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Reading List: Misunderstood

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Feeling misunderstood has been the bane of teen angst for millennia, fodder for pop-punk anthems, and the basis of existential crises. Here, four people delve into the facets of their lives that don’t jibe with the expectations of others—some with disturbing consequences.

1. “I Was A Suspected School Shooter.” (Gina Tron, Vice, January 2013)

In a a small town post-Columbine, Tron’s nonconformity makes her a target. She begins to embody what she is suspected to be.

2. “Why I Stay Closeted in Asia.” (Connor Ke Muo, Buzzfeed, October 2013)

Traveling home for the first time in years, Muo grapples with his parents’ extreme homophobia, cultural stigma, and his father’s reluctance to embrace him — literally.

3. “Hot Girl #2.” (Melissa Stetten, Aeon Magazine, October 2013)

“I like it when people ask if I’m a model, but I hate it when they ask: ‘What do you do?’ and I have to say: ‘I’m a model.’ That makes sense, right?”

4. “Daniel Radcliffe’s Next Trick is to Make Harry Potter Disappear.” (Susan Dominus, October 2013, New York Times)

Radcliffe claims one of the most iconic roles in recent film history, but being Harry Potter isn’t without its cost. Here, the reporter delves into Radcliffe’s upcoming roles (Allen Ginsberg!), his struggle with alcohol and his nuanced relationships with family, friends and fans.

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Reading List: Misunderstood

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Vice, Buzzfeed, Aeon Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 13, 2013

Reading List: The Writing Life vs. The Blinking Cursor

Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Over the weekend, I attended the annual National Book Festival in Washington D.C. One of the highlights was Tamora Pierce’s presentation. Pierce is a young adult fantasy lit author, known for her great writing and awesome female characters. The tent was packed with fans of all ages, and once the Q&A microphones were opened, tween girls rushed to be the first in line. One girl, probably six or seven years old, asked how Mrs. Pierce dealt with writer’s block. Precocious, indeed, but that moment made me think—almost every aspiring writer struggles with the terror of a blank mind and a blank page, from time to time. In every panel I attended over the weekend, at least one person asked about writer’s block. Get out your pencils, punks.

1. “Getting Unstuck” (Caitlin, Rookie, November 2012) features ideas for overcoming writer’s block from many writers, including Joss Whedon, Adrian Tomine and Fran Lebowitz.

2. “The Daily Routines of Famous Writers,” compiled by Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova, is great for its anecdotal charm, as well as its practical advice. Don’t be surprised if you feel envious.

3. In “Ask the Writing Teacher: Story Arc(s),” author and teacher Edan Lepucki expounds upon her understanding of the definition and purpose of story arc, with a little help from Eileen Myles, Margaret Atwood and Orange is the New Black. Includes writing exercises and reading suggestions.

4. The beautiful “A Writer’s Room” (John Spinks, New York Times, August 2013) slideshow includes pictures of the authors in their treasured workspaces, as well as their meditations on writing and the books they’re publishing this fall.

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Photo by Jeremy Levine

On Muppets & Merchandise: How Jim Henson Turned His Art into a Business

Photo by Eva Rinaldi

Elizabeth Hyde Stevens | Make Art Make Money | September 2013 | 17 minutes (4,102 words)

 

In 2011, Longreads highlighted an essay called “Weekend at Kermie’s,” by Elizabeth Hyde Stevens, published by The Awl. Stevens is now back with a new Muppet-inspired Kindle Serial called “Make Art Make Money,” part how-to, part Jim Henson history. Below is the opening chapter. Our thanks to Stevens and Amazon Publishing for sharing this with the Longreads community. Read more…

19: The True Story Of The Yarnell Fire

Longreads Pick

Kyle Dickman, Outside magazine’s associate editor and a former hotshot firefighter, pieces together the final hours of Prescott, Arizona’s Granite Mountain Hotshots, the elite team of firefighters who battled the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30, 2013. Nineteen of the crew’s 20 members would perish:

“The hotshots who’d brought their phones texted or called their loved ones. Another sawyer, Scott Norris, who’d come to Granite Mountain this season after four years on a Forest Service hotshot crew in Payson, Arizona, texted with his girlfriend, Heather.

