Search Results for: fiction

The Changeling

Headshot of the author at 18, courtesy of the author; body composite by Katie Kosma.

Alexander Chee | Longreads | April 2018 | 16 minutes (3,921 words)

Some years into the writing of my first novel, I was 32, living in Brooklyn and waiting tables in a midtown Manhattan steakhouse a few shifts a week. I worked there instead of some trendier or more downtown place for the exact reasons that made it seem odd to the people I knew: it was a world apart from the one I wanted to live in. The commute was long, 45 minutes on the subway each way from my Park Slope Apartment, but I used the time to read and write, often writing on legal pads as I came and went. My income from three or four nights a week, 5 hours a night, was just 15 percent of what the people who ate there spent on dinners out each year — after taxes, I lived comfortably on this. To my relief, I never saw anyone I knew there, except for a single classmate who worked at Vanity Fair and was good at not condescending to me. Celebrities came so regularly, it was a little like working inside the pages of a gossip magazine. I remember the day O. J. Simpson reserved a private dining room under his lawyer’s wife’s name, but then came out onto the main floor, joking around with the diners. The New York Post cover the next day had a photo of our steak knife, bearing an uncanny likeness to the presumed weapon in his wife’s murder.

The best celebrity sighting for me, however, was Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

The hostess seated her in my section for lunch, at an unassuming but generous table by herself. “I love her,” the hostess said, as she walked by me. We had what I thought of as the ordinary interactions between waiter and guest, and I left, put her order in, and returned to my work. Sometime after her food had been served, she called me over as I passed her table. I stopped and leaned in.

“You’re not a waiter, are you?” She said this with a conspiratorial affection, like she knew me.

“Is something wrong with your service?” I asked, alarmed.

“No,” she said, smiling. “Everything is wonderful. But you’re not a waiter, are you? You’re a writer.”

The lunchtime clamor receded a little around the last word. I felt found out, if in the nicest possible way

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.” I then asked her why she had asked me that.

“You can just tell,” she said, her smile gone cryptic.

I thanked her, then went back to serving lunch. I tried to think of what it was that had caused her to descend into my station like an oracle and make this pronouncement, the sort of unrealistic deus ex machina moment of the kind I eventually made the topic of my eventual second novel. I was surrounded by coincidences then, a forest of messages from the universe. But this couldn’t have been a coincidence. Surely this was something else, a more divine and direct kind of message. The voice from the burning bush, but instead of a bush, the message was coming from that marvelous smile, the familiar, kind eyes, the perfect hair — and that twinkle.

Here I was again in an old story, one that had begun with people always telling me to be a writer, starting at the age of 14. My interaction with Dr. Ruth that afternoon, though, mattered in an entirely new way. By that time, I had finally decided to be a writer. I just wasn’t sure I could do it. But I was trying. I was halfway through the novel, though I didn’t know that then. The difference Dr. Ruth made, however, was this: she wasn’t telling me to go and become a writer. She was telling me I was one. And that it was finally something visible, even legible, no matter what else I was doing.

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The 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winners

From left, writers Alice Crites, Stephanie McCrummen, Amy Gardner, and Beth Reinhard embrace in the newsroom after The Washington Post wins two Pulitzer Prizes. The Post shared a Pulitzer with the New York Times for their coverage of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and contacts between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian officials and won a second Pulitzer for uncovering the decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct against Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

As expected, the New York Times and The New Yorker dominated much of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize fanfare, and while it is necessary to honor the award-winning reporting undertaken by Jodie Kantor, Meghan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow, some of the most-talked about features from this past year were also celebrated. Including, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, whose in-depth reporting on Dylann Roof for GQ won for feature writing (Ghansah also won a National Magazine Award for this story). And the staff of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which provided a brutal examination of the effects of heroin during a week-long period.

The entire list of the other Pulitzer recipients can be found here, but below is a list of some of the honored works. Read more…

Why Can’t Female Reporters Stay in the Picture?

Rachel McAdams on the set of 'Spotlight' in 2014 (Stickman/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

The 2002 Robert Evans biopic The Kid Stays In The Picture (based on his memoir) got its title from a line uttered by studio head Daryl Zanuck when Ernest Hemingway, Ava Gardner, and Tyrone Power banded together to tell Zanuck that casting Evans, at the time a suit salesman, in the movie adaptation of The Sun Also Rises would kill the movie. But Evans’ neophyte performance was a success, lauded by one film magazine as giving the film “a jolt of authenticity it desperately needs.”

