Search Results for: The Morning News

Why Karen Carpenter Matters

Karent and Richard Carpenter performing on the BBC's 'In Concert' series. Tony Russell/Redferns

Karen Tongson | Why Karen Carpenter Matters | University of Texas Press | May 2019 | 20 minutes (4,070 words)

 

Maria Katindig-Dykes and her husband, Jimmie Dykes, had finished a six-month stint at the Hyatt Regency in Singapore and were about to wrap up a six-month residency at the Playboy Jazz Club at Silahis International Hotel in Manila when a telegram appeared under the door early one morning in our Manila suite. It was for Jimmie: MOTHER ILL. CALL HOME. It was sent by his older brother Lee.

My dad called home to find out that his mother, Marion Dykes — the woman who sternly scattered the kids taunting me on the lawn during my first visit to Riverside, California; the woman who plied me with my very first taste of stewed tomatoes — was dying of brain cancer. It was late January 1983, and we made our preparations to leave Manila, unsure of whether or not we would return right away, or ever. I remember turning to my mom on one of the first nights we were in Riverside and asking her in Tagalog if we were ever going back home. She said she didn’t know, and we both cried quietly so as not to interrupt the other more urgent processes of loss and mourning happening under the same roof.

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McDonald’s Starts Serving McTech to Survive in the Modern Age

McDonald's arches under renovation. (VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

In a fascinating story about food and innovation for Bloomburg Businessweek, Thomas Buckley and Leslie Patton write about how McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook has been implementing some revolutionary changes to the fast food chain’s business model. Easterbrook wants, they say, “to reclaim the company’s image as a beacon of innovation, a designation McDonald’s hasn’t enjoyed since roughly the Truman administration.” Despite pushback from some franchise owners, the multibillion dollar company is trying to pull customers back from places like Five Guys and Chipotle by adding Uber Eats, item customization, and hoping to remake stores into data harvesting systems. To show how these programs fit into the company’s history, the authors describe the technological innovations that allowed McDonald’s to expand from a single tiny California burger stand into a titanic brand that feeds 1% of the human population. Even if you don’t eat at McDonald’s, it’s interesting to read about the struggles of a seemingly ever-present global brand that, like Coke and Nestle, has shaped the health of our species, and diluted many countries’ regional identity to a form as dull and predictable as the pink slime that becomes a chicken nugget. Now the challenge is for McDonald’s to rebuild itself into what the authors call “the Amazon of excess sodium.”

Easterbrook’s strategy so far has been vindicated by the numbers. That tailwind is breathing new life into the business. Strong drives 40 miles from his home in Aurora, Ill., every morning to be at his desk by 6 a.m., where he and a handful of other masochistic early risers blast rousing tunes by Journey or Adele on a Bose sound system to get the day going. It’s a routine they began after moving into the new head office, a $250 million building replete with sofa pods in the red and yellow McDonald’s color scheme, an amphitheater, rooftop terraces, and thousands of antique and modern Happy Meal toys locked inside cased glass like priceless museum specimens. Easterbrook opened the office in June of last year in a bid to attract young, tech-forward talent.

In March, McDonald’s acquired artificial intelligence startup Dynamic Yield, headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, for $300 million—the company’s largest acquisition in 20 years. The burger chain had been testing the machine learning software on drive-thrus at four restaurants in Florida, where screens automatically updated with different items based on the time of day, restaurant traffic, weather, and trending purchases at comparable locations. That technology has been deployed at 8,000 McDonald’s and counting, with plans to be in almost all drive-thrus in the U.S. and Australia by the end of the year, Easterbrook says. The deal signaled an ambition to align the chain with the same predictive algorithms that power impulsive purchasing on Amazon.com or streaming preferences on Netflix. In April, McDonald’s acquired a minority stake in New Zealand-based mobile app vendor Plexure Group Ltd., which helps restaurants engage with diners on their phone with tailored offerings and loyalty programs. The effort falls into the consumer-goods industry’s wider trend toward micromarketing, which has proved effective in driving sales.

In early September, McDonald’s said it was buying Silicon Valley startup Apprente Inc., a developer of voice-recognition technology. The idea is to help speed up lines by eventually having a machine, instead of a person, on the other side of the intercom to relay orders to kitchen staff. The deal for Apprente is McDonald’s third such investment in a technology business in the past six months as the company shakes off a tamer takeover strategy that for decades had focused on buying and selling restaurants from or to operators. McDonald’s is pursuing this new business model even as the latest burger trends steal the buzz from its offerings. Beyond fashionable vegan patties, a new and daunting foe is the fried chicken sandwich at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen (a Miami-based chain owned by the same company that controls Burger King), which became a national obsession when it was introduced in the U.S. in August.

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Hello, Forgetfulness; Hello, Mother

Roxana Wegner / Getty

Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | October 2019 | 19 minutes (4,770 words)

I can’t pinpoint when it began. Or whether what is happening to me is the same thing that happened to my mother. Is it the first signs of dementia or just your run-of-the-mill aging?

