Search Results for: Roger Ebert

Alex Pappademas: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Alex Pappademas is a staff writer for GQ

***

Rules: Nothing not published this year, nothing from GQ, because I work there, and—in the spirit of the assignment—nothing I didn’t first read on my iPhone. (And I realize now, having done this whole thing, that everything on the main list is from a print-based publication, which should not be taken as some kind of a Statement. I still love you, Internet!)

Michael Kruse, Lonely, Stressed and Frustrated: Inside the Mind of the Pinellas Monkey (St. Petersburg Times, May 16, 2010)

Best celebrity profile I read this year, and it’s a write-around. About a monkey. “People who are alone tend to make self-destructive decisions. They might drink too much or not eat right. They start giving up. And the monkey here, he explains, isn’t all that different.”

Mark Harris, The Red Carpet Campaign (New York, 2/7/10)

Reported essay about awards-season swirl and how the pseudo-event sausage of the Academy Awards gets made. The gist: “A good Oscar narrative makes voters feel that, by writing a name on a ballot, they’re completing a satisfying plotline. Only a few of these stories are effective, and every campaign season, movies scramble to own them.” Sprawling yet surgical; managed to make me care, in February, about a subject I’m usually utterly post-give-a-shit about by Thanksgiving.

Rob Tanenbaum, The Playboy Interview: John Mayer (Playboy, March 2010)

Yeah, this is the one where Mayer rendered himself culturally leprous with a few spectacularly ill-advised comments about African-Americans and his weiner— but it’s also the best Q&A with a rock personality I read this year. Speaking as somebody who does this for a living: It’s hard to get something interesting out of a subject who’s reluctant or dumb, but it’s actually way harder to take a quote machine like Mayer— who’s historically used compulsive self-disclosure and meta-acknowledgements of what he knows about the interview process to completely run the table in these situations— somewhere he doesn’t want to go. And, uh, obviously, that’s what happened.

Chris Jones, Roger Ebert: The Essential Man (Esquire, February 2010)

I spent an embarrassing amount of time—like, months—working on a snakebit-from-the-beginning Ebert profile for GQ five years ago. It never ran, mostly because it sucked. Sucked on draft 1, sucked worse on draft 18. (Like Rog once said about certain reviews: “The bad ones take forever.”) So I was all ready to hate this Ebert story just for existing and appearing in a magazine and reminding me of how spectacularly I blew it in 2005—but I didn’t, because it’s so goddamn good it turned off the part of my brain that hates people for being better than me. That part where Ebert gets mad at Disney’s copyright police for taking down YouTube videos of him and Siskel, and because he can’t yell, he makes the font bigger and bigger? “He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now. He’s standing outside on the street corner and he’s arching his back and he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.” Holy fucking shit.

Joe Hagan, The Return of Governor Moonbeam, And Other Hallucinations From The Golden State (New York, October 10, 2010)

Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman contest the California narrative as the state, fiscally gut-shot by the housing collapse, tumbles broke and stoned into the sea; Hagan weaves Jerry’s free-association and Schwarzenegger’s puny-humans ranting and Meg Whitman’s total carpetbagging bullshit in and out of a bunch of elegant set pieces—the Hyatt-ballroom rally, the pot dispensary, David Boies’ beach house. The obvious comparison to make when you’re talking about a story where a writer tries to comprehend weed-hazy apocalyptic California is Joan Didion, but the real bookend for this one—culturally, decade-wise, whatever—is the series of dispatches Hank Stuever filed from L.A. and Sacramento back in 2003, during the nutsoid recall election that led to Schwarzenegger taking office in the first place. (They’re collected in his book OFF RAMP as one essay, “Recallifornia”; the story about Gary Coleman is here. Read those and Joe’s story back to back, groove on the paradox of Californian perma-decline.)

Honorable mentions, aka “I could have done 15 of these”:

Jay Caspian Kang, The High Is Always The Pain and the Pain Is Always the High (The Morning News, 10/8/10), which I read after everybody else put it on their Top 5 lists, so I’m not counting it, because totally arbitrary rules are rules.

Sean Witzke, Emma Peel Sessions 39 – ‘Have you seen the Lady From Shanghai? Orson Welles… that one makes no sense’ (supervillain.wordpress.com, 7/5/10)

Molly Lambert, In Which We Eagerly Await Aaron Sorkin’s Friend Request (thisrecording.com, 10/7/10)

Michaelangelo Matos, eMusic Q&A: Rob Sheffield (17dots, 8/5/10)

Mary HK Choi and Natasha Vargas-Cooper, On ‘New Moon’: ‘Teenage Female Desire Manifest’ (The Awl, 11/20/10)

Oh, and it’s from 2009, but: Chris Stangl, Ghost Train: The Lost Pauline Kael Review of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) (The Exploding Kinetoscope, 7/7/09)

Matthew Aldridge: My Top 5 #longreads, 2010

aldridge:

My Top 5 #longreads of 2010, featuring a thief, a killer, a fraudster, two musicians, and a film critic:

The Art of the Steal Joshuah Bearman, Wired
“Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.”

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man Chris Jones, Esquire
“He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now.”

The Hunted Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker
“Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.”

The Mark of a Masterpiece David Grann, The New Yorker
“Reporters work, in many ways, like authenticators. We encounter people, form intuitions about them, and then attempt to verify these impressions. I began to review Biro’s story. As I probed further, I discovered an underpainting that I had never imagined.”

Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy
Jon Ronson, The Guardian
“I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown make-up who are suffering from depression. Shaggy nods quietly. ‘I get anxiety and shit a lot,’ he says. ‘And reading that stuff people write about us… It hurts.’”

See my (much longer) list of the best long-form journalism of 2009.

Follow @longreads, or search for #longreads on Twitter. Or follow me, @mpaldridge.

