Search Results for: fiction

The Science of Dreaming

Photo by Eddie Kopp / Unsplash

Jessica Gross | Longreads | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,551 words)

In 2011, when she was in college studying abroad in Peru, Alice Robb ran out of reading material and picked up a copy of Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Her initial skepticism quickly dissolved, and she and a friend spent the summer practicing LaBerge’s tips: they recounted their dreams to each other; they did “reality tests” during the day to trigger similar checks while sleeping. Robb began keeping a rigorous dream journal and found that, after very little time, she began remembering her dreams in detail.

In short, she began taking her dreams very seriously — a stance that she has maintained since. In her new book, Why We Dream, Robb, a science journalist, presents a comprehensive and compelling account of theories of and research on dreaming from ancient times through the present day. Throughout, she displays an intense respect for what our minds do while we’re sleeping, and the findings she presents — that dreaming is essential for sanity, that analyzing our dreams can be revelatory, that dreams can be used as diagnostic tools and even manipulated for our own mental health—corroborate her conviction that, as a culture, we would benefit from paying more careful attention.

Robb and I met at a bar near where she lives in Brooklyn to talk about dreams’ predictive power, what it’s like to make your dream journal entries public (hint: uncomfortable), and what closely observing our dreams can offer.

Toward the end of the book, there is a line that moved me so much: “I like seeing proof that even while I’ve been unconscious, I’ve been alive.” It seems to me that dreams as proof of life — so then, maybe, as defense against death — is a pivotal concept in this book.

I used to have a lot of trouble sleeping and I was kind of afraid of sleep. A lot of people have compared sleep to death, and being unconscious is a scary thing to think about. But paying attention to my dreams and improving my dream recall and seeing that there’s actually so much going on in my mind while I’m asleep has made sleep feel more like a lively time — more integrated with the rest of my life and waking hours — rather than this weird period where I just shut down. Read more…

Take Script, Add Snow

Still from Christmas in Evergreen. Front Street Pictures / The Hallmark Channel / Getty Images / Composite by Katie Kosma

Jane Borden | Longreads | December 2018 | 12 minutes (3,211 words)

In a big city, a woman lives a fast-paced life until something forces her to visit a small town, just before Christmas. Shortly after arriving, she connects with a charming small-town man. Commence ice-skating, hot chocolate, a tree lot, tree decorating, caroling, gift giving, charity work, big family meals, snow, snowmen, snowballs, snowball fights, red scarves, cookie decorating, a grand old house or country inn, sleigh bells, giddy children, and the soft plucking of stringed instruments whenever a character delivers a joke.

Every made-for-TV Christmas movie tracks the above plot. And yet, the uniformity does not prevent proliferation: This year alone, Hallmark made 38 holiday films across its two channels. Lifetime made 14. “The word is insatiable,” says Meghan Hooper, senior vice president at Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network. “We don’t seem to be able to do enough to make the audience happy.”

“Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure,“ says writer-director Ron Oliver, who has made 13 Christmas movies for TV since 2004, mostly for Hallmark, which has become synonymous with heartfelt, holiday romantic comedies (it’s the Xerox of them, or, if you will, the Kleenex). “I have not seen this happen until this year. Everybody jumped on board.“

In 2017, 83 million people watched at least one Hallmark Christmas movie during their Countdown to Christmas and Miracle of Christmas events. The Hallmark Channel was last year’s number one cable network among women 25 to 54 in quarter four, and is shaping up to remain in that spot for 2018. Both Hallmark and Lifetime boast double-digit ratings increases during December. And the field is getting crowded: UPtv produced seven original holiday movies this year, Netflix made four, and Freeform made three.

How did America become obsessed with sappy, predictable, low-budget Christmas movies? Before we delve into history and psychology, let’s finish the plot:

Our protagonist falls in love, of course. She also rights an ethical wrong, always something from the past awaiting resolution and absolution. “It all goes back to Dickens,” Oliver says, referencing Scrooge’s transformation in A Christmas Carol. Like Scrooge, our modern-day heroine receives help, her three ghosts being her new love interest, the small-town community, and a stranger who slightly resembles Santa (what Hooper calls “a Santa-like”). At the film’s end, she and the love interest kiss, usually for the first time (these are family films), and she either moves to the small town or is forever changed by it. No one asks why the moms and aunts look only 10 years older than the protagonist. Roll credits, start the next one, begin to confuse which characters are in what.

It’s easy to assume that viewers enjoy these movies in spite of the repetitive plotlines, as if the networks greedily scam us. But Hallmark and Lifetime both do extensive focus grouping and ratings analysis. They know what works — we watch these movies because the plots are the same. In fact, Oliver calls the plots peripheral: “The real elements of these movies that make people love them is this sense of returning to your own past, your own childhood and sense of innocence from that era.” The slightly varying setups and environs must be similar to deliver us. These films are not art or even entertainment — they serve a function. They are ritual, a ritual as pagan as Christmas’s origins. And their key piece of iconography is the kind of American small town that’s quickly disappearing.

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IMAGINARY AMERICA

“Small towns have always been the iconic image for human relationships,” says Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College, whose work specializes in nostalgia. “The older woman lives here and the nice young family lives here. When you present the imagery of the small town, it’s portraying how we can get along in peaceful ways and help one another.”

Oliver grew up in one of these towns. He recalls, “It was this absolute Norman Rockwell Christmas town.” However, he adds, “I went back, maybe 20 years ago, and it is now strip malls. There is nothing to hold onto from there, so you hold the memories and recreate them in stories.”

He uses his hometown as a template when designing scenes and sets, but admits a challenge: “A few places exist, but they are getting harder and harder to find. We have to make them. We use every trick in the book.” Christmas Everlasting, one of this year’s Hallmark films, is partially shot in Covington, Georgia, because Oliver was drawn to its charming town square. “But when you go two blocks from there, it’s Walmart and CVS,” he says. Ultimately, the setting of the film is an amalgamation of three different small towns, plus a healthy dose of CGI.

