Search Results for: The Guardian

What de Blasio and Uruguay’s José Mujica Have In Common

I showed the group a Guardian article calling [Uruguay’s President] Mujica “the world’s most radical president.” They burst into contemptuous groans.

Last January, Bill de Blasio took over as mayor of New York City. The election was a landslide; the hopes invested in him near messianic. “When New York City Democrats head to the polls … they will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rewrite the narrative of their city … Mayor de Blasio might have a real chance to begin stitching the city’s tattered social contract back together,” the Nation effused in its August 2013 endorsement. It didn’t take long for the backlash to start: protests in the streets over Eric Garner, the police union snubbing and work slowdown. Around de Blasio, The New York Times concluded last month, hangs an “atmosphere of sullen insubordination.”

It’s a pattern: We keep creating saviors whom we expect to single- handedly restore lost values. Then we lash out at them when they inevitably fall short.

“I want a hero,” Lord Byron begins “Don Juan,” written in 1819. “An uncommon want / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one …” So the cycle by which we erect and dismantle saviors isn’t new. But it has been amplified, partly as a result of the increasingly complex nature of global society and power itself.

Eve Fairbanks writing in the New Republic about Uruguay’s José Mujica. Mujica’s straightforward and humble “truth to power” approach has brought him worldwide acclaim, but many Uruguayan progressives are disappointed by what he has actually accomplished.

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A Modern-Day Faery Tale

I recently discovered Kelly Link, an incredible short story author with a penchant for twisty magical realism. Her new collection, Get In Trouble, comes out in February. Luckily, “The Faery Handbag” is available online:

The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.

Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it’s true.

Grandmother Zofia said it was a family heirloom. She said that it was over two hundred years old. She said that when she died, I had to look after it. Be its guardian. She said that it would be my responsibility.

I said that it didn’t look that old, and that they didn’t have handbag two hundred years ago, but that just made her cross. She said, “So then tell me, Genevieve, darling, where do you think old ladies used to put their reading glasses and their heart medicine and their knitting needles?”

I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia used to say to me when she told me stories. At the funeral, my mother said, half-laughing and half-crying, that her mother was the world’s best liar. I think she thought maybe Zofia wasn’t really dead. But I went up to Zofia’s coffin, and I looked her right in the eyes. They were closed. The funeral parlor had made her up with blue eyeshadow, and blue eyeliner. She looked like she was going to be a news anchor on Fox television, instead of dead. It was creepy and it made me even sadder than I already was. But I didn’t let that distract me.

“Okay, Zofia,” I whispered. “I know you’re dead, but this is important. You know exactly how important this is. Where’s the handbag? What did you do with it? How do I find it? What am I supposed to do now?”

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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 Old Music Industry: ‘A System Specifically Engineered to Waste the Band’s Money’

Shellac, with Albini. Photo by goro_memo

During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out of the system and put it into things like houses and groceries and college educations. Or it could be paid to other operators within the industry, increasing the clout and prestige of the person doing the spending. It’s as if your boss, instead of giving your paycheck to you, could pay that money to his friends and business associates, invoking your name as he did. Since his net cost was the same and his friends and associates could return the favour, why would he ever want to let any of that money end up in your hands? It was a system that ensured waste by rewarding the most profligate spendthrifts in a system specifically engineered to waste the band’s money.

Now bands existed outside that label spectrum. The working bands of the type I’ve always been in, and for those bands everything was always smaller and simpler. Promotion was usually down to flyers posted on poles, occasional mentions on college radio and fanzines. If you had booked a gig at a venue that didn’t advertise, then you faced a very real prospect of playing to an empty room. Local media didn’t take bands seriously until there was a national headline about them so you could basically forget about press coverage. And commercial radio was absolutely locked up by the payola-driven system of the pluggers and program directors.

International exposure was extraordinarily expensive. In order for your records to make it into overseas hands you had to convince a distributor to export them. And that was difficult with no means for anyone to hear the record and decide to buy it. So you ended up shipping promotional copies overseas at a terrific expense, never sure if they would be listened to or not.

Music producer and Shellac frontman Steve Albini’s reminder about what the “good old days” of the music industry were really like for artists.

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For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.

Belle Boggs | The New New South | August 2013 | 62 minutes (15,377 words)

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We’re proud to present, for the first time online, “For the Public Good,” Belle Boggs‘s story for The New New South about the shocking history of forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States, and the story of victims in North Carolina, with original video by Olympia Stone.

