Search Results for: New York Magazine

Manic Street Preachers’ Album The Holy Bible

The Manic Street Preachers at Castle roundabout, London, 1990. Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

David Evans | The Holy Bible | Bloomsbury Academic | May 2019 | 17 minutes (2.781 words)

 

Manic Street Preachers never exactly fit in. When they emerged from South Wales with their debut album Generation Terrorists in 1992, their leopard-print outfits, political sloganeering and widdly-woo guitar riffs already seemed out of date amid the musical movements du jour: Madchester, Shoegaze, Grunge. Critics tended to dismiss them as a quirk of pop history, about as relevant to the zeitgeist as that other Welsh throwback, Shakin’ Stevens.

But when The Holy Bible came out, in August 1994, it felt more than just anachronistic. Rarely has a major record been so spectacularly out of step with its cultural moment. This, after all, was the year Britpop took off; the year of girls-who-do-boys and boys-who-do-girls; the year of the New Lad and his lairy pursuit of sex and drink; the year a former barrister named Anthony Blair began remaking the Labor Party in his own primped, twinkle-toothed image. The dominant mood was a sort of willed optimism. “Things Can Only Get Better,” as D:Ream helpfully put it.

Read more…

Took You By Surprise: John and Paul’s Lost Reunion

Illustration by Homestead

David Gambacorta | Longreads | June 2019 | 20 minutes (5,128 words)

The sun was beginning to set over a mostly deserted expanse of beach in Malibu, casting long shadows behind a pair of visitors as they strolled a few feet from the water’s edge. They had the innocuous, no-particular-place-to-go demeanor of average beachgoers, except for the fact that their every step was being recorded by a local news cameraman. One was a guy who was intimately familiar with being filmed, photographed, analyzed, idolized, ridiculed, and praised: John Lennon. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Washington Post via Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Casey Newton, William Langewiesche, Sarah Miller, Hafizah Geter, and Shannon Keating.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

¡Ay qué niñas!

Niños migrantes, algunos de los cuales son menores no acompañados, apoyados contra una cerca en la Casa Hogar del Niño en Reynosa, México. (Photos: Jacky Muniello)

Alice Driver | Longreads | Junio ​​2019 | 17 minutos (4,470 palabras)

AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH

“Yo con un mapa ya” anunció con firmeza Milexi, de 16 años. Me contó que su amor por los mapas le dieron la seguridad para recorrer ella sola los cerca de 2,300 kilómetros que hay entre El Portillo, Honduras y McAllen, Texas. Cuando la entrevisté en agosto de 2018, se encontraba en el Centro de Atención a Menores Fronterizos, CAMEF; su postura estaba algo rígida y su mirada fija en el luminoso patio del lugar. Llevaba partidura en medio y su cabello brillaba bajo el sol. “Mi sueño siempre fue viajar en “La Bestia””; como se le conoce al tren que atraviesa México de norte a sur, al cual los migrantes suben y bajan continuamente para conseguir trabajo y así poder costear su viaje en suelo mexicano.  A veces corren el riesgo de perder uno o dos miembros de su cuerpo si calculan mal el salto, ya sea para bajar o para subir.  Por su parte, Milexi logró llegar hasta Reynosa vestida de hombre; ahí la detuvieron y la llevaron al centro en el que llevaba ya 57 días detenida, y donde tuvo la oportunidad de hacer su solicitud de asilo en México.

Milexi se fue de Honduras porque su padrastro golpeaba a su madre y a uno de sus hermanos.

Me contó que él llevaba años golpeando a su madre, y que incluso llegó a fracturarle la rodilla a su hermanito de 11 años. Me dijo que ella empezó a cortarse desde los 7, pero que también estaba orgullosa de sí misma, porque a pesar de la ansiedad que sentía no se había cortado ni una sola vez desde el año pasado.

Después agregó un detalle: una noche en que su padrastro golpeó a su madre, ella esperó hasta que él estuviera dormido; fue a la cocina, tomó un cuchillo y lo apuñaló. “De mala suerte clavé el cuchillo en el lugar equivocado”, explicó sin pestañear. Su padrastro sobrevivió y ella decidió abandonar Honduras.

