Search Results for: competition

Come Hear My Song

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | June 2015 | 18 minutes (4,437 words)

I came here looking for something

I couldn’t find anywhere else.

Hey, I’m not tryin’ to be nobody

I just want a chance to be myself.

 ─Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, “Streets of Bakersfield”

***

On North Chester Avenue in Oildale, California, an 83-year-old honky-tonk named Trout’s stands down the block from a saloon with an aged western facade, and across the street from a liquor store that sells booze and Mexican candy.

Trout’s opened in 1931 to give hard-working locals a place to dance and drink and unwind to live music.  During the 1950s and ’60s, local country music legends Buck Owens and Merle Haggard played Trout’s, in their own bands and others, and kept people dancing while helping popularize the raw, propulsive style known as the Bakersfield Sound. Read more…

How Would You Design a Memorial for World War III?

Architect Maya Lin was a senior at Yale when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In a 2000 essay for the New York Review of Books—which she began writing around the memorial’s completion in fall 1982 and then put aside for nearly two decades—she reflects on how she came to enter in the competition, and the concepts behind her design. After seeing a notice announcing a competition for a Vietnam veterans memorial, Lin’s funereal architecture seminar decided to adopt the design idea as their class’s final project. In the excerpt below, she delves into the class’s previous assignment:

At that point, not much was known about the actual competition, so for the first half of the assignment we were left without concrete directions for what “they” were looking for or even who “they” were. Instead, we had to determine for ourselves what a Vietnam memorial should be. Since a previous project had been to design a memorial for World War III, I had already begun to ask the simple questions: What exactly is a memorial? What should it do?

My design for a World War III memorial was a tomblike underground structure that I deliberately made to be a very futile and frustrating experience. I remember the professor of the class coming up to me afterward, saying quite angrily, “If I had a brother who died in that war, I would never want to visit this memorial.” I was somewhat puzzled that he didn’t quite understand that World War III would be of such devastation that none of us would be around to visit any memorial, and that my design was instead a pre-war commentary. In asking myself what a memorial to a third world war would be, I came up with a political statement that was meant as a deterrent.

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Fair Hours Have Once Again Become a Basic Concern In Worker Organizing

Laundry Workers Union of New York, 1914. Photo by Library of Congress, Flickr

Along with wages and conditions, hours used to be a basic concern in worker organizing. During the heyday of the struggle over hours, in the century before World War II, the demand was always for fewer of them. The “Lowell Mill Girls” agitated for a 10-hour day, and the Haymarket strikers wanted to get down to eight. But since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 enshrined the 40-hour week, hours have tended to be taken for granted. Time was regularized, and thus depoliticized. This is changing only because, in recent years, employers have entered a devastating new race to the bottom: Involuntary part-time is becoming the new norm for low-wage workers, together with schedules so unpredictable and varying that one can’t easily get another job, or go to school, or be a reliable parent.

Now, as a new national movement about work hours gets going, it has focused on more rather than fewer, and at more regular intervals. University of Chicago professor Susan J. Lambert, a collaborator of Gleason’s, is the leading authority on the numbers behind the crisis. Her research has found that 41 percent of early-career hourly workers—people in their mid-20s and early 30s—learn about their schedules a week or less in advance; for African-Americans, it’s 49 percent. Only one in five of these workers has a significant say in when their shifts will be. The hours worked by part-timers in a given week fluctuate, on average, as much as 87 percent. The ingredients of economic crisis, corporate competition, and technology have created “a perfect storm,” Lambert says.

Nathan Schneider writing in The Nation about how unpredictable schedules and “involuntary part-time” positions for low-wage workers have put fair hours at the forefront of the fight for employee rights.

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The King’s Last Game

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Steven Church | Ultrasonic: Essays | 2014 | 15 minutes (3,655 words)

 

 

Imagine this: It’s early in the morning at the Graceland estate, well before dawn on August 16, 1977, just a few hours before the end, and the crickets and cicadas are thrumming in the Memphis heat. The sun is on the rise somewhere in the east, but the light hasn’t yet reached this place. In the distance a small dog barks sharp, rhythmically, and steady. A siren wails and fades. All else is quiet, all except for the strange noise emanating from an outbuilding behind the main house. It’s a cacophonous noise. Unexpected. So you creep up closer. Tiptoeing now like a trespasser, a voyeur into the past. You shouldn’t be here at all. Yet in this lucid dream you press your ear against the locked door and listen, straining to catch the strands of a voice. The voice. His voice. Perhaps you’re hoping that he might be playing a guitar, jamming with his band. But instead you hear unexpected but familiar noise. You hear the sound of a different kind of playing. It’s the squeaking of shoes on hardwood, the pop and twang of a blue rubber ball rocketing off simulated catgut, followed by the resonant crack of it against a wall; and a different sort of music, that telltale pop and pong ringing out as the ball smacks off the back glass. You linger a while, listening to the high-pitched slap of a well-hit shot, and a short volley of forehand smashes going off like firecrackers. Boom, boom, boom. And laughter. Lots of laughter. Because Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is playing racquetball. And the King loves racquetball. You know this game but not this side of Elvis, not this part of the story. This is your game, your father’s game, a game of noise and speed. And more than anything you wish you could push the door open on that night and join the play. Read more…

‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker

Photo via simpleinsomnia

Nikil Saval | Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace | Doubleday | April 2014 | 31 minutes (8,529 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the book Cubed, by Nikil Saval, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils…

—Theodore Roethke, “Dolor”

The torn coat sleeve to the table. The steel pen to the ink. Write! Write! Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think.

