Search Results for: National Geographic

A Cover That Could Launch a Million Retweets

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Despite constant mischaracterizations that magazines are dead, print media endures, and as Beyoncé’s recent Vogue cover image proves, print issues can still create national conversations about celebrities, culture, and politics. But what is the function of a magazine cover now that we have Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter? At The Ringer, Alyssa Bereznak investigates the historical function of a magazine cover and how its design has evolved to adapt to the digital age. Because print issues no longer sell the way they did a decade ago, titles that haven’t ceased operation have made profound changes to their business and editorial teams to stay solvent. Many have also changed their approach to producing covers, hoping to not only grab attention, but to perform well on phones, tablets, and social media.

According to Allure editor-in-chief Michelle Lee, branding a compelling celebrity portrait is still an effective way to pique interest, especially when it’s designed to pop in multiple platforms. Since she took over the magazine in early 2016, she has worked with the magazine’s creative team to establish a clean feel to its covers by cutting back on coverlines, choosing “nontraditional, super-close-up photos,” and having multiple covers for monthly issues. Depending on the medium, her team might tweak the image so that there’s a simplified version for Instagram, or one that moves for YouTube.

“On social media, sharing a plain photo without a brand logo and without cover lines typically gets far less engagement than that same photo if it were put into a cover design,” she told me via email. “Our eyes are trained to assign value and worth to something that makes it to the cover. I think one of the reasons is that print is finite while the internet is infinite. You could keep writing digital stories forever. But there are only a certain number of pages in a magazine and only one story and one subject (in most cases) can make it to the cover. So it represents editorial decision-making. The editors have deemed this person and this subject most worthy of your attention.”

Editors measure a cover’s success from not just sales, but buzz. What’s especially interesting is what the cover reveals about this important moment in media history, which is populated by both traditional subscribers and digital natives.

But for magazines whose main revenue source still depends on a core group of older subscribers and newsstand readers, revamped covers risk siphoning off valuable revenue sources. While Vanity Fair’s April cover made an important statement about the magazine’s new direction, it sold only around 75,000 issues, according to one former editor familiar with the magazine’s newsstand sales. (A representative for Vanity Fair did not respond to a request for comment.) A June-July issue of the newly redesigned Glamour featuring Anne Hathaway reportedly sold only 20,000 copies on the newsstand; eight years ago monthly sales were around half a million, according to the New York Post. Goldberg said National Geographic’s gender issue drew “hundreds of millions of people” to the magazine’s content on various digital avenues. But it also resulted in the loss of about 10,000 print subscribers, either because they were upset by the content, or disappointed that the magazine addressed it poorly. According to Stone, Sports Illustrated’s subscribers sometimes write in to denounce the more forward-thinking coverage—say, its NBA style issue, or soccer coverage—that its online followers celebrate. “You can see the generational divide that exists there because what is popular online is sometimes less popular with our subscriber base, and vice versa,” he said. “What’s unpopular online is sometimes very popular with our readers.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Rohingya Muslim refugees flee Myanmar.
Rohingya Muslim refugees flee Myanmar. (Photo by Kevin Frayer / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Steve Stecklow, Lynn Johnson, Steven Hyden, Morgan Jerkins, and Chris McGreal.

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The Country Where Fútbol Comes First

Candace Rose Rardon | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,824 words)

They call it the Maracanazo — the final match of the 1950 FIFA World Cup, held in Rio de Janeiro. Host team Brazil was the obvious favorite, set to take on their much-smaller neighbor to the south, Uruguay. Victory was nothing short of inevitable.

The match took place on July 16, in the newly opened Estádio do Maracanã. The official paid attendance was 173,850 — of whom approximately 100 were Uruguayans — but because the stadium’s grandstands had no seats, the actual number might be closer to 210,000. It’s still one of the most-attended sports events of all time.

On the morning of the match, in true Brazilian style, an impromptu carnival began at dawn, with the crowds chanting “Brazil must win!” A samba, “Brazil The Victors,” had been composed, and the mayor of Rio addressed the Brazilian team with a rousing speech: “You, players, who in less than a few hours will be hailed as champions by millions of compatriots! You, who have no rivals in the entire hemisphere! You, who will overcome any other competitor! You, who I already salute as victors!”

That day’s morning edition of O Mundo ran a photo of the Brazilian team on its front page, beneath which a caption read five fateful words:

There was only one problem — they hadn’t played the game yet, and Brazil’s small but mighty opponents weren’t ready to go down without a fight.