From Jason Fagone: my top five @longreads of 2010

jfagone:

  1. Jeff Sharlet, Harper’s, Straight Man’s Burden
  2. Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, Letting Go
  3. Patrick Symmes, Harper’s, Thirty Days as a Cuban
  4. Chris Jones, Esquire, What Happened to Roger Ebert?
  5. Moe Tkacik, Columbia Journalism Review, Look at Me!

Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?

Longreads Pick

The face of the enemy flashed across a 20-foot screen. “That’s right,” Jason Rohrer announced. “It’s Roger Ebert.” There were a few boos, as several hundred people stirred in their seats. The film critic’s cherubic face stared at the audience. “Ebert said video games can’t be art,” Rohrer said. “He issued all of us a direct challenge. And we need to find an answer.”

Published: Nov 13, 2009
Length: 8 minutes (2,132 words)

A Crying Public Shame

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  10 minutes (2,569 words)

“Can I talk to you in private?” No one wants to hear those words. The impulse is to assume you’ve done something egregiously wrong. The expectation is that you are about to be punished. The conviction is so strong that the only good thing about it is that, at least initially, you can suffer without anyone else knowing about it. You might even thank the punisher for coming to you directly, for keeping it between just the two of you. It’s the least someone can do when they are about to theoretically ruin your life.

A lot has been written about privacy online, in terms of information, in terms of being policed. Ecuador is currently rushing to pass a data protection law after a breach affected as many as 20 million people — more than the country’s population. A lot has also been written about callout and cancel culture, about people being targeted and cast off (if only temporarily), their entire history dredged up and subjected to ex post facto judgement; Caroline Flack, the British television presenter who recently committed suicide while being hounded in the press and online amid allegations she had assaulted her on-again, off-again boyfriend, was seen as its latest casualty. But there hasn’t been a lot of talk about the hazier in-between, about interpersonal privacy online, about missteps once dealt with confidentially by a friend or a colleague or a boss, about the discrete errors we make that teach equally discrete lessons so as not to be repeated in public. That’s not how it is anymore, not in a world tied together by social media. Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep. We’re all primed — and able — to admonish institutions and individuals: “Because of social media, marginalized people like myself can express ourselves in a way that was not possible before,” Sarah Hagi wrote in Time last year. “That means racist, sexist, and bigoted behavior or remarks don’t fly like they used to.” 

Which is to say that a lot of white people are fucking up, as usual, but now everyone, including white people and people of color, are publicly vilifying them for it as tech’s unicorn herders cash in on the eternal flames. And it’s even worse than in the scarlet letter days: the more attention the worse the punishment, and humiliation online has the capacity for infinite reach. As Sarah John tweeted after one particular incident that left a person hospitalized, “No one knows how to handle cancel culture versus accountability.”

* * *

“Is that blood?” That was my first question after a friend of mine sent me a message with a link to a few tweets by a person I’d never heard of, the editor-in-chief of a small site. The majority of the site’s staff had just resigned, the impetus being a semi-viral tweet, since deleted, of a DM the editor had sent a Twitter chat in 2016: “I was gonna reply to this with ‘n—a say what?’ Then I was like holy shite that’s racist, I can’t say that on twitter.” According to Robert Daniels at the Balder and Dash blog on rogerebert.com, tweeters, mostly white, piled on — some even called the EIC’s workplace demanding they be fired — before the office-wide resignation. Videos embedded in the tweets I saw showed the editor crying through an apology. (Longreads contacted the editor for comment; they’ve asked to remain anonymous for their health and safety.)

Initially I thought the videos were just a mea culpa, but then I saw a flash of red. Though the details are muddied by a scrubbed social media history, the editor appeared to have harmed themselves. Ex-colleagues rushed to their aid, however, and they were eventually hospitalized. If that wasn’t horrible enough, a filmmaker named Jason Lei Howden decided to avenge the EIC. With scant information, apparently, he targeted individuals on Twitter who weren’t involved in the initial pile-on, specifically blaming two people of color for the crisis — Valerie Complex and Dark Sky Lady, who had not in fact bullied anyone but had blogged about Howden. The official Twitter account of Howden’s new film, Guns Akimbo, got mixed up in the targeted attacks, threatening the release of the film.

There are multiple levels to this that I don’t understand. First, why that DM was released; why didn’t the person simply confront the EIC directly? Second, why did the editor’s staff, people who knew them personally, each issue individual public statements about their resignations into an already-growing pile-on? (I don’t so much wonder about the pile-on itself because I know about the online disinhibition effect, about how the less you know a person online, the more you are willing to destroy them.) Third, why the hell did that filmmaker get involved, and without any information? Why did the white man with all the clout attack a nebulous entity he called “woke twitter” — presumably code for “people of color” — and point a finger at specific individuals while also denying their response to one of the most inflammatory words in the English language (didn’t they realize it was an “ironic joke,” he scoffed)? As Daniels wrote, “This became a cycle of blindspots, and a constant blockage of discussing race, suicide, and alliance.” Why, at no point, did anyone stop to think about the actual people involved, about maybe taking this private, to a place where everything wasn’t telegraphed and distorted? 

Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep.

I had the same question after the BFI/Thirst Aid Kit controversy. In mid-February, the British Film Institute officially announced the monthlong film series THIRST: Female Desire on Screen, curated by film critic Christina Newland and timed to coincide with the release of her first book, She Found It at the Movies (full disclosure: I was asked to participate, but my pitch was not accepted). The promotional image included an illustration of a woman biting her lip, artwork similar to that of three-year-old podcast Thirst Aid Kit (TAK), a show that covers the intersection of pop culture and thirst. Newland later told The Guardian she wondered about the “optics,” but as a freelancer with no say on the final design, she deferred to the BFI. She had in fact twice approached TAK cohost Nichole Perkins to contribute to her book (the podcast’s other cohost is Bim Adewunmi). Perkins told me in an email that she wanted to, but her work load eventually prevented her. And while TAK did share the book’s preorder link, the BFI ultimately failed to include the podcasters in the film series as speakers, or even just as shout-outs in the publicity notes — doubly odd, given that Adewunmi is London-based. Quote-tweeting the BFI’s announcement and tagging both the institute and Newland, TAK responded, “Wow! This sounds great. Hope our invitation arrives soon!”

