Search Results for: atlantic

So Long, Sweet Briar College

I learned that while some are considering work outside of academia, few have knowledge of how to pursue such opportunities. Even those in the math and sciences—industries generally highlighted as ones poised for immense job growth these days—aren’t sure that their skills will translate to another sector. The school, they say, hasn’t offered them career counseling or transition services… [Assistant professor of math, Camillia Smith Barnes], who was a year away from getting tenure, worries about her current resume; until last week, she felt secure. Like many of the faculty whom I spoke with, Barnes said that she was struggling with shock and debilitating stress. “I started the job search on Tuesday night,” she said. “But on Wednesday, I was too depressed to do anything.” Students and faculty didn’t attend classes last week after hearing the news because they were too emotional to focus on their work, some explained.

From an outsider’s perspective, it’s hard to imagine how any school with such extensive grounds, impressive buildings, and a full staff that educated only a few hundred women could remain financially viable. The restrictions outlined in Sweet Briar’s former missions, wills, and trusts made change all but impossible. Still, as inevitable as it may be, it’s worth acknowledging that the school’s closure has taken an enormous toll on people who’ve devoted their lives to liberal-arts education. And many fear that Sweet Briar serves as a case study for what will play out at similar schools in the coming years.

— On March 3, the president of Sweet Briar College, a historic all-women’s liberal arts school, announced its impending closure. Students and faculty will finish the spring semester, but the school itself may be preserved, parceled out, re-purposed or demolished after that. For Sweet Briar professors, this heralds a time of deep uncertainty in an adjunct-heavy job market, and for some academics, homelessness. Lauren McKenna tells these professors’ stories at The Atlantic.

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How Karina Longworth Is Reimagining Classic Hollywood—and the Podcast—in ‘You Must Remember This’

Scott Porch | Longreads | March 2015 | 14 minutes (3,624 words)

 

Almost a year ago, former LA Weekly film writer Karina Longworth began producing You Must Remember This, a podcast about the inner worlds of Hollywood icons of the past and present. The characters and stories range from familiar, to unknown, to just plain weird. (Episode 2 is about a Frank Sinatra space opera that you never knew existed.) Longworth, 34, has also written for publications including Grantland about everything from the history of the Super Mario Bros. movie to the stories of Harvey Weinstein’s ruthlessness in the editing room.

We recently talked by phone about her interest in the stories of classic Hollywood, the unique format of podcasting, and how her roles as a journalist, critic, and historian have informed her storytelling.


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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: sarah-ji

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Story Business: Four Stories About Independent Bookstores

Photo by Omar Bárcena

“Job title: bookseller.” Every time I sneak a glance at the sheaf of employment forms and tax information, I can’t believe it. That job title is mine, now. It’s a lifelong dream come true, as cliche as that sounds. True to millennial form, I’m going to do Online Things for my local indie: blogging, tweeting, research. It’s another step in my quest to own a bookstore of my own one day—now, I can stop daydreaming and see if this is really something I’m cut out for. Wish me luck! To prepare for my first staff meeting, I read these four essays about independent bookstores, specifically their employees: shelvers, sorters, owners, publicity directors and more. Read more…

Raymond Chandler on the Oscar Voting Process, Circa 1948

I am also intrigued by the voting. It was formerly done by all the members of all the various guilds, including the extras and bit players. Then it was realized that this gave too much voting power to rather unimportant groups, so the voting on various classes of awards was restricted to the guilds which were presumed to have some critical intelligence on the subject. Evidently this did not work either, and the next change was to have the nominating done by the specialist guilds, and the voting only by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

It doesn’t really seem to make much difference how the voting is done. The quality of the work is still only recognized in the context of success. A superb job in a flop picture would get you nothing, a routine job in a winner will be voted in. It is against this background of success-worship that the voting is done, with the incidental music supplied by a stream of advertising in the trade papers (which even intelligent people read in Hollywood) designed to put all other pictures than those advertised out of your head at balloting time. The psychological effect is very great on minds conditioned to thinking of merit solely in terms of box office and ballyhoo. The members of the Academy live in this atmosphere, and they are enormously suggestible people, as are all workers in Hollywood. If they are contracted to studios, they are made to feel that it is a matter of group patriotism to vote for the products of their own lot. They are informally advised not to waste their votes, not to plump for something that can’t win, especially something made on another lot.

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The governing board of the Academy is at great pains to protect the honesty and the secrecy of the voting. It is done by anonymous numbered ballots, and the ballots are sent, not to any agency of the motion picture industry, but to a well-known firm of public accountants. The results, in sealed envelopes, are borne by an emissary of the firm right onto the stage of the theater where the Awards be made, and there for the first time, one at a time, they are made known. Surely precaution would go no further. No one could possibly have known in advance any of these results, not even in Hollywood where every agent learns the closely guarded secrets of the studios with no apparent trouble. If there are secrets in Hollywood, which I sometimes doubt, this voting ought to be one of them.