Milexi esperaba pedir asilo en Estados Unidos por motivos de violencia doméstica, quizá sin saber que las políticas de E.E.U.U. habían cambiado. En junio de 2018, Jeff Sessions, el entonces fiscal general de Estados Unidos, en una decisión titulada “Matter of A-B-” anuló un fallo de la corte migratoria que daba asilo a mujeres que huían de sus países por motivos de violencia doméstica. Un juez federal bloqueó la medida establecida por la administración de Trump, la cual ponía fin al otorgamiento de asilo por motivos de violencia doméstica. Sin embargo, la situación de los migrantes que ya lo habían solicitado por esos motivos aún sigue en el limbo y abierta a interpretación. Ashkan Yekrangi, abogado especialista en migración radicado en Orange County, dijo que las acciones de Sessions han creado un área gris en la que los jueces no están seguros de cómo manejar las solicitudes de asilo basadas en alegatos de violencia doméstica. Según Yekrangi, actualmente ” la mayor parte de los casos son rechazados, porque tanto los jueces como el Departamento de Seguridad Nacional se están basando en la medida “Matter of A-B-”. Read more…

On Truth and Lying in the Extra German Sense

Illustration by Homestead

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | June 2019 | 15 minutes (3,962 words)

Would you like to know if you’ve gained weight? If you’re annoying, or too talkative, or not as smart as you think? If you’re doing something, literally anything, the wrong way? Just ask a German and they will tell you immediately. Germans do not do this to hurt your feelings. There isn’t even a single long word in German for “hurt feelings,” they just translate the English directly (verletzte Gefühle), and everyone knows that direct translation from the English is how Germans demonstrate their disdain. There is, however, a common and beloved expression for an individual who makes a big show of having hurt feelings, and that is beleidigte Leberwurst, or a perennially “insulted liver sausage,” because hurt fee-fees are for weak non-German babies.

After all, Germans are just being direct: unmittelbar, or literally translated, “unmediated.” Their assertions are simply unverblümt, or “not putting a flower on it.” They’re not mean, they’re freimütig, or “free-hearted.” They’re just being forthright: offen, “open,” which is a good thing, ja? Germans couldn’t even begin to imagine why being brutally honest would hurt someone in the first place! If the truth hurts you, isn’t that more your fault than the truth’s?

Read more…

We Still Don’t Know How to Navigate the Cultural Legacy of Eugenics

Illustration by Tom Peake

Audrey Farley | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,381 words)

 

On May 28, Justice Clarence Thomas issued an eyebrow-raising opinion. It concurred with the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Indiana law that requires abortion providers to follow a certain protocol to dispose of fetal remains and prohibits abortions on the sole basis of a fetus’s sex, race, or disability. It wasn’t the justice’s position that caught attention, but rather his method. In speaking to the law’s second provision on selective abortions, Thomas launched into a history of eugenics, the debunked science of racial improvement that gained popularity in the early decades of the 20th century.

Arguing that abortion is “an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation,” the justice offered a lengthy discussion of the origins of the birth-control movement in the United States. In this discussion, written for the benefit of other courts considering abortion laws, Thomas explains how Planned Parenthood grew in tandem with state-sterilization campaigns, providing the foundation for the legalized abortion movement. (As historians corrected, legal abortion preceded birth control, as it was not regulated until the 19th century.) The justice cites the disturbing rhetoric of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who wrote in The Pivot of Civilization that birth control was a means of reducing the “ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” While conceding that Sanger did not support abortion, Thomas nonetheless argues that “Sanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ‘the elimination of the unfit’ apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics.”

