Search Results for: The Atlantic

The Magic of Archives: A Reading List

I’m thrilled to present this week’s Reading List in collaboration with Samantha Abrams, an archivist and great friend. I’d planned to curate something about the importance and changing role of archiving—an oft-misunderstood or overlooked science—but I didn’t have enough in my longform arsenal. Cue Sam. I reached out to her via Twitter, asking her if she’d be willing to pass along pertinent articles, essays and interviews she’d encountered as she studied for her master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Library and Information Studies. Sam understood immediately what I was looking for: nothing overly technical, but not condescending or simplified, either.

I spent over a year as an archivist’s assistant, working with the records collectors in a particular branch at the National Institutes of Health. My focus: digitizing records from the late 1980s and early ’90s. My favorite moments: reading someone’s journal from the 1970s and collecting documents for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. I felt like a detective. Archiving isn’t my calling, but I loved my mentors and their serious, inspired work.

On the other hand: You know the look someone gets in their eye when someone really, really loves something? Sam gets that look in her eye, because she loves her work. She has interned at the Library of Congress. She’s the first and only archivist for Culver’s. She’s kind of a genius.

Sam sees outreach as a part of her role as an archivist. Archivists are no longer stuffed into cubicles, scanning and sorting—although that can be part of their job description!—but out saving the World Wide Web, using their best judgement to decide what’s important to preserve and what isn’t. And that requires engagement with the wider world. Here, Sam is genuinely excited to share her expertise with the Longreads community, and I couldn’t be more grateful. I hope (we hope!) that you learn something new and surprising. Read more…

When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman

Robert Owen's vision of New Harmony, Indiana. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Chris Jennings | Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism | Random House | January 2016 | 29 minutes (7,852 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Paradise Now, Chris Jennings’ look at the history of the golden age of American utopianism, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. 

* * *

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. . . .
—OSCAR WILDE

*

Mistaking day for night, they took wing.

At noon, darkness spread across the sky. It was the nineteenth of May 1780, a Friday. On the rolling pastureland of western New England, sheep and cows lay down one by one in the damp grass. As the darkness became total, finches and warblers quieted and returned to their roosts. Above the white pines and budding oaks, bats stirred. Mistaking day for night, they took wing.

The fratricidal war for American independence was grinding into its fifth year. A week earlier, the Continental army had surrendered the smoldering port of Charleston to the British navy after more than a month of heavy shelling. In New England, with so many young men off fighting, gardens went unplanted and the wheat grew thin.

For many colonists the war with Great Britain aroused a stolid nationalist piety, a consoling faith in “the sacred cause of liberty”—the belief that providence would guide the rebels to victory and that the fighting itself constituted an appeal to heaven. But in the hilly borderland between New York and Massachusetts, the anxiety and austerity of the long conflict inspired frenzied revival meetings. This was the New Light Stir, an aftershock of the Great Awakening of radical Protestantism that had coursed through New England in the 1740s. From makeshift pulpits, the New Light evangelists shouted an urgent millenarian message: These are the Latter Days; the Kingdom is at hand.

Standing at the crack of American independence, these backwoods Yankees believed that they were living the final hours of history. It is written: He will come back and the righteous will be delivered from sin for a thousand years of earthly peace and happiness. The New Lights believed that the time had come and that their small revivals, held in fields and cowsheds, would trigger the return of Christ and the millennium of heaven on earth. Looking up from their plows and their milking stools, these hill-country farmers scanned the horizon for signs of His approach. Read more…

14 Stories About Love: A Reading List

Photo: fly

Heartbreak, desire, dating, romance—Valentine’s Day brings all of these experiences to the forefront of our minds and hearts. Revel in all the feels with these 14 (get it?) essays and interviews.

1. “A Modern Guide to the Love Letter.” (John Biguenet, The Atlantic, February 2015)

2. “Love is Like Cocaine.” (Helen Fisher, Nautilus, February 2016)

3. “Unlove Me: I Found Love Because I Was Lucky, Not Because I Changed Myself.” (Maris Kreizman, Brooklyn, February 2016)

Read more…

The Problem With Hollywood’s Portrayal of Pregnant Women

The post-apocalyptic thriller Mad Max: Fury Road has been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award, numerous Producer Guild of America awards, two Golden Globes, and an Academy Award for Best Picture. It’s been hailed as a stealth feminist masterpiece—and it is! But it also contributes to a larger problem: Nobody knows anymore what a pregnant woman looks like.

The plot of Mad Max centers on the escape attempt of several women who have been sexually abused by the monomaniacal cult-leader Immortan Joe. They are as nubile and scantily clad as the patriarch is decrepit and disgusting. A scene in which they take a break in the desert to drink some water resembles nothing so much as a bikini car wash. Read more…

In Praise of Public Pitching

I’ve always been fascinated by how narrative journalism gets commissioned, reported, and published–but the most perplexing part of the entire system is the continued power imbalance between writers and publishers.

This imbalance persists in spite of the internet “democratizing” publishing. More digital publishers are embracing feature writing, but the process behind the scenes feels stuck in the past–a time-consuming marathon of unanswered emails and rejection. Read more…

The Murky Importance of Giving: A Reading List

I have a Facebook “friend”—let’s call him Ken—who does something finance-y for the federal government. What I’m saying is, he has money to burn. Every few months, he’ll post a Facebook status along the lines of “For every ‘like’ I will donate $1 to _______ and for every comment I will donate $3 to ________.” Of course, his thousands of Facebook acquaintances are only happy to oblige. Most of my friends don’t make much more than their car insurance payments, student loans, rent and other bills; maybe that’s why Ken’s altruism seems so novel, almost suspect. In reading for this list, I discovered people who give freely, their generosity intertwined with thoughtfulness at best; carelessness, illness or guilt at worst.

1. “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Giving.”

Sam Kean, The Atlantic, May 2015

Giving, it seems, might become compulsive in some people because they crave the rush of dopamine that accompanies it—a rush that might be similar to the spike in dopamine levels that gets some people hooked on drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines. In a real sense, pathological givers might be addicted to philanthropy.

Read more…

10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2016

Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li (Photo by Don Feria/Getty Images for The MacArthur Foundation Awards, via Wikimedia Commons)

Below is a guest post from Mumbai-based writer-filmmaker—and longtime #longreads contributor—Pravesh Bhardwaj (@AuteurPravesh). Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Under-Recognized Stories

We asked all of our contributors to Longreads Best of 2015 to tell us about a story they felt deserved more recognition in 2015. Here they are. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

Get to Know the National Book Award Finalists for Nonfiction

The National Book Awards, presented by the National Book Foundation, “celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America.” There are four categories: fiction, nonfiction, “young people’s literature,” and poetry. Several of this year’s nominees have been featured on Longreads before (see: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Adam Johnson, Noelle Stevenson), and this reading list features the five nonfiction nominees. The winner will be announced on November 18, 2015.

1. The Radical: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” (Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine, July 2015)

“Letter to My Son,” in The Atlantic, adapted from Between the World and Me

You must struggle to truly remember this past. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.

Read more…