Search Results for: The New Yorker

An Audience of Athletes: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Sports

womenSports, Bettmann / Getty

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | May 2019 | 26 minutes (6,609 words)

The idea for womenSports magazine was born in a car suspended over the San Francisco Bay by beams of steel. Several weeks before she captivated the nation by beating Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match in the fall of 1973, Billie Jean King sat in the passenger seat of a car and stewed. At the wheel was her then-husband, Larry, driving the couple from Emeryville near Oakland toward San Francisco on the Bay Bridge, and as Billie Jean flipped through an issue of Sports Illustrated, she complained, which is what she always did whenever she picked up an issue of SI. Read more…

Shelved: Tupac and MC Hammer’s Promising Collaboration

Illustration by Homestead

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (2,898 words)

 

In 1990, rapper Stanley “MC Hammer” Burrell stood at the pinnacle of popular culture. His stage show featured 32 musicians and dancers, all of whom attended a rigorous boot camp. According to an Ebony magazine article from that year, the boot camp consisted of “four miles of jogging, weight training, and at least six hours of dancing daily.” “Hammer Time” cultural saturation included demonstrations of his athletic “Hammer Dance” on Oprah and appearances in commercials for British Knights athletic shoes and Pepsi. Hammer owned 2,000 pairs of baggy “Arabian pants,” which, along with gold lamé vests, made up his distinctive stage image.

Read more…

Editors Roundtable: Violence of Men, Money, and Space (Podcast)

Getty Images

On our May 10, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Fact-checker Ethan Chiel, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The New Yorker.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


00:26 My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
(Wil S. Hylton, May 8, 2019, The New York Times Magazine

“These are often snapshots or frames in the film of your life, and they don’t often take into account the frames that come after…something like this that is both personal and societal, you certainly should get applause for stepping forward and saying I did these things, I am responsible in this way, but the work continues forever and I agree that the applause can sound like absolution and it should not be.” –Aaron Gilbreath

In his essay, Hylton recounts being physically beaten by his cousin in an unprovoked attack. The piece also weaves in the deterioration, over a decade, of Hilton’s marriage, and examines how masculinity and the ideas around masculinity were a factor in both events.

The team discusses why these types of intimate family violence stories elicit a different reaction when written by women versus men and the tension surrounding the question of whom toxic masculinity hurts more: men or women?

11:06 “Going Under at the Playboy Club
(Josephine Livingstone, May 8, 2019, The New Republic)

“I think the thing we’re struggling over is intentional. Whether it was in 1963 or now, the idea that these women, these waiters, might sleep with you, is a big part of the business that is being sold.” –Kelly Stout

A follow-up to Gloria Steinem’s “A Bunny’s Tale” written in 1963, Livingstone’s piece is in explicit conversation with Steinem’s while grappling with gender performance at a place like The Playboy Club. The piece looks at how both writers examine how the playboy culture and the public conversation around it have changed in the ensuing years.

The team touches on the economic dynamics at play in the piece and “the strange thorny mix of labor and gender representation issues.” They talk about performances of gender and interrogating our reactions to these performances. Finally they look at Livingstone’s and Steinem’s roles as both participants and observers and the inherent reductionist problem of journalism’s assumption that a particular glimpse into a world is more full than it is.

23:20How America’s Oldest Gun Maker Went Bankrupt: A Financial Engineering Mystery”
(Jesse Barron, May 1, 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

“A story nominally about guns that really isn’t about guns at all.” –Ethan Chiel

Gun manufacturer Remington was bought by a private equity firm who moved manufacturing to Alabama and, in the process, pushed the company to bankruptcy. It’s a story about debt and finance and municipal government that looks at how when debt transfer is dressed up as job creation, responsibility is lost.

The team discusses the complex machinations of American finance and how the actual functioning of a company doesn’t always have to do with whether they live or die. Meanwhile, people’s belief that these things are happening in the free market, that meritocracy and supply and demand are the only things dictating whether companies survive, obscures what is really happening while allowing us to feel protected.