Suddenly, Hallmark is no longer a guilty pleasure, it’s just a pleasure.

So these movies deliver a fantasy of a memory — except, for most of us, it’s a false memory we internalized through Norman Rockwell art, and Rockwell was also delivering the fantasy of a memory. You can trace the line of American Christmas imagery all the way to Queen Victoria: In 1848, The Illustrated London News published an etching of Victoria and Prince Albert standing around a Christmas tree with their family. It was published two years later in the States, and had a lasting impact of popularizing the tradition. “Christmas was not always a family-centered celebration,” explains Bruce Forbes, professor emeritus of Religious Studies at Morningside College, and author of Christmas: A Candid History. It became a family holiday in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the wild popularity of Queen Victoria, and to Charles Dickens, who published A Christmas Carol in 1843. “Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet,” says Forbes. “When we talk about the ‘spirit of Christmas’ now, we talk about generosity. That’s a Dickens creation.“

What did exist prior? In England, not much. As a result of the lasting effects of the Puritan revolution in the 1600s, the English hardly celebrated Christmas at all. The Puritans’ beef was twofold: Christmas was not celebrated by early Christians (the holiday didn’t appear until the 300s) and those who did celebrate Christmas, Forbes says, “went to midnight mass and then to the tavern and got drunk.” So Puritans wiped it from the English consciousness.

The Illustrated London News (1848)

Taking the baton from the Victorian image was Currier and Ives. The phenomenal success of this New York City lithography firm in the mid- and late-19th century put affordable prints of snowy landscapes into the hands of a nation. Then in the 20th century, Norman Rockwell paired nostalgia for 19th-century Christmas with images of our mid-century obsessions: the nuclear family and suburban life. It was a powder keg. Today, pulp-like TV Christmas movies recreate these images again — in their own way as prolifically as Currier and Ives — but this time they’re more reflective of our modern world. Additions include both the mundane (texting) and the imperative (finally, after years of criticism, we see characters of color). Nostalgia is meta by nature.

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ART IMITATES ART

A few years ago, Hallmark Cards, Inc., the parent company of the two Hallmark networks (aka Crown Media), tapped one of its senior illustrators, Geoff Greenleaf, to create a series of images about a fictional town called Evergreen. The series of snowy scenes in a small town, featuring quaint shops and an iconic vintage red truck, became a bestseller. In response, Crown Media turned the cards into a 2017 film titled Christmas in Evergreen. The movie, and its 2018 sequel, Christmas in Evergreen: Letters to Santa, were shot at Burnaby Village Museum in British Columbia, itself a fictional setting designed to preserve and romanticize small towns of yore.

Dickens was not telling you what was happening in England, he was trying to create a Christmas that didn’t exist yet.

Oliver believes the mid-century American imagery that these films capitalize on is so effective because it speaks to a time “when America was truly powerful and firing with all six cylinders: making great cars and great music, going to the moon, for crying out loud.” But, of course, Rockwell and his ilk rarely painted the whole picture. “It’s sanitized,” says Forbes. “It ignores all kinds of things: race, teenage pregnancy, poverty. But it was the image that white Americans had of themselves.”

TV Christmas movies have certainly perpetuated this brand of whitewashed nostalgia. As the films’ popularity rose, networks received ample criticism. Still, just five of Hallmark’s 38 holiday films this year feature leads of color. This includes Christmas Everlasting, starring Tatyana Ali, who also stars in this year’s Jingle Belle on Lifetime. “It speaks to a shift in our culture, that suddenly there is a move afoot to have more and more of our real world look like our television world,” says Oliver. Still missing in the genre are LGBTQ love stories; no lead to date has been gay. 

As American as a proclivity towards heteronormative whitewashing, so too is the tendency towards consumerism — some of the imagery within the films is for sale. Christmas in Evergreen has an adjacent product line: a keepsake ornament of the red truck, a magic snow globe, a mystery key, Santa’s mailbox. “We worked in partnership to look at a couple of the products they had that we could weave into the overall storyline,” says Michelle Vicary, executive vice president of programming and network publicity for Crown Media Family Networks, which owns the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. And of course they did: Hallmark was a retailer long before it got into content creation. “Not all brands evoke emotional connections,” Vicary says, “but that is at the top of what this brand promises and it has been since the beginning.”

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CAPTIVE ON THE CAROUSEL OF TIME

These films are not merely delivering the past; the stories achieve a delicate balance between familiarity and novelty. In them, we see a “constant struggle between wanting to hold onto certain things from the past but wanting a new beginning,” says Batcho. That new beginning is provided primarily by the love interest — TV Christmas movies are never not romantic comedies. Hooper says her team at Lifetime learned the importance of adding a romance element, after trying other versions of holiday films without it.

This makes sense to Batcho. “Like nostalgia, romantic stories focus on relationships and the sense of the ideal,” she says, adding that early brain imaging studies suggest that romance and nostalgia produce similar hormonal releases in the brain, “the loving, feel-good, pro-social feelings.” Plus, of course, as important as it is for us to protect the village, we need new relationships to strengthen the gene pool. But Batcho also says novelty is intrinsically linked to nostalgia. She likens cyclical markings of time, such as holiday celebrations, to a carousel: Each time it goes around, the horses look the same, but different people may be sitting in different places. “By being different and new, [novelty] allows you to escape so you’re not trapped in the past,” Batcho says. “Nostalgic people tend to be more optimistic, forward-looking people.”


