Search Results for: essay

An Ode to Black Families: A Reading List

Photo by Johnny Silvercloud (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Moonlight tells the story of Chiron, a beautiful black boy coming of age in a dreadfully under-resourced section of Miami. As with any great work of art, it’s the tiniest details that reveal the most­­­ — the inflection of a phrase, the subtlety of a glance, the seconds of silence. Adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, with cinematography so lush, the balmy humidity of south Florida oozes off the screen, Moonlight is filled with moments like this. It happens when young Chiron avoids eye contact with a drug dealer during their first encounter, and again when Chiron welcomes an unexpected friendship on the soccer field with clear hesitation. You can see it every time Chiron flinches at his mother, and in the need that remains in the shadows of his eyes when he does. It happens when his mother makes Chiron read books instead of watching TV. “Find something for you to read,” she says.

The first time I saw Moonlight, these small revelations of humanity disarmed me. I felt exposed, and had to turn away from the screen. How did the filmmakers know, I wondered, that growing up black could be so contoured with dark peril, so layered with pure, sweet joy? That yes, absolutely, a drug dealer could be a respite, a much needed stand-in for a father?  I realized its novelty is due in large part to the sheer, sad fact that it is rare to see black characters coming of age on screen. Two thirds of the movie is dedicated to Chiron’s childhood and adolescence; we see his intelligence and sensitivity unfurl, retreat, and finally unfurl again.

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The Story of Memory: An Interview with Paula Hawkins

Author photo by Alisa Connan.

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | May 2017 | 8 minutes (2,228 words)

 

Born in Zimbabwe on August 28, 1972, Paula Hawkins’ family moved to London when she was a teenager. Although writing fiction interested her in her younger years, her stories generally remained unfinished. After graduating from Keble College, Oxford, she took the practical route and entered the newsroom at The Times of London, where she became a well-respected financial journalist.

In her thirties, she wrote romantic comedy novels with titles like Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista, All I Want for Christmas, One Minute to Midnight, and The Reunion under the pseudonym Amy Silver, but this never proved a perfect match for her talents. Increasingly tight on money and disenchanted with writing lighter fare, she sent a partial draft of a new novel to her agent. It was unlike anything she had ever published: dark, twisted, and page-turning. Her agent went gaga. The rest is literary history.

The Girl on the Train
has sold about twenty million copies worldwide since January 2015, according to her publisher, and last year’s film adaptation grossed $173 million. Into the Water (out from Riverhead on May 2, 2017), is already destined to be a bestseller and DreamWorks recently purchased the film rights.

Like The Girl on the Train, Into the Water also concerns memory, unreliable narrators, and an obsession with the dark and macabre, but the novel is more complex, with interweaving narratives, narrative perspective shifts, and a cast of characters so complicated it surely deserves a front-of-book family tree for clarity.

I recently spoke with Hawkins about faulty memory, her rise to fame, her desire to be more literary, and the way her novels reflect the contemporary political climate.

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My Father Spent 30 Years In Prison. Now He’s Out.

Longreads Pick

A touching personal essay in which writer Ashley Ford reveals that she and her father are happily rebuilding their relationship now that he has been released from prison after 30 years. Slowly they are getting to know each other in ways they never before had. One of the more challenging aspects: bringing him up to speed with cell phone technology and texting.

Source: Refinery 29
Published: Apr 28, 2017
Length: 9 minutes (2,409 words)

Battling the Odds Against Wolf Reintroduction

Now that they’re endangered, the wolf has become as much a symbol as an animal. From folk tales like Little Red Riding Hood to dramatized stories of mass cattle-killing, many people want the wolf out of the lands where scientists have reintroduced them. In an excerpt of Brenda Peterson’s book Wolf Nation over at The Morning Newsthe author follows captive-bred Mexican gray wolves from a Washington sanctuary to their release site in New Mexico. What she finds is grace and determination among one of nature’s most maligned but majestic creatures, and she examines the powerful network of political and economic interests battling over wolf recovery.