Raymond Chandler, writing in The Atlantic. His critique of the Academy Awards appeared in the magazine’s March 1948 issue. This wasn’t Chandler’s only Hollywood essay for The Atlantic; he wrote about tinseltown scribes in November 1945.

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‘Garbage Comments Cheapen My Work’: Journalist Eva Holland on Freelancing and Commenters

Eva Holland

Eva Holland is a journalist based in the Yukon who has written for publications including Pacific Standard and SB Nation. Her latest Longreads Original, “‘It’s Yours’,” explores the life (and maybe death) of an internet commenter community, “the Horde,” that Ta-Nehisi Coates helped foster at The Atlantic. I spoke with her via email about her own relationship with internet comments as a freelance journalist, and whether there’s hope for building sustainable communities that are not inevitably dragged down by vitriol and spam. Read more…

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…

How a Great American Theatrical Family Produced the 19th Century’s Most Notorious Assassin

John Wilkes Booth, Edwin Booth and Junius Booth, Jr. (from left to right) in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1864. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Nora Titone | My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy | The Free Press | October 2010 | 41 minutes (11,244 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book My Thoughts Be Bloody, by Nora Titone, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky, who writes: 

“This is the story of the celebrated Booth family in the final year before John Wilkes made a mad leap into historical memory that outdid in magnitude every accomplishment of his father and brothers. When the curtain rises on this chapter of Nora Titone’s book, both Edwin and John Wilkes have already staged performances for President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater; by the time it comes down, one of them will be readying to assassinate him there.” 

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‘It’s Yours’: A Short History of the Horde

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Eva Holland | Longreads | February 2015 | 10 minutes (2,458 words)

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates started blogging for The Atlantic on August 4, 2008. His first post was titled “Sullivan… McArdle… Fallows… Coates???” and it laid down his terms from the start: “My only rule, really, is simple,” he wrote. “Don’t be a jerk to people you disagree with.” He’d been hired to fill the slot left in the magazine’s roster of bloggers by Matt Yglesias, and he addressed how he’d be coming at the role differently. “Matt has a fairly amazing ability to comment, from a left perspective, on a wide range of issues… Knowing my own limits, I’ll take a different tack. On things I’m not so sure on, I’ll state my opinion rather gingerly and then hope my commenters can fill in the gaps.”

The blog would soon be widely lauded for the keenness and clarity of its ideas, the power of its language, and for its unexpected ability to host real, substantive conversations in the comments—an extreme rarity on big-name websites. Coates, then a relatively unknown writer, would go on to win a 2013 National Magazine Award for “Fear of a Black President,” an essay published in The Atlantic’s print edition, while a selection of nine posts from his blog would be named a 2014 finalist in the National Magazine Awards’ “columns and commentary” category.

So how did Coates foster a comment section in which—wonder of wonders—intelligent adults thoughtfully share ideas and knowledge, and where trolling, rudeness and bad faith aren’t tolerated? I asked Coates and other players in the blog’s success—editors, moderators and commenters—to look back on what makes it work. Read more…

In Order to Grieve, Helen Macdonald Got a Hawk and Practiced Disappearing

Hawks aren’t social animals like dogs or horses; they understand neither coercion nor punishment. The only way to tame them is through positive reinforcement with gifts of food. You want the hawk to eat the food you hold – it’s the first step in reclaiming her that will end with you being hunting partners. But the space between the fear and the food is a vast, vast gulf, and you have to cross it together. I thought, once, that you did it by being infinitely patient. But no: it is that you must become invisible. You’re trying to get her to look at the steak, not at you, because you know – though you haven’t looked – that her eyes are fixed in horror at your profile. All you can hear is the wet click, click, click of her blinking.

To cross this space between fear and food you need – very urgently – not to be there. You empty your mind and become very still. You think of exactly nothing at all. The hawk becomes a strange, hollow concept, as flat as a snapshot or a schematic drawing, but at the same time, as pertinent to your future as an angry high court judge. Your gloved fist squeezes the meat a fraction, and you feel the tiny imbalance of weight and you see out of the very corner of your vision that she’s looked down at it. And so, remaining invisible, you make the food the only thing in the room apart from the hawk; you’re not there at all. And what you hope is that she’ll start eating, and you can very, very slowly make yourself visible. Even if you don’t move a muscle, and just relax into a more normal frame of mind, the hawk knows. It’s extraordinary. It takes a long time to be yourself in the presence of a new hawk.”

From a Telegraph excerpt of writer Helen Macdonald’s bestselling UK memoir, H is for Hawk, which was awarded the Costa Book Award last week, as well as the Samuel Johnson Prize. The memoir documents her attempt to train a goshawk, a notoriously difficult and deadly raptor, as a way to ameliorate the pain of unexpectedly losing her father. The book comes out next month in the U.S. through Grove Press.

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