Search Results for: The Awl

Really Good Shit: A Reading List

Edited and cropped image by Quinn Dombrowski (CC BY-SA 2.0)

As the Japanese children’s book author Tarō Gomi once wrote: everyone poops. But we don’t talk about this openly or often enough. In fact, talking and reading about poop might make you want to hold your nose — but it’ll also open your eyes. Here are nine pieces about shit, from a DIY mixture a woman used to treat her life-threatening infection, to prehistoric poo that brings us one step closer to understanding the origins of life after the dinosaur age.

“The Magic Poop Potion” (Lina Zeldovich, Narratively, July 2014)

Suffering from a recurring intestinal infection called C. diff, Catherine Duff decided to take matters into her own hands. Using healthy stool from her husband, they concocted an unconventional cocktail — using a plastic enema, blender, and a cheese cloth — which he then transferred into her. This procedure, known as fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), saved her life. Duff advocated for FMT as a viable treatment when the FDA considered regulating it as an “investigational new drug,” and founded the Fecal Transplant Foundation to educate the public and to connect patients, doctors, and stool donors. Read more…

‘If You Think The Internet Is Terrible Now, Just Wait a While’

Photo by CLUC

I have previously shared with you Balk’s Law (“Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people”) and Balk’s Second Law (“The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything”). Here I will impart to you Balk’s Third Law: “If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.” The moment you were just in was as good as it got. The stuff you shake your head about now will seem like fucking Shakespeare in 2016. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I have a hard time seeing a future where anything gets better. Do you know why? Because everything is terrible and only getting worse. We won’t all be dead in twenty years, but we’ll all wish we were. I used to have hopes that once the Internet got completely unbearable some of the smart people would peel off and start something new, but with each passing day it seems ever less likely. (If anyone peels off to start something new it’s going to be teens, and we know what idiots they are.) No, the Internet is going to keep getting worse and there will be no chance for escape. It’s a massive torrent of sewage blasted at you at all hours and you pay handsomely for the privilege of having a hand-held cannon you carry with you at all times to spray more shit-sludge at yourself whenever you’re bored or anxious. Some of you sleep with it right next to your head in case you wake in the middle of the night and need to deliver another turgid shot to your wide-open mouth.

-From a short post by The Awl’s Alex Balk offering advice to young people.

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The Work of Inspiration: Five Pieces about Poetry

How do you write? My best friend might look at her old poems and draw from those. My former newspaper advisor tweeted at me: “Nulla dies sine linea,” or “Never a day without a line.”

“Write something every day,” my English teacher wrote, in blue marker on paper in the shape of a pencil. The best artists of any kind–poet, painter, performer–will inspire awe, not envy. They will make you want to make things of your own. When I’m feeling stuck, I’ll read about poets who inspire me/who are new to me, and today, I’ll share a few with you.

1. “Open Letter: A Dialogue on Race and Poetry.” (Claudia Rankine, Poets.org, 2011)

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric has garnered lots and lots of (well-deserved) praise. Here, several years earlier, she analyzes a poem by having a conversation with Tony Hoagland and through Hoagland’s hostile reaction to (well-deserved accusations) of racism: “I begin to understand myself as rendered hyper-visible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that I am present. My alertness, my openness, my desire to engage my colleague’s poem, my colleague’s words, actually demands my presence, my looking back at him.” Read more…

The Gothic Life and Times of Horace Walpole

Carrie Frye | Longreads | December 2014 | 16 minutes (4,064 words)

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As a child, Horace Walpole frequently heard it said of himself that surely he would die soon. Born in England in 1717, the last of his mother’s six children, he was fragile and prone to illness from birth. Two siblings before him had died in infancy, and so in the family order it went: three older children, loud, healthy and opinionated; two grave markers; and then young Horace toddling up behind—half child, half potential grave marker.

Naturally, his mother, Catherine, spoiled him. His father, Sir Robert Walpole, was the King’s prime minister. This often kept him away from home, as did a long-time mistress who acted, more than his wife did, as his hostess and companion. For her part Catherine had her own dalliances. It was that sort of marriage. The Walpoles of old had been middling country gentry—ancient name, quiet prosperity—before Robert had come along and, through a blend of shrewdness and charisma, wolf-halled his family into riches and the nobility. When Robert was young, the hope for him was that he might one day make a fine sheep-farmer; he died the first Earl of Orford, after a 20-year run as prime minister, a colossus of English history.

