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Science, Chance, and Emotion with Real Cosima

Clone dance party. Photo via BBC America

Maud Newton | Longreads | June 2015 | 24 minutes (5,889 words)

 

BBC America’s Orphan Black seems so immediate, so plausible, so unfuturistic, that Cosima Herter, the show’s science consultant, is used to being asked whether human reproductive cloning could be happening in a lab somewhere right now. If so, we wouldn’t know, she says. It’s illegal in so many countries, no one would want to talk about it. But one thing is clear, she told me, when we met to talk about her work on the show: in our era of synthetic biology — of Craig Venter’s biological printer and George Church’s standardized biological parts, of three-parent babies and of treatment for cancer that involves reengineered viruses— genetics as we have conceived of it is already dead. We don’t have the language for what is emerging. Read more…

John Waters on TV, Bad Taste and Going Undercover

When I’m not frantically blogging for Longreads, I can be found with the writers of The Last Hurrah, a free comedy show in Frederick, MD (hosted by my boyfriend–disclaimer!) In honor of John Waters’ newest book, Carsick, the Last Hurrah team created a video of their attempts to “hitchhike” to Baltimore, Waters’ hometown. Kevin uploaded the video; it got a few hits. Then, silence. Last week, he received an email from an address he didn’t recognize. Guess who? John Waters sent us a video response. His hitchhiking sign says “The Last Hurrah.” That’s us! A weirdo comedy crew from a random Maryland city! We couldn’t believe it, and we still can’t, and all of these events have inspired me to (re)visit the not-so-underground filmmaker’s work. Luckily, Guernica published a new interview with The People’s Pervert just last week:

Guernica: You mentioned in your new book, Carsick, that you wouldn’t make a movie for under ten million now.

John Waters: It’s not that I wouldn’t—it’s that I couldn’t. Because what they want is movie stars. I’m not going to go ask movie stars to work for nothing. I’ve made nineteen movies, I have three homes, what am I going to say to them? “I don’t have any money”? And I’m not going to beg in public. To me, you know, I’ve made all these movies, they’re out there, they’re easy to get. Maybe I’m not going to make another movie. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s not like I haven’t spoken. I think it’s very easy to get my films; I think I was understood right from the beginning. And my books do great. So as long as I have a way to tell you another story—and I’m working on a TV project right now that I’m not allowed to talk about—but maybe it’ll be on TV. TV’s better today—there’s just way more people. So, who knows what’s going to happen? I always have a way to tell stories. That’s the only thing I can pass on: always have a backup career that is equally as important to you. Nothing lasts forever.

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‘Station Eleven’ Author Emily St. John Mandel on Finally Quitting Her Day Job

Station Eleven author Emily St. John Mandel recently tweeted that she’d quit her day job—something she’d been unable to do for years before the success of her highly acclaimed fourth novel, which was nominated for a National Book Award, among other prizes.

In interviews over the years, Mandel has talked about her necessity for at least part-time employment, something she shares with most other writers. And in 2009, she wrote an essay about it for The Millions—in which she likened books to lottery tickets, and predicted that the day she could quit her job might never come:

…For all my longing to write full-time, I have every expectation that I’ll need to hold a day job for the duration of my life. I imagine most of my writer friends with will have to work forever too, except for that one guy with the trust fund.

But at the same time, the paradox is that every book we write is a lottery ticket: the strange alchemy that turns a well-written book into a well-written runaway commercial success…a book with sales numbers on a scale that might possibly allow a writer to quit a day job—is somewhat mysterious. It might happen to anyone. If there were a formula that explained exactly how one book generates buzz while another slips quickly into obscurity, all our books would be blockbusters.

So we all come home tired from our days at the office, sit down in front of the blinking cursors on our screens, and allow ourselves to daydream for a moment about being struck by commercial lightning: a film deal, a surprise bestseller, a call from the organizer of Oprah’s book club. We’re all perfectly aware that it will likely never happen. We all keep writing anyway.

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The Craft of Cooking

Jessica Gross | Longreads | June 2015 | 18 minutes (4,479 words)

 

In 1980, 29-year-old Christopher Kimball enrolled in a cooking class and was so frustrated by his instructors’ inability to answer his questions that he started his own cooking magazine. Cook’s Magazine, since reborn as Cook’s Illustrated, presents a small number of recipes refined through extraordinarily rigorous testing by the cooks in Kimball’s 2,500-square-foot kitchen lab. The bimonthly magazine—which features only black-and-white illustrations—eschews a focus on “lifestyle” in favor of treating cooking as a discipline and a craft. Over the years, Cook’s Illustrated has garnered a large and loyal readership—and spawned an empire, including a second magazine, Cook’s Country; many cookbooks; and two television shows. “America’s Test Kitchen,” the most popular cooking show on public television, is currently in its 15th season. We spoke by phone about what it takes to write a crystal-clear recipe, the Cook’s Illustrated business model, and Kimball’s not-quite success getting his own kids in the kitchen.