The predictable result was a Newland pile-on in which she was accused of erasing black women’s work, followed by a TAK pile-on — though Perkins told me her personal account was “full of support and kindness” — for claiming ownership over a term that preceded them. All three women ended up taking time away from Twitter (which is a sacrifice for journalists whose audience depends on social media) though Newland has since returned. I asked Perkins if she had thought about dealing with the situation privately at first. “I did consider reaching out to Christina before quote-tweeting, yes,” she wrote. “I wonder if she considered reaching out to us, especially after she saw the artwork for the season and admittedly noticed ‘something going on with the optics,’ as she is quoted as saying in The Guardian.” Eventually, the BFI contacted Perkins and Adewunmi and released a statement apologizing “for their erasure from the conversation we are hoping to create from this season” and announcing a change of imagery. They also noted that Newland, as a guest programmer, was not responsible for their marketing mistake, though no reason was given for their omission. “I have no idea why the BFI or Ms Newland didn’t include Thirst Aid Kit in the literature about the Thirst season,” Adewunmi wrote to me. “I was glad, however, to see the institution acknowledge that initial erasure, as well as issue an apology, in their released statement.”

At around the same time, a similar situation was unravelling in the food industry. Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices, an anthology edited by former Food Network VP Katherine Alford and NPR’s Kathy Gunst, was published in early February. The collection of more than 50 recipes and essays presents baking as “a way to defend, resist, and protest” and was supposedly inspired by the 2016 election. The hashtag #ragebaking was used to promote the book on social media in January, which brought it to the attention of a woman named Tangerine Jones, whose Instagram followers believed the idea had been stolen from her and alerted her — and the rest of the world. Unprompted by Jones, Alford and Gunst DM’d her to say they had learned the term elsewhere and that the book was “a celebration of this movement.” Jones called them out publicly, publishing their DMs in a Medium essay entitled “The Privilege of Rage,” in which she described how she came up with the concept of rage baking — using the #ragebaking hashtag and the ragebaking.com URL — five years ago, as an outlet for racial injustice. “In my kitchen, I was reminded that I wasn’t powerless in the face of f**kery,” she wrote. Jones’s supporters started a pile-on, her article shared by big names like Rebecca Traister, who had contributed to the collection and requested that her contribution be removed from future editions. 

In an abrupt turn of events, the Jones advocates were promptly confronted with advocates of the book, who redirected the pile-on back at Jones for kicking up a fuss. “It is beyond f**ked up that my questioning the authors’ intentions and actions is being framed as detrimental to the success of other black women,” she tweeted. Their silence resounding, the Simon and Schuster imprint ultimately issued a statement that failed to acknowledge their mistake and instead proposed “in the spirit of communal activism” to include Jones in subsequent printings. Unappeased, the baker called out the “apology” she received privately from Alford and Gunst, who told her they were donating a portion of the proceeds to the causes she included in her post (though their public apology didn’t mention that), and asked if she would be interviewed as part of the reprint. “Throwing black women under the bus is part of White Feminist legacy,” Jones tweeted. “That is not the legacy I stand in, nor will I step in that trap.”


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According to Lisa Nakamura, a University of Michigan professor who studies digital media, race, and intersectionality, cancel culture comes from trying to wrest control in a context in which there is little. It’s almost become a running joke the way Twitter protects right-wing zealots while everyone else gets pummeled by them. It follows then that marginalized populations, the worst hit, would attempt to use the platform to reclaim the power they have so often been denied. But as much as social media may sometimes seem like the only place to claim accountability, it is also the worst place to do it. In a Medium post following their Howden hounding, Dark Sky Lady argued that calling out is not bullying, which is true — but the effects on Twitter are often the same. “The goal of bullying is to destroy,” they wrote. “The goal of calling out and criticizing is to improve.” Online, there appears to be no improvement without destruction in every direction, including the destruction of those seeking change. On one end, a group of white people — the EIC, Newland, Alford, Gunst — was destroyed professionally for erring; on the other were the POC — Perkins, Adewunmi, Jones — who were personally destroyed, whose pain was minimized, whose sympathy was expected when they got none. The anger was undoubtedly justified. Less justified was the lack of responsibility for how it was deployed — publicly, disproportionately, with countless people’s hurt revisited on specific individuals, all at once. 

We know how pile-ons work now; it’s no defense to claim good intentions (or lack of bad intentions). There were few gains for either side in any of these cases, with the biggest going to the social media machine that feeds on public shame and provides no solution, gorging on the pain of everyone involved without actually providing constructive way forward, creating an ever-renewing cycle of suffering. A former intern for the ousted EIC tweeted that she understood the impulse to critique cancel culture and support the editor, but noted that “there is something sad about the fact that my boss used a racial slur, and I am not allowed to criticize.”