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Although nostalgia was originally defined as homesickness and categorized as a disease, scientists now understand its healthy and profound psychological function. Studies suggest that exercising nostalgia enhances mood, reduces stress, and increases both social connectedness and self-regard. “Nostalgia helps us rediscover aspects of our authentic self, by going into our past,” says Batcho. Studies even suggest it helps us ascertain a meaning or purpose to our lives. Batcho also describes nostalgia as a social experience, since we identify ourselves in terms of relationships. “Nostalgia actually helps diminish loneliness by reminding people that, even if you are not physically with those who have loved you, you were once loved,” she says. Further, the process isn’t random. We specifically seek past memories that will help our current state.

“Every time you turn the television on,” Oliver says, “you’re seeing news about another betrayal of an ideal that America held close for a long time. I think the country is trying to find its moral center again. There’s a consistency to these stories that people hold onto like a life raft in the middle of a cultural storm.” Perhaps, as viewers, we also try to right a wrong.

The makers of TV Christmas movies wisely trigger nostalgia in several ways. “We certainly have gone after a certain type of talent, in terms of recognizable faces we grew up with from ’80s and ’90s shows,” says Lifetime exec Hooper. Nostalgia serves us. A 2018 survey by Cigna reports that most adults are lonely — as in, the average score, on a scale from one to lonely, was at least lonely. Other studies have shown loneliness to be a major predictor of poor physical health, leading some researchers to declare loneliness both a health crisis and an epidemic.

Further, cohorts aged 18 to 22 and 23 to 37 reported more loneliness than older generations. “That’s new,“ Batcho says. A press representative for Hallmark identifies the network’s demographic as women 25 to 54, but says that during the fourth quarter – our holiday season – “our women and adults 18 to 34 are through the roof,” suggesting a potential link between loneliness and viewership. 

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WE ARE ALL JUST PAGANS BY A FIRE

Nostalgia TV has been booming for a few years now, and the seemingly endless reboots and remakes premiere all year long. So why this huge surge in viewers around Christmas? Even otherwise prestige-TV-obsessed viewers, who turn up their noses at predictable schmaltz, now indulge in made-for-TV Christmas movies. “I don’t know if the season causes it as much as the season gives you permission,” opines Oliver. “From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.”

“It’s something about the holidays that is just built in: indulgence. Drink the hot chocolate, eat the food, lay on the couch, enjoy your family,” says Hooper.

And when Batcho is asked why people insatiably consume this kind of content during the holidays, she says, “Winter represents nature dying and taking a pause. It makes you feel very sad and hoping to look forward to a rebirth in the spring, which tells us that it is very fundamental and natural for people to like cycles. Bears hibernate. Even human beings need to take a pause.”

In one way or another, they are all saying the same thing, which is that we watch Hallmark around Christmas for the same reason Christmas happens at Christmas: the solstice. In the 300s, when the church designated the holiday, it likely chose December 25th for a litany of savvy reasons: some political and some for convenience, some building off already established pagan rituals. “You could guess them even if you didn’t study the cultures,“ says Forbes. “If it’s a midwinter festival, it would be a festival of lights to push back the darkness. It would feature evergreens because they look alive when everything else has died. To get past the isolation of winter, you would have feasts. And you would have dancing, singing, and drinking.“

From Thanksgiving night onward, you are allowed to be sentimental.

Part of why we’ve celebrated midwinter festivals since before recorded time is because, as Batcho said, we like cycles. They help us predict regular change: It’s cold and dark now, but abundant spring will come again, and we know it. They also help us deal with the constancy of change, with whatever on the carousel is new. “We can’t stop change. What do we do instead? Build cycles,” Batcho says. These cycles come in the form of temporal landmarks, which trigger nostalgia: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays … holiday movies. “We anchor ourselves. It is important for psychological well-being to have a sense that we are not out of control.”

The consistency of plot and its predictable ending therefore serve an important purpose: we need the films to be predictable because they are another icon of the midwinter festival. We see one and our brains not only know what to expect, but also what to do. If we seek this iconography now more than ever, then we must feel especially out of control.

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THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

It would be easy to attribute the popularity of these films to a kind of escapism resulting from the current division in our country, from the fear and hatred that many feel on both sides. But the rise of both Lifetime and Hallmark TV holiday movies started ramping up around 2012 (see graph). Perhaps the division in our country and the popularity of holiday films (and nostalgia programming in general) are effects of the same cause: an almost unfathomable acceleration of rates of cultural change.

In the 1980s, architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller (he of Dymaxion House and Geodesic Dome fame) posited a theory known as the knowledge-doubling curve. This sort of stuff isn’t 100 percent measurable, but the basic idea is: The amount of information we know, as a species, doubled about every 1500 years back when we were cavemen, and every 100 years in the modern era, up until World War I, at which point, it started doubling at an ever increasing rate. In the ‘90s, Artificial Intelligence researchers estimated the amount of information in the world doubles every 20 months. Today, varying estimates suggest that the amount of information in the world doubles every 10 to 13 months, and that, in our lifetimes, it could begin to double every 11 hours.

Change is coming at a furiously accelerating rate, providing us with greater and greater dominion. However, Yuval Noah Harari argues in his bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, evolution did not equip us to handle this kind of rapidly increasing power. For millions of years, Genus Homo was positioned in the middle of the food chain. Only in the past 100,000 years did we jump to the top. “Humankind ascended … so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence.” Our genus, by contrast, stumbles along with far less than a majestic prowess: “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this overhasty jump.”

We need help adapting to cataclysmic change. Nostalgia provides aid, and so does story. Researchers discovered that character-driven narratives cause the brain to release oxytocin, which can enhance empathy, thereby motivating cooperation and leading us to trust strangers. The study, led by Paul J. Zak at Claremont Graduate University, also found that we continue to mimic the actions and feelings of characters after the story ends. If a protagonist accepts shifts in her life and finds optimism for the future, then so may we.

