Search Results for: Spin

In Conversation: Antonin Scalia

Longreads Pick

The Supreme Court justice on his legacy, gay rights, his belief in the Devil, and the TV show “Duck Dynasty”:

“Maybe the world is spinning toward a wider acceptance of homosexual rights, and here’s Scalia, standing athwart it. At least standing athwart it as a constitutional entitlement. But I have never been custodian of my legacy. When I’m dead and gone, I’ll either be sublimely happy or terribly unhappy.

You believe in heaven and hell?
Oh, of course I do. Don’t you believe in heaven and hell?

No.
Oh, my.

Does that mean I’m not going?
[Laughing.] Unfortunately not!”

Published: Oct 6, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,354 words)

Reading List: The Writing Life vs. The Blinking Cursor

Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Over the weekend, I attended the annual National Book Festival in Washington D.C. One of the highlights was Tamora Pierce’s presentation. Pierce is a young adult fantasy lit author, known for her great writing and awesome female characters. The tent was packed with fans of all ages, and once the Q&A microphones were opened, tween girls rushed to be the first in line. One girl, probably six or seven years old, asked how Mrs. Pierce dealt with writer’s block. Precocious, indeed, but that moment made me think—almost every aspiring writer struggles with the terror of a blank mind and a blank page, from time to time. In every panel I attended over the weekend, at least one person asked about writer’s block. Get out your pencils, punks.

1. “Getting Unstuck” (Caitlin, Rookie, November 2012) features ideas for overcoming writer’s block from many writers, including Joss Whedon, Adrian Tomine and Fran Lebowitz.

2. “The Daily Routines of Famous Writers,” compiled by Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova, is great for its anecdotal charm, as well as its practical advice. Don’t be surprised if you feel envious.

3. In “Ask the Writing Teacher: Story Arc(s),” author and teacher Edan Lepucki expounds upon her understanding of the definition and purpose of story arc, with a little help from Eileen Myles, Margaret Atwood and Orange is the New Black. Includes writing exercises and reading suggestions.

4. The beautiful “A Writer’s Room” (John Spinks, New York Times, August 2013) slideshow includes pictures of the authors in their treasured workspaces, as well as their meditations on writing and the books they’re publishing this fall.

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Caught Up in the Cult Wars: Confessions of a New Religious Movement Researcher

Susan J. Palmer | University of Toronto Press | 2001 | 38 minutes (9,328 words)

The below article comes recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick, and we’d like to thank the author, Susan J. Palmer, for allowing us to share it with the Longreads community.  Read more…

On Muppets & Merchandise: How Jim Henson Turned His Art into a Business

Photo by Eva Rinaldi

Elizabeth Hyde Stevens | Make Art Make Money | September 2013 | 17 minutes (4,102 words)

 

In 2011, Longreads highlighted an essay called “Weekend at Kermie’s,” by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens, published by The Awl. Stevens is now back with a new Muppet-inspired Kindle Serial called “Make Art Make Money,” part how-to, part Jim Henson history. Below is the opening chapter. Our thanks to Stevens and Amazon Publishing for sharing this with the Longreads community. Read more…

The Social Life of Genes

Longreads Pick

How our environment, our sense of support, and our feelings of loneliness can activate or turn off specific genes in our bodies that affect things like how we fight or heal wounds. An examination of the “social science of genetics”:

“Scientists have known for decades that genes can vary their level of activity, as if controlled by dimmer switches. Most cells in your body contain every one of your 22,000 or so genes. But in any given cell at any given time, only a tiny percentage of those genes is active, sending out chemical messages that affect the activity of the cell. This variable gene activity, called gene expression, is how your body does most of its work.

“Sometimes these turns of the dimmer switch correspond to basic biological events, as when you develop tissues in the womb, enter puberty, or stop growing. At other times gene activity cranks up or spins down in response to changes in your environment. Thus certain genes switch on to fight infection or heal your wounds—or, running amok, give you cancer or burn your brain with fever. Changes in gene expression can make you thin, fat, or strikingly different from your supposedly identical twin. When it comes down to it, really, genes don’t make you who you are. Gene expression does. And gene expression varies depending on the life you live.”

Published: Sep 3, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,182 words)

The Woman Who Counted Fish

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jon Mooallem | Wild Ones, Penguin Press | May 2013 | 11 minutes (2,605 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of Jon Mooallem’s book Wild Ones, as recommended by Maria Popova. Read more…

Longreads Guest Pick: Shannon Proudfoot on 'The King Of The Ferret Leggers'

Shannon Proudfoot is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine. Previously, she was a national writer with Postmedia News.

