Search Results for: Music

Yes, All Women: A Reading List of Stories Written By Women

This week, a lot happened. A misogynist went on a violent rampage. #YesAllWomen took off on Twitter. Dr. Maya Angelou, feminist author and all-around genius (and don’t get me started on her doctor honorary), died at 86 years old. This week, I present a long list of essays, articles and interviews written by women. Many are about women, too. Some are lighthearted; others reflect on the events of the past week. I included a variety of subjects to honor those who might be triggered by the deadly violence of last week’s shooting, because women do not only write in the wake of tragedy—we write, we exist, for all time. So in this list there is reflection and humor; there are books and music and religion; there are all kinds of stories, fiction and non. Read what you need. Engage or escape.

1. “Summer in the City.” (Emma Aylor, May 2014)

Aylor, author of Twos, uses #YesAllWomen to write about about the sexual harassment she experienced as she researched her dissertation on the work of Wallace Stevens.

2. “In Relief of Silence and Burden.” (Roxane Gay, May 2014)

The author of An Untamed State and critically acclaimed badass gives her “testimony … so we can relieve ourselves of silence and burden” in the vein of #YesAllWomen, sharing stories of harassment, abuse and more.

3. “Not All Women: A Reflection on Being a Musician and Female.” (Allison Crutchfield, Impose Magazine, May 2014)

A wide range of female musicians react to a depressingly misogynistic article in Noisey about how to tour in a dude-dominated band. They share what they’ve learned on the road, emphasizing self-care, communication with bandmates, and doing what you need to do to feel safe and be your best self.

Read more…

Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)

 

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community. 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

 

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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…

Jesus Land

Julia Scheeres | Jesus Land | 2012 | 21 minutes (5,152 words)

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

 

* * *

For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share the opening chapter of Jesus Land, the bestselling 2012 memoir by Julia Scheeres about her strict Christian upbringing in Indiana, her relationship with her adopted brother David, and the stint they did in a Christian reform school together in the Dominican Republic. Our thanks to Scheeres and Counterpoint Press for sharing this story with the Longreads community.  Read more…

Stairway to Heaven

Longreads Pick

Did Led Zeppelin write the greatest song opening in rock history—or steal it?

For live audiences, Stairway’s power starts with its introductory notes. “Can you think of another song, any song, for which, when its first chord is played, an entire audience of 20,000 rise spontaneously to their feet, not just to cheer or clap hands, but in acknowledgment of an event that is crucial for all of them?” Observer critic Tony Palmer wrote in a 1975 profile. Dave Lewis writes in Led Zeppelin: The Complete Guide to Their Music that “Stairway has a pastoral opening cadence that is classical in feel and which has ensured its immortality.”

But what if those opening notes weren’t actually written by Jimmy Page or any member of Led Zeppelin? What if the foundation of the band’s immortality had been lifted from another song by a relatively forgotten California band?

Source: Businessweek
Published: May 15, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,150 words)

The Good Girls Revolt

Lynn Povich | The Good Girls Revolt, Public Affairs | 2012 | 14 minutes (3,368 words)

 

* * *

“Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint”

On March 16, 1970, Newsweek magazine hit the newsstands with a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement titled “Women in Revolt.” The bright yellow cover pictured a naked woman in red silhouette, her head thrown back, provocatively thrusting her fist through a broken blue female-sex symbol. As the first copies went on sale that Monday morning, forty-six female employees of Newsweek announced that we, too, were in revolt. We had just filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging that we had been “systematically discriminated against in both hiring and promotion and forced to assume a subsidiary role” simply because we were women. It was the first time women in the media had sued on the grounds of sex discrimination and the story, irresistibly timed to the Newsweek cover, was picked up around the world:

• “‘Discriminate,’ le redattrici di Newsweek?” (La Stampa) “Newsweek’s Sex Revolt” (London Times)
• “Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint” (Newsday)
• “Women Get Set for Battle” (London Daily Express)
• “As Newsweek Says, Women Are in Revolt, Even on Newsweek” (New York Times)

The story in the New York Daily News, titled “Newshens Sue Newsweek for ‘Equal Rights,’” began, “Forty-six women on the staff of Newsweek magazine, most of them young and most of them pretty, announced today they were suing the magazine.”

Read more…

Weezer's 'Blue Album,' Twenty Years Later

He was cute; he was vulnerable; he had glasses. Really cool glasses. His hair was unfortunate; his features were delicate; in his videos, he could never quite hold eye contact with the camera. He wore sweaters a lot, and he sang about wearing the sweaters; he was a sweater-wearing dude, that Rivers Cuomo. He sang at you on the radio. He loved you, more desperately than anyone ever had, or would.

If you happened to be of a certain age when “The Blue Album” came out-let’s say, for the purposes of total non-specificity and universal relatability, “exactly twelve years old”-the highly sweater-centric single from that album, and the revelation that its singer was in fact good-looking, opened up a whole new landscape of sexual possibility.

Sady Doyle, in The Awl (2010), on Weezer. Read more on music from the Longreads Archive.

An Untamed State: The Opening Chapters from Roxane Gay's New Novel

Roxane Gay | An Untamed State | May 2014 | 11 minutes (2,742 words)

* * *

Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is out this week, and we’re excited to present the opening chapters with the Longreads community. Our thanks to Gay and Grove Atlantic for sharing it here.

For more, read our Roxane Gay picks from the Longreads Archive. Read more…

Working 9 to 5: A Reading List About the Way We Work

The lines between my life and these lists blur often, and this week is no exception; I begin a new job tomorrow.

1. “Workin’ 9 to 5 (What a Way to Make a Living).” (Megan Reynolds, The Billfold, April 2014)

“I can’t shake the feeling that the 9-to-5 grind carries the one hallmark of adulthood—obligation. The work of the modern office employee is finely tuned drudgery, a daily exercise in doing stuff that you don’t necessarily want to do, but know you have to.”

Read more…

Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story

Ned Stuckey-French | culturefront | 1999 | 21 minutes (5,289 words)

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story,” by Ned Stuckey-French, originally published in 1999 in culturefront, the former magazine for the New York Council for the Humanities. It’s a story that takes a closer look at the dynamics of a friendship, and the roles we play in each other’s lives.

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

* * *

Alexander Woollcott fell in love with Harpo Marx the first time he saw him. It was the evening of May 19, 1924, and the Marx Brothers were making their Broadway debut in the slyly titled musical comedy I’ll Say She Is. Woollcott was there, reluctantly, to review it for the Sun. Another show, a much-hyped drama featuring a French music-­hall star, had been scheduled to open the same night, but when it was postponed at the last minute, the first­line critics decided to take the night off. Except for Woollcott. His career was in the doldrums, and hoping against hope for a scoop, he dragged himself over to see what he assumed were “some damned acrobats.” Read more…