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We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Very Beginning

An advertisement depicts a Baker Electric automobile, the Baker Queen Victoria, driven by a young woman, 1909. (Stock Montage/Getty Images)

Dan Albert | An excerpt adapted from Are We There Yet? : The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless | W. W. Norton & Co. | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,750 words)

Most people reasonably expect the story of the evolution of the automobile to begin with the invention of the automobile itself. I’ve disappointed enough people in my life already, so I give you the Jesuit Rat Car of 1672. In that year, missionary Ferdinand Verbiest created a steam wagon to bring the Emperor of China to Jesus, but the car was only big enough to carry a rat.

If you don’t like the Jesuit Rat Car as an automotive first, you might consider Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s cannon hauler of 1769. A product of the French army’s skunk works, it was canceled in beta testing. In 1790, Nathan Read got the first American patent for a steam-powered wagon, a remarkable feat because the US Patent Office itself had yet to be invented. Perhaps that counts. In London, Richard Trevithick set a Georgian coach body atop a steam boiler and eight-foot wheels, creating the first giraffe-less carriage. In 1805, American Oliver Evans drove his harbor dredge, the Orukter Amphibolos, down the streets of Philadelphia in hopes of enticing investors for a car business. Philadelphia cobblestone street paving gave horses purchase but shook the Orukter so violently that the wheels broke. Let’s call his the first amphibious car. Read more…

‘They Happen To Be Our Neighbors Across the Span of a Century, But They’re Our Neighbors.’

White children celebrating after having raided the home of African Americans during the race riots, Chicago, 1919. Jun Fujita / Chicago History Museum / Getty Images

Adam Morgan | Longreads | June 2019 | 10 minutes (2,587 words)

 

Precisely one hundred summers ago, at least 165 people were killed in “race riots” against black Americans in cities ranging from Washington, D.C. to Bisbee, Arizona. The bloodiest conflict of that “Red Summer” unfolded on the South Side of Chicago between July 27 and August 3. It started at the 29th Street Beach, where a white man threw rocks at black swimmers and killed a 17-year-old boy named Eugene Williams. Over the next few days, 38 people were killed and more than 500 were injured as roving gangs of white men terrorized Chicago’s Black Belt.

“Chicagoans tend to be enthusiastic and vocal discussants of our own history,” Eve Ewing writes in the introduction to 1919, her second book of poetry. “But 1919 didn’t seem to make it into the timeline alongside titanic stories about Fort Dearborn, Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, the World’s Columbian Exposition, the 1968 riots, Richard J. Daley, or Harold Washington.”

So Ewing — the poet of Electric Arches, the scholar of Ghosts in the Schoolyard, the comic book writer of Marvel’s Ironheart, the playwright of No Blue Memories, and arguably the most powerful cultural voice in Chicago over the past five years — set about telling the story of 1919 in a characteristically clever way. Flecked with historical photos and evocative quotes from a post-riot commission report, filled with biblical and mythological references, seamlessly bending time and genre, 1919 is an unforgettable conversation-starter. Every poem leaves a bruise. Read more…

Father’s Little Helper

Illustration by Eric Peterson

Scott Korb | Longreads | June 2019 | 14 minutes (3,467 words)

I.

Some of what you’re reading I was writing a few hours after taking half a Valium, prescribed by my doctor, partly for anxiety and partly for general neck and shoulder pain, and also a tingle and numbness that I was then feeling down my left arm into my fingers. It began with a yoga pose. It’s hard to know now what exactly I wrote while under the drug’s influence, such as it was. When I took the Valium I was 39; now I’m 41.

These 40-odd years, if Schopenhauer is right, have given me the text of my life. “The next 30,” he says, will “supply the commentary,” of which this, I hope, is an early part.

The pharmacist, who was younger than me, with slick hair, and whom I’d gotten to know a little over the years since my wife was treated for breast cancer, used the word spasm when referring to the orders faxed over from my doctor’s office. I nodded, yes, muscle spasms, even though that didn’t seem right; maybe I don’t know what spasm means. I said nothing about the low-grade anxiety I’ve felt for much of my life, which has gotten worse since my wife’s treatments finished up. “Low and slow,” he recommended. So I took half a pill. I’d never taken one before, and I’m cautious.