“It might not constitute a genre, exactly, but my favorite sort of journalism dives into obscure subcultures with their own rules, etiquette, heroes and hacks. This story is one of my all-time favorites of that type. The main character is unforgettable, perfectly drawn with a few brilliant details and vernacular dialogue. And the writing just crackles—clever, cheeky and nimble, but never getting in the way. Read this snippet and just try not to smirk: ‘Reg pulled the now quite embittered-looking ferret out of his mouth and stuffed it and another ferret into his pants. He cinched his belt tight, clenched his fists at his sides, and gazed up into the gray Yorkshire firmament in what I guessed could only be a gesture of prayer.’ It would have been easy to go for the cheap laugh at the expense of the odd in a story like this, but Donald Katz’s obvious affection for his subject pushes this into a sublime little realm for me.”

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‘My Body Stopped Speaking to Me’: The First-Person Account of a Near-Death Experience

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.

“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995. Read more…

Our Longreads Member Pick: A Look Back at New York Woman Magazine

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This week a debate erupted about “serious journalism” in women’s magazines—and as part of this discussion, several magazine editors reflected fondly on the work of the late, great magazine New York Woman and its founding editor, Betsy Carter. New York Woman was published from 1986-1992; Carter went on to work for O, the Oprah Magazine and write books including Nothing to Fall Back On: The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist. She also just finished her fourth novel. 

We asked Carter to share a story from the New York Woman archives, and she chose “The Jogger D.A.,” by Victoria Balfour, from 1991. Carter explains: 

“It was the harrowing New York crime story of the late eighties and every woman’s nightmare: a twenty-nine-year old female investment banker brutally beaten, raped and left for dead in a remote area of Central Park. Eventually, five teenage boys from Harlem were found guilty and sent to jail. As a monthly magazine with a three month lead time on a story that was in the papers nearly every day, New York Woman decided to focus on ‘The Jogger D.A.,’ the prosecutor in the case, Liz Lederer, a young newcomer to the DA’s office.

“Now, twenty-two years later, the story has re-emerged with the discovery that the five young men were wrongfully convicted, and Liz Lederer has been vilified for coercing false confessions from those men. This piece revisits the hysteria that surrounded that crime, and the pressure on the woman in the DA’s office to get it solved. It’s also an example of how, at New York Woman, we tried to find our own take on a story of the moment, and how we gave it the kind of time and space it warranted.

“The goal of New York Woman was to speak to women of the city much as they would speak among themselves. We did investigative pieces, cartoons, reviews, fiction, humor—using the best writers in the city. No topic was off-limits. We tried to capture whatever was in the air and give it a unique spin that spoke to our readers.”

 
Thanks to Betsy and Victoria for sharing this story with Longreads Members.

Malrotation

Drew Magary | Someone Could Get Hurt, Gotham Books | 2013 | 10 minutes (2,520 words)

For our Longreads Member Pick, here is the first chapter from Drew Magary‘s memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for Deadspin and GQ, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together:

I was in the middle of writing a second novel that would hopefully earn me a billion dollars in movie franchise royalties when my third kid was born. There were complications. I find that ‘complications’ is the universal euphemism for anything bad that happens during the birth and early life of an infant. It can mean anything, really: birth defects, mental illness, a lost limb, an ambulance driven into a tree, etc. 
 
If you’ve ever experienced complications with a baby, you know that it immediately makes any other difficulty you’ve ever experienced in life seem harmless by comparison. Your life can be neatly separated into Before Complications and After Complications. They always say that having a kid changes you, but that’s a lie. It’s having a kid on the brink of dying that changes you.
 
So I had to table the novel for a bit and get this out of my system. I had to write about my third kid, and I had to write about my family as a whole, about this whole unit of people that needed to be strong enough to go through what we were about to go through. And that’s how Someone Could Get Hurt came to be. This is the first chapter.
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Our third child was born seven weeks premature with a condition known as intestinal malrotation. The doctor explained it like this: When you’re in your mom’s uterus, your intestines initially form outside of your body. Then they retreat into your abdomen, twist, and your abdomen seals up around them. If you’re unfortunate enough to be born with this condition (5,000-to-1 odds, though more common in premature infants), that crucial twist never occurs, and you can end up with something called a volvulus, which sounds like a kind of Swedish superhero but is actually a dangerous condition in which the intestines get kinked, like a garden hose, and the path of digestion is cut off, restricting blood flow. You must have your belly split open so that everything can be put back in the proper order, or else you will die. If you’re among the lucky souls born with properly ordered bowels, you should thank those bowels the next time they process a two-pound burrito on your behalf.

