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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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What Wall Street and Teach For America Have in Common

Film Still from Wall Street 2

Mike: Jeremy and Samson seemed so miserable and I was rooting for them to quit and do something else. But something seemed to be holding them back—they didn’t like the idea of leaving the well-paid jobs they hated for an uncertain future. Which is funny to me, because being worried about an uncertain future is what nearly every college senior on the verge of graduating worries about. Their recruitment into Wall Street sort of allowed them to delay this.

Kevin: And I think in some ways that Wall Street has functioned as a delay mechanism. You don’t have to figure out what you want to be. And I think that one of the smartest things that Teach for America did was make itself a two-year commitment just like the banks, because people who are seniors in college want some kind of certainty. They want to know that they’re not going to be unemployed. These are people who’ve connected all the right dots their entire lives—they are very Type A. And they want to move from institution to institution without a break in the middle and so Teach For America saw what Wall Street was doing, I think—I don’t have any intel—but I think they probably looked at what banks and consulting firms were doing and saying, “two years is about the right amount of time. We don’t have to pay them a ton, but if we promise them that it’ll look good on their resume, that they’ll be able to do whatever they want afterwards, it won’t close off any doors and it’ll give them structure and stability.” And you can see it now: One in every six Ivy League seniors applies to Teach for America—it’s insane. And that’s probably the best proof that it’s not all about the money for a lot of college students, because they’re willing to work for a little bit of money teaching in the Mississippi Delta if it means that they’ll be able to put off some big decisions for a few years.

In The Billfold, my very long conversation with Kevin Roose about Young Money, Roose’s book about young Wall Street workers recruited straight out of college that came out earlier this week. You can read excerpts of the book at NPR, and an adapted chapter about Wall Street plutocrats dressing up in drag and cracking jokes at the 99 percent at New York magazine.

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A Brief History of PR Disasters By Abercrombie & Fitch

In many ways, Jeffries’s most impressive accomplishment was not the signature Abercrombie style but the signature Abercrombie attitude, with its bluntly brash appeal. As one former employee put it, “The only bad news was no news. Controversy was what you wanted.” Consequently, the list of PR disasters past and present is too lengthy to fully detail, but the more notable flare-ups include the following: the quickly recalled line of Asian-themed T-shirts, which featured men in rice-paddy hats and cartoonishly slanted eyes; a line of thongs, marketed to girls as young as 10, with the words wink-wink on the crotch; an issue of A&F Quarterly that included a user’s guide to having oral sex in a movie theater; and the disingenuous joke-apology to critics that appeared in the same periodical in 2003: “If you’d be so kind, please offer our apologies to the following: the Catholic League, former Lt. Governor Corrine Wood of Illinois, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Stanford University Asian-American Association, N.O.W.”

In 2010, Michael Stephen Bustin, a former pilot of the Abercrombie corporate jet, filed a lawsuit against Abercrombie in a Philadelphia federal court, claiming he’d been unfairly dismissed because of his age. (He is in his mid-fifties.) Abercrombie & Fitch settled with Bustin, but not quickly enough to prevent the disclosure, by Bustin’s lawyers, of a 40-plus page Abercrombie “aircraft standards” manual, a copy of which leaked online.

Included in the manual are rules on crew apparel (the male staff, hand-selected by a New York modeling agency, were to wear a “spritz” of Abercrombie 41 cologne and boxer briefs under their jeans), the specific song to be played on return flights (“Take Me Home,” by Phil Collins), and the way the toilet paper in the aft lavatory should be rolled (never exposed; end square neatly folded). If Jeffries makes a request, the crew is always to respond with “No problem” instead of “Yes” or “Sure.”

It’s Fashion Week in New York, and in New York magazine, Matthew Shaer looks at the rise and fall of retailer Abercrombie & Fitch, which is attempting to reposition itself in a the current market, where stores like H&M have found success. A+F CEO Mike Jeffries helped rebrand the company in the ’90s to much success, but has unable to keep the company up with a changing consumer market. Read more business stories at Longreads.

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Photo: Daniel Spills

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The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words)

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

 

For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press. Read more…

What It’s Like for Renters in America: A Reading List

As we all recently learned from the now-Mayor of New York Bill de Blasio’s campaign, America is becoming increasingly divided along class lines. Major cities, such as de Blasio’s New York (or #deblasiosnewyork, if you like Twitter), are keeping up with that trend. These are three stories of hellish renting experiences in major American cities:

1. “Sympathy for the Landlord” (Lauren Smiley, San Francisco magazine, October 2013)

Smiley’s story about renting in the most expensive city in the country isn’t a very light read, but her nuanced view is essential to understanding the current political and societal climate in San Francisco.

2. “Why Run a Slum If You Can Make More Money Housing the Homeless?” (Andrew Rice, New York magazine, December 1, 2013)

The story of how one family gamed the system and is charging the government $3600 per month, per room, to house some of New York’s many, many homeless.