I had lived far away from Pennsylvania and only seen my parents intermittently for short visits since going away to college. With my mother, the first sign of change I noticed was that she couldn’t remember the titles of novels she had just read or television shows she had just watched. She’d search an invisible memory bank to identify the titles with a baffled look on her face when she found it empty, then shrug the moment of forgetfulness away. Her usually precise way of speaking, of being in the world, started to soften at the edges. She mumbled as if she were sucking on a lozenge she didn’t want to spit out or swallow. I thought she was just slowing down and this was what aging looked like. By the time she became a depressed person, the deterioration had been going on for years and it was something more than aging. Who knows for how long the changes had been fomenting, how far back I would have to go to ferret out the beginning — 10 years, 15? After all, she worked at hiding the slippage, handing the phone to my father when I called, laughing away the mistakes she made. She used her considerable charm, long honed, to divert attention from the truth, for example that the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle that she had been religiously completing for decades was now blank, the squares empty, folded in the bathroom where she thought no one would see it.

At a more advanced stage, she became resistant to change. My mother, who had loved nothing better than a shift in scenery, a drive, a travel expedition, became someone who didn’t even like walking out the front door. My father couldn’t get her in the car to make their seasonal pilgrimage back to Pennsylvania from their winter’s stay in Florida. She wouldn’t do it. I pictured my mother bracing her leg against the door, refusing to enter the car, and my father who wasn’t about to use force, though I’m sure he thought about it, trying to coax her as one would coax a child to do something they didn’t want to do. What did he promise her? A new ring? An ice cream cone? But nothing worked and weeks would pass with my father delaying their departure, carrying the suitcases back inside, until something broke and she got in the car. He’d call my sisters and me from a spot on the road to say they had finally started the drive home. What had eased enough for her to proceed? My father said he didn’t know what allowed him to hustle my mother into the car, but he wasn’t going to count on these sudden and unpredictable openings anymore. He was giving up, and thereafter they stayed holed up in their condominium in Pennsylvania and never went anywhere again.
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These Boys and Their Fathers

Nathan Dumlao, University of Iowa Press

Don Waters | These Boys and Their Fathers | University of Iowa Press | October 2019 | 30 minutes (5,988 words)

 

It’s 10:30 in the morning in Manhattan Beach, California — a warm, hazy day —and from our parked rental van in a lot overlooking the endless strip of sand, we watch the surfers in the lineup, in wetsuits, bobbing like little black buoys. I’ve finally made it to the same beach my father surfed more than fifty-five years ago. I’ve come to find some connection to the man. He abandoned me when I was three years old.

“Look how the waves stand right up,” Robin says. “And so close to the shore.”

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A Single Sentence

greenp/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Ahmet Altan | translated from the Turkish by Yasemin Çongar | an excerpt adapted from I Will Never See the World Again: The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer | Other Press | October 2019 | 9 minutes (2,482 words)

 

The following essay, like all those collected in I Will Never See the World Again, was smuggled out of jail among Ahmet Altan’s notes to his lawyers.

 

I woke up. The doorbell was ringing. I looked at the digital clock by my side, the numbers were blinking 05:42.

“It’s the police,” I said.

Like all dissidents in this country, I went to bed expecting the ring of the doorbell at dawn.

I knew one day they would come for me. Now they had. Read more…

The Girl I Didn’t Save

Woman's spirit ascending to Heaven (1883) / Getty, Lookout Press

Cameron Dezen Hammon| Longreads | excerpt from This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession | September 2019 | 24 minutes (6,521 words)

 

“She’s saying ‘thank you’ when she blinks like that,” Hannah’s mother says.

Hannah is dying. She lies in her bed, in her bedroom, surrounded by cards and flowers. Her mother sits on the edge of the bed, stroking her hand. Hannah’s husband of one month is beside her, propped against pillows, cross-legged. A few close friends are here as well—they sit against the wall, knees pulled to chests, or lean against the window ledge. Every few seconds Hannah’s ribcage rises in a struggle for breath.

Matt and I met Hannah three years after Budapest, while we were working for the young Baptist at Koinonia. It was the first church we worked for with a congregation comprised of people roughly our own age, and Hannah, twenty-seven, fit perfectly into its little galaxy of artists, lawyers, and schoolteachers. She flitted easily between groups of friends, always smiling. The pastor often calls Hannah his favorite, but no one minds. Hannah is everyone’s favorite.
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To Love and Protect Each Other — From Bigotry

CSA Images / Getty

Jay Deitcher | Longreads | September 2019 | 11 minutes (2,743 words)

After dating Annie for six years, it was no surprise to my family when we stomped the glass and jumped the broom in the same Albany, New York temple my parents were married in. Although we came from different backgrounds — I’m Ashkenazi Jewish, Annie’s Jamaican and Nigerian — my relatives fell for her as hard as I had. She visited my 102-year-old Aunt Marion in the nursing home, could cook a mean brisket (with a dash of jerk seasoning), and chose Judaism, eventually speaking better Hebrew than me. After Annie inspired me to quit smoking, she became my parents’ hero. She upgraded me.