Movies about journalism are having a moment right now, at a time when authenticity in representations of the news media could be very helpful. Spotlight won the 2016 Oscar for Best Picture, The Post was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress in 2018. So it was exciting to learn this week that a movie in the works will focus on the last year of Rob Ford’s mayoral term, with a lead character who is a reporter trying to expose a scandal about him. The story is based on the dogged work of Toronto Star reporter  Robyn Doolittle, who discovered a video of Ford smoking crack that eventually imploded the politician’s career.

But the journalist in the new movie is being played by 24-year-old actor Ben Platt

Unsurprisingly, this rubbed Doolittle, and many others, the wrong way.

Platt responded with a sort of non-apology insisting that the movie is fictitious — apparently in the movie, the journalist he plays ultimately fails to expose Ford.

Filmmakers have the right to make any movie for which they can get funding. But there are a few intertwining issues here. One is that it’s hard to think of a situation where a male reporter’s story has been coopted and the reporter has been written out of it. In fact, as Doolittle points out, male reporters are often lionized when their stories are made into movies.

The other is that Doolittle’s story is great. Around the time that she obtained the video, the Star was still fighting a lawsuit Ford had filed against them during his mayoral election. As Star publisher John Cruickshank told On the Media‘s Brooke Gladstone in 2013, the paper had been banned from the mayor’s office and Ford was refusing to communicate with them — making Doolittle’s job as City Hall reporter more than a little challenging. In a separate interview, Doolittle told Gladstone that during the three years she’d covered Ford, had been cast by the mayor as nothing more than a sparring session: “Typically, a Star investigation brings something to light, and he says, oh, this is just the Toronto Star out to get me, and everyone kind of runs with this, oh, it’s the Star and the Mayor at it again.”

Enter Gawker. On August 2016, the site published a post saying they knew a video of Rob Ford smoking crack existed and launched a “Crackstarter” fundraiser to raise $200,000 to pay drug dealers and gun runners for the video. Gawker’s fundraiser fell through, but the post and the ensuing media maelstrom gave the Star — and the Canadian Globe and Mail“cover” to report on Ford and his family’s drug connections.

What a timely story this would be, in our age of public distrust in the media and authoritarian attempts to silence reporters and publications and the struggles of both old and new media companies to survive. So why tell this other story? And if the excuse for writing Doolittle out of it is that it’s “fictional,” why include Rob Ford? Why not concoct a fictional politician, too? What are the chances that someone is going to make a second movie actually showing Doolittle’s story after this movie starring a man comes out?

It seems to be rooted in an assumption that movie-going audiences would be more interested in a male hero than a female one. But the data belies that conviction. As Melissa Silverstein’s “Women and Hollywood” blog noted, the top three grossing films of 2017 were female-led.

Part of this ties in to the general frustration at how women reporters are depicted in movies and television, in the rare instances where they’re not diminished or written out.

The reporter Rachel McAdams portrayed in Spotlight, Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer, who is still a member of the Spotlight team, did the hardest interviews, the scariest door-knocking—yet she was a marginal character compared to Mark Ruffalo’s loner hero. When asked why the priest who McAdams door-knocks isn’t revisited in the film, co-writer Josh Singer told Boston.com that “the writers had two hours to tell the story of Spotlight, and so parts of it had to be sacrificed.” But as Boston.com writer Bryanna Cappadona notes:

It is a jarring scene that emerges above others, leaving you disturbed and hoping to learn more. And, most of all, it’s one of the few moments in the movie that briefly touches on the psychology of the priests and the motives behind their crimes.

Why not center Pfeiffer more in the film? Her story at the time was compelling. She was just 29, newly married, and devoting her whole life to this project that took her away from her husband constantly. He was supportive, her only confidante as she couldn’t tell anyone else what she was working on. We don’t see much of that in the film. Instead, we get Ruffalo playing an archetype beloved by media man: the guy who loves his work so much he can’t be a decent partner to his wife.

It’s frustrating that journalism movies are always centered around these mythical hard-charging men, even when they’re based on real stories in which real women played pivotal roles. It also seems to erase a lot of the humanity that goes into journalism. Pfeiffer told the U.K. publication Stylist that interviewing trauma victims sometimes “felt like we became grief counsellors who weren’t trained.”

“I worried about [the victims]. We were listening to people unearth something so traumatic, from decades ago. Sometimes we would finish a phone interview and then call back shortly afterwards and check they were OK, and to make sure they had someone to talk to.”

