Search Results for: New York Times

'Write What You Want — But Be Prepared for the Consequences'

I’m reasonably certain that John Ashcroft didn’t recognize himself disguised as the evil high school guidance counselor in one of my novels. But like so much else, this thorny matter requires consideration on a case-by-case basis. In Mary McCarthy’s story “The Cicerone,” Peggy Guggenheim, the important collector of modern art, appears as Polly Grabbe, an aging, spoiled expatriate slut who collects garden statuary. Guggenheim did recognize herself and was definitely not flattered; it took years before the two women were friends again. Write what you want — but be prepared for the consequences.

Francine Prose, with Leslie Jamison in The New York Times, on the questions a writer asks when using real people and real experiences in fiction and nonfiction. Read more on writing from the Longreads Archive.

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Photos: Wikimedia Commons and Flickr

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by Jessica Rinaldi / Boston Globe staff

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

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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.

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Read more…

Examining the Religious, Economic, Architectural, and Cultural Facets of Gentrification: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from Christena Cleveland, Gothamist, The New York Times, and New Geography.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 30, 2014

Examining the Religious, Economic, Architectural, and Cultural Facets of Gentrification: A Reading List

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Gif via Justin Blinder’s ‘Vacated’ project.

1. “Urban Church Planting Plantations.” (Christena Cleveland, March 2014)

White suburban churches invade urban spaces with no regard for the churches already in place.

2. “Gentrification Sparks Surge In Landlord Sabotage.” (Lauren Evans, Gothamist, Feb. 2014)

Setting fires, locking tenants out and willfully destroying a building’s infrastructure–evil landlords will go to great lengths to dispose of their rent-stabilized tenants in hopes of increasing rent and making thousands off new residents.

3. “Newburgh, N.Y., Seeks Renewal Without Gentrification.” (Lisa Selin Davis, The New York Times, November 2013)

Is a healthy future possible for “the murder capital of New York?”

4. “Gentrification and Its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans.” (Richard Campanella, New Geography, March 2013)

Gentrification might bring New York City or San Francisco to mind, but Campanella takes the reader to “the Williamsburg of the South”: Bywater, New Orleans. He delves into the history of gentrification in Louisiana, which dates back to the 1920s.

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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.

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

***

Read more…

Gold in the Mud

Longreads Pick

The Twisted Saga of Jailhouse Boxer James Scott’s Battle for Redemption:

Prison inmate No. 57735, accused of murder and serving a 30-40 year stretch inside Rahway State Prison for armed robbery, introduced himself in a letter to reporter Beth Schenerman at The New York Times on Dec. 17, 1978, writing, in a rare moment of understatement, “This is a unique story.” After returning to prison three years earlier, the former professional boxer had long since been recognized as one of the most feared and dangerous of the 1,150 inmates then living behind the walls of New Jersey’s most notorious maximum-security prison, a place journalist Ralph Wiley described “as if the world had dropped the sum of its sores into one of New Jersey’s gritty smokestacks, then chose not to watch as the results of the experiment filtered down into place.”

Source: SB Nation
Published: Mar 12, 2014
Length: 37 minutes (9,381 words)

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.

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

Read more…

The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick

Yiren Lu, a recent Harvard grad who now studies computer science at Columbia, takes a step back from the startup world to wonder what it means for our tech infrastructure when all the bright young things want to make apps but aren’t skilled in networks and hardware — the stuff that makes the Internet go. And then there’s the culture clash between older (read as: 35+) coders and tech executives who have experience running companies and the younger entrepreneurs who may (or not) be on to the next big thing. In her story, Lu articulates the creeping angst of Silicon Valley: “the vague sense of a frenzied bubble of app-making and an even vaguer dread that what we are making might not be that meaningful.”

Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem

Yiren Lu | New York Times Magazine | March 16, 2014 | 28 minutes (6,989 words)

All Aboard: Four Stories About Trains

Longreads Pick

This week’s reading list by Emily includes stories from The New York TImes, n+1, and Der Spiegel.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 9, 2014