Thomas does not offer concrete evidence that American women actually abort fetuses solely because of sex, race, or disability. Nor does he explore the possible reasons for abortions related to these criteria, such as financial hardship or the lack of societal support for individuals with chronic conditions. His grievance with abortion boils down to this point: the practice is ill-borne. This claim is inaccurate, for reasons that historians swiftly noted; it also obscures the fact that eugenics did in fact initiate many traditions in this country, not all of which are perceived to be heinous today. Thomas’s incautious opinion, which echoes other voices in the abortion debate, unwittingly invites a more nuanced discussion of eugenics’ legacies.

Read more…

School for Girls

Illustration by Xulin Wang

Jasmin Aviva Sandelson | Longreads | June 2019 | 28 minutes (7,121 words)

 

I loved being one of your girls. I wasn’t your favorite, but I didn’t need to be. What we had was different.

I found you on that hiking trip to the Spanish mountains. At first I was wary — at our all-girls’ secondary school you were never alone. But in the thin air we climbed together, lotioned each other’s backs, and hand-washed our socks side-by-side. By the end of the week we felt joined, invincible. Remember how we made those campsite boys pitch our tents? That’s not character-building, the male teachers sneered. We just laughed. We were girls: 13 and power-thrilled. While the others hauled their packs up the dusty hill, we lay together on sleeping bags. Your hazel eyes beamed noise and mischief, and I had found my place.

Back in London, I came to you each day, bounding to your classroom after lunch in the cafeteria. The others were with you, but that didn’t stop me. It made me want you more.

Before all the danger, we dashed about, frantic. We sprawled on desks or piled in a corner. You whispered about our classmates — plain girls, weird ones — and the four of us laughed in sly peals. It was both cruel and loving.

Five sounds like an unstable number, but it wasn’t. It was safe. Maybe because there was one of you, and four of us. We gathered at your house each Saturday, and I passed the journey — the bus, two tubes, and the uphill walk — listening to those songs you liked that I’d Limewired onto my iPod: Death Cab for Cutie, The Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay.

The others lived far away, too, some farther than me, but we all hauled our clothes and makeup across the city to get dressed in your bedroom for whatever we had planned: Smirnoff Ices in the park, a lax-bouncered bar, a house party with boys from our brother school.

We shook out our stuff on your big bed, which had space on either side like an adult’s bed, like my parents’ bed, not like my bed, pushed against a wall. We tried on each other’s things and crowded your full-length mirror as Jack Johnson sang through your iPod speaker.

“Pass the panox!” Ashley said, and you tossed the thumb-sized tube of medicated zit cream that you could only get in America, where your mom was from, and where you went every year. In the drawers that pulled out from under from your bed, you stored the things you brought back from New York: moisturizer with fake-tan, spray deodorant, and panoxyl.

We called it panox because we abbreviated everything.

“Emma, your skirt looks beaut,” I said, as you smoothed the white denim.

Oh em gee, totes,” Ashley said, dabbing her chin with the pad of her pinky.

We all spoke the same way, rhythms charged and exclusive like an electric fence.

Ashley was your best friend. She didn’t need panoxyl. Her skin was clear and framed by gold hair that reached the lean arcs of her waist. But even though she had all that I didn’t envy her. She didn’t crackle and sparkle like you did; she couldn’t combust into cackles like you and me.

As Ashley capped the cream, I sprayed the air around myself with your perfume and pulled on your leggings. I’d liked my legs covered since I was 6 or 7, back when my friends in gymnastics learned back handsprings while I was stuck with walkovers. In the cool gym, my thighs stayed pink when chill laced theirs with that wine-colored mottle. Mine touched all the way up. Theirs didn’t. To practice, I wore shorts over my leotard.

But you didn’t need leggings. Your legs were firm, cut with muscle down each thigh and behind the knees. I liked your legs. I also liked your straight white teeth — American teeth — and your full, flushed cheeks. I liked your honey-colored hair, the way the thick drape glinted in the light like amber. You were insecure about your stomach and hips — a little bigger than mine and the other girls’ — so I pretended not to notice when you tugged your shirt off your skin so it didn’t cling. To me, all parts of you, hard and soft, were lovely.