I would’ve loved to see this reflected in a film about journalism — the truth of how difficult the job is, how it necessarily effects you, how the best reporters aren’t cold, calculating scoop machines, but empathetic people who care about the subjects with whom their lives intersect.

How Trump Is Shaking Up the Book Industry

Longreads Pick

Ignore that headline. Trump doesn’t read and he can barely spell, but his election has some American commercial book publishers reassessing how their literary fiction can better connect with small-town America and the white working class. Some publishers, not all. As literary agent Nicole Aragi said, “White identity is very well curated in the literary space.”

Source: Politico
Published: Apr 7, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,092 words)

Get With the Modern Age, Sign Up for the Longreads Books Newsletter

(Photo: Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

Over coffee a few weeks ago, our audience development editor Catherine Cusick told me something remarkable: someone, somewhere is always reading “A Sociology of the Smartphone,” an excerpt from Adam Greenfield’s book Radical Technologies (Verso, 2017) which we published in June of last year. This astute social scientific rumination on our new and profound interconnectedness via the “ubiquitous… slabs of polycarbonate” in our pockets is Longreads’ most-read book feature of all time.

Meanwhile, in “The Death Row Book Club,” our recent excerpt from The Sun Does Shine (St. Martin’s Press, 2018), Anthony Ray Hinton remembers that “the books were a big deal. Nobody had books on death row. They had never been allowed, and it was like someone had brought in contraband.” It is the book, sometimes just a single copytossed from reader to reader across the prison library with a little prayer that it never land too far out of anyone’s reach, since rising from your seat during death row book club is strictly forbidden — which provides a new and profound interconnectedness for the prisoners.


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In another of our recent book excerpts, from Agnès Poirier’s Left Bank (Henry Holt & Co., 2018), we read that when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir founded their literary magazine Les Temps modernes in the rubble of Paris in 1945, they had to request an allocation of paper from the government. They had to bring their own rations to the literary parties. Nevertheless, the magazine was an instant, global success — Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s books became bestsellers, rumors spread that women would swoon when they heard Sartre lecture, even the State Department got Existentialist fever, and Richard Wright bought his entire family steamer tickets to France and wrote in his diary that he “felt relief as he saw the Statue of Liberty” drifting away. He came to Paris to advise Les Temps modernes on their upcoming “America” issue — in which they excerpted books like The Black Metropolis, a groundbreaking sociology of redlining and poverty on Chicago’s South Side.

Of course, in this post-Rex world, the State Department surely no longer has the wherewithal to bother reading such a minor cultural artifact as the first ever Longreads Books Newsletter. Indeed, the founding of Les Temps modernes differs from the first ever Longreads Books Newsletter in, ah, a number of ways — probably the most important of which is that I have not written a 1,000-page philosophical novel to co-promote with this newsletter. But I find myself dwelling on it anyway, comparing our efforts to the past and its apparent perfection. (Or near perfection. According to David Remnick, who is certainly an authority on such things, it was the first issue of The New York Review of Books — also founded, incidentally, at a moment of paper shortage, during the 1963 printer’s strike — which was “surely the best first issue of any magazine ever.”) After all, it’s becoming more and more difficult to stand on the shaky notion that there is some strong dividing line between “the modern times” and “history.” And difficult to think that we should not be making comparisons.

So in the future (no matter how alarmingly it starts to resemble the past), look to this newsletter to encounter new works that hopefully, as Sartre bragged in his introduction to the first issue of Les Temps modernes, “do not… miss a beat on the times we live in,” that “inten[d] to influence the society we live in,” that “take sides.” You’ll read excerpts from new books like Noliwe Rooks’ groundbreaking study of inequality in public education, Cutting School (The New Press 2017); interviews with authors who’ve written remarkable new books that we’re eager to hear more about, like Elizabeth Flock’s study of love, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea (Harper, 2018); essays and discussions about the writer’s craft; and book reviews. Yes, book reviews. This, despite the fact that, in her interview with Longreads, the cultural critic Michelle Dean notes the hysterics to which Norman Mailer was driven by Mary McCarthy’s The Group when he reviewed it in 1963 (in those same venerable pages of the New York Review of Books, although not in the first issue — I checked — but rather the fourth one). Dean tells us that, reading Mailer’s review and others like it, she “starte[d] to have a sense of humor about the value of a review that comes out when a book is initially released.” She continues:

You start to realize how wildly out of sync [contemporary reviewers tend to be] with whatever later opinion of the book developed after people had the chance to digest it and think about it…. The reception adds an element of absurdity to the whole thing.

