Search Results for: Review

Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Prep,’ 10 Years Later

Sari Botton | Longreads | March 2015

 

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, was first published. And not just because the passage of time, in hindsight, is always kind of baffling, but because I have thought about that book so regularly it seems my brain only just first absorbed it. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo of Cody Spafford by: Geoffrey Smith

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

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The Twisted History of Your Favorite Board Game

Jessica Gross | Longreads | March 2015 | 16 minutes (4,113 words)

 

Mary Pilon spent several years reporting on finance for the Wall Street Journal, and several more reporting on sports for The New York Times. In her first book, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, Pilon debunks the myth—long perpetuated by Parker Brothers—that Monopoly was invented by a man named Charles Darrow during the Great Depression. Really, three decades prior, a woman named Lizzie Magie had created The Landlord’s Game, an obvious ancestor. A surprising twist: Lizzie’s game included a set of rules that was anti-monopoly, in which the object was to spread wealth around. In the 1970s, a professor named Ralph Anspach unknowingly carried Magie’s torch by creating a game called Anti-Monopoly, which rewarded players for trust-busting. It was via a very long lawsuit with Parker Brothers that Anspach unearthed the game’s buried history—and through reporting on a wholly unrelated article that Pilon became aware of it. I spoke with Pilon by phone about this complex, multi-layered story, her reporting and writing process, and the surprising Monopoly tricks she discovered. Read more…

Interview with a Torturer

S-21. Photo by lecercle

Rithy Panh with Christophe Bataille | Translated by John Cullen | The Elimination: A survivor of the Khmer Rouge confronts his past and the commandant of the killing fields | Other Press | February 2013 | 44 minutes (12,355 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book The Elimination, by Rithy Panh, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

Making Promises I Can’t Keep: On Sexual “Purity”

My friend Karla and I bought a book called And the Bride Wore White, a guide to remaining sexually pure. Three chapters of And the Bride Wore White are titled as follows: “Satan’s Big Fat Sex Lies,” “Satan’s Second Big Fat Sex Lie,” and “Satan’s Biggest, Fattest Sex Lie.” The book explained to me why condoms don’t work, why everyone isn’t “doing it,” and that oral sex is just as bad as intercourse. The author painstakingly outlined her own sexual foibles and missteps, honesty that I appreciated. I was ready to learn. I read the book steadily — during study breaks, walking through the hallways, before I went to sleep. Karla and I met at her house and talked about the different chapters while her mother brought us garden-grown beefsteak tomatoes that looked like hearts. We swore to strive for purity in every way possible. No more touching. No more being touched.

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When I was 16, a new associate pastor was rotated into our parish.

His name was Sam Jones.

When he introduced himself to the church youth, I felt a kick deep in my pelvis. He was handsome — with straight sandy hair that jutted out over his forehead and a goatee. He was a little pudgy but only just. He had a wedding ring. And when he shook my hand, he looked directly into my eyes.

Turns out, I’d been waiting for that.

Sam was around a lot. He participated in youth group events, alongside his normal church duties. He gave smart, politically progressive sermons that caused grumblings amongst the older congregants, which delighted me to no end. Within days of arriving he knew my name and used it whenever we ran into one another. Sometimes, I would linger after service to speak to him about his sermon. He talked to me as if I was an adult.

I guess I’d been waiting for that, too.

— In “A Girl’s Guide to Sexual Purity,” a striking essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Carmen Maria Machado explores an adolescence steeped in “purity culture”: sexual assault, conservative youth groups, purity rings, curbed fantasies and an unusually close relationship with her youth pastor. Machado’s essay is a quiet triumph; she seeks to reconcile her current, flourishing adult life with the hurt, pain and confusion of her youth.

In Honor of National Grammar Day: What It Was Like to Copy-Edit Pauline Kael

In honor of National Grammar Day—a relatively recent addition to the holiday mix, established in 2008—we are celebrating the copy-editing of Mary Norris. Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker’s copy department, and in a recent piece for the magazine she reflected on her life in grammar:

There were competent writers on interesting subjects who were just careless enough in their spelling and punctuation to keep a girl occupied. And there were writers whose prose came in so highly polished that I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to read them: John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier! In a way, these were the hardest, because the prose lulled me into complacency. They transcended the office of the copy editor. It was hard to stay alert for opportunities to meddle in an immaculate manuscript, yet if you missed something you couldn’t use that as an excuse. The only thing to do was style the spelling, and even that could be fraught. Oliver Sacks turned out to be attached to the spelling of “sulphur” and “sulphuric” that he remembered from his chemistry experiments as a boy. (The New Yorker spells it less romantically: “sulfur,” “sulfuric.”)