“Heather: ‘I had a weird dream I proposed to Scott last night.’ Then, ‘Oh, hi. That was meant for Sarah!’

“Scott: ‘I’m a little old fashioned. I think I’d like to be the one to propose.’

“Scott: ‘Just watched a DC3 slurry bomber nearly collide midair with a Sikorsky helicopter.’

“Heather: ‘Holy hell! That certainly would have made the news.’

“Scott: ‘This fire is going to shit burning all over and expected 40+ mile per hour wind gust from t-storm outflow. Possibly going to burn some ranches and houses.’

“And finally, when the fire was racing straight at Donut, Scott texted a final photo of flames filling the valley below them: ‘Holy shit! This thing is running at Yarnell!'”

Source: Outside
Published: Sep 17, 2013
Length: 39 minutes (9,851 words)

‘He’s Our Baby’: What Happens When a Child Is Placed in Foster Care

Cris Beam | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | August 2013 | 23 minutes (5,787 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, by Cris Beam, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick. Thanks to Cris and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sharing it with the Longreads community.

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The Short Life of Robert Earl Hughes, Who Weighed Half a Ton By His Late Twenties

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Jane R. LeBlanc is a freelance journalist who writes for the Dallas Observer where she covers the local comedy scene and anything strange and interesting. She has written for Denton Live, Mayborn magazine, Spirit magazine and the Denton Record-Chronicle. She has a humor blog, Everyone Hates You, where she pontificates about everyday life. You can find her online.

Inspired by a single black and white photograph from the mid-20th century, Robert Kurson explores the short life of Robert Earl Hughes, a young man born in 1926 with a youthful face, a steel-trap mind and a disposition that drew people in. He was also a Guinness World Record holder weighing more than half a ton by his late 20s. Staring at the photograph for much of the day, one thought repeated in Kurson’s head — ‘I knew the heavy man was lonely.’

In ‘Heavy,’ which appeared in Chicago Magazine in 2001, Kurson not only tells Hughes’ story, but that of his own father, a man he worshiped as a young boy and whose weight caused a young Kurson to worry that a ‘person could get lonely being fat in America.’ Through interviews with Hughes’ friends and family members, Kurson lifts Hughes from the pages of yellowed newspaper clippings and into the living, breathing world once more. He finds that ‘it is in the crevices of their memories, where details drop almost accidentally, that their recollections resonate.’ The author’s own memories take us into the mind of a son who was acutely observant of the world that surrounded him and his father. Kurson offers a revealing look into the lives of these two men, who are connected despite the separation of time and circumstances, and takes us into the hearts of those who loved them most.

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A Brief History of ‘It’ Girls

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“It isn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just ‘It’.”

—Rudyard Kipling

1. “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Clara Bow, ‘It’ Girl,” (Anne Helen Petersen, The Hairpin, May 2011)

Clara Bow was the original It girl, so much so that her 1927 film, titled—what else?—“It,” more or less defined the phenomenon. This piece, from Petersen’s Scandals of Classic Hollywood series, offers a perfectly juicy take on Ms. Bow.

2. “Almost Famous” (Katherine Stewart, Santa Barbara Magazine, Oct./Nov. 2006)

Stewart goes beyond the usual Edie clichés and delves into Sedgwick family lore, as well as Edie’s post-Factory return to Santa Barbara.

3. “Chloe’s Scene,” (Jay McInerney, The New Yorker, Nov. 1994)

McInerney’s piece—a semi-seminal take on uber-It girl Chloe Sevigny in the early days of her downtown reign—captures a weird freeze-frame in time: Sevigny pre-Kids fame, and downtown New York in its last gasps of grittiness.

4. “Welcome to the Dollhouse: New York’s Power-Girl Publicists,” (Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York, December 1998)

“Perky, pretty, and remarkably plugged-in, a pack of young publicists have become the darlings of New York’s demimonde. But be careful—they bite.” Detail-packed, with deliciously good dialogue and a healthy dollop of fun, this is classic Grigoriadis.