While discussing the pain in my neck and shoulder, the facial tics I’ve had my whole life, I also told the doctor I’m reluctant to take drugs, even Ibuprofen, though my wife has told me Valium can be fun. She recalls a day just before Father’s Day, 2014, wandering through New York City’s West Village, buying me expensive t-shirts in the late-spring heat, a week after major surgery, without a worry in the world.

I decided to take the Valium in advance of an MRI my doctor had prescribed to capture images of my cervical spine, hunting for disease. The pill would help get me through the test.
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William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Paul Natkin/WireImage

Casey Rae | William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll | University of Texas Press | June 2019 | 28 minutes (4,637 words)

 

Naked Lunch is inseparable from its author William S. Burroughs, which tends to happen with certain major works. The book may be the only Burroughs title many literature buffs can name. In terms of name recognition, Naked Lunch is a bit like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which also arrived in 1959. Radical for its time, Kind of Blue now sounds quaint, though it is undeniably a masterwork.

Burroughs wrote the bulk of his famous novel Naked Lunch in Tan­gier, Morocco between 1954 and 1957. During those years, Burroughs was strung out and unhappy, living off of his parents’ allowance and getting deeper and deeper into addiction. He had friends but rarely saw them, preferring to spend days at a time staring at his shoes while ensorcelled in a narcotic haze.

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Demonology: A Woman’s Right to Fury

Hulton Archive / Sarah Crichton Books

Darcey Steinke | Excerpt from Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life | Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux | June 2019 | 17 minutes (4,557 words)

I walked up the Q train station steps, pushed through the turnstile, and headed out into the stormy fall night. Even as I left the station, anger swirled in my chest, severe and combustible. I moved away from the dark trees of Prospect Park down toward Flatbush Avenue. Some people say fury makes them blind, unable to see the world around them. I felt the opposite. Rage focused my attention. The wet asphalt reflected a red ATM sign. In the market on the corner, I watched a policeman buy a coffee in a white paper cup. Down Flatbush past the nail salon with the wall of multicolored polish, then past the vegetable stand, lemons and limes shining just inside the glass door, and left on Midwood, where I walked under wild trees, as different from trees in calm sunlight as a living person is from a zombie. Branches moved frantically in the greenish streetlight.

I had my worries. I wasn’t sure I could get the money together for my daughter’s college, and I’d developed a mysterious skin condition, with hives rising up under my bra strap and at the waist of my jeans. Those were on a back burner. In the forefront that night was a rage with a singular focus directed at my husband.

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Fashions Fade, But Fleabag Is Forever

Steve Schofield, Amazon / Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 | 8 minutes (2,150 words)

This is a love story. A dangerously elegant woman (noble stock) in lips the color of a dying rose (not a lipstick, but a blend of oils, waxes, and pigments based on MAC’s Dare You), hair a roaring bob, a cigarette perched on her Erté fingers, stands pensively against a brick wall (real?), the burnished light (not real?) casting the kind of shadow that fills in the blanks — and the cleavage. This is Fleabag (of the Amazon series of the same name, written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge), taking a breather behind a restaurant during a fraught family dinner, a fourth-wall-demolishing millennial café owner who could pass for a femme fatale in a film noir. A big part of that latter fantasy is the navy blue jumpsuit she’s wearing (Love, $50), or, more accurately, embodying. The keyhole at the front is more like a door ajar, two strips of material like curtains begging to be parted while threatening to close. Her shoulders jut out, her back is exposed — this is as naked as chic is allowed to be. It is a sleeveless, backless, armless, chestless (well, sort of) number that requires legs for days. To wear it the way Fleabag does, you basically need to be Fleabag, which means you basically need to be Waller-Bridge, whose androgyny (she dressed as a boy when she was a kid), sexiness (she dressed what we think of as the opposite of a boy when she discovered them), and sylphlike stature are as impossible to mimic as the rest of her.