* * *

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed author Jon Ronson told Maclean’s in 2015 that one of his biggest fears is being defined by one mistake, and that a number of journalists had basically told him, “I live in terror.” I am no exception. Just recently I experienced a comparatively tame callout on Twitter, and even that moderate critique made me drop an entire book project, wonder about a job opportunity that subsequently dissolved, and second-guess every story idea I’ve had since. The situation was somewhat helpful in making me a more considerate person but was exponentially more helpful in making me anxious and in inspiring hateful fantasies about people I had never met. I am 100 percent certain that the first gain would have been made just as successfully had people spoken to me privately and would have saved me from the second part becoming so extreme that I had to leave social media to recalibrate. The overwhelming sense I’m left with is that if I say something that someone doesn’t like, even something justifiable, my detractors will counter with disproportionate force to make whatever point it is they want to make about an issue that’s larger than just me. What kind of discourse is that which mutes from the start, which turns every disagreement into a fight to the death, which provides no opportunity for anyone to learn from their failures? How do we progress with no space to do it?

“I think we need to remember democracy. When somebody transgresses in a democracy, other people give them their points of view, they tell them what they’ve done wrong, there’s a debate, people listen to each other. That’s how democracy should be,” Ronson told Vox five years ago. “Whereas, on social media, it’s not a democracy. Everybody’s agreeing with each other and approving each other, and then, if somebody transgresses, we disproportionately punish them. We tear them apart, and we don’t want to listen to them.” The payment for us is huge — almost as big as the payout for the tech bros who feign impartiality when their priority is clearly capital and nothing else. This is a punitive environment in which we are treating one another like dogs, shoving each other’s noses into the messes we have made. Offline, people are not defined by the errors they make, but by the changes they make when they are confronted with those errors, a kind of long game that contradicts the very definition of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. The irony of public shaming on social media is that social media itself is the only thing that deserves it.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Longreads Best of 2019: Arts and Culture

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in arts and culture.

Jessica Lynne
Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is co-editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives.

For Magicians Who Die On Stage (jayy dodd., Gay Magazine)

Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World (Magdalena Edwards, Los Angeles Review of Books)

As 2019 comes to a close, I would like to offer up two essays, disparate in conceit, but both worth the return.

First, there is jay dodd’s “For Magicians Who Die on Stage” published by GAY Mag. It is a beautiful meditation on the body, pain and fear, the specters of habit that might loom over our presence in the world, and the material reality of/for Black Trans Women. Using magic as structural metaphor, dodd moves us through her relationship to sobriety and the desires of self-imaging. Here is a line that stays with me: “I don’t believe I am attempting an illusion just by being alive and hurting and outside. Part of being able to be anywhere is crafting a self that feels desirable to me.” In truth though, it might be better to say that every line of this essay has stayed with me. dodd’s sentences are seared with undeniable beauty and clarity.

Secondly, I remain struck by Magdalena Edwards’ essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World,” in which Edwards recounts her experience working with the writer, editor, and Clarice Lispector translator Moser. Edwards, also a Lispector translator, vulnerably details the terms of a book translation project that, begun in deep admiration of Moser, leads to a reckoning with the ethics (or lack thereof) that guide Moser’s engagement with the work of one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Most importantly, in mining the politics of translation, Edwards centers a necessary question that remains critical for my own relationship to lineages of writing and research: “Who gets thanked for their devotion?” Edwards asks. “Who gets credit for their work?”


Jillian Steinhauer
Jillian Steinhauer is a journalist and editor whose writing appears in the New York TimesThe New RepublicThe NationThe Art Newspaper, and other publications. She’s a recipient of a 2019 Arts Writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital.

The Tear Gas Biennial (Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett, Artforum)

Psycho Analysis (Andrea Long Chu, Bookforum)

Within the world of writing, criticism gets short shrift. Sure, maybe I’m just saying that because I’m a critic, but I do believe it’s true, both financially and in terms of how our society assigns value. Despite the ongoing journalism layoffs and consolidation bloodbath, a lot of great arts and culture writing was published this year. I don’t know if these two pieces were the best — I find myself utterly unable to make such judgments — but both are excellent examples of criticism at its best. And both have stuck with me.

The first is technically an opinion piece, but it does the work of criticism by helping readers better see and understand something in the culture — in this case, the debate over how artists in the 2019 Whitney Biennial should respond to protests against the Whitney Museum’s vice chairman Warren Kanders. The situation was pretty specific and probably lost on you if you don’t participate in the contemporary art world, but that doesn’t matter. In “The Tear Gas Biennial,” Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett break down the entanglement of art and politics with incredible clarity and moral force.

The same can be said of “Psycho Analysis,” Andrea Long Chu’s review of Bret Easton Ellis’s new book White. For better or worse, takedowns — let alone good ones — are hard to find these days. This piece reminds me why they’re so delicious when done right. Chu refuses to take Ellis’s bait and get angry. Instead, with equal parts rigor and wit, she entertainingly eviscerates his “deeply needless book.”


Soraya Roberts
Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter (Sasha Bonét, Topic)

Few of the multitude of articles I read each year stick, and the ones that do tend to hail from magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian. It makes sense: Those are places that not only have the resources to nurture the best writers, but also to carve their work into its greatest form. Which is why I didn’t want to pick anything from those places. I realize that Topic magazine isn’t the biggest underdog of all, but it’s a start. And I had never heard of Sasha Bonét before I read The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter. But that’s a story that I remember. It’s a story I sent people. Even just seeing the short description in my Twitter feed — the black artist Camille Billops abandoned her 4-year-old child in the ’60s to pursue her art — I knew it was for me. I, as I’m sure a lot of women artists do, have a particular affinity for stories about women who choose their art first, when they are always expected to do the opposite.

Bonét traces how Billops becomes self actualized as an artist by shedding her past — what she had been taught about black womanhood and its attendant motherhood — including her own daughter. If she hadn’t given up her daughter, the artist says, “I would have died, and if I would have died, she would have died.” In contrast, the piece offers up Billops’ partner, a white man who not only contradicted societal norms of the time, but also provided her the emotional support for her art that she couldn’t provide her own child. Bonét illustrates how Billops, following the initial rejection of her own family, adopts a community of artists as her chosen relatives.