5. “Ksenia Sobchak: The Jane Fonda of Russia’s Dissident Movement,” ( Sarah A. Topol, Vice, July 2012)

Ksenia Sobchak is the Russian Paris Hilton, if Paris Hilton all of a sudden took an interest in revolutionary politics.

6. “The Secret Life of Cory Kennedy,” (Shawn Hubler, West, Feb. 25, 2007)

Cory Kennedy was just a regular high school hipster until party photographer Mark “The Cobrasnake” Hunter snapped her picture at an LA club. And then—practically overnight and before her parents had a chance to figure out what was going on—she was everywhere, a club kid, model, and message board fashion icon, with her very own column in Nylon. This is the making of an internet It Girl.

7. “The Trouble With ‘It Girls'” (Anne Helen Petersen, Buzzfeed, January 2015)

Update: A new piece from Anne Helen Petersen on what the label tells us about women and their work.

Reading List: One in Seven Billion

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Emily Perper is word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

The student journalist, the Afghani mother, the elderly custodian, the Chinese orphan boy: each of these pieces forces the reader to stop and consider the extraordinary stories of seemingly ordinary people.

1. “At 99, A St. Petersburg Man Finds Meaning in the Working Life.” (Lane DeGregory, Tampa Bay Times, July 2013)

Feature writing wizard DeGregory has found an incredible subject: the wonderful Mr. Newton, who has worked for over 84 years and hasn’t stopped yet.

2. “‘See You on the Other Side.’” (Sara Morrison, Columbia Journalism Review, May 2013)

Jessica Lum, photojournalist, understood the empathetic necessity of storytelling. She practiced her art until she died of cancer at age 25.

3. “Matthew.” (Andrew Yellis, May 2013)

“We met when I was 15 and he was 7. Matthew was always ‘my little brother in China’ … But how can I pretend to really know what it was like to grow up in the situation he did?” Yellis tries to raise a troubled Chinese teen at his parents’ orphanage.

4. “The View from the Sitting Room.” (Angie Chuang, Vela Magazine, July 2013)

Delving into the daily lives of Afghani women, Chuang meets Amina, whose steadfastness saw her family through war, changing regimes and the disappearance of her youngest brother at the hands of KGB soldiers.

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Photo by Andrew Yellis

Longreads Guest Pick: Valerie Vande Panne on Anna Clark and Detroit

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Valerie Vande Panne is an independent journalist covering life and human interests. This week, she chose a series of articles to help give readers a better understanding of Detroit.

“As a journalist, I am often asked, ‘How do you cut through the noise?’ In other words, how do I sift through the thousands upon thousands of bits of information, ‘facts,’ media outlets, and organizations vying and manipulating to get my attention? One tool I rely on is credible sources—actual human beings, experts of any given field. It starts with curiosity: I read their work; I question everything.

“In the case of Detroit, there is one writer I turn to for understanding again and again—a woman who is so prolific, your heart beats with her words as you read, and you miss Detroit as if the city is a long lost lover who has broken your heart—though, perhaps, you’ve never even felt the Motor City’s aching concrete beneath your feet. 

“Anna Clark’s words are gems of Detroit and offered to you with grace, so you too may intimately know this American city and her people.  

“There’s been a lot of loud noise about Detroit these last few weeks, much of it from people who have never spent a moment breathing her air, and do not hold Detroit in their heart—how can one say what a place is, or what she needs, or what her people must do, when there is such a fundamental and profound disconnect?

“If you care to read anything about Detroit, I humbly suggest you make it one of, if not all three of these wordsmithed pieces of truth. Take them in, let them seep into you, and if it pleases you, lift Detroit with your spirit.”

• “Ty Cobb as Detroit.” (Grantland, July 22, 2011)

“Mapping Motown.” (Architect Magazine, November 27, 2012)

“Can Urban Planning Rescue Detroit?” (NextCity, July 1, 2013, Subscription Required)

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