Search Results for: Slate

What We Saw in Washington, D.C.

Photos by Nate Gowdy for Longreads and The Stranger.

To cover this past weekend’s inauguration and Women’s March protests in Washington, D.C., Longreads teamed up with Seattle publication The Stranger. Armed with mood rings supplied by their editors, writers Sydney Brownstone and Heidi Groover, along with photographer Nate Gowdy, met those celebrating and protesting, shared their personal perspectives, and examined what it means for the next four years. Here’s their full diary from the events of January 18-23.

Read more…

When Beauty Brings Dishonor: Beauty Shopping With My Mother, A Former Cultural Revolution Red Guard

Photo by Max Braun (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In Racked, Noël Duan — a former beauty editor — reflects on the lives of her mother and her laolao (maternal grandmother) as she examines the differences between the definition of beauty in America and in China during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where an “unadorned woman was a symbol of liberation from a patriarchal capitalist system.”

In second grade, when I was assigned an essay about my grandparents, I mistakenly wrote about how soft my laolao’s hands were — I just assumed they were that way because of how soft-spoken and small she was. “This is a beautiful essay. I’ll translate it for Laolao,” Mom said after reading it. “But you should know that her hands aren’t soft at all.” Laolao’s hands, as Mom explained to me, are calloused and blistered and rough from years of raising her three children and her children’s children while putting food on the table, from hand-pulled noodles to congee, no matter how little money the family had. In later years, when visiting China, I watched Laolao’s hands peel and bleed from years of hand-washing her children’s — and grandchildren’s — clothes in industrial-strength lye soap, cooking dinners for extended families every night, and mending worn blankets to keep her husband warm in the brittle winters of Western China. Who had time for beauty when there was a family to feed? Laolao always made sure we were already eating before she sat down at the table herself.

In America, we make the mistake of confusing a beautiful face for virtue — the “What is beautiful is good” fallacy. But women who grew up in the Cultural Revolution were taught the opposite. It’s dishonorable to be beautiful, because how hard in a patriarchal society do you then have to work? It’s frivolous and wasteful to have beautiful things, because why wouldn’t you save the money for something else? And if you happened to be beautiful, you had to serve utility as a dancer or actress.

Read the story

What We Get Wrong about Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt
Photo: AP Images

Within months of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, a political investigator with the Berlin police detained twenty-six-year-old scholar Hannah Arendt and politely interrogated her for more than a week. Upon her release, she devised a plan to leave Germany and headed east with her mother. Taking refuge in the Erzgebirge Mountains, the two women approached the Czech border without travel papers.

Arendt had already helped other Jews escape the country, sheltering some in her own apartment, and was familiar with escape networks. In broad daylight, mother and daughter entered a house that straddled the border, waiting until nighttime to walk out the back door on their way to Prague. Read more…

When a YouTube Video Almost Made the Modular Smartphone Happen

Image by Maurizio Pesce (CC BY 2.0)

Failure stories come in two distinct flavors: “We almost had it all!” and schadenfreude. At VentureBeat, Harrison Weber’s tale of Google’s suspended project to build a modular smartphone is distinctly of the first type. It channels the excitement of the people who tried to make it happen — and the wistfulness of those who find it hard to let go. More than anything else, though, it shows how hard it to translate a cool, lightbulb-moment idea into a viable product.

“I had an old camera that I broke and I couldn’t really fix it. So I took it apart and I noticed all the components were still pretty good, except for one thing.”

“I thought: Isn’t that weird that we throw everything away just because one part is broken?” said Hakkens.

“At first, I wanted to make a phone that lasts 100 years. But then I realized, I kind of like technology — that it evolves, that it gets better. The only downside is that after it gets better, we throw everything away. I started looking into it, and it generates a lot of e-waste… I mean now we have some devices, but in the future it’s thermostats, fridges, microwaves — everything will be connected. So what if a chip breaks in your fridge? Do you just throw the entire thing away?”

The Phonebloks story spread like wildfire. Gadget blogs covered it en masse, hordes of supporters signed up to support, tweet, and share the idea with a viral marketing tool called Thunderclap, and developers fired back, saying it couldn’t be done — that it was impossible to build. Perhaps they had a point.

Read the story

The Changing Face of Reindeer Herding

Mr Ingold wrote about the importance of the word talo. Roughly translated, it means house. But it also has a deeper meaning. When Finnish herders are raised in a talo, it is not simply that they grow up in one place. “A house,” explains Mr Ingold, “is a total establishment, an organic unity of place and people, cumulatively built up through the work of generations.” It is not something that can be shaken off. When Aarne says that herders are “born” to do it he is not being flippant. Like his father, he feels he had little choice. Nor does he regret that. Raisa explains that “this is what we want to do. There’s a richness to this wild way of life.”