So there you have it. The modern times are wildly out of sync (more so than ever?) and absurdly wrong about new books; these days books are as ubiquitous as air and as precious as contraband; and we at Longreads have decided it’s the perfect time to start a books newsletter. Welcome and enjoy!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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When Sartre and Beauvoir Started a Magazine

(Photo: Getty)

Agnès Poirier | Excerpt adapted from Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 | Henry Holt and Co. | February 2018 | 20 minutes 5,275 words)

In September 1945, together with their band of students and friends, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were working night and day finalizing the first issue of their journal Les Temps modernes. They had launched the idea at the end of 1944, choosing the title as a tribute to Chaplin’s Modern Times, and, apart from Camus who was too busy editing Combat, they could rely on almost everyone else to write for them — Communists, Catholics, Gaullists, and Socialists: their schoolmate and liberal philosopher friend Raymond Aron, the Marxist phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, the anthropologist and art critic Michel Leiris, the Gallimard supremo Jean Paulhan, and even Picasso, who had agreed to design the cover and logo, along with a new generation of writers who were submitting articles and ideas such as Jacques-Laurent Bost. The British writer Philip Toynbee would contribute a Letter from London, while novels and essays the committee particularly liked would be serialized prior to their publication or with a view to attracting a potential publisher. Les Temps modernes would be a laboratory of new ideas and a talent scout rolled into one. Simone de Beauvoir had personally approached the minister of information, the Gaullist and résistant Jacques Soustelle, to ask for an allocation of paper.

Gallimard had agreed to finance the journal and to give the team a little office where they could hold their editorial meetings. The first issue was planned for October 1, 1945. Jean-Paul Sartre was made the head of the publication, “Monsieur le Directeur,” and he thought it important to make himself available to everyone. This would be democracy and public debate in action. He committed to receiving anyone who asked to see him at the magazine’s office at 5 rue Sébastien Bottin every Tuesday and Friday afternoon between five thirty and seven thirty. This commitment was printed at the beginning of the magazine, along with the telephone number Littré 28-91, where they could be reached. Sartre had decided to dedicate the first issue of Les Temps modernes “To Dolorès,” in all simplicity. Simone did not blink an eye.

In the first issue, Sartre announced loud and clear what Les Temps modernes stood for. It was to be the megaphone that would carry their thoughts far and wide.

Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps modernes will take sides.

The tone was set, the thinking promised to be muscular and the writing fearless.
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Rules for Departure

Photo: Michael E. Smith, Book: Sarabande Books

Rachel Z. Arndt | Beyond Measure | Sarabande Books | April 2018 | 9 minutes (2,245 words)

 

It’s hard not to giggle when a shirtless sunburned man is chugging beer from a lawn-ornament flamingo whose head has been chopped off while his friends call him “dickhead” in support, while overhearing voices from the front of the bus saying the GPS is wrong, we’re lost, and while trying, from behind sunglasses, to pretend to be asleep. But so it was, as two friends and I hitched a ride to Rock Valley, Iowa, the starting line for the week-long bike ride across the state that would begin the next day.

See? Even the angry one thinks it’s funny, one of them said.

I tried not to flinch. The problem was bigger than the uneasy rapport we’d struck with these strangers — the problem was that the leaving wasn’t going according to plan, and if the plan was already fucked, then the rest of the trip surely would be because for a trip to go well, it has to begin well.

A man called Dr. Dan was supposed to pick us up at 10 that morning, outside the local hardware store. We’d load our bikes, head towards Des Moines, and be on our way to the northwest corner of the state, ready to start riding back across after a good night’s sleep. The day before leaving, the two friends and I wondered what kind of bus it would be — one guessed a yellow school bus, another a Greyhound-style coach. Both possibilities were nauseating, the names alone evoking the sticky vinyl funk (yellow) and chemically cleaned bathroom sweetness (Greyhound) that would make reading impossible. The word, for either choice, was lurching.