We know that loneliness is on the rise. We know that both nostalgia and story help us create and sustain relationships. And we know that more than 83 million of us are turning to nostalgic stories during the annual month when humans anchor themselves against change, all during a time in history when the pace of change threatens to destroy us. Maybe we’re obsessed with schmaltzy TV Christmas movies because humans understand, deep down, that the real savior, this season and every season, is each other. Come on, you knew this article would have a Hallmark ending.

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Jane Borden is a freelance culture writer based in Los Angeles.

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Editor: Katie Kosma

Fact checker: Sam Schulyer

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Jack, Jacqueline — Dad

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Yvonne Conza | Longreads | December 2018 | 28 minutes (6,875 words)

 

Dad is dying. A cell phone ping alerts me to a terse, fracturing email from my father’s younger brother.

Your Father is in a Florida Hospice. My eyes freeze on the bold subject line as I’m having dinner with a friend at an East Village restaurant. The muffled music and clatter of cutlery become an inescapable tunnel of sound. Childhood memories torpedo my thoughts and conflict with the reality that Dad is close to passing away on the cusp of turning 79. Thirty years of not knowing where or how he lived vanish.

***

To most everyone, John Joseph Downes was Jack, but to a few he was Jacqueline, and to Mom, my three older siblings and me, called “Jackass” behind his back. Dad’s multiplex of enduring identities also include: door-to-door Encyclopedia Britannica salesman; entrepreneur selling jigs, molds, gauges and fixture parts to automotive plants through a business he built from scratch; and the owner of a successful home health care agency. A Buffalo Bills fan, he gave his season tickets to clients while he watched games at home eating cheese curds and pretzels. He was a seeker of public office, wearer of white button-down shirts with wife-beater tanks underneath, actual wife beater, sporadic psoriasis sufferer, excellent provider, entertainer, showoff, lover of culture and a Chivas Regal drinker who, as these wailing memories emerge, will not live two months more to celebrate his New Year’s Eve birthday.

For a few years, Dad donned a hearse-black, trapezoid-contoured toupee that our Russian Blue cat murderously stalked like a sly predator. When askew on Dad’s head, the cat didn’t tamper with the hairpiece. But once it was placed atop Mom’s dresser she pounced on it, battled with double-sided tape and amused all, even Dad, with her mischief. Stored in a cherry wood armoire and draped over a creepy female Styrofoam white mannequin wig stand was Dad’s more notable wig, a dolled up shoulder-length Jackie O. bouffant postiche with satiny strands looped into starched beach waves. Had he added oval, dark, smoke-tinted oversized sunglasses, the look would have been complete.

He had a proclivity towards cross-dressing, a marital joint venture since Mom slipped him into finery that hung inside a shared closet. Though their bedroom door was kept closed, the curtains weren’t pulled down, perhaps intentionally, to spark a pivotal conversation. As a child of 8, I was blindsided by intimate details that felt jarring and amiss. Whenever I put away his freshly laundered socks and t-shirts, I had to open the shuttered double doors of his dresser and be exposed to the cavernous storage area where timepieces and ties kept Jackie O’s foam head company.

When I was not much older, flickering flashes, not belonging to a swarm of fireflies, distracted me from Charlie’s Angels. Looking up to the wide-open windows of my parent’s second floor bedroom I saw Dad accessorized, demure and toying with puckered painted lips. Backlit and indefinably beautiful, he seemed more himself in a size 16 dress than in one of his polyester baby blue or pickle green leisure suits.

Once while snooping for Christmas presents, I discovered Polaroid portraits of Dad as Jackie stashed in a shabby shoebox on the top shelf of my parents’ bedroom closet. Clad in kitten heels, stockings and a conservative, zip-from-behind dress, he had been transformed into a chunky, rarified suggestion of Jacqueline Kennedy. When not embodying Jacqueline, he wore a suit, white shirt and tie, shaved, splashed on decadent amounts of Old Spice.  It was hard for him to keep a clean shave, 5 o’clock shadow always intruding. He bore a resemblance to Don Knotts, the billboard-sized forehead over his eyebrows, which I inherited, displaying struggle, though in a more generous light it beamed with determination. After stuffing pens in his pocket protector, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work he’d go — a tender, paunch bellied dwarf with pick and shovel who knew not to return home until a million diamonds shined, and his worth to his wife could be proven.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2018: Arts and Culture

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in arts and culture.

Rebecca Schuman
Rebecca Schuman is the author of “The 90s Are Old,” ask a gen-xer, and Schadenfreude, A Love Story.

Drawing a Line in the Sand Over River Rights (Chris Colin, Outside)

Maybe it’s because I was born with an innate sense of communitarian justice. Maybe it’s because, at the age of 9, I was traumatized for several months after a cranky neighbor screamed me out of her yard when I attempted to sate my (natural, innocent, child’s) curiosity by opening her much-larger-than-usual mailbox. Maybe it’s because, as an adult, I now know that the Venn diagram of people who are really into their private property and people who really suck is basically a circle.

Whatever the reason, I found myself gasping and laughing the whole way through Chris Colin’s journey down the Russian River, as he sought to test the limits of California law against a cross-section of the trespassing-averse. It would be like John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” except “instead of whiskey,” Colin and three friends would be “fueled by a cocktail of righteousness and florid legalese.”

Yes canoes, thinks Colin, as he docks his canoe under one NO CANOES sign after the next — after all, those signs are technically illegal, since all of California’s river beaches are public up to the “ordinary high-water mark,” a fun fact I now know thanks to this piece. Sure, the fascinating confluence of property owners — aging hippies; aging California working class; new-money tech folk from San Francisco — maybe have a point about the costs of constant docking of the hoi polloi (“broken glass, poop in the bushes, and bad music blaring”). But, wonders Colin, isn’t the real answer to enforce the laws that exist, instead of expecting everyone to obey the self-created shadow laws of property owners, who have mean dogs and sometimes really good aim with golf balls?

