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Canada’s National Magazine Award Winners: A Reading List

Canada's Magazine of the Year Gold winner, Nouveau Projet

Below is a guest reading list by Eva Holland, a writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory, whose work we’ve featured on Longreads many times in the past.

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Canada’s magazine industry recently threw its biggest party of the year: the National Magazine Awards. The Canadian event differs from the American Ellies, with more categories and more nominees per category: this year’s awards were up for grabs among 326 nominees from 80 publications, spread across 43 categories. “Gold” and “silver” winners get awards, and the balance of the nominees receive honorable mentions. That spawns the occasional joke about how in Canadian magazines, everyone gets a medal for participation, but—go ahead, call me biased (I was a nominee/honorable mention in the “society” category, for “The Forgotten Internment”)—I like the way our format lets us celebrate many different sorts of work, not just the “biggest,” most ambitious features.

Here are a few of my favorites from among this year’s winners: Read more…

The Big Business of International Kidnapping

Photo via Risks Incorporated

As we drive to an office in nearby Pembroke Pines, Wilson briefs me on the bourgeoning business of international kidnapping. The White House’s recent acknowledgment of the accidental killing of two al-Qaida hostages in Pakistan in January, as well as the dark news from Syria in recent months, both overshadows and underscores the fact that kidnappings are a global scourge. As incidents have increased worldwide, a parallel industry has emerged, one that includes insurance companies, negotiators, lawyers, and security firms like Risks Inc. In a 2010 investigation, London’s Independent newspaper dubbed this the “hostage industry,” and estimated its worth at about $1.6 billion a year.

“You don’t have to be rich. People will kidnap you for next to nothing,” Wilson says. “Venezuela is out of control. Mexico is out of control.” Most of his clients for the Florida course are executives or wealthy individuals who live in high-risk areas, primarily in Latin America. (Wilson also offers the course in Belgrade, Serbia.) Other students have included American businessmen who travel to potentially dangerous locations, security contractors, and an international yacht captain. (Lambros Y. Lambrou, a trial lawyer in Manhattan and a father of two, took Wilson’s kidnap course to help ensure his family’s safety when they travel to countries like Mexico and Serbia, where his wife is from. “We live in a very uncertain world sometimes,” Lambrou says. “Unfortunately, most of the time the only person you have to protect you is yourself.”)

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Educating the Imagination: Kenneth Koch on Poetry

Photo of Kenneth Koch via Teachers & Writers Magazine

I was brought up in Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents were very nice. The first time I wrote a poem, my mother gave me a big kiss and said, “I love you.” The whole idea of writing poetry had a lot to do with escaping, escaping from the bourgeois society of Cincinnati, Ohio, escaping from any society of Cincinnati, Ohio, and escaping from any society anywhere. The first thing I had to find out to be a poet at all was that there was a bigger world, a bigger world than that of my school and my parents and their friends. I had to find out that there was a world where people talked to the moon or said, “O wild west wind,” that there was a past that was more exhilarating and interesting than the Egypt and Ethiopia that I studied in fourth-grade geography.

Then, I had to find out that there was a bigger language than the one that I spoke and my friends and parents spoke. Instead of “Oh, there’s the most darling blouse down at Altman’s. Let’s go down there tomorrow,” I had to find out that you could say, “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being.” I had to find out you could say, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.” In saying so, I was lifted way above all these troubles of Cincinnati, Ohio, these troubles that seemed to be suffocating me though I had a relatively happy childhood. I had to find this big language with words like “impediment” and “wild west wind” and the idea of talking to everything. Then, I had to find some bigger poetic forms than I knew about, bigger poetic forms than nursery rhymes. I had to find sonnets, odes, and things like that. That was the first stage.

No sooner had I found all of these things than I had to start getting rid of them.

Kenneth Koch, in a talk at the Teachers & Writers Collaborative’s Center for Imaginative Writing in 1993. Published originally in Teachers & Writers Magazine in 1994, this transcript is now available in their online archives.

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Gillian Welch on How April 14th Came to Be ‘Ruination Day’

April 15 may be Tax Day, but for some—especially singer Gillian Welch—it’s the 14th of April that’s notorious.

April 14 marks the anniversary of three awful, fabled events: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865; the Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912 (it sunk in the wee hours of the 15th); and the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935. Gillian Welch first brought attention to this foreboding historical confluence on her 2001 album Time (The Revelator)which has two songs chronicling the events of April 14: “April the 14th, Part 1” and “Ruination Day, Part 2.” I caught up with Welch to discuss how she first made the connection, and how the songs in question came about.

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How did you become aware that these three events occurred on the same day? Was the confluence immediately meaningful to you?

