Search Results for: New York magazine

Doughnuts, Witches and Start-Ups: Five Stories About Secret Subcultures

Photo: GôDiNô

What makes a secret society? Is it the codes and the handshakes, the physical language? Perhaps it’s accessibility—you might know an organization exists, but you’ll never be a member. Take this: I rushed a sorority—the same sorority!—three times, because I wanted to be able to walk into any room on my small college campus and see a welcoming face. I wanted the anonymity, the lettered sweatshirt, the history. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself, something a little mysterious. Sure, I could study the colors and crest and memorize the majors and extracurriculars of every glossy-haired member, but that wasn’t the same as being in. I didn’t get in, obviously.

This urge to rush a sorority over and over (insanity, by Albert Einstein’s definition, I know) has manifested itself before. Middle-school me devoured books about the rich and privileged—Gossip Girl, The Clique, Private–because I knew there was a secret and I had to find out what it was. I had to, or I would be stuck reading the “How to Be Popular” WikiHow guide for the rest of my life. Kindergarten me yearned to sit next to the most popular girl in class during circle time, only to be snubbed by her henchmen. See a pattern? My identity crises have perfectly styled hair and would never wear last season’s Tory Burch flats. I continue to be fascinated—less pathetically, hopefully—by these exclusive subcultures. Luckily for you, I didn’t include any essays about the angst of privileged boarding school students. Instead, I’ve packed this list full of success stories, start-ups, witchcraft and comedy. Read more…

The Magic of Archives: A Reading List

I’m thrilled to present this week’s Reading List in collaboration with Samantha Abrams, an archivist and great friend. I’d planned to curate something about the importance and changing role of archiving—an oft-misunderstood or overlooked science—but I didn’t have enough in my longform arsenal. Cue Sam. I reached out to her via Twitter, asking her if she’d be willing to pass along pertinent articles, essays and interviews she’d encountered as she studied for her master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Library and Information Studies. Sam understood immediately what I was looking for: nothing overly technical, but not condescending or simplified, either.

I spent over a year as an archivist’s assistant, working with the records collectors in a particular branch at the National Institutes of Health. My focus: digitizing records from the late 1980s and early ’90s. My favorite moments: reading someone’s journal from the 1970s and collecting documents for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. I felt like a detective. Archiving isn’t my calling, but I loved my mentors and their serious, inspired work.

On the other hand: You know the look someone gets in their eye when someone really, really loves something? Sam gets that look in her eye, because she loves her work. She has interned at the Library of Congress. She’s the first and only archivist for Culver’s. She’s kind of a genius.

Sam sees outreach as a part of her role as an archivist. Archivists are no longer stuffed into cubicles, scanning and sorting—although that can be part of their job description!—but out saving the World Wide Web, using their best judgement to decide what’s important to preserve and what isn’t. And that requires engagement with the wider world. Here, Sam is genuinely excited to share her expertise with the Longreads community, and I couldn’t be more grateful. I hope (we hope!) that you learn something new and surprising. Read more…

Shopping for Forbidden Fruit

Limiting access often increases desire. I call this the velvet rope effect. Some of the appeal is psychological. Some of this is a quality differential. On The New York Times Style Magazine blog, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi writes about proxy services which help Western shoppers navigate the Japanese online marketplace and buy the goods retailers refuse to sell outside Japan. Language is only one of the barriers here. The other is disinterest. Many Japanese clothing and lifestyle companies simply don’t want to sell their products overseas, and not just the boutique limited edition items either, but, as Zaidi put it, “a single pair of the 20,000 available units of the megabrand’s standard-issue jeans.” Zaidi’s piece ran in May 2015.

I turned up a number of forbiddingly impersonal and expensive proxy services before seeking direction from nerds on sneaker forums. The proxy service I chose is called SpeBid, run through a creaky community-style message board by a half-Japanese half-Nigerian man named Spencer (or Spe). For $30 a year plus arcane surcharges, Spe buys, bids on and reships wonderful stuff to “subscribers” all over the world. Per Jay Gatsby, “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall”; but a proxy never proffers anything you don’t already know you need.

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The Freelancers’ Roundtable

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Eva Holland | Longreads |February 2016 | 25 minutes (6,339 words)

 

There’s been more talk than usual lately about the state of freelance writing. There are increasing numbers of tools for freelancers: among them, the various incarnations of “Yelp for Journalists.” There’s advice floating around; there are Facebook support groups.