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Death By Tchotchke

People walk past plastic garbage washed ashore at Versova beach near Mumbai, India. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

Plastic is everywhere: bottles, toys, cars, and, increasingly, in the ocean and its inhabitants. At National Geographic, Laura Parker takes a close look at the dramatic increase in our plastic production over the last half-decade and our profound global failure to properly deal with its disposal. This isn’t just about fish strangling in discarded six-pack rings — its about waterways so clogged with plastic that you can walk across them, and not Jesus-style.

No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean, Earth’s last sink. In 2015, Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia engineering professor, caught everyone’s attention with a rough estimate: between 5.3 million and 14 million tons each year just from coastal regions. Most of it isn’t thrown off ships, she and her colleagues say, but is dumped carelessly on land or in rivers, mostly in Asia. It’s then blown or washed into the sea. Imagine five plastic grocery bags stuffed with plastic trash, Jambeck says, sitting on every foot of coastline around the world—that would correspond to about 8.8 million tons, her middle-of-the-road estimate of what the ocean gets from us annually. It’s unclear how long it will take for that plastic to completely biodegrade into its constituent molecules. Estimates range from 450 years to never.

Getting plastics out of our water isn’t just a matter of producing less disposable plastic, which is unlikely anyway — it’s also an issue of waste management, and making sure the plastic we do create is properly destroyed or recycled. Unfortunately, the countries producing the most plastic are also those least able to deal with its long tail.

In recent years the surge in production has been driven largely by the expanded use of disposable plastic packaging in the growing economies of Asia—where garbage collection systems may be underdeveloped or nonexistent. In 2010, according to an estimate by Jambeck, half the world’s mismanaged plastic waste was generated by just five Asian countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka.

“Let’s say you recycle 100 percent in all of North America and Europe,” says Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University who also works in his native India. “You still would not make a dent on the plastics released into the oceans. If you want to do something about this, you have to go there, to these countries, and deal with the mismanaged waste.”

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A Chance to Rewrite History: The Women Fighters of the Tamil Tigers

Illustration by Cornelia Li

Kim Wall | Mansi Choksi | Longreads | May 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)

Kim Wall and Mansi Choksi met at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2012. Mansi returned to India after graduation and Kim soon followed; it was the start of a writing partnership that took the pair on reporting trips to Africa and Sri Lanka.

“We went on our first reporting trip together to write about an emerging Chinatown in Kampala in 2015,” says Mansi. “And then the next year, I moved to New York, where she was living, so we would spend our afternoons working together.”

Mansi and Kim traveled to Sri Lanka in 2016. Mansi recalls Kim’s dedication to telling the story of the women who fought with the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka’s brutal, 25-year civil war.

“Kim genuinely fell in love with the women we were writing about,” says Mansi. “You can hear it in her voice, in the tapes of our interviews.”

Not long after Mansi and Kim filed this story, Kim Wall was murdered while on another reporting assignment. The story of the Tamil Tiger women became the last piece she wrote. We have been humbled to work with Mansi over the past several months to give this story a home at Longreads.

To honor Kim’s memory, the Kim Wall Memorial Fund was created to “fund a female reporter to cover subculture, broadly defined, and what Kim liked to call ‘the undercurrents of rebellion.'”

–Krista Stevens, Editor

* * *

Velu Chandra Kala was 17 when she charged into her school principal’s office with a bag of milk toffees. She was small and jumpy, with dimpled cheeks and a woolly fringe. The principal took a toffee, briefly looking up from his desk, and assumed it was her birthday. Next, she was in science class, surrounded by howling classmates. They were hugging her, weeping into her palms, begging her not to leave. The cookery teacher took a toffee, and teared up. Next, the vice principal. Afterward she left the toffees in her mother’s kitchen, by the stove. She was on her way to join an armed conflict.

* * *

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The Forever Nomad

Margarita Gokun Silver | Longreads | April 2018 | 18 minutes (4,386 words)

 

On an afternoon in August 2017, I walk out of the library and turn right. At the intersection, the pedestrian light comes on and I cross knowing that once I reach the end of Madrid’s Plaza de Colón, I’d wait less than a minute before I could cross again. I’ve done this walk every day for the past several years, my pace synchronized with the rhythm of traffic lights; my mind concentrated on counting the stairs — 14 of them: seven for my right foot to ascend and seven for my left — and my hand clutching a euro to give to the old man selling tissues on the corner. Everything is the same — skateboards banging against the concrete under the quick feet of their teen devotees, dogs running around the middle of the square let loose by their owners, and, up above, a giant red-and-yellow Spanish flag flying in the wind. Everything but one thing.

