Search Results for: fuck

Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Prep,’ 10 Years Later

Sari Botton | Longreads | March 2015

 

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, was first published. And not just because the passage of time, in hindsight, is always kind of baffling, but because I have thought about that book so regularly it seems my brain only just first absorbed it. Read more…

‘A Taste of Power’: The Woman Who Led the Black Panther Party

Photo: Platon

Elaine Brown | A Taste of Power, Pantheon | 1992 | 30 minutes (7,440 words)

 

Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, lecturer and singer. In 1968, she joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member. Six years later, Huey Newton appointed her to lead the Party when he went into exile in Cuba. She was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Party.  She is author of A Taste of Power (Pantheon, 1992) and The Condemnation of Little B (Beacon Press, 2002)She is also the Executive Director of the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee and CEO of the newly-formed non-profit organization Oakland & the World Enterprises, Inc.

Her 1992 autobiography A Taste of Power is a story of what it means to be a black woman in America, tracing her life from a lonely girlhood in the ghettos of North Philadelphia to the highest levels of the Black Panther Party’s hierarchy. The Los Angeles Times described the book as “a profound, funny and…heartbreaking American story,” and the New York Times called it “chilling, well written and profoundly entertaining.” Our thanks to Brown for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here. Read more…

‘If You Think The Internet Is Terrible Now, Just Wait a While’

Photo by CLUC

I have previously shared with you Balk’s Law (“Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people”) and Balk’s Second Law (“The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything”). Here I will impart to you Balk’s Third Law: “If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.” The moment you were just in was as good as it got. The stuff you shake your head about now will seem like fucking Shakespeare in 2016. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I have a hard time seeing a future where anything gets better. Do you know why? Because everything is terrible and only getting worse. We won’t all be dead in twenty years, but we’ll all wish we were. I used to have hopes that once the Internet got completely unbearable some of the smart people would peel off and start something new, but with each passing day it seems ever less likely. (If anyone peels off to start something new it’s going to be teens, and we know what idiots they are.) No, the Internet is going to keep getting worse and there will be no chance for escape. It’s a massive torrent of sewage blasted at you at all hours and you pay handsomely for the privilege of having a hand-held cannon you carry with you at all times to spray more shit-sludge at yourself whenever you’re bored or anxious. Some of you sleep with it right next to your head in case you wake in the middle of the night and need to deliver another turgid shot to your wide-open mouth.

-From a short post by The Awl’s Alex Balk offering advice to young people.

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The Comfortable, Comic Genius of ‘Broad City’

Broad City returns tonight, much to the glee of critics and fans alike. At Grantland, Rachel Syme spent time with the comic geniuses behind the show, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer:

Some people just naturally fall into shtick, and these two can ping-pong forever. It’s chemical, sui generis, and extremely lucky; if you believe in magical forces, then you might call it fated.

“Look, sometimes it is still hard,” sighed Glazer. “Some people are scared of us, and some think we are dumb little girls. But the way we combat that is just being ourselves in meetings. And having a partner makes that so easy, because when all else fails, I’ll just talk across the table at Abbi like we are chilling by ourselves.”

“Honestly, we regularly forget that other people are in these meetings with us,” Jacobson said.” We are so used to just talking to each other. We do it all day long, all night long. I’m on Skype with Ilana when I go to bed and then again when I wake up. It’s not like we never have disagreements, but we also just really like talking to each other the most.”

“And it freaks people out!” said Glazer. “There is so much power in being able to look comfortable in a conference room, and I’m not sure dudes in suits are used to seeing women do that.”

You can see how Glazer and Jacobson would intimidate anyone in a room with them: They talk so quickly that they seem to share a stream of consciousness. They talk like all BFFs in the era of instant messaging, sending verbal links back and forth about things they saw or read, saving little bits and pieces for later. They traffic in pop-culture references and Internet slang; they are each other’s favorite IRL Twitter feed. Ultimately, snippets of these conversations will end up in the show. They are doing work even when they are not working, building on their banter, winding in and out of silly voices and secret handshakes. Their chemistry is electric, but also familiar. Anyone with a best friend would recognize it.

“I don’t think that the representation of women has caught up with the real,” said Glazer. “Every girl I know shits and talks about it, and fucks and talks about it. And people are like, these women are filthy! And I’m like, not compared to my friends. The show may be a cartoon version of us, but the cartoon sometimes gets closer to reality than anything.”