33:10The Race to Develop the Moon
(Rivka Galchen, April 29, 2019, The New Yorker)

“For fresh starts we used to have California, go west. Now we go up to the moon.” –Aaron Gilbreath

Galchen explores a renewed interest in the moon by China, Japan, Isreal, India, the EU, and the US. Not as a place to stake a claim for political reasons, as it was in the 60s and 70s, but as a place to exploit and monetize resources and start businesses.

The team discusses what might happen if we take our capitalist, resource-exploiting culture beyond our planet and whether we can bring our ability to observe and reflect on the human experience with us as well.

* * *

Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Close-up of an ampoule that contains a medium for stem cell storage at the UK Stem Cell Bank, north London, England, May 19, 2004. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Caroline Chen, Keri Bertino, Ann Friedman, Allison Williams, and Brian Payton.

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

Take Two Stem Cell Injections and Don’t Call Me Until After I Cash Your $10,000 Cheque

Stem cell. Getty Images

Getting older? Feeling the aches and pains that come naturally as we age? If someone suggests that stem cells will ease your ills, ask to see some science, and maybe a valid medical license. Stem cell purveyors are popping up all over the United States in a new, “largely unregulated” industry — and they’re charging $5,000 to $10,000 for a single injection.

As Caroline Chen reports as part of a joint investigation by ProPublica and The New Yorker, “Unscientific methods, deceptive marketing, price gouging and disregard for patients’ well-being were rampant across the amniotic stem cell therapy industry.” The investigation “found disgraced doctors who were recast as salespeople, manufacturers that cloaked themselves in pseudoscience and had few scientists on staff, and clinics that offer to treat conditions like multiple sclerosis or kidney disease without specialized training.”

These clinics are multiplying in the United States. According to a tally by Leigh Turner, an associate professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota, there were 12 such clinics advertising to consumers in 2009; in 2017, there were more than 700. Unproven cellular therapies are a $2 billion global business, according to a recent paper co-authored by Massimo Dominici, the lead investigator at the cellular therapy lab at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, in Italy.

They were there to see a presentation by Dr. David Greene, who was introduced as a “retired orthopedic surgeon.” Atlas Medical Center, a local clinic that specializes in pain treatment, hosted the event. Greene, a short, trim man with his hair slicked up, ignored the stage and microphone and stood close to his audience. After warming up the crowd with a joke about his inept golf skills, Greene launched into his sales pitch. A tiny vial no larger than the palm of his hand, he told the group, contains roughly 10 million live stem cells, harvested from the placenta, amniotic fluid, umbilical cord or amnion, the membrane that surrounds the fetus in the womb. Injected into a joint or spine, or delivered intravenously into the bloodstream, Greene told his listeners, those cells could ease whatever ailed them.

On a screen behind him, Greene displayed a densely printed slide with a “small list” of conditions his stem cell product could treat: arthritis, tendinitis, psoriasis, lupus, hair loss, facial wrinkles, scarring, erectile dysfunction, heart failure, cardiomyopathy, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, emphysema, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, ALS, neuropathy, pelvic pain, diabetes, dry eye, macular degeneration, kidney failure. And that was just a sample. “I need to add a couple more slides,” Greene said with a laugh.

Soni told Longo that three more injections were required for him to feel a significant difference, but, by early May, Longo had decided not to seek further treatment, saying that his left knee hadn’t improved any more. “I don’t think the regenerative properties were happening,” Longo said.

Earlier this year, Soni’s Web site displayed the names and faces of a team of clinicians, including a cardiologist, a cosmetologist, a neurologist, and a urologist. None of them were listed on New York State’s license look-up page, and their photos were traced back to stock photo websites.

When initially asked about these specialists, Soni said, “They are all seeing patients for me” and changed the subject. After ProPublica and The New Yorker expressed doubts about the clinicians’ existence to Soni, the names and photos vanished from the website.

Read the story

Why the Moon Is Suddenly a Hot Commodity

FeatureChina via AP Images

Since astronauts last walked on the moon in 1972, no person has visited this cold lunar body, but a renewed interest in the moon as an economic and scientific resource has launched a new space race. For The New Yorker, Rivka Galchen explores why many countries and private interests, from Boeing to Jeff Bezos, are developing technology and plans to put people back on the moon to mine, inhabit, and use it to launch other space craft.

