Search Results for: baseball

The Art of Escape

Ryan Bradley | Kill Screen | December 2015 | 13 minutes (3,122 words)

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a new essay from Ryan Bradley and Kill Screen, the videogame arts and culture magazine. Kill Screen is currently wrapping up a Kickstarter campaign to reinvent their print magazine, so donate here.

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No one wore stripes that spring and summer in Leavenworth. Stripes were for rule breakers, and no one was breaking the rules. “Baseball As A Corrective” read the front page of the New York Times that May. It was 1912 and “the magic of baseball” had “wrought a wonderful change in the United States Penitentiary.” For the first time in Leavenworth’s history, for months at a time, everyone behaved, because everyone wanted to play or watch the baseball games. “Chronic trouble makers began to be so good that the officials were startled,” the Times reported. Prison guards were planning more amusements for the winter, “such as vaudeville entertainments and moving picture shows, to keep the men on their good behavior.” Read more…

What It’s Like to Fly Into a Thunderstorm

Flying near a fast-forming storm in North Dakota.
Flying near a fast-forming storm in North Dakota. (Photo by Shawn,flickr)

Justin Nobel | Atlas Obscura | November 2015 | 14 minutes (3,498 words)

 

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Justin Nobel, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

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The Outfield

Longreads Pick

Spring training, scheming, and lingerie parties: a short story about a community of baseball wives in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Source: n+1
Published: Nov 6, 2015
Length: 29 minutes (7,440 words)

Advocating for the Bisexual Community: A Reading List

On September 21, Eliel Cruz tweeted, “If you’re an LGBT journalist and you don’t produce even one piece of content for #BiWeek you’re not an LGBT journalist.” Cruz’s words hit me in the chest. I am: a) a journalist who covers feminist & LGBTQ issues, and b) a journalist who interrogates her own orientation and gender identity regularly.

Bisexual Awareness Week (Sept. 21-28) and Bi Visibility Day (Sept. 23) provide solidarity and support for the bisexual community. I was embarrassed I didn’t know about these holidays until this year. Founded in 1999, Bi Week serves as a catalyst for discourse about biphobia and monosexism, bi erasure, mental and physical healthcare, public policy and more.

All week, I’ve watched my favorite websites and my Twitter feed fill with stories, advice and encouragement. Now, it’s my turn to contribute. I’ve collected some of my favorite pieces about bisexuality–personal essays, queer theory, history, and interviews.

1. “More People are Identifying as Bisexual–And That’s Great!” (Emily Zak, Bitch, September 2015)

Spoiler: This interview blew my mind. Bitch sits down with Shiri Eisner, the bisexual, genderqueer author of Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. Eisner isn’t satisfied with merely overcoming stereotypes–she wants more for her community. Read more…

A Very Brief History of Americans Playing Softball with Their Co-Workers

Americans have been playing softball with their co-workers since the game grew out of several variants of baseball in the late 19th century. In 1895, Louis Rober, a lieutenant in the Minneapolis fire department, organized games of “kittenball” to entertain firefighters between runs. Blue-collar company teams proliferated over the next half-century. Office workers joined in later, in the 1970s and ’80s.

Ira Boudway writing for Bloomberg Businessweek about how the High Times Bonghitters (yes, that is the team’s official name) became “the Yankees of New York media softball.”

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Just Below the Surface

Summer Brennan | The Oyster War | Counterpoint Press | August 2015 | 20 minutes (5,042 words)

The following is an excerpt from Summer Brennan’s excellent The Oyster War: the True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America, appearing courtesy of Counterpoint Press. Buy the book here.

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The road to the oyster farm is paved with the moon-white grit of pulverized oyster shells. There is a gleam to it, and to drive it in the dusk of the dry summer months is to see the dust-coated leaves of the ditch plants take on the powdery luminosity of white moths.

Hugging the edge of the estuary’s northernmost inlet, the narrow lane rises a little above a lush wetland dotted with egrets and blue herons, and then winds down again to the edge of a vast and shining body of water. This is Drakes Estero, what’s been called “the heart of the park.” The air feels different here. In winter or summer, heat or cold, there is an enlivening bite of freshness.

I was at the farm one evening in the late summer of 2013 to look for Oscar, one of the farm’s workers. He had given me an unauthorized tour of the planting sites the month before, and I was worried that allowing him to do so had accidentally gotten him fired. Word on the street was that it had. I was initially shocked to hear this, but considering how contentious things had gotten, what with the legal battle and all the national media attention, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. For owners Kevin and Nancy Lunny, who by some estimates had already sunk more than a million dollars into their efforts to restore the farm and keep it open, the stakes could not have been higher.

Like many of the oyster workers, Oscar lived in one of the rundown buildings that made up the farm’s small land-based component—a smattering of sheds, cottages, trailers and pre-fab homes. At least, that is what he told me, though I didn’t know if he still lived there. The buildings were scattered over just about an acre and a half, so I figured it wouldn’t take too long to look.

I pulled up and parked my borrowed, mud-splattered 1991 Toyota station wagon in front of a weatherworn white building. A brightly painted sign exclaimed it to be the “Oyster Shack.” No more than 600 square feet in total, it housed the retail portion of the business in front and the tiny hatchery in back, where the oysters were grown from spat (or “seed”) the size of sand grains. On the wall of an adjacent shed was pinned a large American flag.