I’m on my way to a home that’s no longer there.

A week ago the movers came and methodically went through our three-bedroom apartment. They wrapped our glasses, plates, vases, and the ceramic Don Quixote in bubble wrap. They encased our furniture in cardboard, bending the thick corrugated boxes patiently so that when they were done our couch looked like a mummy-copy of its former self. They sealed our artwork — most of it painted by me — in wooden crates that resembled well-insulated tombs. I wanted to ask if the art could breathe through the layers of paper, plastic, and wood, nailed shut so tightly that not a ray of sunlight could get through. But they were busy, and I didn’t bother them. Instead I went into what used to be our bedroom, lay down on the bed that wasn’t coming with us, and concentrated on my own breathing.

By my count, this was the 18th time I moved homes. Some of those moves were miniscule — just several miles away from where I’d lived, my belongings riding in the back seat of a car in milk crates and an old laundry basket. Others were more substantial — intercontinental relocations that involved wrapped furniture, sea freight, and customs bills. What all of them had in common — and what set them apart from this last one — was that they didn’t evoke grief. Sure, many had been tinged with goodbyes and sadness, but none before had stopped my heart, gelled the blood inside of my veins, and perforated my body with holes that seemed to allow life to seep right out of it.

None of those moves had felt like loss.

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Want Your Husband to Stay True? Kill a Hummingbird and Roll it in Oil and Honey

A hummingbird flies over a garden in Mexico City. (LUIS ACOSTA/AFP/Getty Images)

At National Geographic, Rene Ebersole reports on how hummingbirds (who are in decline due to habitat loss and climate change) are the victims in increasing illegal trade in their tiny, dead, feathered bodies to make Mexican love potions called chuparosas. Birds are captured in nets and even shot with tiny bits of ammunition to fuel the growing demand. Perhaps the biggest problem? Mexico doesn’t think the illegal trade is a threat to the birds.

“This is the honey jar,” she tells viewers while introducing the ingredients on her workbench: photographs of two would-be lovers, a piece of paper with their names written on it three times, a small glass jar—and a dead hummingbird. She rolls the tiny animal inside the photographs and wraps the cigar-shaped bundle with hot-pink yarn nearly the same shade as her long, fake fingernails.

Showing only her arms and lower body on camera, she shields her identity as she swaddles the package in a sarcophagus of tacky flypaper, dips it in cinnamon spice, squeezes it into the jar, and spritzes it with perfumes and oils—pheromones—“so he’ll stay sexually attracted.” Restless balm “so he’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, I need to call her.’” Sleep oil “so he’ll be like a zombie.” Attraction oil “so he’ll be like, ‘Goddamn, you so beautiful, you so fine.’” Dominating oil “so you dominate his thoughts.”

As an entrepreneurial saleswoman, she tells viewers that any hard-to-find ingredients used in her creations are available for customers. For example, on her website a dead hummingbird—in life a feisty little iridescent green creature with rust-colored tail feathers—is $50. Buying a ready-made honey jar is another option. In an email she quoted me $500.

Humberto Berlanga, Mexico’s coordinator of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, an international forum of government agencies and private organizations, is a member of the delegation. Berlanga doesn’t regard hummingbird trafficking as a high priority. “I suspect the market is not too big, and I don’t think it’s affecting any endangered species, but we don’t have the data,” he said. “Those are my general impressions. People are illegally catching and using the birds, but there’s not enough enforcement to limit and stop this practice—it’s sad, but true.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Shiprock Peak in New Mexico
Shiprock Peak in New Mexico. (Education Images / UIG via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Rachel Monroe, Jianan Qian, Rene Ebersole, Adi Robertson, and Kyle Chayka.

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Chasing the Man Who Caught the Storm: An Interview With Brantley Hargrove

AP

 

Jonny Auping | Longreads | April 2018| 15 minutes (4,096 words)

 

In his recently released book, The Man Who Caught the Storm, Brantley Hargrove tells the story of an unlikely legend named Tim Samaras, who lived his life grappling with and addicted to one of nature’s most dangerous marvels.

