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War of Words

Longreads Pick

“What if all the publishers pulled all their books from that fucking idiot device? Then what would you read on your silly Kindle?” Keith Gessen on book publishers’ complicated history with Amazon.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Nov 6, 2014
Length: 31 minutes (7,795 words)

A Birth Story

Meaghan O’Connell | Longreads | Nov. 6, 2014 | 57 minutes (14,248 words)

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It was Monday, June 2nd, and I was wide awake at 6 a.m. Maybe to some of you this hour doesn’t sound remarkable, but for me it was. It was the first day in a lifetime of six in the mornings, and I made the three-hour leap all in one go.

By this point, it was 10 days past my due date, and I had a very specific and recurring fantasy of being moved around town in a hammock flown by a helicopter. I wanted to be airlifted between boroughs.

When I told my fiancé, Dustin, this wish, he was quiet for a second. He had learned to reply to me with caution, but I imagine in this case he just couldn’t help himself.

“Like a whale?” he asked.

I laughed, standing on the curb somewhere. Actually yes, come to think of it: Like a whale.

On the morning of June 2nd I had been waking up “still pregnant” for quite some time—41 weeks and two days to be exact; 289 days. My mom was in town already, at an Airbnb rental a block away. Dustin was done with work. I was chugging raspberry red leaf tea, bouncing on a purple exercise ball whenever I could, shoving evening primrose oil pills up my vagina, paying $40 a pop at community acupuncture sessions I didn’t believe in, and doing something called “The Labor Dance.” The Dance (preferred shorthand) involves rubbing your belly in a clockwise direction—vigorously—and then getting as close to twerking as one can at 41 weeks pregnant.

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How a Prolific Counterfeiter Tricked a Swiss Paper Mill Into Helping Him

In GQ magazine, Wells Tower talks to Frank Bourassa, one of the most prolific counterfeiters in American history who reproduced more than $200 million in twenty dollar bills. U.S. dollars are printed on rag paper comprised of 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen, and asking a paper mill to provide you with some is an easy way to get yourself raided by the Secret Service. Bourassa was able to convince a mill in Switzerland to help him:

In correspondence included in court documents that Frank shared with me, Maxwell told his mark that Keystone was looking to print bond certificates on secure rag paper—customized with one or two security measures designed to, um, foil counterfeiters. Frank says that after Artoz accepted the basics of his bond-brokerage story, he tweaked and refined his order over many months, nudging one felonious tidbit after another onto the papermaker’s plate. He got them to add linen to the recipe. He asked them to mix in chemicals to thwart security pens and black-light tests. He persuaded them to sew in a security strip reading, in near microscopic print, usa twenty. (“I told them it was, you know, for a $20 bond.”)

Artoz, he says, also agreed to imprint his paper with a watermark, an image etched into a cylindrical printing drum and pressed into the paper while the pulp is still wet. To get the equipment Artoz would need to do this, Frank paid $15,000, routed under a surrogate’s name through a Swiss bank account, to a company in Düren, Germany, that manufactured a drum etched with the likenesses of Andrew Jackson’s face. How did he manage that, exactly? “It was easy,” said Frank. “To you, he’s Andrew Jackson. To some guy in Germany, who the fuck is it? Some guy’s face. He doesn’t know.”

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Benjamin C. Bradlee: 1921-2014

Legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who led the newspaper for 26 years and oversaw coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to the impeachment of President Richard Nixon, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93.

“There is nothing like daily journalism! Best damn job in the world!” Ben Bradlee said, as he happily slammed a folded newspaper on his desk one morning in 1985 after I wrote a story that had his phone ringing off the hook.

Ben loved to stir things up, loved to get people talking.

— Some tributes: Editor Mary Jordan remembers what it was like to get praise from Bradlee. Former managing editor Leonard Downing reflects on working with Bradlee, and novelist Ward Just describes his relationship with Bradlee.

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Eight Days In a Hong Kong Hotel Room With Edward Snowden

Profiling documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras for The New Yorker, George Packer writes of her latest film, “Citizenfour,” which tells the story of N.S.A. whistleblower Edward Snowden. Packer describes the documentary as a political thriller in three acts, with the second act chronicling Snowden’s time in Hong Kong. Over the course of eight days Poitras filmed Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room for twenty hours, and “the act proceeds chronologically through the eight days in the hotel room, taking up a full hour of the hundred-and-thirteen-minute film.”