This piece was one of the only things I read in 2018 where I both hung on every word and didn’t hate myself at the end — because it was neither vapid celebrity nonsense, nor an enraging new development in the Trump shit-show. Like a canoe trip down the Russian River itself, Colin’s tale was both beautifully escapist and a perfect microcosm of much of what ails us at this particular moment: the glorification of private property versus the preservation of the public good. Yes canoes, everyone. Yes canoes.


Dan Kois
Dan Kois edits and writes for Slate. He co-authored with Isaac Butler The World Only Spins Forward, a history of Angels in America, and is writing a book called How to Be a Family.

All 41 Broadway Theaters, Ranked (Natalie Walker, Vulture)

Do Men Enter Bathtubs on Hands and Knees So Their Balls Hit the Water Last? (Kelly Conaboy, The Cut)

I read lots of great things this year, long and important and inspiring reads about Deborah Eisenberg and cruise-ship entertainers and #MeToo. But I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge a different kind of great writing that the current internet-media economy, for all its flaws, fosters quite well: the deranged overlongread. This is the piece that, with a wildly entertaining lack of self-control, goes way too deep into a question of perhaps questionable impact, taking advantage of the author’s expertise or tireless interest in the subject. It’s a chance for a writer to completely lose her sense of perspective and launch into the kind of writing project that no editor would say yes to in the abstract but which no good editor can say no to once she’s read it. My two favorite examples this year were both published on nymag.com. Natalie Walker’s exhaustive ranking of all 41 Broadway theaters on Vulture is nearly 5,000 words long, but is so densely packed both with jokes and with absurdly detailed knowledge that it never stops being delightful to read. And in a piece on The Cut that is pegged to nothing, absurd on its face, inspired by a BabyCenter message board post, 2,500 words long, and festooned with amateurish drawings, Kelly Conaboy interviews, at my count, 15 different men to answer, once and for all, the question, “Do Men Enter the Bathtub on Their Hands and Knees So Their Balls Hit the Water Last?” It’s the kind of investigation that the internet was made for.


Tom Maxwell
Tom Maxwell is a writer, musician, and author of the Longreads series, “Shelved.”

The Untold Stories of Paul McCartney (Chris Heath, GQ)

In Praise of ‘Good As Hell,’ The Song That Believes In You Even When You Don’t (Hanif Abdurraqib, NPR)

I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life (Heather Havrilesky, The Cut)

I have three pieces for you to read at this closing of the year. They all trade in perception and value.

The first is Chris Heath’s lengthy interview with Paul McCartney for GQ. “The Untold Stories of Paul McCartney” is a litany of the rock legend’s “less manicured” anecdotes — including the as-yet unshared John Lennon circle jerk story. Mostly it’s about a man, largely responsible for redefining popular culture, slowly revealing himself as a bit of a weirdo.

Next is a piece of luminous writing by Hanif Abdurraqib for NPR’s “American Anthem” series. “In Praise of ‘Good As Hell,’ The Song That Believes In You Even When You Don’t” is a flat-out pleasurable read. “Without erasing the unique specifics of the song’s message,” Abdurraqib writes, “there is another message rattling below: Anyone who desires wings can go out and get them.”

Lastly, I commend to you “I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life,” by Heather Havrilesky in her “Ask Polly” column in The Cut. This to me is pure culture — the culture of perceived value and conferred worth. The piece is in response to a 35-year-old woman who feels as if her picaresque life has been wasted. “Learn to treat yourself the way a loving older parent would,” Havrilesky counsels. “Tell yourself: This reckoning serves a purpose. Your traveling served a purpose. Your moving served a purpose. You’re sitting on a pile of gold that you earned through your own hard work, you just can’t see it yet. You can’t see it because you’re blinded by your shame.” Read this and be refreshed.


Justin Heckert
Justin Heckert is a writer living in Charleston, South Carolina.

‘That had to hurt.’ Lessons learned on the diving board in summer’s final days. (Taylor Telford, The Washington Post)

The diving board in this story is ominous, a tongue. The swimming pool below it “a churning ecosystem of youth.” We are dropped into the summer glow, in with the sunbathers and the divers and the lifeguard, and get to spend a few unforgettable moments inside this day with them, as readers — a world rendered in the third dimension by the sights and sounds and in the movements captured by Taylor Telford. The water dripping off shiny skin, the concrete blazing, people hopping back and forth so their feet don’t burn. This story is wonderful, from the lede to the end, and though it’s a short story that reads like a more ambitious one, it never commits the sin of boring writing: it’s always entertaining, and it demands to be read all the way through. I marvel at the little observations and how she uses them, at what it took to write this and how many people there she must’ve interviewed to make it feel like she didn’t need to interview a soul. That she must’ve stared at people’s faces, toes, hands, the concrete of the pool itself, the counting of steps, the height of the board, the shadows and the sun, the way people were positioned and how they were talking to one another, a great reminder of the type of observation required for this kind of work, and how fun and vivid nonfiction can be.


Anne Thériault
Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based feminist killjoy. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. If she has a looming deadline, you can find her procrastinating on Twitter @anne_theriault.

Living With Slenderman (Kathleen Hale, Hazlitt)

I’m one of those cynical pedants who feels especially exasperated by click-baity social media posts that swear that whatever they’re linking to is the best thing you’ll read all year. More often than is probably (definitely) healthy for me, I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking, “it’s April, my friend, and this year has eight whole months left in it!” So it’s probably poetic justice that the piece that wound up being my favourite long-form essay of the year was published way back in January.