Now, you will ask me what in the world we went up on the Moon for,” Qfwfq, the narrator of Italo Calvino’s “Cosmicomics,” says. “We went to collect the milk, with a big spoon and a bucket.” In our world, we are going for water. “Water is the oil of space,” George Sowers, a professor of space resources at the Colorado School of Mines, in Golden, told me. On the windowsill of Sowers’s office is a bumper sticker that reads “My other vehicle explored Pluto.” This is because his other vehicle did explore Pluto. Sowers served as the chief systems engineer of the rocket that, in 2006, launched nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft, which has flown by Pluto and continued on to Ultima Thule, a snowman-shaped, nineteen-mile-long rock that is the most distant object a spacecraft has ever reached. “I only got into space resources in the past two years,” he said. His laboratory at the School of Mines designs, among other things, small vehicles that could one day be controlled by artificial intelligence and used to mine lunar water.

Water in space is valuable for drinking, of course, and as a source of oxygen. Sowers told me that it can also be transformed into rocket fuel. “The moon could be a gas station,” he said. That sounded terrible to me, but not to most of the scientists I spoke to. “It could be used to refuel rockets on the way to Mars”—a trip that would take about nine months—“or considerably beyond, at a fraction of the cost of launching them from Earth,” Sowers said. He explained that launching fuel from the moon rather than from Earth is like climbing the Empire State Building rather than Mt. Everest. Fuel accounts for around ninety per cent of the weight of a rocket, and every kilogram of weight brought from Earth to the moon costs roughly thirty-five thousand dollars; if you don’t have to bring fuel from Earth, it becomes much cheaper to send a probe to Jupiter.

Experts predict a host of benefits and problems with this renewed lunar interest, from environmental damage to political tensions involving the 1976 Outer Space Treaty. Some see the moon as more of a solution than a problem.

“There’s the argument that we’ve destroyed the Earth and now we’re going to destroy the moon. But I don’t see it that way,” Metzger said. “The resources in space are billions of times greater than on Earth. Space pretty much erases everything we do. If you crush an asteroid to dust, the solar wind will blow it away. We can’t really mess up the solar system.”

Read the story

Did One Young Scientist Discover the Paleontology Pot of Gold?

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid impact seems to have nearly eliminated 99.9 percent of life on Earth, but scientists still have questions about the conditions leading up to this mass extinction. A dark layer of ash and debris known as the KT boundary marks the dividing line: above it is the Tertiary Period, below it is the Cretaceous period, or the time of dinosaurs. Until 2013, scientists had found very few dinosaur remains in the nine feet of material immediately below the boundary, and there was no agreement about the dinosaurs’ decline leading up to the asteroid impact. Then a paleontology student named Robert DePalma made a monumental discovery in North Dakota.

For The New Yorker, Douglas Preston tells DePalma’s and the asteroid’s story, as he spends time with him at the secretive site of what might be the greatest scientific discovery of the century. As DePalma is not yet a known entity and his discovery is just coming to light, some people in the scientific community find him unreliable and doubt his interpretation of the fossil evidence.

The following day, DePalma noticed a small disturbance preserved in the sediment. About three inches in diameter, it appeared to be a crater formed by an object that had fallen from the sky and plunked down in mud. Similar formations, caused by hailstones hitting a muddy surface, had been found before in the fossil record. As DePalma shaved back the layers to make a cross-­section of the crater, he found the thing itself—not a hailstone but a small white sphere—at the bottom of the crater. It was a tektite, about three millimetres in diameter—the fallout from an ancient asteroid impact. As he continued excavating, he found another crater with a tektite at the bottom, and another, and another. Glass turns to clay over millions of years, and these tektites were now clay, but some still had glassy cores. The microtektites he had found earlier might have been carried there by water, but these had been trapped where they fell—on what, DePalma believed, must have been the very day of the disaster.