Then Dr. Dan was supposed to pick us up at noon, then 2, then 4, then finally 7, when he showed up. I’d spent the day eating the snacks I was supposed to be eating on the bus, taking food-induced naps, and waking to an alarm that made me jump awake every time into a bedroom bright with sunlight from the west windows. Outside the hardware store, men tied our bikes to the ceiling of an enclosed trailer, which would be pulled behind the bus, and we drove off into the already-setting sun. Rick, our first backseat companion, introduced himself. I should clarify: These weren’t seats; these were mattresses perched on some sort of ledge that was about a third the width of each mattress, so the front was always folding and pulling the whole thing toward the center of the bus. Rick apologized. But it’s fun back here! he said, and explained that the bus had two kegs and we could pay for cups if we wanted and he’d been drinking since he got on, just west of Chicago, and boy, that bathroom was already a mess. Rick wore a Hawaiian shirt and black wraparound sunglasses, had a handshake that took too long to get rid of, legs shaved according to that odd bike-riding convention. Rick had done this all before, he said. Ask me anything, he said.

At least I’d left my apartment in good condition. I made sure to clean everything before I left, as I always do, and put everything away where it belongs — the plates in their metal cabinets, the clothes in their fiberboard drawers — thereby guaranteeing that there would be something tangible and exactly in order to return to. A bit of continuity, a ritual, a joyful habit.

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A Clarifying Dose of Reality (TV)

fox broadcasting

Valentina Valentini | Longreads | April 2018 | 9 minutes (2,320 words)

 

After 16 hours, 5 hot dogs, 2 nacho bowls, 3 sodas, and 20,000 people, I felt more like an idiot than an idol.

***

Walking down the steps to Qualcomm Stadium’s field level, I wondered how I’d gotten there. Four days prior I was tuned into my go-to San Diego radio show, “AJ’s Playhouse” on 99.3 FM, when they plugged upcoming American Idol auditions. I cursed aloud to no one, because two years earlier — as an even younger and more attention-hungry woman — I’d promised myself that if they ever came to the city I was living in I would audition.

Ten years later, as a supposedly mature 34-year-old, seeking 15 minutes of fame is very low on my list of priorities, far below items like “find a great yoga studio” and “figure out which hair dye covers grays best.”

But back in 2008, there I was on that Saturday morning. I arrived at 9 on the dot to stand in line, eager. It took two hours — just to register.

***

I met sleek Barry and cherubic Rory while waiting in that godforsaken first line. (If only I had known what was to come.) They were a couple from Hillcrest, the epicenter of San Diego’s LGBTQ scene, hopping with gay bars and the city’s annual Pride Parade. Barry was auditioning, and Rory was there for support. I’d come alone, so my two new besties were a welcome addition to a morning crowded with narcissists. (Not including us, of course.)

Lacking for distractions in line — these were the days before cell-phones-as-mobile-entertainment-centers — we formulated theories about how it was all going to go down. Would we meet Paula and Randy? Would Simon deign to set foot in a stadium if he weren’t the halftime entertainment? Would it be filmed? Who were the crazies going to be? You know, the ones whose auditions are so ridiculous that they get aired for that reason alone.

We were excited — in retrospect, naïve is more like it — and never imagined the cattle call that was to unfold over the next 24 hours. The mastery of producing a show like this is to never let them see the wizard. But we were the wizards — all 20,000 of us, hundreds of thousands if you add up the people for all the other cities — and in my case, the wizard was a beaten-down twentysomething, mascara mixing with sweat, hopes of stardom ripped out of her sticky-with-junk-food hands.

Two years earlier — as an even younger and more attention-hungry woman — I’d promised myself that if American Idol ever came to the city I was living in I would audition.

After (finally) successfully registering, we decided to meet at Barry’s house at 3:30 a.m. — yes, a.m. — the next day to head to the stadium. I was glad to have joined up as Three Amigos and thankful that Barry and Rory were so welcoming to a near stranger. The rules explicitly said no camping, so we were confident there wouldn’t be too big of a crowd by 4 in the morning.

There were 5,000 people.

Someone with a loud bullhorn told us we’d be shuffled in by 8 a.m. They didn’t use the term shuffle, but I assure you, we were shuffled. And it wasn’t until 9 that the line — a disorganized mass, 20 bodies wide, each only centimeters from the next — began to trundle forward. Some cheered as the prospect of getting into the stadium became a possibility. The sound of those whoops coincided with the moment when excitement began to bleed out and embarrassment began to creep in.

Forty-five minutes and 50 feet later, we were at the front of the line. They were letting groups of about 100 through the side gate to the outer ring of the stadium, making us duck under a rope. Oh the horror of it. It felt like the start of the Boston Marathon, except these competitors were caked in makeup, some balanced on heels, some carrying pillows and curling irons and banjos; some with big hair and some with greasy faces. One person had even brought their own music stand. And as the cameras closed in on the overtly gregarious ones — answering our question from earlier as to whether or not this would be filmed — I wanted to be peppy like them and give a gorgeous smile for the camera. But the sinking feeling that I was a cow being prodded along just made me want to give the finger instead.