“Her memory collided with the new world she had carefully and meticulously molded,” she writes. The eventual fraught rapprochement of mother and daughter, itself becomes a confluence of emotion and creation. Bonét doesn’t shy away from Billops’ fundamental paradox, which is that she could only nurture that which she chose to create: “Christa had said that meeting her birth mother and her biological family saved her life, but some may argue that it led to her demise.” A devastating but beautiful piece of art about a devastating but beautiful artist.


Danielle A. Jackson
Danielle A. Jackson is a contributing editor at Longreads.

Forgotten: The Things We Lost in Kanye’s Gospel Year (Ashon Crawley, NPR Music)

For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway (Tari Ngangura, Catapult)

Like most people I know, I read a lot of articles and books and listened to a lot of music in 2019, for learning, for practice, for work. When it got to be too much, when work overwhelmed, or the world did, by way of the news or simply duty, I spent a fair amount of time reconnecting to pleasure. I needed to re-learn how to experience the art I love for the sake of sensation, for how it vibrated in my body, rearranged my cells, made me change. I never want to be too busy or too much in despair to remember that my work should be infused with pleasure, too, that what I place on the page, how I think and engage in the world must be infused with heart and feeling. These two pieces immediately struck me and stayed, guiding me through my attempts at staying connected.

First, Ashon Crawley’s examination of Kanye West’s Sunday services and their culmination, the very popular Jesus is King album, is a moving meditation on remembering, or rather, how, in the deluge of so much sensory input and so much hype, we forget precedents, echoes, entire people and eras. We lose the substance, Crawley insists, when we lose the memory. And so, we are so easily deluded, so easily bought. Crawley threads together stories of Zora Neale Hurston, who told us a century ago about the political underpinnings of Black American religious ritual, the author Hans Christian Andersen, and William Seymour, the founder of the American Pentecostal movement, to help us think through the sad, hollow spirit-lessness of Kanye’s endeavor into gospel. More importantly, Crawley proposes that failing to remember costs us in imagination and progress. In his words, “Gospel performance at its inception was the announcement of the practice of different worlds, the fact that alternatives are available, the sounding out of the here and now breaking with the normative and violent world. Sounds of otherwise possibility.”

Tari Ngangura’s Catapult piece “For Black Women, Love is a Dangerous Thing —“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway” is a story and analysis of bassist and vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello’s album Bitter, but also of Ngangura’s first encounter with it, and how the album allowed her to verbalize and move through the feelings and aftermath of an early romantic relationship. I love Ngangura’s insistence on hope through disappointment, her gentle pleas with herself to stay open. I love that a piece of art can help us do that.


Monica Castillo
Monica Castillo is a New York City-based film critic and writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, RogerEbert.com, Remezcla, The Wrap, Hyperallergic and elsewhere.

Earlier this year, while many critics and moviegoers were scratching their heads over the outpouring of love for the uncomfortable interracial buddy movie from Peter Farrelly, Green Book, Wesley Morris made sense of the ordeal by examining the way certain feel-good movies about race like Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy tend to win awards over more challenging and honest works like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The year Lee’s electric film broke out, it wasn’t even up for the Best Picture category at the Oscars. Instead, the award would eventually go to the much more saccharine movie in which Morgan Freeman played a happy-go-lucky driver hired for a racist client played by Jessica Tandy. Through his piece “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies” and a few episodes of his podcast with Jenna Wortham, “Still Processing,” Morris explores the various shortcomings of the form and why its persistence does more harm than good. For starters, these types of movies always prioritize the character arc of the white character who’s maybe a little bit racist but not explicitly so, and over the course of the film, they learn the error of their ways. Unfortunately, that journey comes at the expense of the Black character who must endure the white character’s racist nonsense as they play second fiddle to the white protagonist’s story. Morris finds a through-line in Driving Miss Daisy and to other movies before and after it like Green Book that offers an easy out for white audiences because they’re not as bad as the worst racist villains in the movie. It was the incisive reading I needed — and still need to some extent, as there are still people who want to relitigate my opinion — to back up my own misgivings on the movie. Green Book won the Oscar for Best Picture that night (and picked up a few extra awards as well), so Morris’ piece will likely continue to resonate for many more awards seasons to come.


Krista Stevens
Krista Stevens is a senior editor at Longreads.

Trigger (Michael Hall Texas Monthly)

More than anything, I love music and and I love writing that transcends time. For me, music is fifty percent art and fifty percent magic. During this most trying of years it’s been a salve I turn to (or perhaps tune in to?) every day to find solace as the planet collapses and the news cycle brings to mind Yeats’ center that cannot hold. Of all the pieces I’ve read this year as part of my curation work for Longreads, there’s one that particularly resonated with me as a keen student of guitar and bass. Back in the January 21st edition of Texas Monthly in 2013, Michael Hall wrote a lengthy ode to Trigger, Willy Nelsen’s faithful musical sidekick.

Wille’s been playing that same Martin N-20 classical for 50 years. In it, Hall chronicles Nelsen’s career through the battle scars literally etched into Trigger’s worn neck and battered body as well as the careful tending and regular repair the guitar has undergone in the span of five decades.

Reading the piece, my own small instrument family suddenly meant even more to me and it made me happier about the countless hours I’ve spent studying music. For is there anything more worthwhile than to make a bit of magic?

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.