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Budd & Leni

Photos via Wikimedia Commons

Bruce Handy | Tin House | March 2013 | 26 minutes (6,452 words)

 

They were fleeting and unlikely collaborators, for lack of a better word. He was a son of Jewish Hollywood royalty, she a Nazi fellow traveler and propagandist, though they had a few things in common, too: both were talented filmmakers, both produced enduring work, and both would spend the second halves of their lives explaining or denying past moral compromises. Which isn’t to say the debits on their ledgers were equal—far from it. Read more…

A Meditation on Pain

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Ira Sukrungruang | River Teeth | Fall 2014 | 15 minutes (3,767 words)

River TeethFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share an essay from Ashland, Ohio’s narrative nonfiction journal River Teeth. Longreads readers can receive a 20 percent discount off of a River Teeth subscription by going here.
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“And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that.” –Joan Didion, “In Bed”

It’s happening, says the woman I love to someone in the other room. The someone is most likely her sister, and I hear the shuffle of clogs on the ruined carpet, the swish and swirl of her turquoise dress. I feel the shadow of her body in the doorway. I hear her breathing, tiny bursts of air through the nose and mouth. I feel and hear everything, but I am not a body. And because I am no longer a body, I do not register sound or voice. I do not register anything. Even my presence on the scratchy carpet. I do not know that I have been lying in the lap of the woman I love as she soothes my sweat-drenched hair, as she whispers that this will pass. I do not hear her because I do not have ears. I do not have eyes. I do not see the hazy outline of her humid-frizzed hair or the worry etched in her face or how she looks down at me and then out the window, out past the dilapidated houses of this rundown block in Lafayette, Colorado, past the Rockies rising in jagged edges to snowy peaks, past logical explanation. Because right now, I do not register logic. Because this pain is not logical. This pain makes me whimper, makes me produce a noise that is octaves higher and sharper than I can otherwise make. I become a supplicant to its needs. I have a mouth. Of this I am sure. I have a mouth but it acts without my guidance. Saliva seeps from corners. Lips chapped as cracked earth. The woman I love feeds me water. I sip from a straw, but all of it dribbles out from the corners of my mouth. All of it wetting my cheeks and chin, like a child sloppy with food. I am a child. I am helpless. I am without strength. I am without will. I believe I might die. That this might be the end of me, this moment. I believe that death would be a relief from it all.

Hang on, she says. It’s almost over, she says. The end is in sight, she says. Read more…

My Elf Self

Longreads Pick

Sedaris recalls his time working as a Macy’s elf during the holiday season:

“Today was the official opening day of SantaLand and I worked as a Magic Window Elf, a Santa Elf and an Usher Elf. The Magic Window is located in the adult ‘Quick Peep’ queue. My job was to say, ‘Step on the Magic Star and look through the window, and you can see Santa!’ I was at the Magic Window for 15 minutes before a man approached me and said, ‘You look so fucking stupid.’

“I have to admit that he had a point. But still, I wanted to say that at least I get paid to look stupid, that he gives it away for free. But I can’t say things like that because I’m supposed to be merry.

“So instead I said, ‘Thank you!'”

Source: The Independent
Published: Dec 9, 1995
Length: 11 minutes (2,921 words)

Longreads Best of 2014: Essay Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in essay writing.

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Meaghan O’Connell
Freelance writer, “Birth Story” author, motherhood columnist at The Cut, who believes her best work is at The Billfold.

The Empathy Exams (Leslie Jamison, The Believer)

I did not know who Leslie Jamison was before I read her essay “Empathy Exams” late one night at the pie shop that I use as an office when the library is closed. I was hungry, and it was dark out, and I was very pregnant and needed to get home. But I stayed in that uncomfortable chair and read it the whole way through, bursting with excitement. I G-chatted friends in all caps asking them if they’d read it. I Googled her, saw she had a book coming out, and floated home feeling like, “Yes, let’s do this. Let’s write some fucking personal essays, people!” I think Jamison, especially here, convinced or re-convinced a lot of people of the possibilities and the value of writing in the first person. Of course I think it’s horse shit that it takes a white lady with a veneer of intellectualism to make it okay, but I’ll take it where I can get it. Jamison, for her part, rises to the occasion. She certainly reminded me to hang onto the art of the thing, all the while going deeper, letting the problem of whatever you’re trying to do take up its own space. Read more…

It’s Time to Stop Saying ‘Drink the Kool-Aid’: Interview with Jonestown Author Julia Scheeres

Children in Jonestown

Mark Armstrong | Longreads | November 18, 2014 | 5 minutes (1,301 words)

 
Thirty-six years ago, on Nov. 18, 1978, a charismatic preacher from San Francisco named Jim Jones led his followers into one of the most horrific massacres in American history. More than 900 people—including 303 children—were slaughtered, in a place called Jonestown. It was a community first built as a socialist utopia for parishioners from the Peoples Temple. But Jones had other plans, planting the seeds of “revolutionary suicide” that ended with mass cyanide poisoning.

I spoke with Julia Scheeres, author of the book A Thousand Lives and our latest Longreads Exclusive, “Escape from Jonestown,” about the newly public home movies from inside and how the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” became a terrible reminder for its survivors. Read more…

Escape from Jonestown

Julia Scheeres | A Thousand Lives | 26 minutes (6,304 words)

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For our latest Longreads Exclusive, we’re proud to share Julia Scheeres’ adaptation of her book, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown, which tells the story of five people who lived in Jonestown at the time of the infamous massacre, which occurred 36 years ago, on Nov. 18, 1978.

This story also includes home movies—never before released publicly—from inside Jonestown. The footage, discovered after the massacre, includes tours of the compound by Jim Jones and interviews with many of those who lived and died there. You can view the entire series of clips at YouTube.com/Longreads. Read more…