Once we were dressed, spritzed, and painted, the five of us — you, me, Ashley, Kat and Kay — trooped down three flights of stairs. In your kitchen, we piled around one corner of the wooden table that could seat 12, and ate whatever your mom cooked, something like pasta with tomato sauce, because she, like you, was a vegetarian. Your mom perched as we ate, not eating herself, but watching you chew with bird eyes, hard and blue. I was usually still hungry because she didn’t cook that much, so I’d buy a chocolate bar from the shop at the station. I always shared it around, but you never took any. Neither did Ashley. The two of you linked arms as Kat and Kay and I ate it up, square by square.

We also bought drinks at the station shop. Kat was 4’10 and looked even younger than 14, but she flashed her older sister’s passport and heaved our low-shelf vodka onto the counter. Glenns or Kirov tasted fine with enough Diet Coke. Kat and Kay bought regular Coke — “full fat Coke,” we called it. You glanced at them and clutched your own bottle closer.

At house parties, we’d flirt limply with whoever, but then you and I would run off. We peeked in bathrooms, jumped on boys’ beds, had swordfights with baguettes grabbed from bread bins, and gave each other hickeys. We looked each other in the eyes and laughed — laughter like a fist around our stomachs as we shook with devilish synchrony.

When we left one party for another, staggering down the sidewalk and dodging the cracks, I wanted to walk all night instead of going to some boy’s preened Hampstead house. I liked the in-between times best, and the befores and afters.

The afters looked like this: when we’d banked enough fun to last the school week, we all turned to you. We caught the last tube or you called a cab from Addison Lee, which we called Add Lee or just Add, and we lay our heads on each other’s shoulders as we waited to pull up at your front door. At the top of your house, in the “upstairs living room,” we flopped on those couches big enough to sleep four. The fifth, usually Kat, who was small and unfussy, lay on the carpet so thick she didn’t even need a sleeping bag. At home it took me hours to fall asleep. But beside you, my body unclenched and I slept deep and dreamless.

Read more…

‘Brokenness and Holiness Really Go Together’: Darcey Steinke on Menopause

Nefertiti, 14th century B.C., dark granite bust.(Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | June 2019 | 19 minutes (5,308 words)

By the time I finished reading Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life I had over nine pages of questions for author Darcey Steinke. She does, after all, explore a variety of topics through the lens of menopause: Sex; grief; the patriarchy; whales, gorillas, horses, and elephants; God; art; the transgender community; and, of course, women’s bodies, along with our minds, our spirits, our anger, and our animalness. She braids all of this into sparse, patient prose that’s somehow lush and explosive, not to mention formidable and exquisitely sensitive to all beings. [Read an excerpt from Flash Count Diary on Longreads.]

I first met Darcey back in the day, when I was a newbie writer and she was my scorchingly cool teacher. Dirty blonde hair, black tights, oozing brilliance, confidence and a bit of the daredevil, she kind of scared me. As it turns out, she is all of that — and also gigantically kind, funny, generous, and wise. The perfect combination to pull off a book like this.

Darcey’s menopausal journey begins with hot flashes so intense she, a minister’s daughter, believes God must be visiting her and ends with the bone-deep realization of her place within the divinity of nature. “I pray to the body, I pray to the lake, I pray to the whale,” she writes. In between she explores why there is so much scarcity and shame around menopause. Read more…

Bearing the Weight of My Grandfathers’ Old Clothes

Illustration by Homestead

Aram Mrjoian | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,320 words)

The first time I was mistaken for my father on the phone, I feigned annoyance. It was around 2004, I was 14 or 15 years old, and my family’s main form of communication was still the cordless phone mounted to the wall at the threshold of the kitchen, important numbers listed in thick pencil on a faded pad of yellow paper taped to the inside of the neighboring cabinet door. My mother and father also had cell phones, single-function dull silver models with green calculator screens and pixelated numbers, but these devices were strictly for work or emergencies. I was too young for my own phone, which was still an uncommon luxury among my friends, especially those still without a driver’s license. At home, the majority of calls we received were from telemarketers, and by my adolescence my parents had trained me to decline the onslaught of polite, prodding inquiries from unknown numbers, so that once or twice a day I hung up on an unfamiliar voice the moment they butchered our last name.