I can’t remember how I first stumbled across Kathleen Hale’s “Living With Slenderman.” I’m sure I opened it because I thought it was going to be a lurid read that scratched my true crime itch. Instead, it was a complex narrative about childhood, mental illness, and the carceral system. In her essay, Hale tells the story of Morgan Geyser who, when she was 12, acted with her friend Anissa to try to kill their classmate Bella. The case has generated many sensationalist headlines, especially since the defendants claimed that they had hurt their friend in an effort to appease the internet bogeyman “Slenderman;” many people believed that Morgan and Anissa should serve a maximum prison sentence for such a senseless, horrifying crime. But Hale neatly lays out all the details — from Geyser’s early hallucinations and delusions, to her diagnosis of early-onset schizophrenia, to explanations of why American children can be tried as adults in the courts — in a way that’s both engaging and deeply unsettling.

I came to this essay because I wanted some kind of voyeuristic thrill over something I didn’t really know about and certainly didn’t understand. I keep coming back to this essay because of the layered truths it tells: that stigma against mental illness can be deadly; that revenge is not a recipe for justice; that prisons chew up and spit out literal children and not many people seem very bothered by that fact. I can’t stop re-reading it and don’t imagine that I will be able to any time soon.


Seyward Darby
Editor in Chief, The Atavist.

For One Last Night, Make It a Blockbuster Night (Justin Heckert, The Ringer)

I didn’t know I needed a gorgeously written feature about Blockbuster nostalgia until this one popped up on my newsfeed. Turns out, I really needed it. All movie-lovers probably needed it. Certainly, all kids from small towns who once combed the store’s white shelves each weekend needed it. Justin Heckert’s superb story for The Ringer about one of the last Blockbusters in Alaska — where the once-hegemonic rental chain went to die — is an elegy for a distinctly 20th century way of consuming culture. Transactional, tactile, conversational, illuminating, and relatable. Rooted in real places, yet also in our imaginations. Situated at the intersection of the fantastic and the mundane. Like my favorite movies, I could rewind this story and read it again, and again, and again.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

Longreads Best of 2018: Profiles

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in profiles.

Sarah Smarsh
Journalist Sarah Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The Guardian, The New York Times, The Texas Observer, and many other publications.
Smarsh’s first book, Heartland, was long-listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction.

William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump (Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker)

The intersection of class, race, and religion — what could be more fraught in these times? Cobb’s rare combination of quiet wisdom and a steady journalistic hand is the perfect guide. He profiles Protestant minister William Barber, the progressive activist and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, with thorough reporting and sensitivity, letting facts speak for themselves but humanizing the subject as no fact alone can do. I’ve been part of the Poor People’s Campaign at the ground level and was heartened to learn here that more than one respected source calls Barber “the real thing.” But, whether or not Barber is your political comrade, you will learn that he believes himself to be your spiritual brother — a refreshing fusion of political and moral force on the sometimes god-averse left.


Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Feature writer for The New York Times.

The mystery of Tucker Carlson (Lyz Lenz, Columbia Journalism Review)

This was a really good year for profiles, despite their death (reported annually). So good that it was very hard to narrow it down, and so I was very grateful that I couldn’t pick any from the New York Times, where I work, which really helped narrow it down. (Though you’ve just got to read this one.)

And how do you choose from the others: Dan Riley on Timothée Chalamet (though exactly which profile/article/photo/table of contents, even, under Jim Nelson wasn’t great?). Allison P. Davis’ Lena Dunham lede-ender of fallopian tubes like outstretched arms? Amanda Fortini opening Michelle Williams’ historically very locked vault. Emily Nussbaum on Ryan Murphy. Paige Williams on Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Wright Thompson on Geno Auriemma. Jessica Pressler on Anna Delvey. (Jessica Pressler on anything.) What a year.

But I finally picked one, and when I did, I realized it was a no-brainer. Lyz Lenz, who has terrifying amounts of talent, pulled off the neatest trick: A profile of screamy Tucker Carlson that walks the line of being way too self-referential, and yet somehow makes that work. It’s perhaps because it’s so funny. It’s perhaps because instead of looking for some fatuous lede scene it goes straight to the most prominent aspect of Carlson (why is he always screaming?). It’s perhaps because she knows that there is no end to the delight of knowing his full name: Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson. Or maybe it’s this section ender: “His publicist calls after our interview to make sure I know that Carlson is not a racist.” Whatever it is, I was very grateful for it.


James Ross Gardner
Editor-in-chief, Seattle Met.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s Battering Ram (Paige Williams, The New Yorker)

I lost count of how many times Paige Williams was obliged to deploy terms like “inaccurately,” “falsely,” “erroneous,” and “lie” in this extraordinary portrait of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. What’s remarkable about Trump’s press secretary though is that, at least here, those words are rarely used to describe statements by Sanders herself — but rather of those whose lies she must justify. It’s also what makes Sanders a cipher of our time. How does someone who vehemently claims to possess high moral character rationalize defending the indefensible? Put another way: How does one become that person? Williams’s search for an answer takes her to her subject’s native Arkansas, where in the ’90s the daughter of then governor Mike Huckabee “was given Chelsea Clinton’s former bedroom” in the governor’s mansion, and Little Rock “residents and journalists mocked the Huckabees as rubes.” Later, during a visit with a lifelong friend, we catch a rare glimpse of the press secretary uncoiled and away from the podium, “wearing tropical-print shorts and flip-flops, with a blue blouse and her pearls.” Details like these are certainly humanizing. But Williams isn’t here to vindicate Sanders’s transgressions. In 9,293 words she deftly dismantles the notion that the president’s “battering ram” might walk away from any of this with clean hands. “A press secretary who had an abiding respect for First Amendment freedoms likely would have resigned once it became clear that Trump intended to steamroll his way through the Constitution,” Williams offers early in the piece. “But Sanders stayed.”