His son Horace worked himself into history another way. In his early 30s, he bought a box-shaped house—just an ordinary sort of house, sitting on a bit of hill in a fashionable country suburb—and decided to transform it into a Gothic castle. Room by room he went. Stained-glass window of a saint here, ancient suit of armor stowed in a wall recess there.

Then one summer, sitting in his castle’s library, he wrote a novel called The Castle of Otranto. Its setting was a medieval castle, not unlike his own mock-castle in many of its details, but grown, in the way of novels and dreams, into something grand and imposing. There the villainous Manfred schemes to block the return of the castle’s rightful heir, a young man named Theodore. Commonly pegged as the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto turns 250 this year. It’s a strange, great, terrible, campy novel, slim but with some paragraphs so long and dense that you have to slash your way through. If Gothic literature had a family tree, its twisted gnarled branches chock-full of imperiled, swooning heroines and mysterious monks, with ghosts who sit light on the branches, and Frankenstein’s monster who sits heavy, with troops of dwarves, and winking nuns, and stunted, mostly nonflammable babies, at its base would sit Horace Walpole’s Castle. (Presumably with some lightning flickering dangerously nearby.) Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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Interview: Maya Rao on Spending a Month Working as a Cashier in the Bakken

Western North Dakota—at the epicenter of the Bakken oil rush—has become a new Wild West of sorts, where fortunes are made, sought and lost with alarming speed. Thousands have been drawn to the Bakken over the last seven years, including Maya Rao, a talented reporter who has cut her teeth at dailies and currently covers regional issues at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She first ventured there to write a short piece for The Awl last year about the overwhelming experience of “being a woman in a place where women could be in demand as much as the oil.” After her first visit to the region Rao felt there were larger stories still untold, and she returned this past summer, spending a month working as a cashier at a truck stop just south of Alexander. Her efforts culminated in “Searching for the Good Life in the Bakken Oil Fields,” an immersive 6,000-word piece published by The Atlantic last month. Rao spoke with us about her gutsy decision to pick up and spend a month in the Bakken, her experience as a female reporter in a decidedly male-centric environment and carving out space for longer form enterprise reporting at daily papers. Read more…

‘Yours Lovingly’: A Collection of Stories About Writing Letters

A man writes to a convicted killer. Fan letters to a troubled country star. Letters by parents. Here are five stories about the letters we write to one another.

1. “Please Don’t Stay Long.” (Eva and Mark Raphael, Brick, Winter 2014)

Excerpts from love letters written by a couple in 1928, who corresponded between London and Łódź:

My boy, my darling what two silly children we are, to part willingly and condemn ourselves to this state! How good, that this month has fewer days! You know I forgot about Nora’s birthday on the 23rd. I can’t forgive myself. I am writing to your parents. I did not know the address, till you sent it.

Yours lovingly Eva

2. “How a Convicted Killer Became My Friend.” (Gary Rivlin, Mother Jones, June 4, 2013)

The writer on his friend Tony Davis, a middle-aged man who was convicted of killing a 13-year-old boy when he was 18:

I first met Tony Davis in the early 1990s, when I was a young reporter for an Oakland-based alternative weekly. The city was a hot spot in the nation’s crack epidemic, and turf warfare had sent its homicide rate soaring. I wanted to put a human face on the issue of teens killing teens, which is how I met Tony, who was two years into an 18-to-life sentence for Kevin Reed’s murder. That shooting would become the focus of my 1995 book, Drive-By.

We kept in touch, and somewhere along the way, Tony ceased to be my subject and became my friend. Over the years, we have exchanged probably a couple hundred letters and shared countless phone calls. Inmates sometimes ask him about the white man whose picture is on his cell wall. ‘He’s like the only real best friend that I’ve had in years,’ Tony tells them.

3. “I Was A Love-Letter Ghostwriter.” (Bonnie Downing, The Awl, Jan. 30, 2014)

The writer on working on an art piece called the “Love Letter Project,” in which she ghostwrote love letters for strangers:

I listened until he was finished talking. Then I arranged the sentences he’d spoken on the page. It was more like transcribing than writing.