Samaras was a tornado chaser with a simple but absurdly treacherous goal: to get close enough to a twister to glean data from within its core. Hargrove, who spent months on the road chasing tornadoes for the reporting of the book, retraces and recreates Samaras’ most dramatic missions, culminating on May 31, 2014 in El Reno, Oklahoma, where he would face off with the largest tornado ever recorded. That same tornado would take Samaras’ life along with those of his son, Paul, and fellow chaser Carl Young.

“We now live in an era when the Mars Pathfinder rover has touched down on the Red Planet,” Hargrove writes. “The human genome has been mapped. But twisters still have the power to confound even the most advanced civilization the planet has ever known.”

Samaras legacy and life’s work represented a crucial foundation for how to better understand and predict historically unpredictable tornadoes.

But The Man the Who Caught the Storm is hardly a meteorological textbook. Rather Hargrove weaves a uniquely American tale of adventure — “nowhere else on the planet do tornadoes happen like they do in this country,” as he explained to me — diving into the circumstances and makeup that leads a man to chase what he should be running from.

Lacking even a college degree, Samaras was an outsider in the meteorological community, who not only developed one of the most sophisticated information-gathering probes the field had ever seen, but also had the courage (or perhaps unrelenting urge) to personally drop that probe in front of a twister.

Hargrove sat down with Longreads to discuss tornadoes, his own storm chasing, and the addicting thrill of being in the presence of something that can cause unfathomable chaos and destruction.
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The Writers’ Roundtable: Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad and Katie Kosma

Eva Holland | Longreads | April 2018 | 23 minutes (5,900 words)

A lifetime ago, it seems, I used to write fiction. I wrote little stories on scraps of paper as a young kid; throughout grade school, I filled my unused notebooks with attempts at novels; I wrote a few short stories in high school and college. But since I started freelancing full-time a decade ago, I haven’t written a single line of fiction.

For a few years now, I’ve been intrigued by the writers who manage to produce both fiction and nonfiction work — the ones who excel on both sides of the divide. How do they do it? Why? Do they prefer one to the other? Does one feed the other? I had so many questions, I finally decided to convene another writers’ roundtable (last time around, we talked freelancing) and I asked a few writers I admire to weigh in.

Benjamin Percy is a Minnesota-based writer of novels (most recently, The Dark Net), comics, and the nonfiction book Thrill Me: Essays On Fiction. His nonfiction stories have also appeared in the likes of GQ, Esquire, Outside, and Men’s Journal. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times, a contributor to GQ and many other fine magazines, and the author of a forthcoming novel. Mary H.K. Choi has written for Wired, GQ, The Atlantic, and more. Her first novel, Emergency Contact, recently debuted on March 27. Adam Sternbergh is an editor at New York magazine and the author of the novels The Blinds, Shovel Ready, and Near Enemy.

ORIGIN STORIES

Eva Holland: When I was younger, I admit I barely even understood that nonfiction writing existed, outside of daily hard news reporting. My understanding of “writing” was entirely “fiction writing,” and I only fell in love with magazines and narrative nonfiction much later. So, my first question is: What came first for you as a writer — fiction, or non?

Benjamin Percy: Growing up, my only doses of nonfiction came from The Oregonian, Time, Newsweek, Fangoria, National Geographic, and Archaeology Magazine. Most of my reading was devoted to novels — mass-market paperbacks with embossed titles and dragons on the cover — and that’s what I hoped to become when I stepped into my first creative writing workshop: a genre novelist. The first time I wrote something that resembled “creative nonfiction,” I was in my mid-20s and only attempted it because a magazine approached me about an assignment.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I was absolutely, definitely, without a doubt going to be a fiction writer or a screenwriter. And then I wasn’t! When I left NYU with a BFA in screenwriting, I realized I had zero version of a plan. I didn’t know what to do, so I got a job that was advertised in the New York Times classifieds (a fiction writer might call this foreshadowing). It was to work at a Soap Opera Magazine. I was still writing screenplays, but they weren’t good—they were cynical, in the way that ’90s screenplays were cynical. And I was taught how to write those things so that they would sell, not so they would be meaningful. So I worked at the soap opera stuff, and I wrote profiles of the actors. I was going to get back into fiction…one day. But it was always hovering in the background. It seemed very fancy to me, to write a novel. And very big and out of reach. I became a freelance writer after a time, and realized I couldn’t devote the amount of time to a novel that a novel would need because I couldn’t bet so many working hours on something that wasn’t a sure thing. Read more…