The struggle between state and federal wildlife agencies over the Mexican wolf recovery continues. The Center for Biological Diversity urges that New Mexico should “extricate itself from the state politics driven by the livestock industry, stop removing wolves from the wild, release five more family packs into the Gila as scientists recommend, and write a recovery plan that will ensure the Mexican gray wolf contributes to the natural balance in the Southwest and Mexico, forever.” Even though the law demands that the USFWS fulfill the Endangered Species Act and wolf recovery has huge public support in the Southwest, the states still continue to resist. In late fall of 2016, an Arizona judge issued a court order requiring USFW to finally update a decades-old recovery plan for the endangered Mexican gray wolf by November, 2017. With only about 113 wild wolves in Arizona and New Mexico, this move toward increasing Southwest wolf populations is essential to recovering the Mexican gray wolf in America. “Without court enforcement, the plan would have kept being right around the corner until the Mexican gray wolf went extinct,” said the Center for Biological Diversity. This court order dismissed protests by ranchers and other antiwolf factions in favor of moving ahead with wolf reintroduction.

But the root cause of much antiwolf bias remains. Wildlife commissions reflect the preferences of their members. A recent Humane Society study of eighteen states’ game commissions revealed that 73 percent were “dominated by avid hunters, clearly unrepresentative of the state’s public they speak for, but in line with their funding sources.” New Mexico’s Department of Game and Fish receives $20 million each year from licenses bought by hunters, trappers, and anglers. Not much has changed since 1986 when Ted Williams wrote his famous essay, long before wolf reintroduction: “Wolves do not purchase hunting licenses. . . . That, in brief, is what is wrong with wildlife management in America.” But we are on the cusp of a cultural change in wolf recovery. As Sharman Apt Russel writes in The Physics of Beauty, “All Americans would feel better if we could agree to share our public land with one hundred Mexican wolves, a fraction of the wildness that once was here.

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The Best Longreads From Trump’s First 100 Days

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Michelle Legro | Longreads | April 2017 | 7 minutes (1,773 words)

 

Day 100 is a Saturday, which is good because Donald Trump should probably get some rest. Saturdays are usually fairly easy for the president—he took the first one off right after his own inauguration—a day he can kick back and enjoy some quality time with a piece of chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago.

The Trump Administration introduced the American people to a new kind of time, one that moves with a glacial tick of the clock, but with the drama of a high school lunch period. To look back on the early days—yes, that was three months ago—is to find reporters breathlessly navigating the events of a single day in a flurry of tweets, with little time for a proper write-up before the next dramatic turn of events. We found ourselves asking what the fuck just happened today? as it became harder and harder to remember what happened an hour ago, let alone a day. However, it quickly became clear that journalists were digging in for the long fight. And while the best reporting has often been short, spry, and effective in these first crucial days, these were some of the longreads that stood out.

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The 2017 James Beard Award Winners: A Reading List

Fluke Crudo with Cucumber, Radish & Nasturtium at the kick-off event for the James Beard Foundation’s Taste America® 10-city national tour, held Wednesday, August 3, 2016 at the James Beard House in New York City. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision for James Beard Foundation/AP Images)

The growth of food writing has evolved with the explosion of all the food-watching that accompanied programs like Top Chef and Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and we’re way past the days of Craig Claiborne or Ruth Reichl reveling about an up-and-coming chef in an out-of-the-way corner of a yet-to-be-gentrified-neighborhood somewhere.

The James Beard awards—otherwise known as the Oscars of food—were announced earlier this week, and befitting the honor’s nearly 30-year history, let’s toast sparkling rosé and caviar-topped amuse-bouches to the best food writing published in 2016 (here is the full list of winners).

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When Your Subject Is #Content: An Interview with Rachel Monroe

#vanlife has over 1.3 million tags on Instagram, and top vanlife accounts can have more than half-a-million followers. Vanlife content should feature a beautiful landscape, a vintage Volkswagen, and preferably, a woman. (Unsplash)

For the New Yorker, Rachel Monroe followed Emily King and Corey Smith as they traveled up and down the California coast with their vintage Volkswagen and 156,000 Instagram followers in search of contentment—and content—through the “vanlife” movement. While her feature looks at the highs and lows of choosing to live your life through the internet, there were a few threads that I couldn’t shake loose while reading it. It’s easy for a writer to paint a target on her subject, especially anyone who is trying so hard to achieve a certain image, (for another masterful dissection of what lies beneath the “lifestyle” brand, I’d suggest Kyle Chayka’s profile of the creators of Kinfolk for Racked), but throughout the piece, Monroe is both savvy and sympathetic to the dynamic that keeps King and Smith going, and the often-invisible labor that keeps their relationship afloat while making life and work happen seamlessly in front of a demanding audience. I spoke with Monroe recently about what it takes to report about social media celebrities.