“I will never in my life not regret that we didn’t work things out. I will never let go. I don’t want to.”

4. “Dear Charlie.” (Joe Hagan, Oxford American, Jan. 7, 2014)

Joe Hagan stumbles onto old fan mail sent to 1970s country-R&B star Charlie Rich. The fans share their most intimate secrets with a musician who had his own troubled life:

Tara’s confession to Charlie Rich, a major country star that year, was among forty-two others I discovered in the home of a woman who produced Rich in the 1960s. Unread for nearly forty years, mixed in with yellowing newspaper clips and old drink coasters from a Las Vegas revue, they were the last known remnants of the Charlie Rich Fan Club. Variously handwritten, typed up, set on stationery and notebook paper, the stash contained the intimate pleas and declarations of fans who sought communion with the star known as “The Silver Fox.”

5. “How I Met My Dead Parents.” (Anya Yurchyshyn, Buzzfeed, April 18, 2013)

The writer gains a new perspective on who her parents were after examining old photos and letters they left behind after they died:

As I worked on my blog, I read these and similar letters again and again, and wondered how the man I thought my father was could have written these words, words that are so romantic that I melt on my mother’s behalf when I read them. How could my father have been the person that I knew, the person I was happy to have dead, and the person in these letters, a person who was articulate, generous, and so, so loving? And how could my mother, who never seemed very happy with him, love him so much in return? Didn’t she know he was a monster?

Photo: Liz West

Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 3

Our latest collection is now live at WordPress.com, featuring stories from Aeon, Grantland, Brooklyn Quarterly, The Awl, Texas Observer and more. Get the full list here.

Longreads’ Best of WordPress, Vol. 3

Longreads Pick

Here are 10 of our favorite stories right now from Aeon, Grantland, Brooklyn Quarterly, The Awl, Texas Observer and more.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 12, 2014

‘This Story Isn’t For Everyone’

Today, Matter published a story by reporter Luke Malone about a group of young men struggling with the realization that they are pedophiles and seek help to prevent themselves from becoming future offenders and from using child pornography. It’s a difficult story to read (warning: the story contains graphic details of child abuse), and raises questions about why there aren’t treatments for pedophiles who have not offended and want help.

Malone talked to Choire Sicha at the Awl about how he reported this story, and why he thought it was important to tell:

Luke: I agree that this story isn’t for everyone. And that’s fine. No one is under any obligation to learn more about how pedophilia develops and is managed by this group of well-meaning guys, and I’m referring solely to the people in the piece here. Though if it’s an area that you feel strongly about one way or the other—which, to be fair, is most of us—then I’d recommend it. The story of the young, non-offending pedophile is one that hasn’t been told before and if you want to talk seriously about preventing child sexual abuse then bringing them into the conversation is vital. They’re not boogiemonsters, they are kids who want to have sex with younger kids. It’s a sad reality, but they are going to grow up to be men who are attracted to little kids. It seems insane to me that they are brave enough to put up their hands and ask for help but we, as a society, essentially tell them, “Nope, no therapy for you! Go away and rape a child and then you will enter the criminal justice system and then we can deal with it.” By then the damage is done. We need to start intervening before abuse occurs, for everyone’s sake. Despite the child porn and the ugly truths that this story details, there is a lot of optimism coming through. These are young guys who want help, and there are therapists and researchers who want to help, they just need policy and funding that allows it. In fact, a radio version of this story appeared on This American Life a few months back and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Not only did all these teenage pedophiles contact me asking where they could get help, there were a lot of abuse survivors who reached out and said that while it was hard for them to listen to they were grateful that the topic was being addressed in a way that signaled real change. A much more logical interventionist approach to reducing the incidence of child sex abuse.

1. “You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?” (Luke Malone, Matter)

Malone’s story today for Medium.

2. “Behind the Story: The Pedophiles Who Didn’t Want to Hurt Children.” (The Awl)

Choire Sicha’s conversation with Malone about how and why he reported this story.

3. “Help Wanted.” (This American Life)

Malone’s radio version of his story for This American Life, which aired in April.

Illustration: Simon Prades for Matter