“When I saw that, I knew this wasn’t just any flood deposit,” DePalma said. “We weren’t just near the KT boundary—this whole site is the KT boundary!” From surveying and mapping the layers, DePalma hypothesized that a massive inland surge of water flooded a river valley and filled the low-lying area where we now stood, perhaps as a result of the KT-impact tsunami, which had roared across the proto-Gulf and up the Western Interior Seaway. As the water slowed and became slack, it deposited everything that had been caught up in its travels—the heaviest material first, up to whatever was floating on the surface. All of it was quickly entombed and preserved in the muck: dying and dead creatures, both marine and freshwater; plants, seeds, tree trunks, roots, cones, pine needles, flowers, and pollen; shells, bones, teeth, and eggs; tektites, shocked minerals, tiny diamonds, iridium-laden dust, ash, charcoal, and amber-smeared wood. As the sediments settled, blobs of glass rained into the mud, the largest first, then finer and finer bits, until grains sifted down like snow.

Read the story

The Women Characters Rarely End Up Free: Remembering Rachel Ingalls

Gaia Banks / New Directions Publishing

Ruby Brunton | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,674 words)

Rachel Ingalls, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 78, was a writer who did not seek out the spotlight, but found it not at all unpleasant when at last it came. Beyond a small circle of loyal friends and regular visits to Virginia to see her family, Ingalls lived a fairly reclusive existence after her move from the U.S. to the U.K. in 1965. “I’m not exactly a hermit,” she said, “but I’m really no good at meeting lots of strangers and I’d resent being set up as the new arrival in the zoo. It’s just that that whole clubby thing sort of gives me the creeps.”

A writer of fantastical yet slight works of fiction, with a back catalog numbering 11 titles in total, Ingalls flew more or less under the literary radar until recent years, when the newfound interest that followed the 2017 re-issue of her best-known book, Mrs. Caliban, also finally allowed her readers to learn about her processes and motivations; the attention slowly brought her into the public eye. Reviews across the board revered the oddly taciturn novella, in which mythic elements and extraordinary happenings are introduced into the lives of otherwise normal people by a prose remarkable for its clarity and quickness. “Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness.” Wrote Lidija Haas in The New Yorker; in the same piece she described Ingalls as “unjustly neglected.” (Mrs. Caliban was also lightheartedly celebrated as a venerable addition to popular culture’s mysterious year of fish sex stories, a fittingly strange introduction of her work to a broader readership.)  Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A U.S. soldier looks towards the military prison known as 'Gitmo.' (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Ben Taub, Paige Blankenbuehler, Alex Horton, Victoria Gannon, and Gustavo Arellano.

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

MFA vs. NYC: A Reading List

42nd Street with Chrysler Bulding during Manhattanhenge in 2018, captured in Manhattan, NYC. (Getty Images)

Near the end of my MFA, someone asked what my plans were after graduation. Before allowing me to answer, he said, somewhat wistfully, that he thought I should move to New York City and “live a little” before writing anything else. In the moment, I probably nodded politely and smiled, as I’m prone to doing, but his suggestion frustrated me. How, after living for two years on a barely-sufficient stipend, did he expect that I’d be able — or want — to fling myself across the country to a city with exorbitant rent prices where I had no job, no insurance, and no community? And what did he mean by living? Had I not been living during the two years of my MFA, during which I moved to an unfamiliar-to-me city, taught classes at the university for the first time, learned to edit a journal, found my way into a community of writers, and struggled in draft after draft to improve my own prose?

Instead of moving to New York City, I did what might be considered the opposite; I started a PhD in creative writing in the middle of Oklahoma, which I’m finishing up now. During my years here, I’ve certainly grown as a writer and a teacher, and had the opportunity to build lasting relationships with people who have supported me in innumerable ways. But I also have remained aware of the problems within academia: there is a food pantry for graduate students in the room across from my office, for example, a lack of diversity within my program and many others, and a job market that dwindles every year. Sometimes I think back to that person telling me to move to NYC, and I wonder who I might be now — as a writer, as a person, as a professional — had I “lived life” rather than pursuing another degree. I’ve probably thought about his offhand comment more than I should, but it also seems to encapsulate some of the larger conversations about the function of MFA and PhD creative writing programs and the various pros and cons of making a life as a writer within or outside of academia.

More interesting to me than prescribing one way of life over another, however, is to examine the challenges and sources of nourishment in each, and to wonder about the possibilities that exist beyond a reductive dichotomy. The essays curated in this reading list illuminate problems that exist within MFA and PhD creative writing programs, explore the idea of mentorship both within and outside of the academy, and offer insight on how to live a fruitful writing life without the support and constraints of a formal program.