This time, though, it was a number I recognized, from a family member, someone who knew both my dad and me well enough to identify the distinct tones and cadences of our voices. She confused us anyway. I remember the static over the line, my momentary pause as I tried to make sense of this error. How could I be mistaken for my father? How could there be any confusion given the unsure wavering in my adolescent voice? Even as a teenager, I understood one distant moment of misidentification was neither some portentous sign of manhood nor a hint that I had matured in a more physical sense of the word. At least, I didn’t see it that way. Today, the feeling of being lost in adulthood is as constant as ever, like I am still an anachronistic version of my younger self, winging it day to day, uncertain of who I am and what the hell I’m doing. This mood was intensely magnified in my adolescence. My conceptions of masculinity and adulthood were out of whack with my perception of myself. It wasn’t simply that I wasn’t a man yet, but a larger question of how could I ever be half the man my father is, at all?
Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: Shorthand, Looking Away, Getting It Wrong (Podcast)

Trisha Meile
Trisha Meile, the Central Park jogger. (Duane Braley/Star Tribune via Getty Images)

On our June 7, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Essays Editor Sari Botton, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The Cut, The New Yorker, and The California Sunday Magazine.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


0:53 Before, and After, the Jogger (Sarah Weinman, June 3, 2019, The Cut

“It’s so important to push through your discomfort and watch these things and read these stories. It’s important for us to have episodes like this where we’re paying attention to heavy stories about other people’s difficulties that we don’t have.” —Sari Botton

The Cut revisits the story of The Central Park Five with a look at the experiences of the nine women who were raped, assaulted, and one, murdered, by Matias Reyes. Reyes only admitted to the crime years after Manhattan District Attorney Linda Fairstein had, in 1989, charged five innocent young boys with the crimes.

The team discusses the complicity of Fairstein, the police, and the press in vilifying the wrong people, and the way that the womens’ stories, central to everything, were never properly told. They also talk about Ava Duvernet’s When They See Us Netflix series and how it humanizes the boys from a similarly overdue angle. They address the responsibility we have to engage with tough stories, and how a story like this, about racism and misogyny, has reach far beyond New York City.

9:57 R. Kelly and the Damage Done. (, June 3, 2019, The New Yorker)

“To read these two pieces side by side disturbed me further, because on the one hand, you have somebody who’s being falsely accused of rape, and on the other hand, you have somebody saying I was raped, and not being believed.”  —Kelly Stout

The editors respond to Jim DeRogatis’s memoir of reporting on R. Kelly’s alleged victims, as well as his acknowledgement of his failures, prejudices, and the perspective that he lacked as a white member of the press.

The team discusses the blind spots of whiteness, and how white people fail to see what is directly in front of us when it comes to realities non-white communities have long dealt with. Additionally, they look at how in this particular case, information about R. Kelly’s actions was available for years and ignored by reporters. They also address the way members of privileged communities create scapegoats to recalibrate a sense of security after horrible incidents, including hanging on to the idea that the justice system provides protection more than it exacerbates harm.

25:28 The Billboard (Kathy Dobie, May 30, 2019, The California Sunday Magazine)

“Shorthand isn’t enough… victims don’t get the privilege of shorthand.” —Aaron Gilbreath

Artist Stephanie Montgomery was working in a club in Los Angeles, dancing and trying to get her career started, when one of the customers raped her. She told management and the police, but no one did anything. This is a story about the aftermath of that rape, and how Montgomery went on to tell her story by painting a billboard on the I-10 Freeway.

The team continues their conversation about the shortcomings of law enforcement and the media, as well as the meaning and weight of the word victim. They touch on the importance of permitting people who have suffered a trauma to forge their own path to healing. They reiterate the need for details and going beyond shorthand terms like ‘sexual assault’ in these stories. Readers may not want to read or hear these details, but they need to learn them if anything is going to change.

* * *

Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.