With the exception of one 10-month staff interlude, I’ve been freelancing full time now for seven and a half years. I’ve learned a few things along the way, but I also still have a ton of questions, and often feel as if I’ve outgrown some of the advice I see going by in the social media stream.

So I gathered a handful of well-established freelance writers and asked them to participate in a group email conversation about their experiences and advice. Josh Dean is a Brooklyn-based writer for the likes of Outside, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science. Jason Fagone lives in the Philadelphia area and has recently published stories in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Matter, and Grantland. May Jeong is based in Kabul, and has written for publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and Al-Jazeera America. (She managed to fit in her contributions to this roundtable while reporting from a remote corner of Afghanistan, so thank you, May.) As for me, I live in Canada’s northern Yukon Territory, and my work has appeared in AFAR, Pacific Standard, Smithsonian, and other places on both sides of the border. Read more…

Mallory Ortberg’s Favorite Advice Columns

Last year, I became an advice columnist. This is my only qualification for being an advice columnist, as I am quite literally just some guy. “Noted some guy Mallory Ortberg.” Here are a few of my favorite advice columns:

1. “The Monty Hall Problem” (Marilyn vos Savant, Parade Magazine)

Priceonomics describes this column thusly:

When vos Savant politely responded to a reader’s inquiry on the Monty Hall Problem, a then-relatively-unknown probability puzzle, she never could’ve imagined what would unfold: though her answer was correct, she received over 10,000 letters, many from noted scholars and Ph.Ds, informing her that she was a hare-brained idiot.

What ensued for vos Savant was a nightmarish journey, rife with name-calling, gender-based assumptions, and academic persecution.

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Technology for Problem Sleepers

Having trouble sleeping? In The New Yorker, Patricia Marx writes about the economy of slumber, offering a lively survey of current gadgets and expensive equipment designed to get you a night of rest, and she nestles it snug as a bug with a primer on the growing science of sleep. From deprivation to natural cycles to oversleep, Marx’s piece is far from zzzzzzz.

If you are hoping to excel at sleeping, you’ll need a high-performance pillow, Eugene Alletto, the C.E.O. of Bedgear, told me. (His observation that “many people have never been fitted for a pillow” was not exactly a shock to me.) You’ll also want sheets and a mattress protector made from “climate-control fabric.” Bedgear is one of several new companies that sell technologically advanced bed accessories. My friend Marshall’s Pillow ID—based on a Web questionnaire concerning his size, sleep position, and type of mattress—pegged him as a perfect candidate for the Dusk 2.0, a spongy cushion with a crimson border made from “nature’s most durable support material, derived from the frothed milk sap of natural rubber trees,” as opposed to fake rubber trees ($162). He took it to his mother’s house in the Hamptons, where the cacophony of nature tends to keep him up. After a week with Dusk 2.0, he said, “It’s the kind of pillow I like, mostly because it’s cold and firm. I also like that it is red and distinctive.”

On the other head, there is Pillo 1, a large, bouncy, latex-foam model from a company called Hall Innovations ($199). With a scooped-out hollow for your skull, the Pillo 1 would make perfect packing material for a cantaloupe. But, as a sleep aid, it disappointed my friend Penny: “I woke up that first morning with an acute pain in my neck, so I wasn’t willing to be a volunteer for this pillow anymore.” The directions indicate that, because it can take from three to four weeks to “break in” (whether it is the pillow or you that is broken in is unclear), you should use it at first for only one or two hours a night. Isn’t that like waking the patient to give her a sleeping pill?

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A Brief History of Solitary Confinement

Eastern State Penitentiary, c. 1876. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Jean Casella and James Ridgeway | Introduction to Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement | The New Press | February 2016 | 20 minutes (5,288 words)

 

Below is Jean Casella and James Ridgeway‘s introduction to Hell Is a Very Small Place, the collection of first-person accounts of solitary confinement which they edited together with Sarah Shourdas recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. 

* * *

Imagine you’re locked in the cell, and don’t know if you’ll ever get out.

Imagine a corridor flanked by closed, windowless cells. Each cell may be so small that, inside, you can extend your arms and touch both walls at the same time. The cell contains a bunk, perhaps a solid block of poured concrete, with a thin plastic mattress, a stainless steel toilet, maybe a small table and stool. A few personal possessions—books, paper and pencil, family photos—may be permitted, or they may not. The door to the cell is solid steel.

Imagine you’re locked in the cell, and don’t know if you’ll ever get out. Three times a day, a food tray slides in through a slot in the door; when that happens, you may briefly see a hand, or exchange a few words with a guard. It is your only human contact for the day. A few times a week, you are allowed an hour of solitary exercise in a fenced or walled yard about the same size as your cell. The yard is empty and the walls block your view, but if you look straight up, you can catch a glimpse of sky.