Seyward Darby
Editor in Chief, The Atavist.

The mystery of Tucker Carlson (Lyz Lenz, Columbia Journalism Review)

Lyz Lenz’s profile of Tucker Carlson in the Columbia Journalism Review begins and ends with the subject shouting at the writer, but insisting that he’s not. It’s the perfect encapsulation of Carlson’s raison d’être in the Trump era: convincing people to believe lies despite proof of the truth sitting right friggin’ there in the form of scientific studies, sociological data, photographic evidence, and the like. And when gaslighting fails? To Lenz, hardy soul that she is, Carlson again demonstrates his favorite ripostes. He deflects probing questions with glib mockery, by rejecting a query’s value so that he doesn’t have to address it, or — my personal favorite — with pseudo-intellectual incoherence masquerading as the sort of wily argument that wins high-school debaters gleaming trophies. (This is a digression where I beg someone reading this list to pen the definitive essay on how debate is the root of political evil. I will tweet it every day, forever.) Lenz, wholly in control of her craft, injects the profile with her own anxiety and anger about Carlson’s bullshit and with sly reminders that, for too long, respectable media overlooked his bullshit because Carlson was quite good at mimicking Hunter S. Thompson. People keep wondering, wide-eyed, what happened to Tucker Carlson. They don’t want to admit that the answer is, and was always, right friggin’ there.


Krista Stevens
Senior editor, Longreads.

Jerry and Marge Go Large (Jason Fagone, Huffington Post Highline)

To Gerald “Jerry” Selbee, an “intellectually restless” dyslexic cereal box designer from Battle Creek Michigan, everything in the world was a puzzle to be solved. At age 64, Selbee’s mathematical mind discovered a loophole in the Michigan Lottery’s “Winfall” game. He figured he’d test his lottery strategy as something fun to do to in retirement. Jason Fagone wrote 11,000 words about how Jerry and Marge Selbee won $27 million gaming the Michigan Lottery over nine years and this piece has it all in a winning combination. As you root for the working man who finds a way to win against a big government entity, you too savor the thrill of solving a tough puzzle to make your lottery dream come true. This is longform at its finest.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

Hellhound on the Money Trail

AP Photo/Justin M. Norton

Robert Gordon | Memphis Rent Party | Bloomsbury | March 2018 | 32 minutes (6,304 words)

 

This story first appeared in LA Weekly in 1991.

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The sun did not shine, but it was hot as hell the day a memorial stone was unveiled for bluesman Robert Johnson near a country crossroads outside Greenwood, Mississippi. About seventy-five people filled the tiny Mt. Zion church, a row of broadcast video cameras behind the back pew and a bank of lights illuminating a hoarse preacher as he praised a man who reputedly sold his soul to the devil.

There was no finality in setting the stone. The attention came fifty years too late, and even if his memory is more alive today than ever before, Johnson’s rightful heirs still have nothing but the name. This service was not about the body of the bluesman, which lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in the vicinity; it was about the guitar-shaped wreath provided by Johnson’s current record label, and about the video bite that would be beamed into homes around the country that April 1991 evening.

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My Brother, My Self

Illustration by Eric Peterson

Katie Prout | Longreads | December 2018 | 25 minutes (6,270 words)

Every addict is a lawyer and my brother is no exception. On the first winter day that feels like spring, the boys next-door get too rowdy. Beer cans fall to the ground under a faint February sun. Frat boys slur-shout along to Drake and make my thin walls quake. I huff and puff, and I consider putting on my boots and crunching over through the melting snow to tell my neighbors I have a sick kid (“Will you please turn it down?”), but instead I pull my bathrobe tighter and text Hank. I feel like you know about noise complaints, I write.

Huh? he texts back.

I know it’s only 5:30 and a Saturday, but I’m trying to work on my thesis, I have a deadline, the undergrads next door are having a party. I’m about to cut their wires.

It’s not too early to call in a noise complaint, he writes. It just depends on how loud.

I thank Hank and call in my noise complaint, and as the sun goes down I screenshot our text exchange and go back to writing, as I always do, about him.

Every addict is a pharmacist and my brother is no exception. In June, our mother asks for Hank’s take on a new pain medication before allowing our youngest brother, struck by spina bifida in the womb, to be put on it. I am less inclined to take his advice when it comes to my own medication: “Xanax is as bad as a drink,” he says, and perhaps for him, that’s true. Like my mother, I go to Hank for his take on medicine in general, on how various pills may or may not interact with one another, even if I don’t always follow what he says. As an addict, he’s come to know the law, from its loopholes to its nooses, as intimately as he knows how ADHD meds mix with benzos, or how much vodka can steady withdrawal shakes until he can figure out his insurance for the hospital.

Every alcoholic is an addict, but not every alcoholic is taken seriously as such. I think about this every time I refer to Hank as an addict in conversation with others or on the page by myself: I think about this a lot. “Addict,” I say, and the faces of the people I’m speaking to grow still in sympathy; “alcoholic,” I say, and their faces are blank. The word alcoholic doesn’t mean much to them, or maybe it’s that the word alcoholic could mean anything. “I’m basically an alcoholic,” a man said to me once over drinks, laughing, and then frowning when I didn’t laugh too, when I stood up from my barstool and asked him if he was OK. It’s a joke, he said, you should joke more. But words matter to me, and that one matters in particular.
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At the Very Least We Know the End of the World Will Have a Bright Side

DigitalVision / Getty

Adam Boffa | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,324 words)