3. “Lord of the Sties” (David Bates, Boston magazine, January 2014)

Bates’ story about nightmare landlord Anwar Faisal is a terrifying portrait of what it’s like to be a college student renting in Boston.

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Photo: eviltomthai, Flickr

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Jan. 3, 2014

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist.

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A Brief History of Epic Parties: Reading List

The following reading list comes courtesy Michelle Legro, editor at Lapham’s Quarterly.

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No doubt you are on your way to one right now: an epic party, a night to end all nights. But will your epic party be as legendary as those thrown attended by Truman Capote, Cher Horowitz, Jay Gatsby, Jordan Belfort, Silvio Berlusconi, or the kids from Saturday Night Fever?

1.  “The Great Fratsby” (Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, December 2013)

While Jay Gatsby may have spent lavishly, in the end he did it for love;  in Martin Scorese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort does it all for the money.

2. “Suck and Blow: The Oral History of the Clueless Party Scene” (Jen Chaney, New York magazine, December 2013)

Before we were rolling with the homies, director Amy Heckerling had to figure out if Cher Horowitz would totally gag if she had to go to a party in the Valley.

3.  “The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy” (Devin Friedman, GQ, September 2012)

The hottest club in Las Vegas has Italian princes, ten-thousand dollar tables, a champagne fairy, air of pure oxygen, and you’re not invited.

4. “Basta Bunga Bunga” (Ariel Levy, The New Yorker, June 2011)

The era of Berlusconi may be at an end, but the legend of this  Italian version of Benny Hill will never be forgotten, nakedly chasing after topless nymphettes while running the country into the ground.

5. “A Night to Remember” (Amy Fine Collins, Vanity Fair, July 1996)

Truman Capote kept telling people that he was going to invite everybody to his party at the Plaza Hotel in November of 1966. Guests were required to wear only two colors, black and white, to mirror the ascot races in My Fair Lady. Masks were to be worn by all upon entry and  removed only at midnight.

6. “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” (Nik Cohn, New York magazine, 1976)

By day, Vincent sold paint in a Bay Ridge hardware store; by night he was the best disco dancer in all of New York City. And in 1977, he would be played on screen by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Cohn, meanwhile, later admitted to making most of the story up.

Longreads Best of 2013: Best Old Story That I Didn't Read Until This Year

Is John Lindsay Too Tall To Be Mayor?

Jimmy Breslin | New York magazine | July 28, 1969

 

Mark Lotto (@marklotto) is a senior editor at Medium, and a former editor at GQ and The New York Times Op-Ed page.

In the month since I happened upon Jimmy Breslin’s story about the 1969 New York City mayor’s race, I’ve probably reread it a dozen times; I’ve recommended it to college kids, writers of mine, fellow editors, and when Marshall Sella and I were working on our own story about Anthony Weiner’s tragicomic run, I thought about it every single damn day. My love of it is almost hard to explain, but: It’s an adventure. It starts in a leisurely and apathetic place, ends with a startling announcement, and in between twists and turns through gossip, memoir, poetry, politics, polemic. It’s beautiful; it’s funny; it’s angry; it’s self-lacerating; it looks at the city from 10,000 feet and then zooms in at the ice in a glass. Nowadays, most magazine features hit you with a nut graph somewhere near the bottom of the first section or the top of the second, and then spend 4,000 words fulfilling your exact expectations. But Breslin surprises, again and again. You don’t even know what the story is really about until you’ve read the last line.

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Reading List: When We Fall In Love

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Vulture, New York magazine, The Rumpus, and The New Inquiry.

Source: Longreads
Published: Dec 15, 2013

Reading List: When We Fall In Love

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

What does love look like and feel like and sound like to you? What have you read that changed the way you think about love? I’d like to know. Reblog your suggestions or comment or drop them in dietcoker.tumblr.com/ask.

1. “Him and Her: How Spike Jonze Made The Weirdest, Most Timely Romance of the Year.” (Mark Harris, Vulture, October 2013)

Have you heard of Her? Spike Jonze’s latest is about a man who falls in love with his cell phone’s AI interface. Sound hokey? If you know anything about Jonze (and you will after reading this), then you know Her will be anything but.

2. “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School.” (Alex Morris, New York magazine, February 2006)

In this 2006 piece, privileged New York school kids navigate the lack of binary between friendship and romance.

3. “Love Love Love.” (Lizzy Acker, The Rumpus, September 2013)

So often Rumpus essays read like songs. This, thankfully, is no exception: “When you love someone, you will sacrifice everything for them, even if that means they never exist at all.”

4. “K in Love.” (Hannah Black, The New Inquiry, February 2013)

Cop goes undercover. Cop meets girl. Cop falls in love. Cop’s cover is blown. Cop sues his superiors. “Love is most private, most public, of all.”

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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