Imagine that a third to a half of the people who live in this place suffer from serious mental illness. Some entered the cells with underlying psychiatric disabilities, while others have been driven mad by the isolation. Some of them scream in desperation all day and night. Others cut themselves, or smear their cells with feces. A number manage to commit suicide in their cells. Read more…

The Art World Is Crazy

I have been mildly obsessed with freeports—the secretive, treasure-crammed warehouses where Picassos are stashed alongside stacked bars of gold, tax-free—since David Segal’s 2012 New York Times article on the Geneva Freeport. Freeports, Segal explained, “remain the closest thing to the Cayman Islands that the art world has to offer.”

Sam Knight takes coverage of international freeport intrigue to the next level in this week’s New Yorker, with “The Bouvier Affair.” His story delves into the machinations of the Geneva Freeport and describes how one Swiss shipper saw the potential of the freeport as an adjunct to the art market, ultimately transforming himself into an under-the-radar dealer and bilking a Russian oligarch out of a billion dollars. It would not be an overstatement to call the story completely bananas. It is also a magnificently fun read—a delicious rollercoaster of a narrative, undergirded by a foundation of detailed, careful reporting. Of particular note are Knight’s nuanced insights into the bonkers world of art, like this description of the relationship between dealer and collector:

The relationship between art dealer and collector is particular and charged. The dealer is mentor and salesman. He informs his client’s desires while subjecting himself to them at the same time. The collector has money, but he is also vulnerable. Relationships start, prosper, and fail for any number of reasons. It is not always obvious where power lies. Over time, each one can convince himself that he has created the other.

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See Also:
“Swiss Freeports Are Home for a Growing Treasury of Art” (David Segal, July 2012, The New York Times)

The ‘Wellness Craze’: Six Stories About Fitness

I have this pair of running shoes that I bought three years ago, and the last time I wore them was in the shoe store. I had the best of intentions. My then-boyfriend encouraged me to buy them. I was always complaining about how out-of-shape I felt, which was code for how unsatisfied I was with my looks.

These days, I’m cooler with how I look, trying to navigate body-positive feminism and genuine self-care. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to put those running shoes on, even if it’s just for a walk around the park.

Maybe it’s because I’m so enamored with Netflix binges and junk food and sleeping in, but I’d rather read about exercising than exercise myself. Here are several of my favorite stories about fitness magazines, FitBit, yoga and athleisure.

1. “Why Can’t Fitness Magazines Cash in on the Wellness Craze?” (Erika Adams, Racked, January 2016)

“Wellness” is so hot right now. It sounds holistic, body positive, more all-encompassing than plain old “fitness”—so why are magazines geared towards the health-obsessed floundering?  Read more…

How Winona Ryder Became the Face of ‘90s Nostalgia

Image adapted from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It’s not uncommon for artists to be associated with a particular cultural moment: think Hemingway and interwar Europe or vintage Lady Gaga and the onset of the age of virality. What is rare is for a cultural moment to be so strongly linked to a specific artist like the `90s — specifically the first, pre-internet half — are with Winona Ryder.

At Hazlitt, Soraya Roberts digs deep into Ryder’s career to find out why we (or at least a certain subset of “we,” mostly born between the mid-seventies and mid-eighties) struggle to decouple the artist from the period in which she got lodged in our collective psyche.

We cannot see Ryder without seeing the grunge era. In the New York Times Magazine in 2011, Carl Wilson riffed on the “20-year cycle of resuscitation” that had finally turned to Gen-X nostalgia. “In intimate terms, nostalgia is a glue that reinforces bonds of solidarity and shared experience,” he wrote. “And it’s a reminder that it matters not only that an idea or an image was created, but when — that things speak most fully in chorus and counterpoint to other events and concepts of the same era.” As Tavi Gevinson told Entertainment Weekly in 2014, “how I feel when I see pictures of teen Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp holding hands in leather jackets, like, nobody can match that.”

The only person that can come close is Winona Ryder now, because embedded in Winona Ryder now is Winona Ryder then. She carries her past with her. The teen actress who sought to make her own life nostalgic before it had even passed her by peeks out from within the woman Marc Jacobs now imbues with nostalgia — she is a Russian nesting doll of reminiscence. That Winona Ryder’s image makes more of an impression than her current performances — in The Ten, The Last Word, Stay Cool — confirms our culture’s chronic desire to preserve the past rather than accept the present.

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