When everyone ran out to buy that jumpsuit last week, that is what they wanted: everything it entailed, from the lights illuminating the scene right down to the It Girl inside. In her ode to the jumpsuit, The Cut’s Kathryn VanArendonk — who bought two sizes just to be sure — wrote not so much about how it looked as what it meant: “It’s revealing in a way that feels like a choice rather than a plea.” A British fan then polled Twitter: “Will buying the Fleabag jumpsuit solve my emotional problems AS WELL as making me look bomb?” The only answers she provided were “Yes” and “Absolutely.”   

“I think people don’t always view contemporary costuming as hard, and it’s really hard,” says Emma Fraser, creator of the TV Ate My Wardrobe blog. “It’s not just about throwing together an outfit,” she explains, it’s using clothes as “an extension of who that character is.” The last time a television star’s style migrated en masse into off-screen culture may have been The Rachel in the ’90s: the shaggy hairdon’t of the Friends everywoman played by Jennifer Aniston, whose face was normal enough that every woman thought a mere haircut could be a conduit for a New York City life that didn’t suck. Fleabag gives us an updated version of that same generational aspiration — the bold red lip, the navy jumpsuit, the “achievable” look and life. Describing the character’s allure, Fraser inadvertently defines the millennial: “Everything can be a mess, but you can still kind of be put together.” Watching television can be like window-shopping, shallow characters being little more than clothes horses for pricey brands, so seeing a layered antiheroine whose affordable accoutrements are inseparable from who she is feels revolutionary. And who, these days, doesn’t want to be part of a revolution? As Waller-Bridge herself texted Fleabag costume designer, Ray Holman, (referencing Twitter): “The jumpsuit is a movement.”

* * *

Broadchurch brought Waller-Bridge and Holman together five years ago — she was acting on the series, he was doing costume design. He was too busy to work on the first season of Fleabag so Jo Thompson designed that one, but when Thompson was too busy during the second season, Holman stepped in. He read the script first, of course, because he always does that before accepting a project. And despite only having one episode’s worth of material, he took the job. “Oh my god,” he recalls Waller-Bridge telling him, “I did a little dance in the office when you said yes.” Holman had a limited BBC budget (he wouldn’t reveal it, but they reportedly spend around $1 million total per episode, pocket change next to Game of Thrones$15 million) and didn’t want anything to stand out (oops). Holman purchased a handful of jumpsuits, wide-leg jeans, striped shirts, and canvas shoes — all items he had discussed with Waller-Bridge — for around 12 outfits total. None of it was expensive: Fleabag runs a cafe in London, remember. “She is stylish but completely High Street,” Holman tells me. “It’s quite a generic urban look, really. It’s quite practical, but slightly stylish.” One of his secrets, he says, was dressing Fleabag according to her situation, rather than just her personal style. The flashback to her mother’s funeral was the hardest because it balanced two opposing ideas: Fleabag’s grief, and, more largely, the objectification of women even in their grief. In that scene, Fleabag appears in head-to-toe black, wearing a blouse that would not look out of place in a courtroom.

As much as the first season of Fleabag is about loss, the second is about love. And isn’t it like that messy bitch to fall for the one guy she can’t have sex with. When we first meet the priest (aka “the hot priest,” played by Sherlock’s Andrew Scott), it’s not clear he is one. He’s unknown to Fleabag, just a random sweary guy at the table of her family dinner. He’s not wearing the dog collar (the audience shouldn’t have any preconceived notions, says Holman). Instead, he is rumpled, in a lavender linen shirt designed by Oliver Spencer, master of the relaxed Brit look (as if that isn’t an oxymoron). Father looks good, but not too good. “He’s quite poor,” the costume designer explains. “He’s not a rich Catholic priest so he doesn’t have many clothes and the clothes he has, they’re old.” He’s not the point anyway. This episode belongs to Fleabag. Fleabag and her jumpsuit (and, okay, her priest boner).