***

Can you tell me a little about how you first encountered vanlife? 

I live in Marfa, Texas, a town that seems to be on every professional road-tripper’s itinerary. We get a lot of travelers passing through, and at some point I began to notice that some of the vehicles in town had proprietary hashtags and decals on their windows that advertised their social media accounts. At the same time, I was thinking about how to build out the back of my pick-up to be more comfortable for long-term travel. After a little research, I came across articles about #vanlife.

Like any celebrity, or wanna-be celebrity, social media influencers have an agenda. How can you tell if an influencer will also make a good subject for a piece? 

For this feature I was specifically looking for a couple—since that’s the prototypical vanlife unit—who were making money through brand partnerships and social media because I wanted to learn more about how that world worked. It was also important to me that the people I profiled have significant experience actually living full-time in their vehicle. Emily and Corey had been on the road pretty much full-time for the past four years; I knew that meant they’d have stories and experiences that went well beyond creating branded content. They were also willing to be very open about the realities of their lives with me, which was crucial to make the story work.

You mention that vanlife is a nostalgic throwback to a sixties lifestyle: “the neo-hippie fashions, the retro gender dynamics.” It seems that women are putting in more of the effort to bring in the money, providing the majority of the support for the vanlife lifestyle, both on and off the road. How did those gender dynamics reveal themselves over the course of reporting?

In terms of the specific dynamics between Emily and Corey, the couple I profile in the piece, I witnessed them in a bunch of different modes. We were living in a very confined space together for a week, a space that’s their home, workplace, and their vehicle. They live together, travel together, take care of their dog together, and run a small business together. For that to work with a minimum of drama, it seemed like there needed to be defined roles and responsibilities. And what I observed in their relationship was that Emily was always the primary breadwinner while Corey made pretty much all the executive decisions about where they’d go, how long they’d stay, what route they’d take to get there. This seemed to be a relatively common dynamic, a slight scramble of the traditional model in that the vanlife man is in charge of the domestic sphere, which in this case is also a machine.

I was also struck by the number of men-only conversations I witnessed within the vanlife community about engine configuration, repairs, et cetera. Obviously there are plenty of women who know how to work on vehicles, but in the vanlife universe they definitely seemed to be in the minority. There was something about the overall dynamic—the women are photographed while the men bond over their shared, specialized mechanical knowledge—that seemed old-fashioned and kind of depressing to me.

And of course there are fewer solo women travelers than couples or solo male travelers. Vanessa Veselka wrote about this really well in her essay about female road narratives. It’s also one of the factors why vanlife is so white: Part of the “freedom” that the vanlifers are always talking about, the freedom of traveling alone and carefree through rural remote areas, is certainly more accessible to some people than others.

Did you start to encounter more people involved in vanlife after the article came out? 

While I was reporting, I felt like vanlife was everywhere. I learned about a friend’s cousin who gets paid to travel around the world making branded content. And I started to be hyper-aware of the vans passing through Marfa, particularly the ones with hashtags plastered on the side. But this happens every time I get fixated on a story—I start to see signs of it everywhere—and I never know if that’s the world validating my interest or just me being a little obsessed.

It’s easy for a writer to skewer a subject for not living the life they attempt to project. How did you find compassion for your subjects?

I saw Emily and Corey as people who are in many ways living out their ideals, while also in some ways not. Like all of us! That’s one thing that troubles me about influencer marketing: It encourages you to think that only certain aspects of your personality are worth showing the world, the most marketable aspects, I suppose. But I’m always much more fascinated by the parts that don’t fit as neatly.