* * *

I want to get into the nitty-gritty of writing recipes that are really easy for people to follow. In thinking about our conversation, I remembered that in middle school, I had to do a project called “Write It Do It.” You were given a structure and had to write out, step by step, how to put it together. Your partner got these instructions and then had to try to construct a replica, which you’d then compare with the original.

That’s great—I should do that with my test cooks.

Well, we did horribly—my partner and I came in second to last or something—which drove home how difficult it is to describe in words how to physically construct something specific. So, when you’re writing a recipe, how do you make crystal clear what the cook is supposed to be doing?

Yeah, that’s the essence of it—and it’s made even more difficult because every home cook’s kitchen is different. The cookware is different, the stovetop is different, the oven is different and they almost never use the right ingredients, or they substitute ingredients and leave ingredients out. So the variables beyond your control are substantial. In your case, if you have a set of Legos on a desk, you know exactly what the components are. In our case, they don’t have all the Legos. They substituted some other puzzle game for half the Legos and they aren’t going to actually build a whole building; they’ll leave out parts of it. And they won’t read your directions entirely. They’ll read parts of it but not fully. So it’s more like, “Write It, Kinda Do It.” Read more…

The College Syllabi That Shaped ‘The Waste Land’

Indeed, the famous eclecticism of “The Waste Land,” which incorporates quotations from multiple languages and literatures, can be seen as a tribute to the educational philosophy that governed Harvard during Eliot’s time there…

Yet as Crawford shows in the impressively researched Young Eliot, the “melange of topics” that Eliot explored in college “mightily enriched his poetry.” Eliot’s studies with the philosopher George Santayana planted the seeds of the idea that later emerged in his criticism as the “objective correlative”—the notion that poetic images function as a formula to evoke an emotion. In the recently founded Comparative Literature department, Eliot studied with scholars who “encouraged people…to connect literary works through anthropology to supposedly primitive rituals.” This would become a major technique of “The Waste Land,” which uses the Grail legend, as interpreted by scholars like James Frazer and Jessie Weston, as a structuring myth.

Crawford even manages to track down the moments when Eliot first discovered images and individual words he would later employ in his verse. As a junior, for instance, he took a class on the Roman novel that included Petronius’s Satyricon; years later, the novel’s image of an undying Sibyl appeared in the epigraph of “The Waste Land.” In Eliot’s own annotated copy of the novel, which Crawford examines, the poet glossed the Latin word for mushrooms, tubere in the text—a word that returns in “The Waste Land,” where he writes of winter “Feeding/a little life on dried tubers.” There is something thrilling about the way Crawford locates such moments in time and space, showing how a poem as mysterious and complex as “The Waste Land” draws on something as familiar as a college syllabus.

Adam Kirsch writing in Harvard Magazine about how T.S. Eliot’s time at Harvard shaped his life and career.

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Defending Journalist Joseph Mitchell

In the April issue of the New York Review of Books Janet Malcolm wrote about the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell, and responded to Thomas Kunkel’s new Mitchell biography. The biography reveals how Mitchell invented some of his beloved material, which raises questions about larger journalistic standards, betraying readers’ trust, and what effect Mitchell’s invention and embellishment might have on the reputation of pieces like “Mr. Hunter’s Grave.” On this Malcolm is clear:

Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to. This is why they are journalists rather than novelists or short-story writers. They depend on the kindness of the strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads. Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

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All the Language in the World Won’t Make a Bookshelf Exist

Photo by Nina MacLaughlin

Nina MacLaughlin | Hammer Head, W.W. Norton | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,383 words)

The following is an excerpt from Nina MacLaughlin’s memoir Hammer Head—the story of MacLaughlin’s journey out of a drag-and-click job at a newspaper and into a carpentry apprenticeship. In this section MacLaughlin strikes out on her own to craft bookshelves for her father and meditates on the relationship between writing and carpentry, and learning to build with wood instead of words.

***

The maple leaves dropped, the temperature fell, and we slipped into winter. After the skylight, in the slowing of the year, Mary planned to pause the progress on her third-floor office space in favor of redoing a bathroom downstairs, the one with the paintbrushes in the tub and the crumbling walls.

I swung by her place to pick up the last check she owed me before we took our annual break. She walked me through her bathroom plan.

“Give me a call if you want some help,” I said.

