by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, announced it was closing the digital long-form magazine Topic and would no longer be funding The Nib, a haven for cartoonists that, unlike newspapers with their piecemeal offerings, gathered together the work of a group of artists, many of whom were neither white nor male. Contributing editor Sarah Mirk told me that the site actively worked to find diverse contributors — women, artists of color, nonbinary artists — and paid them a living wage. “We are elevating the voice of the people who are marginalized in our society and who don’t get the chance to get published in traditional media outlets,” she says, adding, “that’s part of why it’s so especially disappointing and frustrating to have our funding cut out of the blue.” In almost six years, The Nib has published 4,000 comics and paid cartoonists $1.5 million. It was first backed by Medium, then, starting in 2016, by First Look, where the staff was working toward subscriber-based funding before it was dropped.

“After three and a half years, we will no longer provide funding for The Nib, however, we are working to transition it back to Matt Bors so he can continue to publish independently,” Jeannie Kedas, the chief communications officer at First Look Media, wrote to me in an email. “We have been honored to support and provide a home for The Nib during the last few years and are thankful to Matt and his fantastic team for their provocative and impactful work. We look forward to seeing where he takes The Nib and its unique brand of comics next.”

Mirk believes First Look’s decision had to do with The Nib’s modest revenue even though, within four days of the announcement, they had 1,000 new members. “There’s a huge demand for this,” Mirk says. “That’s not the problem. The problem is the people who are deciding the funding levels of media don’t understand comics, don’t see their potential, don’t want to fund them, and don’t get what we do.” Read more…

Holding the Pain

Illustration by Lily Padula

Amye Archer | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,422 words)

On the morning of December 14th, 2012, one of my twin daughters stayed home from school. Warm from fever, Samantha drifted in and out of sleep as I cleaned around her. The house was still out of sorts from the girls’ 6th birthday party only two days prior. Shortly after 10 a.m., I started receiving texts from my more news-conscious friends alerting me to a school shooting unfolding at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Sandy Hook. It would be the first and last time I would ever hear those two words and not feel an ache somewhere inside of me.

I turned on the news and saw dozens of children with terror on their faces, walking in connected ropes, hands on shoulders through the parking lot. As the minutes ticked by, reporters began saying numbers. Two, four, six, twelve. I remember thinking that’s a dozen. A dozen children are dead. I tried hard to busy myself. I washed the same dish three times, dismantled the bathroom faucet and scrubbed every part with an old toothbrush, anything to keep from thinking of that number. Then, a CNN text alert: Dozens dead. They had added an “s.”

I couldn’t hide any longer. I turned the television on low. There it was on the Chiron: 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 were dead. I struggled to breathe. Twenty. Twenty children the same age as my twin daughters. I pressed my spine against the doorframe of my kitchen and sobbed. I prayed the frame would hold my pain.

I watched the coverage in drips as Samantha was waking up. I remember thinking she should not associate first grade with murder. She will never go back. I came up with explanations I would use if she woke and discovered the news. I came up empty. I worried that I would never be able to adequately explain what happened at Sandy Hook. I also worried about school. I prayed my other daughter, Penelope, who was tucked away in the safety of her Kindergarten classroom, didn’t know. Can I ever assume she is safely tucked away there ever again? I wondered if I should call the principal and ask him not to tell her. Not to tell any of them? I made a promise to myself right then and there that I would be a bucket for my daughters, and that I would carry this for as long as I could so they didn’t have to.

Shortly before 2:30 pm, I dressed a groggy Samantha and took her with me to pick up Penelope. The school was only blocks away, and we rode in silence. As we waited outside the elementary school exit for the students to emerge, I scanned the other parents’ faces for any sign of worry or anguish. They seemed fine, relaxed, smiling. Did they know? Many looked like they came right from work. I envied them in that moment, in that place, the not-knowing. I wished I could warn them. There was a bomb of heartache waiting for them at home. Tick, tick, tick.

By the time we got home, the country knew more. Six educators were also killed. We learned it was a lone gunman. We learned what collective heartbreak felt like. Shortly after 3 p.m., President Obama spoke to a stunned and grieving nation. I set the girls up with some Legos in the other room so I could watch. He fought to hold back tears at first. Then, he let them fall. In that moment, he wasn’t our President, he was also Sasha and Malia’s dad. I ran into the small guest bathroom, locked the door and called my mother. I cried harder than I ever have in my life.
Read more…

The Brazilian Healer and the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes

Illustration by Aimee Flom

Leigh Hopkins | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,131 words)

 

The roosters started at 4:30 in the pasture behind the inn. On the second crow, I rolled onto my back and blinked at the jalousie window’s slatted light, considering my first day at The Casa. We were allowed to ask three questions, no more. A visit with the world’s most famous spiritual surgeon was like going to see the wizard.

Mariana was silent in the bed next to me, the sleep falling in loose spirals across her face. I pulled back the sheets and slipped inside. “Bom dia.”

“Bom dia, meu amor.” A soft sound from a distant place.

Seven and a half years later, I receive a text from a friend in Rio: “Did you see the news?” She links to a New York Times article: “Celebrity Healer in Brazil Is Accused of Sexually Abusing Followers.”

***

Read more…

‘If an Animal Talks, I’m Sold’: An Interview with Ann and Jeff Vandermeer

A Midsummer Night's Dream. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). (Culture Club / Getty Images)

Alan Scherstuhl | Longreads | July 2019 | 19 minutes (5,080 words)

“Hic sunt dracones,” the 500 year-old Hunt-Lenox globe warns travelers off the coast of southeast Asia: Here be dragons. In the half millenium since that mysterious Euro-centric globe’s construction, dracones have evolved, in the popular imagination, from representatives of a dangerous, fantastical unknown to something like just another of the familiar beasts populating what we might call the Fantasy-Industrial Complex. Through big-budget TV and movies, video and pen-and-paper games, and hundreds of novels and short stories each year, fantasy rules like never before. Dragons reign over much of our pop-culture globe, not just one patch.

Diverse and often self-reflexive, today’s fantasy fiction varies wildly in quality and approach. Writers like N.K. Jemisin (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria), Ann Leckie (The Raven Tower), Kameron Hurley (The Mirror Empire), Seth Dickinson (The Traitor Baru Cormorant), Marlon James (Black Leopard, Red Wolf), Steven Erikson (the Malazan Book of the Fallen series), and many more have in recent years spun dazzling, forward-thinking variations on a genre that has at times been accused of wallowing in repetitive stories, simplistic good-versus-evil conflicts, and an inherent conservatism.

Now, with the publication of The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (Vintage), anthologists Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (shes a Hugo Award-winning editor; hes the bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy; and together theyve edited The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Weird, and other collections) are declaring that fantasy has always been weird and wild, thoughtful and delightful. The Big Book covers a diverse array of fantasy fiction from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of World War II. It opens with a German fairy tale (Bettina von Armin’s “The Queens Son”) about a queen whose son, immediately upon sliding from the womb, is stolen by a she-bear; it closes, fittingly, with J.R.R. Tolkien, whose tale “Leaf by Niggle” concerns nothing less than an artist’s act of world-making. The almost 800 pages between these offer almost 90 stories from around the world, from the expected writers of fantasy (Fritz Lieber, Robert E. Howard, Lord Dunsany, L. Frank Baum), many unexpected fantasists (Zora Neal Hurston, E.M. Forester, W.E.B Du Bois, Edith Wharton), and a host of surprises from lesser-known writers. The Vandermeers approach is expansive. Half the stories in The Big Book are works in translation; fourteen have never before been published in English; few concern monster-slaying. Read more…