Did you get a sense there’s an endgame for vanlifers? What’s the ultimate destination?

Vanlife definitely seems to be both a generational trend and an expanding business. Corey and Emily say they can’t imagine staying put full-time, but they also occasionally fantasized about buying some land in New England near their parents and building a tiny house by the river to live in at least part of the year.

I think that full-time traveling is tough, and expensive, as a forever-dream, but the idea of incorporating longer stints of rootlessness, even if there is a home base to come back to, is something that appeals to both professional vanlifers and people who are watching the trend from afar. That’s something I hear from a lot of people—it’s maybe even my own ideal—to have a life that somehow combines a solid home base with occasional extended stints of exploration.

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Can an Old Satire, Reborn, Survive the New Political Climate?

The Virginia Quarterly Review has a personal essay by Meghan Daum in which she discusses the recent reissue of her 2003 debut novel, The Quality of Life Report. Daum is nervous about the book’s reception the second time around. Fourteen years after publication, the book is entering a different kind of political climate: A satire about a New York television reporter who moves to the midwest, it pokes fun at overly sensitive liberals, coastal elites, and P.C. culture, and makes jokes about gender, race, and class.

The book can be buffoonish and broad (for better or worse, I was reading a lot of John Irving the time) but I’ve never in my life had so much fun writing anything. I remember sitting in my chair during those years and at times practically falling out of it from laughing out loud. This is not a regular feature of my creative process.

Last year, after not having looked at the book for a very long time, I reread it and found myself laughing all over again. I also found myself utterly shocked by some of the content. Though the reviews back in 2003 had been mostly positive and, moreover, made little if any mention of the risky humor around things like race, class, and gender (or the political undertones of sexually irrepressible farm animals) the humor seemed to me by today’s standards to be something bordering on unacceptable. Were the novel to be published for the first time today (and I suspect it might not be) there’s a good chance it would be the target of such excoriation on social media and elsewhere that its fundamental message—that liberals can be the most illiberal of all, just as urban coastal types can be the most provincial—would be dismissed as irrelevant, if not lost altogether.

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The Quality of Life Report, 2017

Longreads Pick

A personal essay by author Meghan Daum in which she describes her trepidation around the re-issue of her 2003 debut novel, The Quality of Life Report. The book–about a New York television reporter who moves to the midwest–pokes fun at liberals, coastal elites and P.C. culture, and makes jokes about gender, race and class, all of which might not be as easy to get away with in the tense political climate of 2017.

Published: Apr 18, 2017
Length: 10 minutes (2,557 words)

“Texas is Gilead and Indiana is Gilead”

Image by Jaap Noordzij via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

The Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale could not have been more timely, and therefore chilling. “In February, the book overtook George Orwell’s 1984 on the Amazon best-seller list. Texas is Gilead and Indiana is Gilead and now that Mike Pence is our vice president, the entire country will look more like Gilead, too.”

In The New Republic, Sara Jones (a former fundamentalist Christian whose education prepared her for a life of tending home and making babies and obeying a husband) writes about The Handmaid’s Tale, how its world could not exist without conservative women — represented in the book by the character Serena Joy — and what it ultimately means for those women’s lives.

America is rich in Serena Joys. One need look no further for her contemporary counterparts than Michelle Duggar and her daughters; or Paula White, the televangelist who allegedly led Donald Trump to Christ; or his aide Kellyanne Conway, who defends him as a “great boss” to women. The character Atwood invented is an amalgam of Phyllis Schlafly and Tammy Faye Bakker with a dash of Aimee Semple McPherson. The spectacle of the female fundamentalist celebrity is not recent, and she is not an anomaly. Her existence is proof of American fundamentalism’s durability, and a reminder that it could not thrive without the enthusiastic backing of women.

The dilemma of Serena Joy feels deceptively easy to resolve. She’s in this for power, and understands that it’s hers if she says the right things to the right audiences. Schlafly achieved international fame, and Conway has the ear of the president. With Gilead, however, Atwood reminds such women that they might not like the results of their labor; that by the time they come to regret it, the culture they helped create will have developed far beyond their control. Serena Joy is a warning, not only to her feminist antagonists, but to conservatives, too.

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