Toni Morrison, 1931-2019

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison photographed in New York City in 1979. (Photo by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)

To lose Toni Morrison is to lose a great earthly guide. It feels personal, familial, yet I am aware that it is not. She had her own, very full life, with two sons, Harold Ford Morrison and Slade Morrison (who died in 2010), as well as grandchildren and other extended family. Still, I was born into her world. When she died last Monday night after a short illness at 88, Toni Morrison, born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, had published eleven novels, nine volumes of non-fiction, five children’s books (in collaboration with Slade), two plays, a libretto, and more over four-and-a-half decades. After her third novel, Song of Solomon, Morrison left her job at Random House, where, as senior editor, she shepherded work by Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis. She “single-handedly produced a black literary canon,” poet Harmony Holiday wrote as part of a longer reflection. A good amount of this work, including Clifton’s memoir Generations and The Black Book, from 1974, is out of print. The essayist Michael Gonzales told me The Black Book was “a breathtaking tome of black life from the Motherland to the Otherland, sheet music and slave notices, pictures of baptisms and black bodies burning as hordes of white men laughed.” In her foreword to the 35th anniversary edition, Morrison called it a “requirement for our national health.”

My earliest years overlap with the publication of Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz. Morrison won the Pulitzer in 1988 and became a Nobel Laureate in 1993, when I was not yet a teenager. In their tributes, many writers have spoken of a maternal transmission — how they came to Toni Morrison through their mothers, aunts, older sisters. I remember early edition hardcovers with bold plain fonts, laid out in different spots around my first home, protected in slick plastic, tucked under my mother’s arm or in the space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats for a return trip to the library. Morrison was grown-woman business and I burned to be let in on it. I’ll never know the force of what made my mother — born in 1943 to a woman born in Mississippi in 1906 — truly reach for those books and hold on to them the way she did. I’m lucky to have come of age with Toni Morrison fully formed, her books on the typewritten reading lists teachers pass around at the start of the school year, on Oprah’s show, in the glossies. We do not deify the pursuit of learning — we’d pay teachers and journalists more in money and respect if we did. When a person who reads for pleasure and reads for work, who takes the lessons of what they read to heart, who allows the lessons to wash over them is held up as an American celebrity, it is its own kind of coup. This coup made a different country possible. By being born and coming of age in the last years of the 20th century, I received the gift of the challenge Morrison waged on behalf of literacy, learning, and language, and, to some degree, won. 

 

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I finally read my first Toni Morrison novel, Song of Solomon, at 16. Before then I breezed through every book I read for school or fun with a haughty ease, memorizing names and dates and the facts of plots in order to recite them back for tests. I do not know that anything before made me stretch and reach for my intelligence. The village in which the protagonist, Milkman, comes of age, the circle of women who surround him, the language they speak to each other, all had the texture of home. But Morrison’s experimentation with narrative and her conception of time — the gaps and dynamism that make a reader slow down  — were too much for tenth grade me to breezily absorb. It got better the second time; I could understand enough to talk about it. “That, my dear, is called reading,” Morrison said to Oprah when Winfrey phoned about adapting Beloved for the screen. I hadn’t known before then that if something did not come easy, I could struggle with it until it changed me. That it would be meaningful; I could be made myself by the struggle. Not an egoistic pursuit of struggle, not a flirtation with martyrdom or self-deprecation. But a grown-woman struggle made of will and a desire to extend myself. Reading is re-reading, trying means trying again.

There would be other lessons. Sula sees possibility in a matriarchal upbringing and pushes me to recommit to my own women friends. “My sister? I need her,” Morrison told the writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah during their time together. I am thinking of black women like my mother who rushed the bookstores and signings when Toni Morrison began publishing her own work in 1970, before she’d won any of the awards that signaled her significance to white America. I am thinking of the black women she shared the New York Times bestsellers’ list with, like Alice Walker and Terry McMillian, who, together, created a renaissance of black women’s fiction. I am thinking of the poet Sonia Sanchez, one of the early instructors to teach Morrison’s work in the university. I am thinking of the 48 signatories of the January 1988 open letter to the New York Times, published shortly after the publication of Beloved and fresh off the loss of James Baldwin, whose defiance helped write Toni Morrison’s work into posterity. I am thinking of the black women she wrote alongside (“Some of us thrived; some of us died,” she writes in a foreword to Sula), with whom she dreamed:

I was living in Queens while I wrote Sula, commuting to Manhattan to an office job, leaving my children to childminders and the public school in the fall and winter, to my parents in the summer, and was so strapped for money that the condition moved from debilitating stress to hilarity. Every rent payment was an event; every shopping trip a triumph of caution over the restless caution of a staple. The best news was that this was the condition of every other single / separated female parent I knew. The things we traded! Time, food, money, clothes, laughter, memory—and daring. Daring especially, because in the late sixties, with so many dead, detained, or silenced, there could be no turning back simply because there was no “back” back there. Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore. Use what was known and tried and investigate what was not. Write a play, form a theater company, design clothes, write fiction unencumbered by other people’s expectations. Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves. 

Morrison’s passing is an enormous loss. She was a singular writer and editor with a complex body of work, a rigorous, unwieldy mind who wrote and thought us toward a more capacious humanity. She defies any impulse toward summary. She taught us what reading is, and will be teaching it into all the futures we actually have. May we also remember the witnesses who saw her early on. 

For more on Toni Morrison, selected profiles, interviews, and tributes: 

For more of Toni Morrison, a short story and selected essays: 

 

Joss Whedon and the Feminist Pedestal: A Reading List

Jason LaVeris / FilmMagic / Getty Images

I don’t remember when Joss Whedon went from being a garden-variety household name to being someone I refer to on a first-name basis. I quote Joss, I verb Joss, I adjective Joss. As a woman who was once a teenage girl who grew up with Buffy, I’ve internalized more than my fair share of lessons from Our Lady of Buffdom. For the better part of twenty years, I’ve known Joss Whedon as the creator of a feminist hero.

For the better part of the same twenty years, Kai Cole knew Joss Whedon as her partner and husband. He was just Joss to her, too — far more intimately Joss than to any of his first-name-basis-ing fans.