That remains true even as threats from climate change, logging and other signs of expanding human footprints impinge on their vast emptiness. But throughout the centuries herders have adapted to changes wrought from outside. They have embraced GPS tracking, all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and drones.

The Economist goes into the frigid north to examine how climate change and economics have endangered the centuries-old relationship between Finn and reindeer.

Read the story

Against Confession: On Intersectional Feminism, Radical Catholicism, and Redefining Remorse

Laura Goode | Longreads | January 2017 | 23 minutes (5,818 words)

 

In the last formal confession I remember having delivered, I sat face-to-face in the room with a priest: the confessional booth and screen, while useful for dramatic staging in mob cinema, has mostly fallen out of the contemporary Catholic architecture. I was 10 or 12, and mostly absorbed the time with meditations on curse words and disobedience to my mother, too skittish to relieve myself of what I knew to be my more impure concerns, those having to do with other people’s private parts. There was nothing remarkable about this last confession, except for my discomfort with its blocking: why did God suppose that I, a young girl, facing this elder male stranger alone, would feel safe enough to truly unburden myself, or to be relieved by such an unburdening? After this event, I gratefully allied myself with my father’s discomfort with the sacrament—he has always felt a license to improvise within the choreography of the sacraments that my more faithful mother eschews—and I would not confess.

I was a senior in high school in suburban Minneapolis in 2002, when The Boston Globe published the sea-changing evidence of rampant sex abuse, and institutional harboring of abusers, within the Catholic church. One shudders to imagine a readier justification to depart from one’s own native faith, and the fact that it arrived in my defiant throes of late adolescence only accelerated my exit out the papal door. Catholicism was guilty of cloaking the wolf, so I would no longer call myself a Catholic. I traipsed off to college prepared to locate and adopt a more unimpeachable moral code, as convinced as any other 18-year-old that I was in possession of some sacred and unique ethical ambition absent from my parents.

Tellingly, since relieving myself of the formal sacrament of reconciliation, I have pursued no dialectical gesture more compulsively than the informal “confession.” Especially in those tender, feckless years that begin adulthood, I have always apprenticed myself to my own peccadillos, constantly working them over in thought, diary and conversation; I am constantly forcing myself to think, write, or speak at least some of the feelings and behaviors that disturb me the most. I am the partygoer forever in pursuit of the inappropriate comment everyone else is thinking. I am the stranger who will tell you the secret she’s never told anyone else; I can keep any secret but my own. Sometimes I inflect it with humor, sometimes rue; here, candor, there, shock value. I fetishize the intimacy of revelation between unlikely interlocutors. I am no evangelist, but O! paradox enamors me. Read more…

‘See What Y’All Can Work Out’: The State of Empathy in Charleston

Survivor Polly Sheppard on the stand during the Dylann Roof shooting trial. Illustration by Jerry McJunkins

Shani Gilchrist and Alison Kinney | Longreads | January 2017 | 31 minutes (7,836 words)

 

The sentencing phase of Emanuel AME Church shooter Dylann Roof’s trial for racially-motivated mass murder is scheduled to begin on Wednesday, January 4th, 2017. The white supremacist’s trial brought together two writers of color—Shani Gilchrist, one of a small group of black reporters in the press room, and Alison Kinney, an Asian-American living in New York—who, prior to the trial, knew each other only from Facebook. Here they write about their experience in Charleston. They write about banding together to get better access to the story; about resisting white supremacy with creative collaboration and strategic silence; about working together to figure out the ethical responsibility of storytelling now—and to find hope and friendship in their conversations.

1. We write:

On June 17, 2015, a Bible study group met at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Their text was Mark 4:16-20, the parable of the sower, a narrative of words scattered, heard, received, or failing, of deep-rooted faith that withstands trouble and persecution. The parishioners welcomed a newcomer, who sat down with them, listened, reflected, and then opened fire.

Of the twelve parishioners, three survived: Felicia Sanders, her little granddaughter, and Polly Sheppard. Nine died: their names were the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel W. Lance, the Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., and Myra Thompson.