—Benjamin Browne Foster, Down East Diary (1849)

They labored in poorly lit, smoky single rooms, attached to merchants and lawyers, to insurance concerns and banks. They had sharp penmanship and bad eyes, extravagant clothes but shrunken, unused bodies, backs cramped from poor posture, fingers callused by constant writing. When they were not thin, angular, and sallow, they were ruddy and soft; their paunches sagged onto their thighs. Read more…

Why the World Is Betting on a Better Battery: A Reading List

Photo from the Henry Ford Collection, via Ford

Nick Leiber | Longreads | March 2015

 

The first battery, a pile of copper and zinc discs, was invented more than 200 years ago, ushering in the electric age. Subsequent versions led to portable electronics, mobile computing, and our current love affair with smartphones (1,000 of which are shipped every 22 seconds). Now batteries are powering electric cars and storing electricity produced by solar cells and windmills, but they don’t last long enough and are too expensive for either use to really go mainstream. To cut the cost, Tesla plans to double the world’s production capacity of the popular lithium-ion battery with its forthcoming $5 billion battery manufacturing plant in the Nevada desert. Tesla’s idea is to use economies of scale to lower prices. Meanwhile, other companies and many industrialized countries, including China and the U.S., are racing to develop batteries that are more advanced than Tesla’s. They’re betting billions that breakthrough battery technologies will help create new industries, juice existing ones, and wean us off fossil fuels because we’ll be able to use the sun and wind in their place. Here is a book, a documentary, and five stories on our battery-powered future. Read more…

Interview with a Torturer

S-21. Photo by lecercle

Rithy Panh with Christophe Bataille | Translated by John Cullen | The Elimination: A survivor of the Khmer Rouge confronts his past and the commandant of the killing fields | Other Press | February 2013 | 44 minutes (12,355 words)

Below is an excerpt from the book The Elimination, by Rithy Panh, as recommended by Longreads contributor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

Why Watching ‘Survivor’ Is Like Watching Sports

The sense of participation is key, both in competition-based shows like Project Runway and programs like Dance Moms that don’t have a prize, but position players as teams in drama-filled social acrobatics. The format “invites the audience to participate, either directly (through voting) or indirectly (by imagining how they might behave in similar situations),” Papacharissi says.

Dawson suggests these shows are more closely related to sporting events than scripted dramas. In the case of Survivor, viewers get an experience similar to televised sports, Papacharissi explains: “You can root for your favorite castaway like you do for your favorite team, and vicariously experience her triumphs and setbacks from episode to episode.”

That unlikely alignment could explain why reality TV, mocked though it may be, is being watched—perhaps surreptitiously—heavily, and with consistency. “The core elements of Survivor are pretty much the same as they were when the show debuted in 2000,” Dawson says, an unusual feat for any series in the current TV climate. “It’s a pretty unexpected turn of events, that 15 years after its debut, the show that was responsible for starting the reality TV tidal wave that dramatically disrupted the status quo of the American TV industry has become a sort of year-in, year-out institution.”

Lizzie Schiffman Tufano, writing in Pacific Standard about how reality television conquered the airwaves, and “unseated the Rachels and Monicas of the world.” The new season of Survivor, which debuted last week, is the show’s 30th.

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Can a Reporter Go a Whole Day Without Learning Who Won the Super Bowl?

A hundred and fourteen million Americans watched the Super Bowl on the first Sunday of this month. That same day, just over a hundred people embarked on a different kind of game, an annual, loosely organized showdown called Last Man. Last Man is the battle to be the “Last Man in America to Know Who Won the Super Bowl;” its players call themselves “runners” and report their “deaths” on Twitter. The whole thing is strictly run on the honor system. Below is an excerpt from a recent New Yorker story by Reeves Wiedeman about Last Man:

Monday is the most difficult day, and within twenty-four hours, half of the runners had been eliminated. Just getting to work was a problem. (Did you glance at the Captivate screen in your office elevator? You died.) “I think the slushercane helped,” John Carney, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and a Last Man competitor, said, of the wintry mix in New York the day after the Super Bowl. “I had to keep my eyes down, watching my step. No danger of accidentally seeing a newspaper.” Survival, he said, requires “intense eye discipline.” Getting to his desk near the Journal sports department required passing innumerable copies of the day’s paper, which had the result printed across the top of the front page. He recruited nearby coworkers to alert him to possible danger—the newsroom has enough televisions to make a Best Buy manager envious—and when an editor from another desk walked by wearing a Patriots jersey, a friend warned Carney not to look up. At one point, Carney had nineteen unread text messages and eighty-six unclicked e-mails. (A Journal colleague writes, “Are you making clear there’s no way Carney could have been doing his job effectively while avoiding all news services?”) On Tuesday, he was looking at the Pragmatic Capitalist, a Web site that typically offers “Practical Views on Money & Finance” but that day had an article titled “Game Theory Cannot Rationalize Seattle’s Super Bowl Loss.” (“It all makes me wonder if Carroll wasn’t suffering from a severe case of recency bias.”) Death by game theory.

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Last Man Running

Longreads Pick

A story about the Last Man competition. Last Man is a loosely organized, annual battle to be the “Last Man in America to Know Who Won the Super Bowl.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 13, 2015
Length: 8 minutes (2,098 words)