This weekend, Cole wrote about her divorce with Joss in a post on The Wrap. She writes about how, on their honeymoon in England in 1995, she encouraged him to turn his script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer — which had just been misinterpreted as a film — into a television show. Joss apparently hadn’t wanted to work in television anymore. I repeat: As of 1995, Joss Whedon “didn’t want to work in television anymore.”

Yet on March 10, 1997 — two years after their honeymoon — Buffy aired on The WB.

According to Cole’s post, Joss had his first affair on the set of Buffy, and continued to have affairs in secret for fifteen years. I believe Cole. I believe that when she quotes Joss in her post, she is quoting him verbatim. I’ve quoted him verbatim, too.

(Or have I? I wonder, knowing more now than I did then about writers rooms, whether every line I attribute to episodes credited as “Written by Joss Whedon” were, in fact, written by Joss Whedon. Every time Jane Espenson tweets credit for specific lines to specific writers on Once Upon a Time — or retroactively to Buffy quotes — I wonder. Every time I watch UnREAL, a show co-created by Sarah Gertrude Shapiro and Marti Noxon that sends up how often women are discredited in television, I wonder. I don’t doubt that Joss was responsible for the vast majority of what I’d call classic Joss dialogue. I’ll just never know which lines weren’t actually his.)

After I saw Joss Whedon trending and read Cole’s post, I scrolled through other longtime fans’ and non-fans’ reactions on Twitter. Many were not surprised. I texted friends about my own lack of surprise, punctuated with single-tear emojis: “I almost can’t even call it disappointed. As though it would be actually inhuman to expect something else.”

Cole quotes a letter Joss wrote to her when their marriage was falling apart, when he was “done with” lying to her about the truth of his affairs. He invokes the inhuman in his confession, too — or, as is so often the case with Joss, the superhuman: “When I was running ‘Buffy,’ I was surrounded by beautiful, needy, aggressive women. It felt like I had a disease, like something from a Greek myth. Suddenly I am a powerful producer and the world is laid out at my feet and I can’t touch it.”

Was it superhuman for Cole to expect her husband to resist that kind of power? Would Joss have been running Buffy, if he hadn’t married Cole? “I was a powerful influence on the career choices Joss made during the 20 years we were together,” Cole writes. “I kept him grounded, and helped him find the quickest way to the success he so deeply craved. I loved him. And in return, he lied to me.”

As Marianne Eloise notes below in Dazed, it remains to be seen whether Cole’s letter will impact Joss’s career, most notably as director of the upcoming Batgirl. In the meantime, his fans are left to resolve tense, charged questions, none of which have easy answers: How do we come to personal decisions about whether or not we can separate the art from the artist? Will consequences come in the form of a public fall from feminist grace, or cost Joss professional opportunities he’s been enjoying for decades as a self-proclaimed feminist artist? Do feminists, male or female, need to be perfect to count?

In “Lie to Me” — Season 2 Episode 7, “Written by Joss Whedon” — Angel asks Buffy if she loves him. Buffy answers, “I love you. I don’t know if I trust you.” For fans and collaborators who are working through hard questions about love and the loss of trust this week, here is some guided reading on feminism, fandom, and fidelity for Whedonverse enthusiasts:
Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Essays & Criticism

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism.

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Kiese Laymon
A Professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Mississippi, and author of forthcoming memoir, Heavy.

Chicago State of Mind (Derrick Harriell, LA Review of Books)

Derrick Harriell wrote a piece on Chicago State that challenged my understanding of what’s possible with form and content in the long lyric essay. The piece narrativizes educational place and the journey of learning in a beautiful black place that’s trying to survive.


Mira Ptacin
Writer whose work has appeared in NPR, New York Magazine, Guernica, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Tin House, The Rumpus, and more. Author of the memoir Poor Your Soul, and teacher of memoir to women at the Maine Correctional Center.

On Domestic Disobedience (A.N. Devers, The New Republic)

I nominate this sharp-eyed and insightful piece not only because it brilliantly gave us a taste of Claire-Louise Bennett’s collection, but it gives it its proper place in the family tree of nature-writers by blowing “nature-dude” writing out of the water. Devers shows readers how important and triumphantly Bennett’s penmanship is, even in its simplicity: how even writing about the goings-on in the microcosm of a kitchen can dip into great depths to the mind and soul.


Tobias Carroll
Freelance writer, managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn, and author of the books Reel and Transitory.

Advanced Search (Franceska Rouzard, Real Life Magazine)

The right essay can turn an object or memory that I’d previously found mundane into the stuff of gripping narrative. Such is the case here, as Rouzard’s essay opens with descriptions of AOL dial-up in the mid-1990s before segueing into a capsule history of social media, and then extending into broader questions of identity and the sacred. It neatly parallels its author’s life with broader societal questions, keeping the two in perfect balance, and leaving me with a greater sense of both–I can’t ask a great essay to do more than that.


Sara Benincasa
Screenwriter, comedian, and writer, whose books include Agorafabulous, Great, DC Trip, and Real Artists Have Day Jobs.

Southern Fried Pride: What Hattiesburg’s First Pride Means in the Deep South (Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Medium)

The Reverend Jasmine Beach-Ferrara of the United Church of Christ is a wife, a mother, a lesbian, a former college professor (I took her class at Warren Wilson College), and the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality. In this piece, Jasmine takes a road trip across the Deep South to visit Hattiesburg, Mississippi on the occasion of its very first Pride parade. People like Jasmine do the work that all Americans need, whether they accept it or not. In her peaceful, dignified but impassioned manner, she fights for equality for all Americans. That she happens to be a damn fine storyteller is just icing on the deep-fried cake.

