Search Results for: The Billfold

Food For Thought: A Reading List

This week, we return to your regularly scheduled Longreads programming. The theme? Food: queering food, eating Pokemon, the potential of Soylent, tasting curly fries for a living, and Canadian food trucks.

1. “America, Your Food is So Gay.” (John Birdsall, Lucky Peach, June 2013)

“It’s food that takes pleasure seriously, as an end in itself, an assertion of politics or a human birthright, the product of culture—this is the legacy of gay food writers who shaped modern American food.”

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Working 9 to 5: A Reading List About the Way We Work

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from The Billfold, the Walker Art Center, The New Yorker’s Currency blog, and The New York Times.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 4, 2014

Working 9 to 5: A Reading List About the Way We Work

The lines between my life and these lists blur often, and this week is no exception; I begin a new job tomorrow.

1. “Workin’ 9 to 5 (What a Way to Make a Living).” (Megan Reynolds, The Billfold, April 2014)

“I can’t shake the feeling that the 9-to-5 grind carries the one hallmark of adulthood—obligation. The work of the modern office employee is finely tuned drudgery, a daily exercise in doing stuff that you don’t necessarily want to do, but know you have to.”

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What Wall Street and Teach For America Have in Common

Film Still from Wall Street 2

Mike: Jeremy and Samson seemed so miserable and I was rooting for them to quit and do something else. But something seemed to be holding them back—they didn’t like the idea of leaving the well-paid jobs they hated for an uncertain future. Which is funny to me, because being worried about an uncertain future is what nearly every college senior on the verge of graduating worries about. Their recruitment into Wall Street sort of allowed them to delay this.

Kevin: And I think in some ways that Wall Street has functioned as a delay mechanism. You don’t have to figure out what you want to be. And I think that one of the smartest things that Teach for America did was make itself a two-year commitment just like the banks, because people who are seniors in college want some kind of certainty. They want to know that they’re not going to be unemployed. These are people who’ve connected all the right dots their entire lives—they are very Type A. And they want to move from institution to institution without a break in the middle and so Teach For America saw what Wall Street was doing, I think—I don’t have any intel—but I think they probably looked at what banks and consulting firms were doing and saying, “two years is about the right amount of time. We don’t have to pay them a ton, but if we promise them that it’ll look good on their resume, that they’ll be able to do whatever they want afterwards, it won’t close off any doors and it’ll give them structure and stability.” And you can see it now: One in every six Ivy League seniors applies to Teach for America—it’s insane. And that’s probably the best proof that it’s not all about the money for a lot of college students, because they’re willing to work for a little bit of money teaching in the Mississippi Delta if it means that they’ll be able to put off some big decisions for a few years.

In The Billfold, my very long conversation with Kevin Roose about Young Money, Roose’s book about young Wall Street workers recruited straight out of college that came out earlier this week. You can read excerpts of the book at NPR, and an adapted chapter about Wall Street plutocrats dressing up in drag and cracking jokes at the 99 percent at New York magazine.

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What’s in a Home? A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Thought Catalog, The Wall Street Journal, Buzzfeed, and The Billfold.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 19, 2014

What's in a Home? A Reading List

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

New York, London, Detroit, Indianapolis: What does it look like to make a home? To build a home? To live in an office building, with a Craiglist roommate, with your best friend, in a condemned house, without any electricity, in a bankrupt city, in one of most expensive cities in the world, with mice, with your dog, with your parents? Is home a place or a state of mind or a manifesto?

1. “Getting Uncomfortable With Being Uncomfortable.” (Chloe Caldwell, Thought Catalog, November 2013)

One of my favorite essays from Caldwell’s essay collection, Legs Get Led Astray, about what made the worst (and cheapest!) apartment in Brooklyn a home.

2. “In London, ‘Guardians’ Live in Empty Office Buildings.” (Art Patnaude, Wall Street Journal, January 2014)

To deter squatters, companies hire ‘guardians,’ from young professionals to 50somethings, to babysit buildings slated for construction or destruction. In the zany world of London real estate, the rent is a dream and the waiting list is 2,000 strong.

3. “Why I Bought A House In Detroit for $500.” (Drew Philip, Buzzfeed)

Part personal narrative, part history lesson and part something like hope-in-action, I learned more about Detroit reading this essay than any other: “We want things to flourish, but we want them to have roots.”

4. “Places I’ve Lived: Sleepwalking, Mice Herding, and Craigslist.” (Katherine Coplen, The Billfold, January 2014)

I’ve praised PIL before and The Billfold in general, and this installment is no exception. The writer sings Paul Simon in the shower. Who can resist?