“It could be a disaster, it could be absolutely brilliant” is what Holman thought when he first saw the jumpsuit in the basement of the Oxford Street Topshop in London. It was designed by a small local label, Love, which was founded by Teri Sallas and her husband, Toby, in 2003. “I wanted to make something that covered everything up but was still sexy,” Teri told The Guardian. Though the jumpsuit has been identified everywhere as black in color, Holman insists that he bought two versions – one black, one navy – and that the one on screen is blue (he just never corrected anyone, not to mention that Love, according to Toby, hasn’t produced that version “for some time.”) Holman hesitated because he knew a bra couldn’t be worn under it, but that’s also part of its charm — the apostatism of wearing such a thing to a family gathering. Fleabag’s slightly profane clothing choices, by the way, are deliberate. It’s part of her “off-key” character, which is why we find her in a too-short red dress at her dad’s wedding (that one sold out in the U.K. too) and this too-dressy jumpsuit (paired with sneakers). Maybe she hasn’t seen her family for ages and she’s trying a little too hard. Or maybe Waller-Bridge just put on the jumpsuit and fell in love with it. Holman says that when she wore it for the first time, it was a “wow moment” for them both. Waller-Bridge had two words for it: episode one.

The first episode of the second season has Fleabag at a fancy restaurant celebrating her parents’ engagement. Her family hasn’t been together like this in more than a year, since everything blew up between them over various mishaps, a number of them starring Fleabag. This jumpsuit is her, grown-up — elegant, but, still, showing some tit. The struggle within (and without) her continues, but on a more subdued level. At the table she is wry and ramrod straight, her sideboob teasing the holy father beside her. Smoking behind the restaurant, alone, in the dark, the glow of the street lamp bringing out her curves, she is introspectively sultry. “You look strong,” her dad says. And when she and the other father end up back there alone for the first time, instead of asking for his blessing, she keeps her sins to herself. “Fuck you,” the priest calls to her naked back. It’s a Fleabag kind of benediction.

The second season of Fleabag originally aired on the BBC in March, but British site Stylist didn’t track down the jumpsuit until about two months ago, at which  point it sold out. Since the show’s Amazon premiere on May 17, American viewers have been similarly clambering to buy it. Holman was “completely surprised” by the response and bemused by the “jumpsuit as movement,” but thinks it’s great they helped a local indie label boost its sales. Fraser, who is also British, is witnessing the cycle for the second time and offers some prosaic reasons for the transatlantic phenomenon, including availability (shot in advance, shows often come out when the clothes are no longer available) and affordability. Not to mention practicality — per VanArendonk, the jumpsuit “could so easily pass for something much more expensive, but which I can put on without fretting about stains, child smudges, wrinkles, weird crotch lines, or much at all in the way of further styling” — as long as you have a body that approximates Waller-Bridge’s. Fraser provides the contrasting example of Killing Eve (another series developed by Waller-Bridge), with its aspirational “outlandish” costuming, particularly Villanelle’s translucent bubble gum pink pouffe-frock from the first season. “Nobody could afford that Molly Goddard dress,” she says, “and where would you wear that?”

But the jumpsuit is more about the story of Fleabag, which it serves to represent. This is the story of a young woman who looks like she has it together but doesn’t, and if you get just close enough, you can see it. This is a woman who knows who she is, but still feels the need to perform, who is constantly wrestling with the push and pull of revealing too much and too little. And in the perfect chiaroscuro, this is a woman who thrives on the frisson of impossible love. But it’s also about the story of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the It Girl whose singularity, which is what everyone keeps trying to imitate, is It precisely because of its indivisibility from her. This is a woman who can be easily conflated with the character she created from elements of her own life. When Slate asks why so many journalists want the jumpsuit, the answer is obvious: because they want to create an award-winning one-woman play (Fleabag) in their 20s, because they want to helm two series (Crashing, Fleabag) by the time they are 30 (and then a third, Killing Eve), because they want to be hired to appear in a Star Wars film and to brush up Bond. If they can’t have Waller-Bridge’s career, at least they can have her clothes.

* * *

The Fleabag jumpsuit actually appeared on the red carpet (the black version, anyway) a full six months before it appeared on the show, but no one remembers that. Waller-Bridge wore it, along with a huge grin, up-swept hair, and patent leather flats to a screening of Killing Eve in September. In that context, without a cigarette, without her flapper do, without the brick wall or the glowing light or the cleavage or the priest, the jumpsuit lost its mystique. In those photos it has reverted back to a, well, black jumpsuit. The same thing happened each time someone posted a photo of themselves in it. Even when it suited them, which was often, it didn’t have the same power without Fleabag’s context. And the more people bought it, the less impact it had. Like the sparkly white dress in Cinderella, the sleek black jumpsuit dissolved in the daylight.