I can’t remember which I knew first, but it was probably the Woody Guthrie song “Dust Storm Disaster,” that goes “on the 14th day of April… there came the greatest dust storm the world had ever known….er, ever filled the sky.” So that’s probably the first one I knew, and that’s considered the worst storm in American history. I think they call it Black Sunday. I’d known that one since I was a kid.
When Dave [David Rawlings, Welch’s musical partner and co-writer of Time (The Revelator)]  and I first started working together I was listening to a lot of Blind Willie Johnson, who does “God Moves on the Water,” and that has a lyric that goes “year of nineteen hundred and twelve, April the fourteenth day.” When I made that connection I was like wow, crazy, the Titanic hit the iceberg on the same day as the dust storm. Bad day. Read more…

National Audubon Society v. Jonathan Franzen

Ghostly Bird Trace on a Window, Photo by Alan Hensel Wikimedia Commons

It’s not clear what the Audubon Society did to piss off Jonathan Franzen. But the Audubon that emerges from Franzen’s essay is a band of once-scrappy conservationists who have grown content to peddle squeaky plush toys and holiday cards; we’ve seized on climate change, apparently, in a last grab at relevance.

In order to gin up that caricature, however, Franzen, who has no journalism experience that I know of, was forced to ignore or actively distort a great deal of inconvenient truth. In fact, the very examples he cites in his piece of the kind of retail, grassroots protections we should be offering to birds (and the very kind that would presumably be subsumed in a wave of climate neurosis) were spearheaded by . . . Audubon.

—From “Friends Like These,” a short response by Mark Jannot at the National Audubon Society to Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker essay on the organization’s efforts to have bird-safe glass installed at the new Vikings stadium, and climate change’s effects on conservation efforts.

In Honor of National Grammar Day: What It Was Like to Copy-Edit Pauline Kael

In honor of National Grammar Day—a relatively recent addition to the holiday mix, established in 2008—we are celebrating the copy-editing of Mary Norris. Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker’s copy department, and in a recent piece for the magazine she reflected on her life in grammar:

There were competent writers on interesting subjects who were just careless enough in their spelling and punctuation to keep a girl occupied. And there were writers whose prose came in so highly polished that I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to read them: John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier! In a way, these were the hardest, because the prose lulled me into complacency. They transcended the office of the copy editor. It was hard to stay alert for opportunities to meddle in an immaculate manuscript, yet if you missed something you couldn’t use that as an excuse. The only thing to do was style the spelling, and even that could be fraught. Oliver Sacks turned out to be attached to the spelling of “sulphur” and “sulphuric” that he remembered from his chemistry experiments as a boy. (The New Yorker spells it less romantically: “sulfur,” “sulfuric.”)

When Pauline Kael typed “prevert” instead of “pervert,” she meant “prevert” (unless she was reviewing something by Jacques Prévert). Luckily, she was kind, and if you changed it she would just change it back and stet it without upbraiding you. Kael revised up until closing, and though we lackeys resented writers who kept changing “doughnut” to “coffee cake” then back to “doughnut” and then “coffee cake” again, because it meant more work for us, Kael’s changes were always improvements. She approached me once with a proof in her hand. She couldn’t figure out how to fix something, and I was the only one around. She knew me from chatting in the ladies’ room on the eighteenth floor. I looked at the proof and made a suggestion, and she was delighted. “You helped me!” she gasped.

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Glamorous Crossing: How Pan Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s

Longreads Pick

Starting with just a mail route, Juan Terry Trippe helped create a uniquely American luxury experience.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 10, 2015
Length: 17 minutes (4,383 words)

Glamorous Crossing: How Pan Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s

Meredith Hindley | Longreads | February 2015 | 18 minutes (4,383 words)

 

In August 1936, Americans retreated from the summer heat into movie theaters to watch China Clipper, the newest action-adventure from Warner Brothers. The film starred Pat O’Brien as an airline executive obsessed with opening the first airplane route across the Pacific Ocean. An up-and-coming Humphrey Bogart played a grizzled pilot full of common sense and derring-do.

The real star of the film, however, was the China Clipper, a gleaming four-engine silver Martin M-130. As the Clipper makes its maiden flight in the film, the flying boat cuts a white wake into the waters off San Francisco before soaring in the air and passing over a half-constructed Golden Gate Bridge. As it crosses the Pacific, cutting through the clouds and battling a typhoon, a team of radiomen and navigators follow its course on the ground, relaying updated weather information. The plane arrives in Macao to a harbor packed with cheering spectators and beaming government officials. Read more…

Destination Whatever: Touring the Cruise Industry of the Caribbean

Longreads Pick

A look at the current cruise ship industry—where ships have grown so large that they have become destinations themselves—and the effect of these “floating cities” on their Caribbean ports of call.

Published: Dec 8, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,700 words)

The 2015 National Magazine Award Winners: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

Here’s a brief rundown of some of the winning stories.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 2, 2015