Search Results for: Narrative.ly

Living With Depression: A Reading List

Photo: JìD

The holiday season isn’t easy. Even the most well-adjusted person has to deal with stressful family members, strained finances, and travel logistics. Mental illness exacerbate these stressors even more. Not every story here is about depression during the holidays, specifically; I’ve interspersed my own experiences with depression, anxiety and panic disorders. I made this list for you who might be struggling with the gloom of winter (hello, seasonal affective disorder!), and for me. I took notes—in an actual notebook!—on these stories, on definitions and symptoms and experiences. “We read to know that we are not alone,” so sayeth C.S. Lewis, via William Nicholson. I want you to know that this holiday season, you are not alone. Read more…

Going Underground into New York’s Tunnels: A Glimpse at Life in the Dark

“You’re the first person to visit this week,” he says. “People don’t want to speak to me when they come here. I don’t know, man. They’re scared or something. I can get why, it’s a spooky place when you don’t know it. But people, they like it when it’s scary. They like it when it’s dirty, right? It makes them feel alive. That’s why they make up these stories about cannibalism and stuff. Like alligators in the sewers.”

Jon offers me a sip of vodka. We drink together. He tells me to stay safe and to watch out for trains when I go back walking into the tunnel. I hear him talk to himself as I go away from the entrance and from the white sky.

The smell down here is the one of brake dust and mold. I can see rats scouring for food and drinking from brown puddles in the tracks ballast. EXISTENCE IS FLAWED, a graffiti inscription reads.

The city growls over my head — a distant growl muffled by the concrete, almost a snarl, like something cold and foul spreading over the long stretches of stained walls, like a dark and wild beast curling up around me and breathing on my neck. A dark and wild beast silently trailing me.

— At Narratively, Montreal-based freelance writer Anthony Taille takes us into New York’s underground among “Mole People,” the Amtrak tunnel residents under Riverside Park. Taille has spent time with people who have lived under the city for many years, from Bernard Isaac, a legend among Mole People, to longtime resident Brooklyn, who has lived underground since 1982.

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The Life of a Teen Beauty Pageant Host

Has Zak Slemmer found his calling? He’s not sure. He loves Korea and politics, teaching and comedy—but he’s really, really good at hosting Miss Teen pageant contests. Laura Shin shadowed Slemmer for Narratively.

It’s the rehearsal for the New York City Miss Teen pageant. Though he is giving the same spiel for almost the 20th time, he makes it fresh, and people are not only paying attention but laughing. When [Jen] Klem, the pageant director, who participated in and won teen pageants herself, demonstrates the spins that the girls will do on the Xs marked onstage, Slemmer asks the audience, “Did she do this?”—and here, he walks bent over at the waist, head down like he’s hunting treasure, until he reaches the X, at which point he stomps his feet on it. Then he shows how he would do the spins instead—and does them while keeping his head aloft, eyes forward and tossing his head this way and that, as if it were a delicate, fluttery scarf.

Behind me a woman laughs, and a girl says, “He’s very funny.”

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Relationships in a Time of Excretory Trouble

Dating is laborious and embarrassing. Irritable bowel syndrome is, too. In Narratively in March 2014, food critic and memoirist Gwendolyn Knapp wrote about both, detailing the humor and stamina involved in dating with IBS in a city of spicy food like New Orleans.

When you feel the need to shit uncontrollably, dating is tough. Like your mind, your whole existence is in the toilet, has been for years, and you certainly can’t expect to drag someone down there with you. One poor guy, Michael, contacted me after I hadn’t spoken to him in two years. He’d just moved back to New Orleans after a brief bout of grad school and veganism and wanted to know if anything cool and cheap was happening on Saturday night. We met up in Mimi’s, where most of these horror stories begin. It’s a popular bar in the Marigny that has great tapas and nightmarish bathrooms. The ladies room has two toilets that practically face each other and no stalls. There’s always the chance some crazy bitch will follow you in and lock the door, drop trou and sit down on the pee pee drops, looking at you like, “What, you pee shy or something?” Sucks for you.

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The Art of the Con: Four Stories About Scams

This morning, as I filed folders at my day job, I turned to the podcast Criminal for comfort. Today’s episode was Gil From London, the story of a strange man posing as a British sixty-something who almost seduced an American widow named Karen. There are lots of well-told stories about con men, Craigslist hoaxes and financial scams—here are a few of my favorites.

1. “Crowded House.” (Tad Friend, The New Yorker, May 2013)

Mix cutthroat New York real estate, a too-good-to-be-true apartment, an unstable photographer to the stars and dozens of international tenants. Read more…

How the Skater Kids From the Movie ‘Kids’ Were Cast

[Harmony] Korine, nineteen at the time, and [Larry] Clark, then over fifty, wrangled the troops from the skate clique, supplementing them with more non-actors from Washington Square Park and the club scene, and across downtown—including Chloë Sevigny, from tony Darien, Connecticut, who had been hanging out with the crew in Washington Square Park for years. They plucked a then fifteen-year-old Rosario Dawson from her stoop in the East Village. Vibe magazine was shooting a commercial on her block, and her father told her to go downstairs to get discovered. Korine heard her laughing loudly at a strange man who looked like Jesus, walked over and told her, “You’re exactly what I wrote.”