The pop radio station I’d been listening to on the drive out had turned to white noise. I switched it off and got out of the car. Read more…

How Many Gigs Does It Take to Make It in NYC?

The gig economy (“a phrase which encompasses both the related collaborative economy and sharing economy”) is inescapable. AirBNB (now in Cuba) and Uber flood your feeds regularly. Chipotle recently announced its partnership with delivery startup Postmates—burritos at your doorstep are imminent (Quality? Price? Questionable). These companies seem successful, but what about the individuals who carry out their mission statements—the couriers, the hosts, the drivers? Is there genuine money to be made in the gig economy? Is it an economically—and emotionally—viable means of support? For one month, Sarah Kessler attempted to employ herself using TaskRabbit, Fiverr, Skillshare and other “sharing”-centric companies. It didn’t go well.

When I come across the task, “Proposal Flash Mob in Central Park,” I know immediately that I am exactly the wrong person for the job. The training video opens in a mirrored dance studio, with a man in a tight-fitting black t-shirt. “Please make sure you are familiar with this choreography before you commit to that rehearsal so we don’t have to waste any time,” he explains in a high-pitched voice before counting out about three minutes of what looks to me like complex choreography. During slow claps at baseball games, I’m the fan who claps on the wrong beat. A real rabbit might have a better chance of learning this dance.

But the job pays $20, and because it involves a two-hour rehearsal beginning at 8 a.m., it could help me finally achieve an elusive goal I had been working toward for weeks: a full day of micro-entrepreneurship employment. I had already lined up a personal assistant gig for mid-afternoon, and I had bids out on a handful of odd jobs in the evening. Experience has taught me not to count on any of these, but still, here was the morning timeslot that could lead me to an eight-hour workday. I accept the offer.

And then I immediately panic.

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The Man Who Became Big Bird

Photo courtesy of Debra Spinney

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,430 words)

 

Caroll Spinney has performed Big Bird and Oscar on Sesame Street since the show launched in 1969, almost half a century ago. A new documentary, I Am Big Bird, follows Spinney’s journey from a somewhat difficult childhood—his father had abusive tendencies, and he was picked on in school—to becoming a childhood icon, not to mention a man in an almost absurdly happy marriage. Spinney’s wife, Debra, sat nearby (laughing and interjecting sporadically) as we discussed the film, the physical and emotional reality of playing these characters, and what kind of guy a grouch really is. Big Bird and Oscar made cameo appearances.

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The film features a lot of old footage that you and your wife, Debra, gathered over the years. What was it like to go through all those old tapes?

We didn’t look at any of it, although Deb had categorized it all. We gave the filmmakers many boxes of videotapes, literally hundreds of hours of television, because we’ve been taking videos since 1978. Before that, starting in 1954, I was taking eight millimeter movies, which is that blurry stuff in the film. An eight millimeter picture is just a little more than a quarter inch wide, so you can imagine when that’s blown up a million times it looks pretty soft. But it kinda makes nice footage for the story.

What was it like for you to watch the film after all that time?

It was interesting to see what they had picked out. We first watched it at home on the flat screen. But the next time I watched it, we were in Toronto in a theater with 300 people on a 60-foot-wide screen, and it’s a very different experience to watch it with other people than with just the two of us. You could hear their emotions, and you could tell they were using Kleenex at certain times. There’s about three moments in the thing that are quite emotional, I think partly due to the wonderful music that was composed for it. Read more…

ROKIT, MOTOWN and NIMOY: How Aviation Waypoints Get Their Names

Route map of the world's scheduled commercial airline traffic, 2009. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Then there is the intriguing way airways are navigated, using radio beacons and “waypoints”, spots defined by geographic co-ordinates or their bearing and distance from a beacon. These waypoints are typically given five-letter capitalised names that are supposed to be simple enough for any controller or pilot to recognise them, regardless of their first language.

Europe’s sky-mappers turn out to have taken a fairly business-like approach to naming their waypoints, though there is a TULIP off the Dutch coast and England has a DRAKE, for Sir Francis. Australians have had a bit more fun, naming points off their west coast WONSA, JOLLY, SWAGY, CAMBS, BUIYA, BYLLA, BONGS, in honour of the opening lines of the country’s unofficial national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda”. The Americans have just gone mad. Detroit has MOTWN and WONDR (Stevie was born in Michigan). Houston has a ROKIT for its Space Center. There is a NIMOY in Boston (where Leonard was born) plus several local culinary references (CHWDH, LBSTA and CLAWW) and SSOXS, STRKK and OUTTT for the Red Sox baseball team.

Pilita Clark writing in the Financial Times about the future of flying.

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See Also: “The Secret Language of the Skies” (Deborah Fallows, The Atlantic, 2013)

Life After Football: Our College Pick

Disappointment feels so much bigger when you’re young because you haven’t lived long enough to know that there’s always something else on the other side. In his story about a former football prospect who seeks a new identity on a baseball field, Jesse Dougherty elicits emotion from a normally taciturn type – the young male athlete – and conveys those feelings without tripping over purple prose.

Life After Football

Jesse Dougherty | The Daily Orange | April 5, 2015 | 1,647 words (7 minutes)