Search Results for: dad

Ingenious

Jason Fagone | Ingenious, Crown Publishing Group | November 2013 | 20 minutes (4,972 words)

 

Below is the first chapter from Jason Fagone’s book, Ingenious, about the X Prize Foundation’s $10 million competition to build a car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas. Thanks to Fagone and Crown Publishing for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book here. Read more…

‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jeff Sharlet | Sweet Heaven When I Die, W. W. Norton & Company | Aug 2011 | 37 minutes (9,133 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Quebrado,” by Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and bestselling author. The story was first published in Rolling Stone in 2008 and is featured in Sharlet’s book Sweet Heaven When I Die. Thanks to Sharlet for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

Longreads Member Pick: 'A Semester with Allen Ginsberg,' by Elissa Schappell

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This week we’re excited to feature Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg,” as our Longreads Member Pick. Her recollections are an intimate window into the Beat legend. The piece originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review and was later anthologized in their 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community:

Of all the literature classes I have ever taken in my life Allen Ginsberg’s “Craft of Poetry” was not only the most memorable and inspiring, but the most useful to me as a writer.
First thought, best thought.
It’s 1994 and I am getting my MFA in fiction at NYU. I’m sitting in the front row of a dingy classroom with a tape recorder and a notebook. The tape recorder is to record Allen Ginsberg, the big daddy of the Beat’s “Craft of Poetry” lectures for a feature I’m writing for The Paris Review. No. Lectures is the wrong word—Ginsberg’s thought operas, his spontaneous jet streams of brilliance, his earthy Dharma Lion roars—that’s what I’m there to capture. His teaching method is, as he explains it, “to improvise to some extent and it have it real rather than just a rote thing.”
It was very real.
The education Ginsberg provided me exceeds the bounds of the classroom, and far beyond the craft of poetry. Look inward and let go, he said. Pay attention to your world, read everything. For as he put it, “If the mind is shapely the art will be shapely.”

—Elissa Schappell, 2013

Read an excerpt here. 

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full ebook.

Photo via MCDarchives

‘You’re in Trouble. Am I Right?’: My Unsentimental Education

Debra Monroe, 1977 (Photo courtesy of the author)

Debra Monroe | 2012 | 20 minutes (5,101 words)

Debra Monroe is the author of six books, including the memoir “My Unsentimental Education” which will appear in October 2015. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The American Scholar, Doubletake, The Morning News and The Southern Review, and she is frequently shortlisted for The Best American Essays. This essay—which is an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir—first appeared on John Griswold‘s Inside Higher Ed blog, and our thanks to Monroe for allowing us to reprint it here. Read more…

‘He’s Our Baby’: What Happens When a Child Is Placed in Foster Care

Cris Beam | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt | August 2013 | 23 minutes (5,787 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care, by Cris Beam, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Julia Wick. Thanks to Cris and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for sharing it with the Longreads community.

* * * Read more…

Rhumba

Longreads Pick

The writer and her husband, who live in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, deal with a rattlesnake problem:

“Nineteen-year-old Faith comes in the door after a bit, hunting her camera. ‘There’s a snake coiled in the yard,’ she says, her voice remarkably calm. Little eight-year-old C.C. marches to the living room, stands in front of my snake-phobic mom, and announces: ‘There’s a big snake in the yard, Grandma. We think it’s a rattling one.’

“Daddy is up from his easy chair and out the door like a shot. I hurry around trying to locate my phone to take pictures while the rest of the family troops out to see it—except for my mother, of course, who wouldn’t go out there on a dare.

“By the time I reach the porch, the rattler has uncoiled and begun crawling away from the house toward a flat nest of sandstone slabs and boulders beside the pond path. I catch a glimpse of it gliding rapidly through the dead grass, its diamond markings mottled, but distinct. Its size is almost beyond belief: even winding S-like that way, the rattler is longer and thicker than any I’ve ever seen.”

Source: Tin House
Published: Sep 3, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,998 words)

How Athletes Get Great

Longreads Pick

How much of greatness is nature vs. nurture? Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein challenges Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” rule in a new book about the science of training, The Sports Gene. A lot depends on individual biology, and there are cultural factors, too:

“Usain Bolt is a great example. He was 6’4” when he was 15 years old and blazing fast. He wanted to play soccer or cricket. What are the chances anyone lets him run track in the U.S.? To me, it’s zero. There’s no way he’s not playing basketball or football. Nowhere but Trinidad, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Jamaica would a guy that’s 6’4”, with blinding speed, be allowed to run track instead of something else. People have asked me, ‘Should we do genetic screening for the best athletes or at least some sort of measurements?’ Yes, measuring kids and trying to fit them into the right sport for their body type absolutely works. That’s why you saw Australia and Great Britain up their medal haul with their talent search programs when they had their Olympics. However, when there’s a sport that’s most popular in an area, you don’t have to do that because you already have the natural sifting program. You don’t have to go hunt for the best football players in America because they’re already going to go play football and then we select them.”

Source: Outside
Published: Aug 9, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,302 words)

How a Convicted Murderer Prepares for a Job Interview

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Sabine Heinlein | University of California Press | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,132 words)

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prison, by Sabine Heinlein.

Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world.  Read more…

A Hollywood Ending

Longreads Pick

The writer reflects on the 1992 murder of his brother, incorporating the stories of his friends and family members:

“Dad said he often thinks about how things might’ve been if only my brother was less naïve, better prepared for confrontation. Armed.

“‘I still think that,’ he said quietly on the phone. ‘And I think: Damn.’

“The line was silent for five long seconds.

“‘Damn.'”

Source: Gawker
Published: Jul 27, 2013
Length: 33 minutes (8,328 words)

The Pros and Cons of Culinary Education

Longreads Pick

The writer investigates the financial realities of attending culinary school, and the hard life of a working chef:

“Chef Brad Spence wouldn’t go culinary school if he had to do it all over again. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, the chef/partner of Philadelphia’s Amis moved to New York City, where he made $8 or $9 an hour. Even though he was getting help from his dad to pay off the student loans, Spence says he “could barely live” between the low salary, high rent, and regular loan payments. And that’s the norm for New York City line cooks. Dirt Candy’s Amanda Cohen says that generally cooks can expect a raise of $1 a year, meaning one can hope to be making $20 an hour 10 years into a career. That’s still not very helpful for someone who needs to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in culinary school debt.”

Source: Eater
Published: Jul 11, 2013
Length: 34 minutes (8,587 words)