We watch Snowden explain his background, his motivations, the nature and extent of N.S.A. eavesdropping, and his fears for the future. His control under immense pressure is unnerving. “I am more willing to risk imprisonment,” he says, “or any other negative outcome personally, than I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me, whom I care for equally as I do for myself.” The interviewer is Greenwald, and, soon enough, he and Snowden become defiant collaborators against power. Snowden, explaining why he plans to reveal his identity, speaks as if he were confronting a government heavy: “I’m not afraid of you. You’re not going to bully me into silence like you’ve done to everybody else.” Greenwald exclaims, “You’re coming out because you want to fucking come out!” (It’s a moment of inadvertent and unregistered humor, since Greenwald is gay.)

Snowden watches the global fallout from Greenwald’s stories on the TV in his hotel room. Snowden’s girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, whom he left behind in Hawaii without a word of explanation, writes him that police have come to question her. He is shaken, imagining her realization that “the person that you love, that you spent the decade with, may not be coming back.” He types something on his laptop—presumably, a reply to Mills—but Poitras, respecting his privacy, doesn’t move the camera to show its content. As the days go by, Snowden’s anxiety increases, and the room becomes claustrophobic. A fire alarm keeps going off—routine testing, he’s told. The bedside phone rings—“I’m afraid you have the wrong room,” he says, and hangs up. “Wall Street Journal,” he explains. His chin is stubbled and his hair won’t lie flat. He seems to be growing visibly paler, and the many stretches of silence last longer; Poitras’s camera stays close to him, at once exposing and protective. In such a small space, from which there’s no exit, the presence of a camera has a distorting effect, and it turns Snowden into a character in a play. Unlike Dr. Riyadh and his family, who went about their lives as Poitras trailed them, Snowden can never forget that he’s being filmed. There are few moments of self-betrayal.

“How do you feel?” we hear Poitras ask.

“What happens happens,” he says. “If I get arrested, I get arrested.”

In shots of him sitting on his unmade bed—white sheets and covers, white headboard, white bathrobe, white skin—Snowden seems like a figure in some obscure ritual, being readied for sacrifice. At one point, we hear his heart beating against a microphone. Still, he keeps speaking in the hyper-rational, oddly formal sentences of a computer techie. And then he’s gone.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

What Keeps Anthony Bourdain Excited About Making His Show

Bourdain’s shows have grown more visually complex and cinematic over the years, using intricate editing and atmospheric slo-mo shots to add mystery and gravitas. Episodes are often directly inspired by Bourdain’s film passions. A season 2 trip into Tokyo’s nightlife underbelly–complete with segments on bondage and S&M–was informed by the work of Tokyo Fist director Shinya Tsukamoto, while the Shanghai episode currently unspooling on-screen tapped Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai as its key reference point. Bourdain usually picks the influences, but it’s up to the team to execute that vision. “Before we go out on a shoot, Tony will give us a homework assignment, which is about a dozen esoteric films,” says Brigden. “We become obsessed with those filmmakers. We live and breathe them.”

Bourdain is more than just Parts Unknown’s host, head writer, and executive producer; he is its creative engine, picking locations, teasing out themes, obsessing over narrative structure, and guiding its overall artistic vision. At one point while watching a meditative, beautifully shot Shanghai montage, he’s distracted by some incongruously funky background music. “I wish there was no bass,” he says to Brigden and Andrukanis. “It shouldn’t be danceable. It should be wistful.” It’s a small detail in a short segment from a single show, but it’s easy to see how that one tweak will transform the mood of the scene–and maybe even the whole episode.

That quest for excellence is a big part of what’s kept Bourdain excited about making a show with the same basic format for the past 14 years. He can be intense, but he constantly pushes the crew to reach toward the new. “We literally sit down and try to figure out, ‘What’s the most fucked-up thing we can do?’ ” he says, taking a swig from his industrial-size cup of light-and-sweet deli coffee. “ ’What haven’t we done that we can try?’ ”

— Anthony Bourdain, profiled this week in Fast Company. Says a producer who has worked with Bourdain for a long time: “He is fun, funny, smart, sardonic, and a pain in the fucking ass sometimes. But it’s a very collaborative process. He is challenging in all the best ways. He can outtalk, outwit, outhumor anybody who’s trying to argue with him, and sometimes that gets your ire up. But ultimately you take that ire and channel it into the show.”

