Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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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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It just wasn’t that interesting to read the entries in chronological order, so I started to play around with different ways to arrange them, like dividing them up into categories like “Friends” and “Children” and “Weather” and … I don’t know, “Sweaters.” But all of those categories kept collapsing back into themselves. “Friends” and “Sweaters” belonged together, and so on. Eventually I had one big pile of entries again. The metaphor I’ve been using to describe my eventual assembly process is the “mix tape metaphor.”
— Heidi Julavits kept a meticulous diary as a child. In preparation for a new project, she returned to journaling, only to discover that the journal itself would be her project. LARB interviews Julavits about her book, The Folded Clock, the result of two years’ diary entries, “when my life counted as my job.”

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,345 words)
After getting her start in the Chicago improv scene, Kay Cannon went on to write for 30 Rock—where she was on staff from the very beginning—and New Girl, for which she was also an executive producer. Her debut screenplay, a quirky a cappella comedy, became the hit film Pitch Perfect. The sequel, Pitch Perfect 2, is in theaters now. Cannon and I spoke by phone about why a cappella is so uncool, the movie’s treatment of weight and race, and Cannon’s feelings about her own teeth.
Yeah, I kind of put it out into the universe. I’m around a lot of creative people, so you start to talk about ideas, and maybe somebody helps spark something. I actually think this one was kismet for me, because I had said something to Elizabeth Banks, who’s my friend, just in conversation. A long while later, and separate from what I’d said to her, her husband found out about this book, Mickey Rapkin’s Pitch Perfect, and thought it would make a great movie. So when I got the call from them to say, “Hey, would you be interested in writing this?,” it was just such a wonderful collision. Read more…

Architect Maya Lin was a senior at Yale when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In a 2000 essay for the New York Review of Books—which she began writing around the memorial’s completion in fall 1982 and then put aside for nearly two decades—she reflects on how she came to enter in the competition, and the concepts behind her design. After seeing a notice announcing a competition for a Vietnam veterans memorial, Lin’s funereal architecture seminar decided to adopt the design idea as their class’s final project. In the excerpt below, she delves into the class’s previous assignment:
At that point, not much was known about the actual competition, so for the first half of the assignment we were left without concrete directions for what “they” were looking for or even who “they” were. Instead, we had to determine for ourselves what a Vietnam memorial should be. Since a previous project had been to design a memorial for World War III, I had already begun to ask the simple questions: What exactly is a memorial? What should it do?
My design for a World War III memorial was a tomblike underground structure that I deliberately made to be a very futile and frustrating experience. I remember the professor of the class coming up to me afterward, saying quite angrily, “If I had a brother who died in that war, I would never want to visit this memorial.” I was somewhat puzzled that he didn’t quite understand that World War III would be of such devastation that none of us would be around to visit any memorial, and that my design was instead a pre-war commentary. In asking myself what a memorial to a third world war would be, I came up with a political statement that was meant as a deterrent.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Indeed, for a city that only last summer feared it would be overrun by jihadis, Baghdad feels uncannily lacking in trauma. Perhaps Iraqis have learned how to live with their fears, but ISIS feels more threatening in European capitals than it does in Baghdad. Too complacently, Iraqis talk about ISIS in the past tense, as if its defeat was a foregone conclusion. Young men drive through the streets, playing a pop song mocking ISIS’s “feminine” fighters at full volume on their car stereos. Cafés spill onto sidewalks, their tables filled with families late into the night. Hip eateries have opened around Baghdad University where dressed-up girls go to smoke water pipes. Closed by Saddam Hussein’s faith campaign in the early 1990s, the bars that tentatively reopened in 2010 are now jammed. Bartenders cheer the greater margin of freedom they have gained since Sunni and Shia militias turned their guns on each other instead of on their customers.
–In the New York Review of Books, Nicolas Pelham examines two very different worlds—while ISIS destroys antiquities in northern Iraq, Baghdad sees signs of reconstruction in the south.

Diane Arbus was renowned for photographing people on the margins, such as the mentally challenged, dwarves, giants, sideshow performers, crossdressers, and transsexuals. Was she merely a privileged voyeur of the vulnerable or an unsung champion of sexual and societal minorities? Here are five stories that will help you cut through the controversy. Read more…

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)
I first encountered the work of the memoirist, critic, and journalist Vivian Gornick in graduate school when we were assigned The Situation and the Story, her handbook on personal writing. Gornick explains that the writer must create out of her real self a separate narrative persona. The narrator has wisdom and distance the writer may not, and can craft a meaningful story out of the raw details of life. This slim book cracked open my understanding of what it means to write.
In Fierce Attachments, her 1987 memoir, Gornick wields her narrative persona to construct an incisive, nuanced portrait of her conflicted bond with her mother. She describes the Bronx tenements where she grew up, the early death of her father, the complex relationship with their neighbor Nettie and, at the center of it all, a struggle with her codependent maternal bond. Her new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, a collage of interactions in the New York City streets and with her longtime friend Leonard, is a meditation on friendship, her status as an “Odd Woman”—a second-wave feminist—and her place in urban life.
We met at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Gornick was staying for spring break before she returned to the University of Iowa where she teaches at the nonfiction program. It was sleeting out, and Gornick asked me if her mascara was running, then ordered a mezzo plate and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. She began by telling me how much she hates teaching.
I don’t do it often at all anymore. In this case, they offered me too much money, and I felt I couldn’t say no. But I was wrong: I should have said no.
I can’t live for four months in a place like Iowa City anymore. I’m really too old for that. I’m not even sure I do need the money, but you always feel you need the money. I always taught just to make a living, and I made myself a good teacher of writing; I certainly made myself a good editor. But this time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach. Read more…

Today I was so relieved to get a migraine. For the past thirty-plus years I’ve gotten migraines regularly; they were part of the whether that happened within and without. I would get a migraine after a manic jag. I would get a migraine before a blizzard. Now I rarely get them. I don’t want to say that I miss being in pain, but I do miss the excuse to not give a shit about all the big and small things I often care too much about and that a migraine eradicates. When I have a migraine I do not grieve the shirt that was put in the dryer by accident and its texture forever ruined; I do not feel undermined by the passive-aggressive person at my workplace; I do not blame myself for failing to be in better touch with my grandmother. My body used to have the good sense to give itself a regular break from my mind. It is no longer sensible.
I welcomed a migraine today because it permitted me to forget that it is the end of summer and we are about to leave until basically next summer, and I feel guilty for abandoning my house. I turned out the lights and sat in the dim living room. I thought, This is what it’s like in this house for other nine months of the year. Lightless and empty. I tried to put myself in the house’s position. I tried to feel what the house feels because this house is a people house. I worry, without people, what might become of it.
–From the August 31st entry of writer Heidi Julavits’s year-long diary, The Folded Clock, a project she started in adulthood after rediscovering her childhood diaries, which, she found, read like they were were written by a “paranoid tax auditor.” In her review of The Folded Clock, Eula Biss writes in The New York Times Book Review, “This diary is a record of the interior weather of an adept thinker. In it, the mundane is rendered extraordinary through the alchemy of effortless prose.” The book came out this month from Doubleday.

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