The irony is that these writers would have been better off, you know, writing. Because that’s what they really want — to be this famous writer, to be who she is and what she creates. Of course, that costs a lot more than $50. A jumpsuit is a tangible symbol of the life these women want and the fallacy, as understandable as it is in a culture that silences women as well as writers — why am I doing this, again? — is buying a well-cut piece of dark material as a shortcut to that life. Fraser was actually one of the few women writers who resisted the jumpsuit’s siren song, but it was a close encounter. She was about to buy it before remembering who she was: a woman who had other jumpsuits, and who also needed to wear a bra. A woman who did not have a production company turning her body into a genre, who wasn’t living a fictional romance with a man of God, who didn’t live a real life in which she herself was an idol (well, by Hollywood standards). “I had it in my basket,” Fraser says, and then she asked herself a question that, ironically, is very Fleabag: “What are you doing?”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

‘If Any of My Old Friends Are Reading This, It Is Okay Out Here.’

A woman is baptized during a Jehovah's Witnesses assembly gathering. Martin Bureau / AFP / Getty Images

Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | June 2019 | 16 minutes (4,301 words)

Religion can offer narratives that help us make sense of the world, answers to difficult questions like: Where do we go when we die? How can we best love others? Why do bad things happen to good people? Within belief systems, people learn to love, to grieve, to serve, and to live, often with the hope of some eternal reward at the end. For many people, there is beauty and comfort to be found within these faith-based communities. But what happens if you are someone who begins to doubt everything you’ve grown up believing, everything you’ve built your life around? What happens if, by expressing this doubt, you are shunned forever by your family, community, partner, and way of life? How do you learn to move through the world and make meaning?

Amber Scorah, in her riveting debut memoir, Leaving the Witness, explores the upheaval of exiting a faith. Raised from birth as a Jehovah’s Witness, Scorah experienced difficulty tempering natural desire and curiosity for the sake of faith. As a teenager, she had sex with her boyfriend and was promptly disfellowshipped, leaving her unmoored from a religion that had served as the blueprint for her life up to that point. Rather than leave, Scorah, afraid of being killed by God at Armageddon and unable to see a sustainable path to an alternate future, returned to the faith. She married a Jehovah’s Witness and they moved to China and began preaching. There, Scorah’s doubts swelled until she could no longer suppress them, and she left, not knowing what grief and beauty lay ahead.

Leaving the Witness, witty and moving in turns, offers a rare look into the workings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as the various complications that prevent others from leaving despite their own doubts. Scorah, by untangling and exposing the mechanisms that once held her, offers a path for others to imagine new and unexpectedly hopeful futures for themselves, despite the fear and grief that accompany such a transition. I spoke with Scorah via Skype about her writing process, how she’s learned to dismantle harmful dichotomies, and how she has learned to carry and grow from immense loss.

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The 19th Century Lesbian Made for 21st Century Consumption

Jay Brooks, HBO / document courtesy of the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | June 2019 | 12 minutes (3,114 words)

When we call Anne Lister, the 19th century British diarist and adventurer reimagined in HBO’s hit series Gentleman Jack, the “first modern lesbian,” what do we mean, precisely? Critics don’t seem to know. The catchy tagline coined by Lister’s devotees and perpetuated by the show’s marketing is good branding, but makes for a slightly confusing moniker: what is it, exactly, that makes Anne Lister a “modern” lesbian, let alone the first?

The answer goes beyond a casual Wikipedia-esque list of Lister’s propensities and accomplishments that most coverage of the show has thus far relied on. To understand what makes Anne Lister unique, you have to understand how lesbianism and identity were understood in the 1830s — and it’s far too simplistic to say that women with women was simply “unimaginable” for the time, that Lister was completely solitary in her pursuit of as public a commitment as would have been socially acceptable.