As Boggs explained to us last year: 

“Last summer I met Willis Lynch, a man who was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years earlier, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children. Willis was one of 7,600 victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program, and one of the more outspoken and persistent advocates for compensation.

“At the time I was struggling with my own inability to conceive, and the debate within my state—how much is the ability to have children worth?—was something I thought about a lot. It’s hard to quantify, the value of people who don’t exist. It gets even more complicated when you factor in public discomfort over a shameful past, and a present-day political climate that marginalizes the poor.”

Thanks to Boggs and The New New South for sharing this story with the Longreads Community, and thanks to Longreads Members for your helping us bring these stories to you. Join us.

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The Gentrification of San Francisco, Circa 1985

Stories about San Francisco’s latest wave of gentrification—perhaps exemplified by the tech bus battles—have been everywhere as of late. But this isn’t the first time critics have mourned the end of San Francisco-as-bohemian-enclave. From “Gentrification’s Price: Yuppies In, the Poor Out” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 3, 1985:

In short, San Francisco has become perhaps the most gentrified large city in the nation. Districts that a decade ago were blue collar are now ghettos for young urban professionals, who have spawned a consumptive economy in which one highly successful new chain mass markets croissants, sort of a Yuppie version of Winchell’s doughnut shops.

The change has created a new vocabulary:  Yuppification, croissantification, Manhattanization. City Planning Director Dean Macris calls it the “boutiquing of San Francisco.”

Whatever its name, its result is spiraling housing costs, clogged traffic, an exodus of middle-class and poor families and declining black and Latino populations. And the trend seems certain to continue despite a new effort by the city to limit growth, restrain housing costs and preserve neighborhoods.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons 

Author John Green on the Problem With 'Twilight'

John Green is the author of the wildly popular young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, which remained No. 1 on Amazon in the U.S. and Britain two years after its release. Guardian writer Emma Brockes profiled Green for Intelligent Life this month, and here Green discusses what is problematic about another wildly popular series: Twilight.

Green has firm moral views about the influence of teen fiction and the responsibilities that rest on its authors, particularly around the subject of sexual politics. “Twilight” bothers him a lot. Although impressed by the “world-building” in the story, he is “troubled by some of the relationships, and certainly troubled by the gender politics of that novel.”

In what way?

“I wanted a stronger, more defined Bella and I wanted an Edward who hadn’t been around for a century. I find it very problematic that you have a century to accrue experience of life and then you seduce a teenager.”

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See also: Emily’s reading list, “The Fault in Our Canon”

Photo: Genevieve

Swiping Right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads

Noga Arikha | Lapham’s Quarterly | 2009 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)

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I.

In 1727, a lady named Helen Morrison placed a personal advertisement in the Manchester Weekly Journal. It was possibly the first time a newspaper was ever used for such a purpose. As it happens, Morrison was committed to an asylum for a month. Society was clearly not ready for such an autonomous practice, especially on the part of a woman. But personal ads quickly became an institution. Heinrich von Kleist’s celebrated novella The Marquise of O, first published in 1810 (and said by Kleist to be “based on a true incident”) opens on the newspaper ad placed by “a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-brought-up children,” to the effect “that she had, without knowledge of the cause, come to find herself in a certain situation; that she would like the father of the child she was expecting to disclose his identity to her; and that she was resolved, out of consideration for her family, to marry him.” Read more…

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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What Happens When the State Separates a Mother From Her Child

“Sacha Coupet, a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago, who used to work as a guardian ad litem and as a psychologist, worries that the Adoption and Safe Families Act, by promoting ‘adoption as the normative ideal,’ has made it easier to avoid ‘dealing with the enormously complex root causes of child neglect and abuse,’ which may have little to do with parenting skills. ‘There’s this very American notion that mothers should be self-reliant, capable of taking care of their kids without any support, when that’s just not the world we live in,’ she said. She finds that child-welfare agencies often ‘rush to get to the end of the story,’ creating a middle-class fairy tale: ‘a poor kid is rescued by the state, given a new mom and dad, and the slate is wiped clean.’

“Martin Guggenheim, a professor at New York University of Law, who represented children in court for more than a decade, believes that before long we will look back at the policy of ‘banishing children from their birth families’ as a tragic social experiment.”

Rachel Aviv, in The New Yorker (subscription required), on the case of Niveen Ismail, who was deemed to be an unfit mother for her son Adam. Read more on child welfare.

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Photo: gustfischer, Flickr

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