Search Results for: The Guardian

Vagabonds, Crafty Bauds, and the Loyal Huzza: A History of London at Night

Photo by Garry Knight

Matthew Beaumont | Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London | Verso | March 2015 | 37 minutes (10,129 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from Nightwalking, by Matthew Beaumont, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. In this excerpt, Beaumont describes the complex and transgressive act of nightwalking in London during the 16th & 17th centuries. He paints a vivid picture of the city at night and explains what nightwalking revealed about class, status, and the political and religious leanings of those who practiced it. The plight of the jobless and homeless poor in this era, which also witnessed the birth of capitalism, are dishearteningly familiar today.

Beaumont draws on a variety of compelling sources, which have been linked to when possible, such as Beware the Cat, a puzzling English proto-novel that features a man who attains cat-like superpowers, The Wandring Whore and The Wandring Whore Continued, and A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, which defines, among other things, the 24 types of vagabond.  Read more…

Celebrating and Surviving in North Korea

Interviews with defectors also suggest that North Koreans are not serious consumers of marijuana. The drug of choice is, in fact, something much more pernicious: crystal meth.

Meth, known colloquially as eoreum or bingdu (both mean “ice”, a name by which the drug is also known in the US) is a drug unfortunately suited to the realities of life in North Korea: it is cheap, requires no elaborate equipment or specialist knowledge to make, and keeps the weary and hungry on their feet – at least until they become addicts.

Daniel Tudor and James Pearson writing in The Guardian about the recreational habits of North Koreans, from smoking to homebrewing to coping with crystal meth.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Interior of the United States Supreme Court. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

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

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Brussels Playbook: Meet the Mike Allen of Europe

A 35-year-old Australian, [Ryan] Heath rises every morning at 4.30 to finish off the day’s Brussels Playbook, which in only a month and a half already goes out to almost 40,000 people. (The site itself received, in May, about 1.7m page views, from just over 700,000 unique visitors. The original Politico receives 7m monthly uniques, though they claim their relevance not by aggregate traffic but by the quality of their audience.) If Budoff Brown and Palmeri think a lot about their audience in Washington, and Kaminski and the tech reporters keep Europe more broadly in mind, Playbook speaks directly to Brussels. It promises to create Politico as the trusted house organ for a community of the displaced.

Though Heath’s Playbook roughly follows the original Mike Allen model from Washington, Heath has made it his own. He is aware that it is forging something new and, rather than fear the threat of absurdity, he allows it to revel in its own surrealism. Heath writes like he speaks, in flirtatious, conspiratorial tones about serious, substantive things. A recent item: “FINLAND – WELCOME TO THE LAND OF SOLUTIONS: That’s the official name of the Finnish government’s programme. Take that, all you Lands of Problems! Many journalists weren’t able to digest the new programme at the government’s regular sauna briefing Wednesday night (yes, people from outside Brussels, this is a real, proud tradition) because they were camped out waiting for Juncker and Tsipras to finish dining. So we bring them, and you, the full programme of the new government.” Another item seemed built around the basic desire to simply delight in the phrase, “Róża Gräfin von Thun und Hohenstein, chair of the IMCO working group on the DSM.”

Gideon Lewis-Kraus writing for The Guardian about Politico‘s new Brussels outfit. The brash, oft-gossipy has website transformed Washington D.C. journalism, but it remains to be seen whether even they can make E.U. politics sexy.
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See Also: “Politico’s Mike Allen, the Man the White House Wakes Up To” (Mark Leibovich, New York Times, April 2010)

Diane Arbus, Uncropped: A Reading List

Diane Arbus' Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City (1962)

Diane Arbus was renowned for photographing people on the margins, such as the mentally challenged, dwarves, giants, sideshow performers, crossdressers, and transsexuals. Was she merely a privileged voyeur of the vulnerable or an unsung champion of sexual and societal minorities? Here are five stories that will help you cut through the controversy. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by Flickr

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

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

* * *

Read more…

A League of His Own

Longreads Pick

A profile of the man The Guardian once called “the most successful non-homicidal dictator of the past century,” FIFA president Sepp Blatter. Blatter has controlled worldwide soccer for the past 17 years.

Published: Apr 30, 2015
Length: 19 minutes (4,770 words)

How San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium Helped Launch Led Zeppelin

Whether by accident or design, [the Fillmore Auditorium’s Bill Graham] has succeeded in launching most of the international pop groups whose claim to fame is musical rather than fashionable. Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Who all owe a great deal to his fanatical championship. And at the beginning of January, he promoted a new group called, rather enigmatically, Led Zeppelin. If their LP is anything to go by, he has discovered a worthy successor to the defunct Cream.

They’re all in their 20s and extravagantly hirsute in the current manner. They started as a group in November last year and the LP now released is the product of their first improvisations together. They rely on formalised beginnings and endings and leave the rest to the mood of the moment, and they are complete masters of their material. They bend and twist the simplest of lines into architectural caverns of sound, careful but throbbing with violence. Their music crouches like a giant panther and shudders like a mighty jet waiting to leap down the runway.

Tony Palmer writing about the role San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium played in promoting Led Zeppelin during the band’s early days. Palmer’s article was originally printed in The Guardian on March 9, 1969; an edited excerpt was reprinted on their site this year.

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Yes Means Yes, So What’s the Catch? A Reading List About Consent

I subscribe to writer Ann Friedman’s fabulous newsletter, where she recently shared a link to an article she wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine. Friedman visited the University of California at Santa Barbara and interviewed twenty-something students about their sexual habits and desires—specifically if they’d been affected by the “Yes Means Yes” law, SB 967, which demands enthusiastic consent from all parties throughout a sexual encounter.

I’d heard of SB 967, but I hadn’t done any real research about it. Unsurprisingly, I discovered a variety of reactions. Some feminists welcome the bill wholeheartedly, while others are trepidatious about its limitations and do not think it does enough to protect victims and their advocates. Read more…

Who is Art For? Our College Pick

A recent act of vandalism at UC San Diego prompted student Teiko Yakobson to wonder about the rest of a significant collection of sculpture and monumental art that dots the campus. What does it mean to have a great art collection if students don’t understand it to be great art? Yakobson’s story considers many of the same issues confronting the art world today: class, diversity, and accessibility. Her article doesn’t presuppose that all art must be complex to be good, nor does it dismiss the virtue of challenging pieces. Instead, like the best art, it starts a conversation.

Art Around Us

The Guardian | Teiko Yakobson | February 17, 2015 | 1,950 words (Eight minutes)