The oil industry in the U.S. has had a busy few years. In North Dakota alone, barrel production increased more than tenfold between 2005 and 2015. The state’s daily oil barrel output surged from a low of 90,000, and within a decade it was consistently producing over one million barrels of oil per day. A majority of this oil was extracted via fracking, a controversial practice linked to a litany of harmful health and environmental effects. But if there were to be a public reckoning with fracking’s dangers in North Dakota, it would have to overcome steep challenges. A recent collection of research on the oil boom includes Sebastian Braun’s account of how pro-fracking sentiment, propped up by corporate lobbyists (like the American Legislative Exchange Council) and others who stand to gain, is so strong in the state that, during a speech at an energy conference, the audience didn’t bat an eye when a presenter likened EPA regulation to terrorism. Braun, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of American Indian Studies at Iowa State University, alleges that this lobbyist-generated atmosphere of consensus is hostile to local researchers investigating topics including air and water quality. Another study in the collection by Ann Reed, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at ISU, points to the oil industry’s spending on “community outreach initiatives” within the state, funds which it disperses in order to establish a positive reputation for itself (and, as a side effect, make some citizens feel pressured to stay quiet about their apprehensions regarding the industry’s practices). As of 2018, the state continues to set daily oil production records.

It’s not just North Dakota, of course. Similar efforts helped silence debates around fracking, pollution, and renewable resources in the lead-up to this year’s elections in Colorado, Washington, and Arizona, eventually helping defeat reform initiatives in those states. But these are only regional instances of the broader, global trend of the suppression of research and stifling of public discussion on the impacts of fossil fuel extraction. The most significant example probably involves Shell and ExxonMobil, who studied and documented the catastrophic effects of climate change decades ago but kept their findings confidential and, in ExxonMobil’s case, funded denialist campaigns and anti-regulatory efforts based on false information. While the public spent years fruitlessly debating the legitimacy of climate science, oil giants obscured evidence, promoted research amenable to their interests, and kept drilling, happy to make hay while the warming sun shone. Read more…

Queens of Infamy: Zenobia

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | December 2018 | 18 minutes (4,570 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

When one thinks about Roman triumvirates, insofar as one ever thinks about Roman triumvirates, there are two that spring immediately to mind: the First Triumvirate and the Second Triumvirate. The former involved a would-be emperor (Julius Caesar), a man with a beautiful head of hair (Pompey), and a guy whose name no one can ever remember (Crassus); the latter included an actual emperor (Augustus), a noted piss artist who also happened to have great hair (Mark Antony), and another guy whose name no one can ever remember (Lepidus). But I propose we add another Ancient Roman triumvirate and turn this list into a triumvirate of triumvirates. This last (and, frankly, greatest) of the triumvirates consists of the three queens who led revolts against the Roman occupation of their lands: Cleopatra, Boudicca, and Zenobia.

Do I understand that the term “triumvirate” means “three people who operate together as a governing coalition”? Yes. Since vir is Latin for “man,” wouldn’t the term refer specifically to men? Sure, whatever. Given that Cleopatra, Boudicca, and Zenobia were women whose lives were separated by the vagaries of time and geography, doesn’t that suggest that I’m applying “triumvirate” incorrectly here? Probably. Do I care about your petty and pedantic opinions on this matter? Not especially.

Cleopatra and Boudicca’s stories are both fairly well-known in the West, if somewhat distorted in their retellings (the Egyptian queen wanted her legacy to be tax reform and a stable, drought-resistant economy, but instead we mostly remember her as being sexily embroiled in Roman politics). Zenobia is a popular historical figure in the Arab world, especially in her native Syria, where her image appears on banknotes and where her story featured heavily in the 1997 historical soap opera Al-Ababeed (The Anarchy). Outside of the Middle East, though, she seems to be half-forgotten aside from a few works produced during the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, all of which employ extreme artistic license. Part of the problem is that when it comes to Zenobia, hard facts are few and far between. This is almost certainly related to gender; while historians were studiously chronicling the frequency and texture of royal men’s bowel movements, the most basic details of women’s lives are lost to time. The Romans were particularly reluctant to include women in their accounts, so it’s unsurprising that they didn’t leave much information behind about the queen who conquered a solid chunk of their empire.

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You Don’t Own Me

Billy Joe Armstrong playing the Black Cat, 2018. Photo by Joe Bonomo

Joe Bonomo | The Normal School | November 2018 | 27 minutes (5,476 words)

 

Did you hear the news? John Bonham used a mud shark as a sex toy! Rod the Mod had to have his stomach pumped! Paul is Dead! But when a band gets too famous, literally too big for the room, I resist them, because I’m a fameist.

I saw the Rolling Stones and the Who at Washington D.C.’s Capitol Centre arena in the early 1980s, and both shows were highly memorable but occurred on the cusp of my exploding love for indie and punk, for bands, many of which were local, whose gigs take place in small, sweaty joints—and I was truly baptized as a rock ‘n’ roll fan in those places. Until very recently, I hadn’t seen a stadium-size show, though in retrospect I wish I’d put my bias aside and gone to see Prince, the Kinks, David Lee Roth-era Van Halen, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and a few others. I’m irrational. I know that fans of enormously successful artists and bands happily spend big bucks to see their favorites in arenas or at sprawling festivals; for many of them, the experience is spiritually gratifying, emotionally rich, exciting. Dwarfed by a huge crowd, one of tens of thousands, spending as much time watching a band on a JumboTron as on the stage: to me this feels like the equivalent of a hundred-person banquet dinner, versus an intimate supper for five, of praying with hundreds in a megachurch versus sitting in a back pew with a dozen spiritually hungry folk in a ramshackle wooden church somewhere. I see that I’m getting carried away here. As with any doctrinaire, you can easily poke holes in my argument, call me hipster, pretentious, roll your eyes at my piousness while pointing to the sweatily anointed kid emerging blissful from an arena, pyrotechnics still dancing in her eyes.

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