Having witnessed anti-Semitism in the black community and racism coming from Jews, Annie and I made a contract: we’d protect one another. When her African-American friends referred to me as a “good Jew” — as if I were an anomaly — she said something. After the Ashkenazi guy greeted Annie in our temple lobby with a “Welcome, can I help you?” — watching her purse, as if she were going to shoot the place up — I said something, too. I attempted to show wrongdoers their errors, while Annie was an advocate of confrontation followed by ghosting the offender.

Weeks after our wedding, Annie and I went to an Italian spot for lunch with my dad and his friend Bill. Over the decades, Bill was my dad’s go-to fix-it man — initially helping around the house, later becoming one of my father’s closest non-Jewish buddies, one of his confidants. Bill had given us $300 — the most generous gift we received from someone who wasn’t related.

Over lunch, Bill shared his own family milestones, but while waiting for the leftovers to be boxed he dropped the N-bomb, over and over. “They call themselves it, why shouldn’t I?” he asked, smiling, looking directly at my wife. “I call a spade a spade.”

Annie’s eyes slit into tense pockets of rage. Her mouth twisted. Bill didn’t notice or care. Annie wasn’t only mad at Bill, who’d exposed his true self. It was my dad and I who were disappointing failures. A tension began forming between Annie and my father and me. With every word Bill uttered, it grew.
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The Bread Thread

Daniel Grizelj, Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Emily Weitzman | Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,335 words)

 

EMILY WEITZMAN IS A HUGE FUCKING SLUT.

 

The words leap out of the computer screen and hang in the air. Enlarging, colliding, rearranging:

 

EMILY WEITZMAN IS A HUGE FUCKING SLUT.

Emily Weitzman Is a Fucking Huge Slut

Emily Weitzman Is Fucking A Huge Slut

Emily Is Weitzman Fucking A Slut

Weitzman A Fucking Slut

Huge Fucking, Emily:

SLUT.

 

When I sign on to my college’s gossip site, the “Anonymous Confession Board,” there’s my name at the top of the homepage. The words glare back at me. I rush into my dorm room and shut the door. I’m terrified the entire freshman class has seen the post by now. “Anonymous” could be in my English class or my dorm room or my bed. I hide in my room and call my friend Lisle, four floors below in Clark Hall. She has seen the thread and already begun retaliating. But every time she replies to defend me, the insult continues to rise to the top of the homepage. Lisle decides we should force the post down the page by starting another thread. Instead of writing slander, we set out to find a topic that’s neutral, undeniably loved.

The answer is simple: bread.

We call it: “The Bread Thread.” Lisle explains: “Everyone loves bread!” Maybe you don’t eat bread, but you likely don’t despise it either. The first post begins: I FUCKING LOVE BREAD! Soon someone adds: I thought no one could relate to my obsession with bread! People get into friendly debates on what’s the best bread spread. They post about white bread, wheat bread, flat bread, pita bread, rye bread, corn bread, banana bread, tortilla. “The Bread Thread” spreads across campus. Everyone writes of their love for the loaf.

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Where Am I?

AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills

Heather Sellers True Story | April 2019 | 44 minutes (8,983 words)

 

I was on my way home, flying from New York back to Florida. In the heart of Manhattan, I had given a keynote address to a large group of researchers at Rockefeller University. Internationally known neuroscientists, men and women at the top of their field, had been interested in what I had to say. I still couldn’t believe how well it had gone.

When we landed in Tampa, the plane, full of Disney-bound families and snow birds, nosed up to the gate, and I strode down the jet bridge. Confident and successful in my big-city clothes — black boots, black tights, black silk tunic — I followed the stream of passengers ahead of me as we made our way past the gates.

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How to Predict the Unpredictable

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Katie Gutierrez | Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,370 words)

 
On the side of a busy road, I called her name: Lola! Lola! Flaxen weeds blew at my knees. Traffic a blur of painted metal. She could be anywhere. And then I saw her — a black pug parting the grass, running toward me. I took her into my arms and pressed my forehead against hers, relief stinging sweet.

I told Adrian about the dream with my eyes still closed. We had only been living together for two weeks, since he’d moved to San Antonio from Sydney to be with me. We’d known each other since we met on a cross-continental flight 10 years earlier, though we’d only been together, long-distance, for the last two years.

When he didn’t respond, I opened my eyes. He was grinning at a Craigslist photo: a black pug puppy drooping in slim-fingered hands. She looked like a child’s school project: clumsily glued googly eyes, pink felt tongue.

“We can’t,” I said, laughing, but he was already sending the email.

We drove to a neighborhood in northwest San Antonio. It was March, and the puppies looked like miniature seals, basking, all shiny black fur and skin rolls. They were big for their age, except for the only girl, the runt in the back corner. At first we passed one of the boys back and forth. Then the girl, who instantly crawled up our necks, her sharp puppy claws sticking like burrs in the collars of our shirts. She licked our chins, swiping at our ears and cheeks.

“This is her, isn’t it?” Adrian asked.

I nodded, thrilled and mystified at where we found ourselves, all because of a dream.

“What should we name her?” I asked.

“I think it has to be Lola,” he said.
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