More Than Coffee: New York’s Vanishing Diner Culture (George Blecher, The New York Times)

George Blecher paints a wonderful portrait of the diner he loves the most. He also gives a great bit of history about the rise of the diner in New York City. I grew up in New Jersey, which has its own brilliant and thriving diner culture but I lived in New York for many years. The old diner joints there are just as important as George says. Here in my newer home in Los Angeles, a city I love, I’ve got a few diners I can depend on: in Silverlake, Sunset Junction Coffee Shop; in Los Feliz, House of Pies; and more scattered around town. And in Manhattan, at 100th and Broadway, George has the Metro – for now.


Emily Gould
Half of the Coffee House Press imprint and e-bookstore Emily Books, and the author, most recently, of the novel Friendship.

H.: On Heroin and Harm Reduction (Sarah Resnick, n+1)

This year I started teaching writing workshop classes for the first time, and a lot of students want to learn how to do exactly what Sarah Resnick does here–and so do I! Addressed to a relative with a longstanding heroin habit, as well as a host of other problems, Resnick’s essay goes down several different paths, ultimately illuminating a lot of what’s circuitous and maddening about addiction and recovery as they’re currently understood in America, and how harm reduction programs work. The essay’s idiosyncratic, personal approach makes it more convincing than a straightforward argument for a new understanding of addiction could be. Reading it is memorable the way an experience is.

Perhaps Having Kids Saves You From Mourning the Person you Might Have Been (Laura Hazard Owen, Medium and tinyletter)

Owen publishes her essays about parenthood via newsletter as well as on Medium. She’s a journalist with expertise in publishing, tech and the business of journalism, and she brings the same kind of skepticism about received wisdom and eye for detail to her observations about children and parenting culture as she does to her other work. In this one, she takes on the hardest question of all — whether having children could be a mistake, whether parents can allow themselves to think it might have been. She writes about ambition so well. I will always remember the line here about lying on a couch reading in a beautiful house.


Porochista Khakpour
Author of the forthcoming memoir, Sick (Harper Perennial, August 2017) and the novels The Last Illusion, and Sons & Other Flammable Objects, whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, Spin, Slate, and many other publications around the world.

The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Buzzfeed)

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah has become my favorite writer of my generation since I first read her writing about Dave Chappelle in The Believer several years ago (it was a National Magazine Award finalist, collected in The Best American Nonrequired Reading as well as The Believer’s anthology Read Harder). Since then I’ve been a fan of every piece of hers and this chronicle of traveling to the home of James Baldwin in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France is no exception. (It’s a highlight of what I consider one of the best books of the year, the Jesmyn Ward-edited The First This Time). Ghansah writes about Baldwin from all different angles and with every emotion, braided with her own issues of identity. The result is a hard, rough, beautiful diamond of piece, pushed to brilliance from considerable pressure. Ghansah is perhaps one of the only writers we have today who can live up to Baldwin in so many shades of style and substance.

Who are All the Trump Supporters? (George Saunders, The New Yorker)

Saunders has always been one of my favorite writers–it’s physically impossible for me to not read a piece by him–but this classic from last summer will be surely studied for decades if not centuries in the future. Trump and his supporters are a perfect match for Saunders, who although a liberal, often sketches the America Trump supporters know well in his fiction. The trademark Saundersian dark absurdism is a perfect fit for taking to the campaign trail and interviewing Trump supporters at rallies in Arizona, Wisconsin and California. The result is as funny as it frightening. It’s doubly a punch in the gut to read it now that Trump is, somehow, our president-elect.”Although, to me, Trump seems the very opposite of a guardian angel, I thank him for this: I’ve never before imagined America as fragile, as an experiment that could, within my very lifetime, fail,” Saunders writes, and ends almost prophetically: “But I imagine it that way now.”


Emily Perper
Emily Perper is a writer, bookseller and contributing editor at Longreads. In addition to word-work, they’re on the board of The Frederick Center, which provides resources for queer people in central Maryland.

My Son, the Prince of Fashion (Michael Chabon, GQ)

Both of my “best of” personal essay nominations concern the reaches and limits of parenthood. At GQ, novelist Michael Chabon writes about his trip to Paris Men’s Fashion Week, where his young son, 13-year-old Abe, catches a glimpse of his future and yearns after his tribe. I’d never presume to understand the intricacies of childrearing, but Chabon treats his son with a blend of kindness and respect we’d all do well to emulate with the young folks in our own lives–taking their desires, ideas and motivations seriously, and fostering their artistic instincts. And Chabon is simply an excellent writer, blending gentle self-deprecation with astute observation. He doesn’t need paragraphs of adjectives to transport the reader to the studios and runways of Paris. You are there, sweating in the French summer. You are there, checking out the throngs of stylish young men loitering outside shows. And you there, beaming (Guardedly! Be cool!) at your son, when he recognizes and is recognized.

Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid (Rufi Thorpe, Vela)

Novelist Rufi Thorpe upends traditional discourse around the ponderous/condescending/exhausting query, “Can women have it all?” Instead, she makes a distinction between the selfishness of the artist’s way and motherhood’s requisite selflessness. Beyond her powerful and honest observations, the energy behind her language is distinct and exciting; it’s why I’ll read anything she writes. When I read the line “Children are a hinge that only bends one way,” I gasped.


Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Story Wrangler, WordPress.com and Longreads

Champagne in the Cellar (John Temple, The Atlantic)

During the Second World War, John Temple’s parents hid in a basement in Budapest with a French doctor, underneath a home that German soldiers had made their headquarters. After they separated from the doctor, they never reconnected. For the next 70 years, they wondered what had happened to this man who saved their lives. After his parents’ death, Temple turns to the internet to search for this man, known to him only as Dr. Lanusse. This is a touching story about history, family, memory, and — ultimately — a lasting bond between two families, connected by extraordinary circumstances. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photograph by Elinor Carucci for The New Yorker.

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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