“We’ll see if I can afford you. I’m scared shitless about how much the plumbing is going to cost.”

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A Business Journalism Classic: Inside the Multibillion-Dollar Takeover Battle for RJR Nabisco

Everyone in the room knew about leveraged buyouts, often called LBOs. In an LBO, a small group of senior executives, usually working with a Wall Street partner, proposes to buy its company from public shareholders, using massive amounts of borrowed money. Critics of this procedure called it stealing the company from its owners and fretted that the growing mountain of corporate debt was hindering America’s ability to compete abroad. Everyone knew LBOs meant deep cuts in research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrificed to pay off debt. Proponents insisted that companies forced to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: The executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich.

“The wolf is not at the door,” Johnson said. No corporate raider was forcing him to do this. “This is simply the option that I think is best for our shareholders. I believe it is a doable transaction, and it can be done at prices much higher than the present stock price. We’re not far enough along this road to make firm conclusions or make a proposal at this point, though.”

Johnson stopped a moment and looked at each of the directors: mostly current and retired chief executives, their median age was sixty-five. They had given him a free hand running RJR Nabisco, and hadn’t objected when he wrenched it from its century-old North Carolina home and transformed it into a monument to nouveau-riche excess. But they had struck down his predecessor for lesser transgressions than the one he was now committing.

“I want you to understand one thing,” Johnson continued. “You people will have to decide. If you think this isn’t the answer or there’s a better idea, there will be no hard feelings. I just won’t do it. There are other things I can do, and I’ll do them. We’ll sell food assets. We’ll buy back some more of our stock. I have no problem walking right back upstairs, going to work on plan B, and no hard feelings.”

Silence.

Vernon Jordan, the civil rights leader cum Washington lawyer, was the first to speak. “Look, Ross, if you go ahead with this thing, there’s a real likelihood this company is going to be put in play. Somebody might come along and buy this company for more than you can pay. You might not win. I mean, who knows what could happen?”

—From 1989’s Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. Their bestseller followed the multiple players involved in the 1988 bidding war for the tobacco and food giant, which resulted in its $25 billion leveraged buyout, at the time the largest in history.

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Lightnin’ Hopkins Gets Your Head Tore Up

In the summer of 1960, Dallas, Texas journalist Grover Lewis went to Houston’s Third Ward in search of Bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lewis found him in an old ’54 Dodge. The resulting essay, published in the Village Voice in 1968, is a small masterpiece of personal music writing, offering a snapshot of artistic endurance, 1960s race relations, and the daily life of one of the pivotal figures in the ’60s Blues revival. It’s also a shining example of how to blend first-person interiority with reporting in a way that shows the effect music can have on our lives. Lewis isn’t as well known as his New Journalism counterparts Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, but he’s just as good. You can read the essay in the book Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader:

The head-tearing up process, which was enacted in a succession of piss-smelling little beer parlors, wore on for days, at the end of which I knew considerably more about sour mash whiskey than I had counted on. But in the end, I also knew considerably more about myself, and the South (and that knowledge ultimately freed me to leave it forever), and my own forebears, who, like Hopkins in his young manhood, had been sharecroppers Somewhere along in there, too, in those feverish, rushing days and nights of sweet, raw whiskey fumes and mournful guitar cadenzas ─ even as we shyly began to feel each other out over the clattering racket of the Dodge’s hoarse engine ─ I realized with a dawning sense of wonder that the quest I’d initiated in looking for Lightnin’ had begun long before.

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Troy James Weaver on Pleasure and Shame in Cross-Dressing as a Young Boy

So we were in the food court eating chili dogs and my dad was smoking his cigarettes and drinking a cup of coffee…Then, out of nowhere, my friend started blushing, eyes fixed to his plate, very clearly distraught, so my dad asked him: What’s the problem? And my friend, he said: That lady looks like an old man, pointing his finger. My dad couldn’t hold his laughter. He doubled over the newspaper he was staring at, and when he finished laughing, he patted my friend on his back and said: That lady looks like an old man because she is an old man. But of us were taken off guard. Why’d he dress like that? My dad laughed again…and whispered loudly: He’s a fairy. That’s what he’s into.

And then I wondered if that’s what I was into. I thought of all the times my older sister put makeup on me. I thought about all the times I’d ever played with Barbie dolls of my own free will. I thought about what my friends might think of me, if they knew I enjoyed it when my sister let me play with her girly toys. I wondered what it would be like to be a man dressed as a woman, especially in a world so clearly dominated by men who dressed like men.

–From Witchita Stories, a collection of autobiographical short fiction by Troy James Weaver about growing up in a small town with a junkie, convict brother.

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