Rosario’s father rode her on his bike handlebars to the auditions, downtown on Broadway. When it came down to Rosario and another girl for the part of Ruby, Harold, who she knew from the East Village, was the deciding factor–he told Korine and Clark to go with his neighbor.

Caroline Rothstein writing for Narratively in 2013 about what happened to the cast of the seminal 1995 movie Kids.

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Rest in Peace: Stories About Death Care

I. I’ve been thinking: What would my life look like if I were not afraid of death? Thinking too closely about not existing, not having a consciousness, sends me spiraling into a panic attack. Protestant Christians believe in an afterlife—a heaven, a hell. I did, too, for a while. I was confident, fervent, about heaven. I was no longer afraid to die. Now I’m not so sure. Nothingness scares me, but so does an eternity spent somewhere else.

A month ago, I shared a reading list about architecture. My pick from The Stranger was about Katrina Spade, an  archeologist from Seattle interested in environmentally friendly, community-centered death care: city centers dedicated to composting human beings and reuniting their bodies with nature. It’s called the Urban Death Project. A few days ago, Spade debuted her fundraising campaign to make the project a reality.

I studied artist Iris Gottlieb’s drawings of plants and fungi and Spade’s architectural plans. I liked the idea that the composting hubs would be unique to each city—much like libraries, which take on aspects of their communities while serving the same essential purpose worldwide, Spade explained. Reading the details of Spade’s proposal, I felt genuinely moved, and, for the first time in a decade, peaceful. Read more…

The Loaded Expectations and Hopes of a Fan Relationship

A group of gymnasts at the 2008 Olympics. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

The fan relationship is often built on expectations and hope, however unfair they might be. My expectation going to Dominique [Moceanu]’s hotel that night in 1998 was that she’d come down from her room even after a long day of training and competing, and grant me an autograph or, if I was really lucky, a picture. My hope was that somehow she’d see how much we had in common – Isn’t Anne Frank’s diary so beautiful and sad? I’d ask, right there in the hotel, and we’d immediately bond. My celebrity crush is Leo, too – natch! I’d say while we watched “Titanic” together.

***

The fact of the matter is that Dominique and I are not best friends, not the way I’d once dreamed we would be. But I also realized that I no longer even wanted that, to the extent that it was ever possible, because that would mean I would have to shed the last remnants of that fan’s adulation to see her as an equal. Of course, I have a relationship with her that I would’ve died for when I was a kid. Instead of sending American flag-decorated letters into the ether, I can e-mail or text or call – Happy birthday! Your haircut looks awesome! How are the kids? – and Dominique will respond. Together, we’ve created something that we’re immensely proud of, a series that will hopefully inspire generations of young gymnasts in the way that Dominique inspired me.

Young adult novelist Alicia Thompson writing in Narratively about her relationship with gymnast Dominique Moceanu. Thompson idolized Moceanu growing up; years later the two wrote the childrens’ series Go-for-Gold Gymnasts together.

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Inside the Advertising Industry: A Reading List

Photo: SenseiAlan

From fashion bloggers to food “fluffers,” it takes a village to make you want to buy stuff. Why do some brands connect with us, while others take us by surprise or make us angry? Here are six stories examining the advertising industry.

1. “Nice to Meat You.” (Adam Kotsko, The New Inquiry, February 2015)

On the creepiness of the Burger King king (you know the one), Freud’s “uncanny,” and more. (This excerpt is a classic example of why I love The New Inquiry.) Read more…

Really Good Shit: A Reading List

Edited and cropped image by Quinn Dombrowski (CC BY-SA 2.0)

As the Japanese children’s book author Tarō Gomi once wrote: everyone poops. But we don’t talk about this openly or often enough. In fact, talking and reading about poop might make you want to hold your nose — but it’ll also open your eyes. Here are nine pieces about shit, from a DIY mixture a woman used to treat her life-threatening infection, to prehistoric poo that brings us one step closer to understanding the origins of life after the dinosaur age.

“The Magic Poop Potion” (Lina Zeldovich, Narratively, July 2014)

Suffering from a recurring intestinal infection called C. diff, Catherine Duff decided to take matters into her own hands. Using healthy stool from her husband, they concocted an unconventional cocktail — using a plastic enema, blender, and a cheese cloth — which he then transferred into her. This procedure, known as fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), saved her life. Duff advocated for FMT as a viable treatment when the FDA considered regulating it as an “investigational new drug,” and founded the Fecal Transplant Foundation to educate the public and to connect patients, doctors, and stool donors. Read more…