Search Results for: New Yorker

What the Greek Tragedy Told Us About Modern Life

“What’s so interesting about tragedy is even as it confirms what we sort of think is true about life, which is most of us just want to have a medium life, without attracting the ire—or the jealousy—of the Gods, it nonetheless is crucial to look at stories about people who go to the extremes, because it simultaneously satisfies our desire to see the great while confirming the rightness of our choice not to be one of them.

“As someone who was trained as a classicist, it’s basically how I see [contemporary political spectacle], you know. So, these things occur to me. But then there are some things that happen which are so strongly reminiscent of actual Greek material—like the Tamerlan Tsarnaev burial controversy. It’s the first thing you think of as a classicist. The refusal to bury the body of the enemy is a culturally fraught situation that calls into question essential cultural values about what it means to be an enemy and whether there is a transcendent morality that applies even to one’s enemies; and this is of course is the central animating question of Sophocles’ Antigone, and so when that started to happen—the Tsarnaev thing—I just thought, I have to write about this. Because it just shows that the Greeks is not just old stuff that we curate because we think it’s good for you. Greek civilization continues to be vibrant because it’s just that they happen to write or make their art in a very elemental way about questions that are animating to all cultures, and so when these things happen today it seems worthwhile pointing out that this has been dealt with in a sort of incredibly distilled way by a great culture, which happens to be the culture to which we are heirs.”

Writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn, on The New Yorker’s Out Loud podcast, talking about Greek tragedy.

(h/t @contextual_life)

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Longreads Best of 2013: Most Urgent Story, Award for Outstanding Reporting

Taken

Sarah Stillman | The New Yorker | August 2013 | 45 minutes (11,405 words)

Raphael Pope-Sussman (@AudacityofPope) is the managing editor of News Genius and a founding co-editor of BKLYNR.

Sarah Stillman’s story describes the use of civil forfeiture, a process by which the state can confiscate individuals’ assets with no due process. I chose this story because it sheds light on a fundamental injustice in our judicial system—one of many ways in which this system has been perverted to deny of basic rights and disenfranchise those who lack substantial financial or social capital. And it’s beautifully told. You can’t ask for more in a long-form story.

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Eva Holland (@evaholland) is a freelance writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory.

I continue to be amazed by Sarah Stillman’s reporting. In “Taken,” she tackles civil forfeiture, an obscure and seemingly dry legal loophole that has enormous implications for police abuse. The story is thorough and compelling, and left me feeling, suddenly, like a topic I’d never heard of before I sat down to read it was an urgent matter, a serious public concern. That’s journalism at its best.

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How To Get Your Own False Confession

“If you decide the suspect is lying, you leave the room and wait for five minutes. Then you return with an official-looking folder. ‘I have in this folder the results of our investigation,’ you say. You remain standing to establish your dominance. ‘After reviewing our results, we have no doubt that you committed the crime. Now, let’s sit down and see what we can do to work this out.’”

“The next phase—Interrogation—involves prodding the suspect toward confession. Whereas before you listened, now you do all the talking. If the suspect denies the accusation, you bat it away. ‘There’s absolutely no doubt this happened,’ you say. ‘Now let’s move forward and see what we can do.’ If he asks to see the folder, you say no. ‘There’ll be time for that later. Now let’s focus on clearing this whole thing up.’

“‘Never allow them to give you denials,’ Senese told us. ‘The key is to shut them up.’”

Douglas Starr, in The New Yorker, on how police have traditionally used The Reid Technique to get confessions—some of which have later turned out to be false.

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Photo: boelaars, Flickr

Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

Happy holidays! Read more…

What Happens When the State Separates a Mother From Her Child

“Sacha Coupet, a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago, who used to work as a guardian ad litem and as a psychologist, worries that the Adoption and Safe Families Act, by promoting ‘adoption as the normative ideal,’ has made it easier to avoid ‘dealing with the enormously complex root causes of child neglect and abuse,’ which may have little to do with parenting skills. ‘There’s this very American notion that mothers should be self-reliant, capable of taking care of their kids without any support, when that’s just not the world we live in,’ she said. She finds that child-welfare agencies often ‘rush to get to the end of the story,’ creating a middle-class fairy tale: ‘a poor kid is rescued by the state, given a new mom and dad, and the slate is wiped clean.’