They found out that the baby had the condition when he began vomiting thick green fluid after his first feedings. The bile that he secreted to digest his formula was getting clogged in his intestines and was gurgling back up into his stomach, causing him to vomit over and over again. They placed a tube down into his stomach to suck up all the excess fluid and hoped the issue would resolve itself. Nights before the surgery, I stood by his isolette—an enclosed plastic incubator— in the NICU and stared at the output of that tube, praying that it would turn yellow or clear, hoping to God that he’d be spared the knife and that I’d never see that horrible green shit come out of him again. But I did see it again. I would come to the NICU during the day and ask the nurses if he barfed, my fingers crossed tight enough to break. And they often said yes, he had an “emesis.” The first time I heard the word, I asked them if “emesis” meant barf, and when they said that it did, I wished they had just said that he had barfed instead.

The vomiting wouldn’t stop. His insides weren’t going to just naturally fall back into place. He had to be opened. No one makes it through life unscathed, but you usually get a grace period at the start. My son would not be so lucky. At the time, he weighed five pounds—large for a preemie, but still just five itty-bitty pounds. No heavier than a dictionary. I wondered how the surgeons’ blades and instruments would fit inside him. Such a large surgery for such a tiny body, I thought.

The surgeon was talking us through the procedure as we all stood by the door to the OR. He had only a few moments to speak with us before our son had to go under. To wait any longer risked killing him.

“What’s the survival rate for this surgery?” I asked the surgeon.

“If I don’t find any salvageable bowel, the survival rate is zero.” Doctors never explicitly say your loved one will die. They say things like “the survival rate is zero.” It’s up to you to jump to the proper conclusion. “But if the bowel is healthy,” he said, “the survival rate is one hundred percent.” He suspected my son’s bowels were still viable, but he didn’t rule out the possibility that there would be “dusky bowels,” parts of the intestine that had lost blood flow permanently and were now dead and would have to be removed. Forever. I had never heard the term “dusky bowels” before. It sounded like a good name for a fantasy football team.

The doctor needed our consent before going ahead with the surgery. We didn’t hesitate for an instant. In fact, we felt as if we had wasted enough of his time already. It’s amazing how quickly you’ll agree to a procedure like this once you hear talk of survival rates. You take a leap of faith. You trust that a total stranger will know how to properly disembowel your child because you do not. He was a nice-looking doctor. He seemed to know what he was talking about. Fuck it. I signed the forms.

The doctor rushed back into the operating room to prepare, and a very nice NICU nurse named Kathy led my wife and me to our son, to see him one final time before he went to have his guts torn out. They had knocked him out with an anesthetic, so he was sleeping peacefully by the time we got there. He was in an isolette and had wires running from his mouth, chest, stomach, and foot. He looked like an IED. He was surrounded by a phalanx of adults who were all determined to prevent his death because the death of a child is the saddest thing in the world. He wasn’t old enough or awake enough to know that he didn’t want to die. We did all that worrying for him. Kathy opened the top of the isolette so we could kiss him on the head—possibly for the last time, possibly just another kiss in an entire lifetime of them.

His head was coated with a shocking mass of black hair. When a baby is born premature, it still has plenty of the mother’s hormones racing through its system. This can cause it to have enlarged genitals, lactating breasts (!!!), or a healthy head of hair. That hair eventually falls out and is replaced with new hair. But for now, our son still had hair long enough to get a side gig as a bassist. I bent down and let my nose glide along the soft fur, alternating between taking in his scent and kissing him on the head. I wanted to retain as much of the sensation as I could.

Kathy led my wife and me back out to the general surgical waiting room. They had updates on the status of all operations listed on a big monitor at the far end of the room. We could check on our son’s intestines like we were trying to catch a connecting flight to Milwaukee. The second I saw my son’s doctor and room number up on the board, I got a morbid thrill. THERE’S MY BOY UP ON THE TEEVEE! Then reality set back in and I could feel my heart withering. There were dozens of other people sitting in the room, and I felt exposed, naked, without any armor to protect myself. I just wanted to find somewhere for my wife and me to cry ourselves sick. Kathy saw us visibly breaking down in front of everyone and stole us into a private waiting room. I sat down next to my wife and stared off into space because the rest of the world seemed empty to me at the moment. Desolate. We took turns telling each other it was going to be okay because it helps in times of grief when someone you love tells you everything is going to be all right, even when you suspect that it’s a lie.