Lesbian content was not unfamiliar to 17th, 18th, and 19th century audiences. From lesbian eroticism in pornographic texts such as the psuedonymous Abbé du Prat’s The Venus in the Cloister: or, the Nun in Her Smock, published in 1683, to the trope of a “Female Husband” (which had historical grounding in famous figures like Mary Hamilton) to the romantic friendship of Ladies of Llangollen, who were contemporaries of Lister’s, the idea of women loving (and fucking) women was hardly new, if deeply socially unacceptable. Among women of the upper class with means, Lister was hardly alone in forging her own kind of life. The “first”? No.

Lister was ahead of her time, but not in the obvious way: not because of her desire, or even her willingness to throw off norms. Rather, her desire to live what we would identify as an “out” life (or, as “out” a life as possible) was informed by a distinctly Enlightenment-informed conception of her individuality and her psychosexual identity that would have been more at home in 2019 than 1839. In Lister’s time, lesbian wasn’t the distinct identity category it would later become. Lister’s prescient insistence on a cohesion between her public and private personas — an insistence on her sexuality as a vital component of her identity — was remarkable. Thanks to her diaries, we also have unprecedented access to how she herself thought of her identity and sexuality, as well as an explicit record of sexual activity. Ultimately, this means that Lister is a historical figure made for 21st century consumption, onto whose life we can easily project (if anachronistically) ideas like that of the closet and the difficulty of living an “out” life in Regency England.
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How the Cosby Story Finally Went Viral — And Why It Took So Long

Associated Press, Collage by Homestead

Nicole Weisensee Egan | An excerpt adapted from Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad | Seal Press | 14 minutes (3,614 words)

In October 2014 Bill Cosby was in the middle of a career resurgence. His biography by former Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker had just come out to rave reviews and was climbing the bestseller list. He had a comedy special coming up on Netflix and was in development with NBC to star in a family sitcom. He was about to embark on another comedy tour based on a special that had aired on Comedy Central the year before. The special, Far from Finished, was Cosby’s first stand-up TV special in three decades, and it attracted two million viewers.

It was as if the scandal in 2005 had never happened, as if fourteen women hadn’t accused him of heinous offenses. The book didn’t even mention Andrea Constand’s allegations, let alone her civil suit or any of the other accusers. And no one in the media was asking Whitaker or Cosby why.

The situation was clear: Cosby had successfully repaired what little damage there was to his reputation after Andrea’s case made the news. He slipped right back into his revered status as public moralist and children’s advocate, chalking up even more awards and honors, including his entrée into the NAACP’s Image Awards Hall of Fame in 2006 for being a “true humanitarian and role model.” Read more…

Kristen Arnett on Taxidermy, Memory, and “Mostly Dead Things”

Creative Touch Imaging Ltd. / NurPhoto via Getty Images / Tin House

Tobias Carroll  | Longreads | June 2019 | 18 minutes (4,707 words)

The writings of Kristen Arnett are a beatific study in contrasts. In her fiction — namely, the 2017 collection Felt in the Jaw and her new novel Mostly Dead Things — she grapples with unruly bodies, complex emotions, and relationships both familial and romantic that have gone awry. Arnett is among a cadre of contemporary authors, such as Karen Russell and Eleanor Kriseman, who remind readers of what a stunning backdrop Florida can provide for works of fiction. And she is quite possible the only writer to ever hold a book release event in a 7-Eleven.

Jessa-Lynn Morton, the protagonist of Mostly Dead Things, has not had an easy life when the novel opens. She’s dealing with the aftermath of her father’s suicide, and is endeavoring to keep the family taxidermy business in operation while also contending with her mother’s artistic ambitions and a burgeoning relationship with Lucinda, a gallerist whose perspective on taxidermy is very different from Jessa’s more quotidian understanding of it.

Arnett’s fiction perfectly captures unruly family dynamics, the way that the same person can take on very different roles in the eyes of those closest to them, and the subtle ways in which class and economics can reshape a community over time. I spoke with Arnett about her fiction, the role of Florida in her work, and the messy line between fine art and the lowbrow. Read more…