“Martin Guggenheim, a professor at New York University of Law, who represented children in court for more than a decade, believes that before long we will look back at the policy of ‘banishing children from their birth families’ as a tragic social experiment.”

Rachel Aviv, in The New Yorker (subscription required), on the case of Niveen Ismail, who was deemed to be an unfit mother for her son Adam. Read more on child welfare.

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Photo: gustfischer, Flickr

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Did Dorothy Parker Try to Steal ‘Lolita’ from Nabokov?

Longreads Pick

A literary mystery: Soon after Vladimir Nabokov began shopping his novel Lolita, Dorothy Parker published “Lolita,” a short story in The New Yorker with a very similar story and characters:

Edmund Wilson was a friend Nabokov shared with many people in American literary circles—including Dorothy Parker. Wilson had first learned about Nabokov’s Lolita in the summer of 1953, when he was contemplating an article about Nabokov and asked the novelist whether he had a new project in the works. “Yes,” Nabokov responded, “I will have … кое что [“something”] published by the fall 1954. I am writing nicely. In an atmosphere of great secrecy, I shall show you—when I return east—an amazing book that will be quite ready by then.” A year later, Nabokov offered to let Wilson read his new novel, which he said he considered “to be my best thing in English.”

Published: Nov 24, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,475 words)

Making Marijuana Legal Might Not Save Police Money

“When legal marijuana goes on sale, sometime next spring, the black market will not simply vanish; over-the-counter pot will have to compete with illicit pot. To support the legal market, Kleiman argued, the state must intensify law-enforcement pressure on people who refuse to play by the new rules. A street dealer will have to be arrested in the hope that ‘you will migrate that dealer’s customers into the taxed-and-regulated market.’”

“He left the city councillors with a warning: without intensified law enforcement, pot legalization might not succeed. ‘The illicit market is a paper tiger,’ he concluded. ‘But a paper tiger doesn’t fall over until you push it.’”

Patrick Radden Keefe goes to Washington State for The New Yorker to explore what it really takes to create a legal marijuana economy. Read more on marijuana.

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Photo: eggrole, Flickr

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Reading List: Flannery O'Connor's Prayer Journal

Flannery O'Connor
Photo credit: AP Images

Known for her grotesque short stories, mythic personality and Southern Catholic faith, O’Connor’s prayer journal ends in her 22nd year, before, as Casey N. Cep writes in The New Yorker, “the literature itself was a prayer.”

“Flannery O’Connor’s Desire For God.” (Jen Vafidis, The Daily Beast, November 2013)

O’Connor believed that any fiction that revealed her own character would be inherently awful writing. In her prayer journal, she critiques her own ideas of love and faith and success, covering oatmeal cookies and metaphysics.

“God’s Grandeur: The Prayer Journal of Flannery O’Connor.” (Carlene Bauer, The Virginia Quarterly Review, November 2013)

Intermixed with excerpts from O’Connor’s letters, this tender review focuses on her seemingly one-dimensional attitude toward human love and clarifies its nuance.

“Inheritance and Invention: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal.” (Casey Cep, The New Yorker, November 2013)

Casey N. Cep has fast become one of my new favorite writers. In this excellent review, Cep emphasizes that O’Connor’s prayer journal was a highly internal affair, both a way to get at a more authentic relationship with God and work through her blossoming writing career.

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Photo by Brent Payne

Reading List: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal

Longreads Pick

New story picks from Emily Perper, featuring VQR, The Daily Beast and The New Yorker.

Source: Longreads
Published: Nov 17, 2013

Casey N. Cep on Ariel Levy’s ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review.

There is a kind of loss that our culture does not yet understand. The death of a child is the worst tragedy we can imagine, yet we lack understanding for the hundreds of thousands of women who miscarry every year. Miscarriages are an invisible loss for most women, one they suffer by themselves. Imagine the courage, then, that Ariel Levy summoned to write “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” She not only shares her experience of pregnancy, but also her miscarriage and the sorrow that followed it. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part grief narrative, the essay is remarkable from its opening memories of Levy’s own childhood to its heartbreaking ending: “But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic.”

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