All I could think about was my son dying. I tried my best to avoid it but I couldn’t. I wondered what would happen if his intestines were deemed unsalvageable. Do they euthanize your child? Do they just leave him until he starves to death because he can’t fully digest anything? They can’t do that. The world couldn’t possibly be that cruel, could it? I envisioned being escorted into the morgue and holding a swaddled, nine-day-old corpse in my hands, and how that would make me feel. He wasn’t dead yet, but I had a clear idea of how badly it would hurt. My heart was firmly clenched to absorb the blow. I thought about whether we’d have a funeral for him. I didn’t think we would because that would just be too awful to put our friends and family through. You can’t herd people into a room and force them to stare at a tiny coffin for an hour.

I wondered if he could donate his organs as a premature infant. I wondered if we would bury him or cremate him, and where we might scatter his ashes. Maybe the Atlantic Ocean. He might like that. Maybe we would get a dog if he passed away, a little dog named Otis or Kirby that would bark and yip and shit all over the place and help us forget about this. That might help. Maybe nothing would help.

Maybe our marriage wouldn’t survive if he died. We’d been married nine years, together for twelve. I remember the night we met, in some shitty Manhattan bar that no longer exists. I staggered out of the john and there she was, drunk and smiling, as if she had been planted there by some magnificent benefactor. It took five minutes for me to get her full name right because it was an obscure Armenian name and I was too shitfaced to pronounce obscure Armenian names. God, I loved her. Only an act of extraordinary circumstances could possibly end us: a war, a natural disaster, an unspeakable crime, etc. And as we waited, I thought that perhaps these were those extraordinary circumstances. Maybe we would look at each other after this and see nothing more than a reminder of what was lost. Maybe we would drift apart and I would become a filthy hobo, working odd jobs and dabbling in surfing and heroin.

I couldn’t stop crying. My wife stood in front of me and I wrapped my arms around her waist and buried my head in her stomach. I told her all my fears in hopes that it would make us both feel better. I wanted to find a way through the grief, to emerge on the other side in a state of grace, knowing I was strong enough to live on regardless of what happened. But I still wasn’t certain.

And then my wife farted—a remarkably well-timed fart that made me switch from tears to laughter right away. God bless that fart. I needed that fart. I asked her to do it again and she declined.

She went out for water, and a different nurse, who turned out to be a real shithead (every hospital has its share of dud nurses), told us that we were being kicked out of the private room. No more VIP treatment for us. When my wife came back in, we both took turns calling the shithead nurse a shithead behind her back, and then we headed out to the main waiting room. The receptionist said there was a phone call for us from the OR with an update. The doctor had promised us a mid-surgery update to let us know if the bowel was viable or not—if our son was going to live or die. This was that phone call. The receptionist held out the receiver for me.

I have a chronic case of Walter Mitty syndrome. I’m the type of person that spends an unreasonable amount of time during each day imagining himself plunged into extreme circumstances. Any time I walk outside with my children, I look up to the sky to see if a giant alien ship has stationed itself above my house. Any time I go to Target, I take note of which items I could use as weapons should a zombie apocalypse strike and then the entire store becomes a stronghold for the last of the uninfected. Any time I get on an airplane, I think about crashing in the ocean and being lost at sea for years, teaching myself to fish using only the stitching of my wallet. I am constantly foiling imaginary bank robbers and sexual predators. I waste hours every day envisioning a life far more dramatic, far more macho, than the sedate circumstances in which I usually exist.

That’s part of the reason why I wanted to start a family. When you start a family, you’re signing up for drama. You’re signing up for worry. You’re signing up for life-and-death. You’re signing up for a life that means something more, even if it isn’t as fun a life as when you were single and drinking shots of Fire Water in the Giants Stadium parking lot. Kids make your life significant. They give your life a spine. On some twisted level, I was signing up for a moment such as this: to be there waiting and weeping as I clutched my fists and begged for my son to be all right. But now that it was here, now that it was so sickeningly real, I knew I wanted no part of such cinematic moments. I just wanted life to become normal again. Uneventful. Boring. I wanted to go back to the intensely aggravating march of daily existence. I wanted my son to live so that he could grow up to annoy the shit out of me. People tell you that you should never take life for granted but that’s wrong, because taking life for granted is an encouraging sign that your life is going well. I wanted that.

I took the receiver from the receptionist and braced myself.

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From Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books, 2013). Purchase the full ebook here.