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Photo: YouTube

Interview: Caitlin Moran on the Working Class, Masturbation, and Writing a Novel

Jessica Gross | Longreads | Sept. 25, 2014 | 13 minutes (3,300 words)

Caitlin Moran has worked as a journalist, critic, and essayist in the U.K. for over two decades, since she was 16. In her 2011 memoir/manifesto, How to Be a Woman, she argued women should keep their vaginas hairy, said she has no regret over her own abortion, and advocated for the term “strident feminist.” Moran brings the same gallivanting, taboo-crushing spirit to her debut novel, How to Build a Girl, which follows Johanna Morrigan, a working class teenager, as she navigates her way toward adulthood. Morrigan shares a few traits with Moran, from her background and career path to her obsession with music and masturbation.

* * *

As I read How to Build a Girl, I pictured you laughing uproariously to yourself as you were writing it. But in the acknowledgments, you say, “Writing a book is literally worse than giving birth to a baby—in hell.”

I wrote the acknowledgments in a welter of self-pity. I love writing—it’s the easiest thing in the world for me to do. But all through that summer, my children and husband would disappear and come back all covered in sand, having been to the beach while I sat at the table I’m at now, in the garden, chain smoking roll-up cigarettes, chain-drinking coffee. I was working so hard that I genuinely thought I’d have to go to the psychiatrist and get some valium prescribed to me. I’ve always been incredibly cheerful and laid-back, and that summer I was incredibly anxious and depressed, like my head was going to explode. There was one morning where I was putting the coffee pot on, and I noticed it said that it made 12 cups of espresso. I’d been drinking that, diluted with milk, before lunchtime. I stopped drinking the coffee, and it all got a bit easier after that. Do not drink 12 espressos before midday. It’s enormously bad for your mind.

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Living During an Age of Anxiety: A Reading List

When I am wracked with anxiety, I make a list of everything that is stressing me. These lists have included “transportation plans for this weekend,” “living at home,” “Sandy [my dog] dying,” “getting props for the play” and “editing articles for The Annual.” I don’t write solutions. Sometimes, there are no solutions, or the solutions are not immediate, which makes me worry even more. Just writing down what weighs on my mind helps.

The act of writing moves these things out of my head, where they take up space in my subconscious, and makes them tangible and coherent. These lists are a part of my self-care routine—a routine I adopted when I suffered from a particularly nasty bout of depression in college. I use this ritual today, and I do other things too: I eat three meals every day; I get enough sleep at night; I read to relax; I take my medications; I clean my room; I listen to music or to podcasts; I call my friends; I sleep some more.

Here’s another list: four authors who write about their experiences with anxiety, its roots and its bedfellows.

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The Genius and Mystery of Willie Nelson

Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He’s an uncanny vocal phraser: “The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson,” said the late producer Jerry Wexler. “The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think they’re going to miss the next actual musical demarcation – but they always arrive there, at bar one. It’s some kind of musical miracle.”

In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on. “The Hells Angels love him, and so do grandmothers,” says Raphael. But in private, he can seem introverted and given to long silences. He will often describe his life in brief, purely factual terms, saying things like, “Oh, why does a guy write? I don’t know. You get an idea, and you sit down, and you write it.” Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, “a bit of a mystery.” “He’s really good at throwing out a one-liner that will get you off of what you’re talking about,” says Shooter Jennings, who has known Nelson since he was a kid tagging along on the Highwaymen tours with his father, Waylon. “You’re like, ‘Fuck, Willie, answer the question!’ There’s a lot of exterior there. That’s why you’ll never quite fully get that picture.”

“You never get to know him like you should, but you know there’s more there than what you’re seeing,” says Loretta Lynn. “I know there’s more there because of how he writes. He can’t fool me!”

“He’s a hard man to know,” Johnny Cash wrote in 1997. “He keeps his inner thoughts for himself and his songs. He just doesn’t talk much at all, in fact. When he does, what he says is usually very perceptive and precise. . . . He has a beautiful sense of irony and a true appreciation for the absurd. I really like him.”

Patrick Doyle, in Rolling Stone, on the story of a music legend.

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Photo: thomashawk, Flickr

Where the Spirit Meets the Bone: A Memoir by Lucinda Williams

Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin  | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words)

Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS app.

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