A year-and-a-half later, at Charleston’s J. Waties Waring Judicial Center (named for the civil rights judge who first declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional), the two of us, Shani Gilchrist and Alison Kinney, would briefly note the scripture. We were at the courthouse, listening for the most incidental revelation, not only on the trial of Dylann Storm Roof, who would be found guilty on 33 counts of federal hate crimes, including hate crimes resulting in death, but also on the national crisis of bigotry and empathy. From the courtroom arguments and testimony, we gleaned bits of procedure, too: when Judge Gergel told the counsel for defense and prosecution to reach a resolution on the evidence, “I would direct you two to sit down together today and see what y’all can work out.”

We heard it as a directive to the nation, and to us—two writers who’d met through a Facebook group, whose prior interactions were limited to reading each other’s work there—sitting down together for the first time in real life, in coffee shops and in the courtroom, to work it out. We’d already found that we were both people who knew within five minutes if we were going to like someone, both people with loquacious, goofy senses of humor that masked our shyness. As writers on race, social justice, and culture, we were also figuring out how to participate in our country’s post-election dialogue. Some of the people we’re supposed to interview and interact with pose dangerous threats to us—although the invitations and threats we receive are not commensurate, as Shani is black, and Alison is Asian-American.

Another random moment: on the day before opening statements, Roof, who’d chosen to self-represent, reinstated his attorneys. While the courtroom deputy, Eunice Ravenel-Bright, a dark-skinned woman with a serious face whom everyone referred to as Mrs. Ravenel, readied a Bible for him to swear upon, he stood up casually, unshackled, as he’d remain for the duration, and started to make his way to the podium. There was almost a sideways swagger to his walk. Mrs. Ravenel’s body stiffened. The consummate professional, she said what sounded like, “No, Mr. Roof. You wait. Will the U.S. Marshal accompany the defendant to the podium?” But what the entire gallery heard in their heads was probably more like, “Hell no. Don’t get near me or my judge without someone with you who can legally knock you on your ass if you even look at me funny.”

An accused mass murderer. An entitled, lazy kid who was a proven danger to society. Unshackled and unaccompanied. In a courtroom. It’s an image that does not set right. An image that shatters the illusion of safety: safety depends here not on the law, but on rebuke, minding, and vigilance—not by the marshals, but by the person subject to the greatest threat. Read more…

The Great A.I. Awakening

Longreads Pick

The story of how Google’s developed artificial intelligence to vastly improve its translation service, Google Translate, and what machine learning might be able to do in the near future.

Published: Dec 14, 2016
Length: 60 minutes (15,174 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: sashko

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2016: Under-Recognized Stories

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

* * *

Michael J. Mooney
Dallas-based freelance writer, co-director of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

You Are Not Going to Die Out Here: A Woman’s Terrifying Night in the Chesapeake (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post)

I saw this story posted and shared a few times when it first ran, but in the middle of an insane election cycle, it didn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. This is the tale of Lauren Connor, a woman who fell off a boat and disappeared amid the crashing waves of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s about the search to find her, by both authorities and her boyfriend, and about a woman whose life had prepared her perfectly for the kinds of challenges that would overwhelm most of us. This is a deadline narrative, but it’s crafted so well—weaving in background and character development at just the right moments, giving readers so many reasons to care—that you couldn’t stop reading if you wanted to.


Kara Platoni
A science reporter from Oakland, California, who teaches at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of We Have the Technology, a book about biohacking.

Michelle’s Case (Annie Brown, California Sunday)

A clear-eyed, thought-provoking retelling of Michelle-Lael Norsworthy’s long legal battle in hope of becoming the first American to receive sex-reassignment surgery while in prison. Her lawyers argued that the surgery was medically necessary and withholding it violated the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But, they argued, rather than grant the surgery and set a legal precedent, the Department of Corrections instead ordered her parole. The piece is a nuanced take on what it’s like to transition in prison—at least 400 California inmates were taking hormone replacement therapy when the article was published in May—where trans women are vulnerable to sexual assault and survivors are placed in a kind of solitary confinement, stuck in limbo in a prison system where it’s unsafe for them to live with men, but they are generally not allowed to live with women. And it asks a bigger question: What kind of medical care must the state cover?


Azmat Khan
Investigative Reporter, New America Future of War Fellow.

Nameplate Necklaces: This Shit Is For Us (Collier Meyerson, Fusion)

At first, it may seem like a simple essay about cultural appropriation, but this opus on the nameplate necklace is so much more than that. It is a beautiful ode to black and brown fashion. It is a moving history of how unique names became a form of political resistance to white supremacy. And it is the biting reality check Carrie Bradshaw so desperately needed. Read more…