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Sharp Women Writers: An Interview With Michelle Dean

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Natalie Daher | Longreads | April 2018 | 15 minutes (4,014 words)

The subjects of cultural critic Michelle Dean’s new book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion — including Dorothy Parker, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion and Nora Ephron — have appeared in Dean’s writing and interviews again and again over the years. It’s not difficult to see how Dean would develop a fascination with opinionated women — she is one herself. Lawyer-turned-crime reporter, literary critic, and Gawker alumnus, Michelle Dean’s has had her own “sharp” opinions on topics ranging from fashion to politics, from #MeToo to the Amityville Horror.

The book is more than just a series of biographical sketches. Dean is fascinated by the connections between these literary women — their real-life relationships, their debates, and the ways they were pitted against each other in a male-dominated field.

We spoke by phone between New York and Los Angeles and discussed writing about famous writers, the media, editors, and feminism.
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My Own ‘Bad Story’: I Thought Journalism Would Make a Hero of Me

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Steve Almond | Bad Stories | Red Hen Press | April 2018 | 9 minutes (2,223 words)

Since November 8th, 2016, like so many other Americans, I’ve lived in a state of utter shock and disbelief over the results of the presidential election and everything that’s followed. Author Steve Almond found himself equally bewildered, but after wallowing in dread for a few weeks, he decided to try to make sense of what happened through the lens he’s most familiar with as a journalist, author, and co-host of the New York Times ‘Dear Sugars’ podcast: story.  The result is his new book, Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, in which he contends that the election of a racist, misogynist, bullying con artist like Donald Trump wasn’t just possible; it was inevitable. He says it’s the result, in part, of our buying into a litany of “bad stories” — about our country and its history, and ourselves. In 17 essays, the book covers vast swaths of American history, from the birth of the nation, to Watergate to now. Here I’ve picked an excerpt of the book in which Steve focuses on his own “bad story,” and those put forth by the Fourth Estate, having to do with his years as a young journalist. I also spoke with Steve for an edition of the Longreads Podcast. – Sari Botton, Essays Editor

Listen to the Longreads Podcast Interview with Steve Almond here:

***

I spent the first half of my adult life almost comically devoted to the belief that journalism would preserve American democracy. I still believe in the sacred duties of a free press. But if I’m honest about my own experiences in the field, the lessons that emerge most vividly are these:

1. Reporters are no more virtuous than anyone else, and often less so

2. Journalism hardly ever tells the most important stories

3. Even when it does, not much happens

***

Consider this story: the summer before my last year in college, I took an internship at the Meriden Record-Journal, a tiny paper in central Connecticut. I was asked, toward the end of my tenure, to undertake what sounded like an ambitious project: documenting 24 hours in the life of the city. I was teamed with a veteran reporter named Richard Hanley, an energetic psychopath who sustained himself on a diet of steamed cheeseburgers and Kent cigarettes and who, wisely, consigned me to the graveyard shift.

Had I been serious about this assignment, I would have consulted with police, city officials, maybe a historian to map out an itinerary. I would have hung out with workers on an overnight factory shift, tagged along with a cop, visited an emergency room or a jail or a radio station or a homeless shelter. Instead, I spent most of the night camped in diners and donut shops, cadging quotes from bleary waitresses, then roaming the empty downtown waiting, I suppose, for the essence of Meriden, Connecticut to descend from the dark summer sky and reveal itself, like an arch angel. I eventually retired to the bucket seats of my Mercury Bobcat.

This piece stays with me, I think, because it begins to capture the audacious fallacy at the heart of modern journalism, the idea that a subjective (and frankly haphazard) account of one night in Meriden, compiled by a lazy 20-year-old who has never even lived in the city, can be touted as a definitive version of the place.

Or maybe the lesson is this: my bosses actually liked the story I handed in. The executive editor later called me into his office. He was a towering silver-haired reptile, reviled by that entire small, ill-tempered newsroom. But he looked upon me fondly, probably because I was obsequious and poorly dressed. He floated the idea that I drop out of school and come to work full-time for him. When I demurred — and this part of the story I’ve never quite figured out — he slipped me an envelope with $350 cash inside. “Go buy something for your girlfriend,” he murmured mystically. “Go get her some cocaine.”
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