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Photo: Moyan Brenn

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Reading List: Stories From the Working Class

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

I read a brilliant piece, “Zen and the Art of Cover Letter Writing,” that reminded me that I had not yet featured the stories of those suffering under the yoke of this abusive economy.

These are stories about injustice, about broken promises, about frustration and desperation and of course, debt. This is a list for anyone caught in a gross transition period, in a dead-end job, who is trying to make something, anything work out long-term. This is a list for anyone who has been told to “just find a job” or “you can do anything you set your mind to” or “your generation is so lazy/narcissistic/vapid.” This is a list for anyone who has been late on their rent, or hassled by credit card companies, or received overdue loan warnings. You’re not alone.

1. “Young, Multi-Employed, and Looking for Full-Time Work in San Francisco.” (Lucy Schiller, The Billfold, May 2013)

The Billfold is my go-to site for voyeurism, empathy, financial advice, and great storytelling. Schiller and her friends attempt to “ford the murky river of the hiring process” of self-employment, multiple part-time jobs and internships—anything but traditional full-time work.

2. “Retail Workers Need Rights, Too.” (S.E. Smith, This Ain’t Livin’, Febraury 2013)

Retail workers work long hours for practically minimum wage, with hidden physical and emotional abuses, few benefits, and intolerant leave policies.

3. “How She Lives on Minimum Wage: One McDonald’s Worker’s Budget.” (Laura Shin, Forbes, July 2013)

A single mother of four shares the harrowing experience of living on her part-time job’s minimum wage.

4. “‘We’ve Got Ph.D.s Working as File Clerks.” (Will Owen, The Washington Blade, June 2013)

The recently founded Association of Transgender Professionals (ATP) works to further transgender equality in the workplace in the U.S. and abroad. ATP helps trans* individuals prepare for interviews, apply for jobs, and find employment; it also assists companies in recruiting LGBTQ folks.

5. “The Burdens of Working-Class Youth.” (Jennifer M. Silva, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2013)

Silva spoke to over a hundred working-class citizens in Lowell, Mass. and Richmond, Va. She found that education for working-class teens is no path to success; rather, these students have no one to advocate for them or explain the labyrinthine bureaucracy of higher education and financial planning, which ends in a dead-end of debt and frustration.

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Reading List: Stories From the Working Class

Longreads Pick

This week’s reading list from Emily Perper includes stories from The Kenyon Review, The Billfold, This Ain’t Livin’, Forbes, The Washington Blade, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 6, 2013

Longreads Best of 2012: Doree Shafrir

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Doree Shafrir is the Executive Editor of BuzzFeed. Her story, “Can You Die from a Nightmare?” was featured on Longreads in September.

This year I read a lot of great personal essays, but these were my favorites.

Meaghan O’Connell, “Places I’ve Lived: A Nanny’s Room, the Perfect Sublet, and a Place You Can Instagram,” The Billfold

The story of young people moving to New York and learning how to navigate the city, particularly its real estate, will never get old, but it’s hard to do well/without sounding like you’re trying to mimic Joan Didion. I loved Meaghan’s piece because it was so perfectly of its time and place, and yet managed to capture the timelessness of feeling that, for the very first time, you’re really on your own in a city that doesn’t give much of a shit. 

Lena Dunham, “Seeing Nora Everywhere,” The New Yorker 

No one could quite believe it when Nora Ephron died, partly because she’d concealed her illness from all but her closest friends and family, but also because she was the premiere chronicler of love and relationships and making it as a woman, and if she was gone, what did that mean for the rest of us? There were lots of tributes to Nora Ephron, but Lena Dunham’s resonated the most with me, because she portrayed so beautifully Nora’s brilliance, her empathy and her wit.

Amity Bitzel, “My Parents Adopted a Murderer,” xoJane 

The particulars of the story were so outlandish that it almost seemed impossible for someone to write about it eloquently, but Amity Bitzel’s essay about her parents adopting a young man who had murdered his parents, and what it was like for her as a 13-year-old, managed to be affecting and beautiful, and maybe most amazingly, not sensationalistic. 

Emily Gould, “Laughing and Crying”, Emily Magazine 

Emily is so, so good at talking about those feelings that you’d really rather not admit you felt, much less put on the internet, and she is also really good at being funny about it and making bigger points about success and jealousy and autobiography. She writes in this piece, which is also about “ladyblogs” and a visit to PS1, “I have made so many decisions based on my desire to never seem publicly weak or vulnerable,” and that seemed like just about the most perfect articulation of human behavior I’d ever read.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from Vanity Fair, The Billfold, The New Yorker, Wired and New York magazine, plus fiction from Electric Literature and a guest pick by Brittany Shoot.