1. MFA vs. NYC (Chad Harbach, November 26, 2010, Slate)

Chad Harbach theorizes about how MFA programs are influencing both the craft and professional development of fiction writers, as well as impacting the landscape of publishing, in this viral essay.

It’s time to do away with this distinction between the MFAs and the non-MFAs, the unfree and the free, the caged and the wild. Once we do, perhaps we can venture a new, less normative distinction, based not on the writer’s educational background but on the system within which she earns (or aspires to earn) her living: MFA or NYC.

Related read: Which Creates Better Writers: An MFA Program or New York City? (Leslie Jamison, February 27, 2014, The New Republic) and “MFA vs NYC”: Both, Probably (Andrew Martin, March 28, 2014, The New Yorker)

2. Going Hungry at The Most Prestigious MFA in America (Katie Prout, Lit Hub)

The idea of writers living without substantial income is one that’s sometimes romanticized, as Katie Prout notes while listening to an audiobook of A Moveable Feast, in which Hemingway says that “he and Pound agreed that the best way to be a writer is to live poorly.” One month away from turning 30, Prout writes about the realities — which include food banks and multiple jobs — of living with very little money while pursuing her MFA at Iowa.

I’m an instructor at the university where I attend the best nonfiction writing program in the country, and I make approximately $18,000 a year before taxes. When I was denied a second teaching assistantship at the university this summer for the upcoming school year even though I already had signed a contract with the offering department, my director explained that it was in the school’s best interests to look after my best interests, and my best interest was to make sure that I had time [to] write my thesis.

3. Every Day is a Writing Day, With or Without an MFA (Emily O’Neill, November 27, 2018, Catapult)

The requirement to relocate and the insufficiency of fully-funded spots are just two of many reasons why MFA degrees are not possible for many people, as Emily O’Neill explains in this essay about how she nurtures a writing life outside of the academy.

I don’t have an MFA. It often makes me feel like the man on that mortifying date to admit this to writers I don’t know well. So many people who write are academics or at least aspiring to an MFA or PhD, and mentioning I don’t feel specifically drawn to the demands of graduate school is often seen as a sin against literature.

4. Woman of Color in Wide Open Spaces (Minda Honey, March 2017, Longreads)

After two years, Minda Honey longs to escape from the whiteness of her MFA program, and plans a trip to four national parks, not realizing that “80% of National Parks visitors and employees are white.” Weaving together moments from her travels and memories from her writing program, Honey lays bare the lack of diversity in both spaces.

When I’d first started my MFA program, I thought it would be an escape from the oppressive whiteness of Corporate America. I thought without suits to button my body into, I would be free to exist. But Academia proved to be just as oppressive.

5. How Applying to Grad School Becomes a Display of Trauma for People of Color (Deena ElGenaidi, April 17, 2018, Electric Lit)

When consulting with people about how to apply to PhD programs, Deena ElGenaidi’s advisor tells her to play up her minority status in her personal statement. ElGenaidi explores the problematic and pervasive nature of this advice, while also discussing what it means that minority students and people of color are encouraged to use their trauma in order to be admitted into academic programs.

The experience taught me that society, white America specifically, regularly asks minorities and people of color to tokenize and exploit themselves, talking about their cultural backgrounds in a marketable way in order to gain acceptance into programs and institutions we are otherwise barred from.

6. The Mentor Series: Allie Rowbottom and Maggie Nelson (Allie Rowbottom, ed. Monet Patrice Thomas, March 25, 2019, The Rumpus)

How do writers balance the challenge of seeking publication in a difficult fast-paced market while nurturing their craft? And what role do mentors play in a writer’s development? In the inaugural installment of “The Mentor Series,” a series of interviews between mentors and students curated by Monet Patrice Thomas, Allie Rowbottom and Maggie Nelson ruminate on these questions and more.

Allie Rowbottom: I remember once, after I finished my MFA thesis, you advised I take my time and sit on the project. You said something about not publishing too young, or rushing out of the gate, and I’ve thought about that a lot now that I have published—one of my biggest challenges (or strengths?) as a writer is that I push myself. Now that my first book is out in the world, I feel an urgency to produce more, at the same time I worry that rushing never makes for solid work.

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.