When Pauline Kael typed “prevert” instead of “pervert,” she meant “prevert” (unless she was reviewing something by Jacques Prévert). Luckily, she was kind, and if you changed it she would just change it back and stet it without upbraiding you. Kael revised up until closing, and though we lackeys resented writers who kept changing “doughnut” to “coffee cake” then back to “doughnut” and then “coffee cake” again, because it meant more work for us, Kael’s changes were always improvements. She approached me once with a proof in her hand. She couldn’t figure out how to fix something, and I was the only one around. She knew me from chatting in the ladies’ room on the eighteenth floor. I looked at the proof and made a suggestion, and she was delighted. “You helped me!” she gasped.

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The Bomb in the Bag

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jack El-Hai | Longreads | March 2015 | 14 minutes (3,509 words)

 

 

A New York City stockbroker named M. Leopold was working in his office at 84 Broadway shortly after noon on December 4, 1891, when he sensed vibrations, an odd rumbling. Looking outside, he saw flames and a cloud of smoke shooting out from a window of the Arcade Building directly across the street. A man’s body then flew out through the opening, landing on Broadway. Leopold raised his window and smelled the tang of dynamite. Read more…

‘A Taste of Power’: The Woman Who Led the Black Panther Party

Photo: Platon

Elaine Brown | A Taste of Power, Pantheon | 1992 | 30 minutes (7,440 words)

 

Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, lecturer and singer. In 1968, she joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member. Six years later, Huey Newton appointed her to lead the Party when he went into exile in Cuba. She was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Party.  She is author of A Taste of Power (Pantheon, 1992) and The Condemnation of Little B (Beacon Press, 2002)She is also the Executive Director of the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee and CEO of the newly-formed non-profit organization Oakland & the World Enterprises, Inc.

Her 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power is a story of what it means to be a black woman in America, tracing her life from a lonely girlhood in the ghettos of North Philadelphia to the highest levels of the Black Panther Party’s hierarchy. The Los Angeles Times described the book as “a profound, funny and…heartbreaking American story,” and the New York Times called it “chilling, well written and profoundly entertaining.” Our thanks to Brown for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here. Read more…

Kelly Link Is Beloved, But Still Underrated: A Primer on My Favorite Living Short Story Writer

There’s that urge in adolescence when you feel like you discovered something, maybe a song, a book, or a painting, that resonates so deeply within you, to protect it, and keep it secret and close, so that you feel like you have claim of something wondrous and all your own. And if you share the secret, or if others discover the artist, you may later state that you were listening to the music first, or reading an author first, as if your personal first spark determines the authenticity of an artist. It does not end up being an attractive trait, because we should share good art, because we shouldn’t be snobs, and because artists are responsible for their talent, not the consumers of the work. Luckily, it’s an impulse most seem to grow out of, except for in extreme cases, particularly if that person continues to fly under the radar of mainstream culture for an unexplainable amount of time. Read more…

Robert Oppenheimer on Albert Einstein and the Bomb

Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, 1947: Flickr, James Vaughn

Though I knew Einstein for two or three decades, it was only in the last decade of his life that we were close colleagues and something of friends. But I thought that it might be useful, because I am sure that it is not too soon—and for our generation perhaps almost too late—to start to dispel the clouds of myth and to see the great mountain peak that these clouds hide. As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful.

Late in his life, in connection with his despair over weapons and wars, Einstein said that if he had to live it over again he would be a plumber. This was a balance of seriousness and jest that no one should now attempt to disturb. Believe me, he had no idea of what it was to be a plumber; least of all in the United States, where we have a joke that the typical behavior of this specialist is that he never brings his tools to the scene of the crisis. Einstein brought his tools to his crises; Einstein was a physicist, a natural philosopher, the greatest of our time.

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Einstein is often blamed or praised or credited with these miserable bombs. It is not in my opinion true. The special theory of relativity might not have been beautiful without Einstein; but it would have been a tool for physicists, and by 1932 the experimental evidence for the inter-convertibility of matter and energy which he had predicted was overwhelming. The feasibility of doing anything with this in such a massive way was not clear until seven years later, and then almost by accident. This was not what Einstein really was after. His part was that of creating an intellectual revolution, and discovering more than any scientist of our time how profound were the errors made by men before then. He did write a letter to Roosevelt about atomic energy. I think this was in part his agony at the evil of the Nazis, in part not wanting to harm any one in any way; but I ought to report that that letter had very little effect, and that Einstein himself is really not answerable for all that came later. I believe he so understood it himself.

Robert Oppenheimer speaking about his relationship with Albert Einstein. Oppenheimer’s lecture was delivered at UNESCO House in Paris on December 13, 1965. The text was reprinted in The New York Review of Books the following March.

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