Search Results for: fuck

Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List

When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to map a cartography of loneliness. Published in 2012, Laing writes, “What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal.” Four years into my New York experiment, the pang of loneliness has dulled and has been exchanged for a desire to retreat from an overstimulating city with my close friends and a bag of salted caramel.

This brief list takes a dive into the discussion about loneliness and solitude in our contemporary lives—what it is, how we cope, and how it affects our bodies. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, if you have them.

 

1. “American Loneliness” (Emma Healey, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2014)

I’ve been watching MTV’s reality show, Catfish in awe for the past two seasons. I vacillate between heavy feelings of eager empathy and awkward amusement. Healy explores what Catfish reveals about our common loneliness, longing and vulnerabilities as well as how easily we suspend logic in the pursuit of companionship.

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Robin Williams: 1951-2014

Comedian and actor Robin Williams died today at the age of 63. Here are five in-depth interviews with him.

1. Robin Williams: ‘The Night Listener’ (Terry Gross, Fresh Air, Aug. 3, 2006)

Terry Gross talks to Robin Williams, and, towards the end of the interview, asks him about depression: “Do I get sad? Oh yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh yeah.”

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The Founder of Flickr and Slack on the Psychological Torture of Selling Too Early

Stewart readily admits he sold Flickr too early.

“If we had waited six months we would have made much more money. If we had waited a year we would have made 10 times more money,” he says. He regrets it now. But at the time, after the dotcom crash, the Nasdaq plummet, and September 11, deals just weren’t happening. All his advisers and investors told him to go for it. It was hard to know what to do.

In the wake of WhatsApp (a $19 billion sale to Facebook) and Beats ($3 billion to Apple) and even Instagram (a lousy $1 billion, Facebook again), $22 million now seems like the kind of money you dig out of your wallet to give a stranger at the bus stop. But for the team at Flickr, it was life-changing. Slack, on the other hand, is looking at something more like first class airfare.

Such temptations aren’t easy to resist. “We could sell it right now for a billion dollars,” Stewart says, and then shakes his head like he’s trying to wake up from a weird dream. “Which sounds fucking mental. But the thing is, those options aren’t going to go away.”

He admits that if the right offer comes along, the kind of offer that only three or four companies in the world could come up with, he would have to jump. But what is that? Five billion? Seven? Ten? It’s hard to know, because in Silicon Valley today, money has lost all meaning and value.

Mat Honan, in Wired, on Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield, whose newest startup, Slack, is taking off.

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Photo: kk, Flickr

Call It Rape

Margot Singer | The Normal School | 2012 | 23 minutes (5,683 words)

The Normal SchoolThanks to Margot Singer and The Normal School for sharing this story with the Longreads community.
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Still life with man and gun

Three girls are smoking on the back porch of their high school dorm. It’s near midnight on a Saturday in early autumn, the leaves not yet fallen, the darkness thick. A man steps out of the woods. He is wearing a black ski mask, a hooded jacket, leather gloves. He has a gun. He tells the girls to follow him, that if they make a noise or run he’ll shoot. He makes them lie face down on the ground. He rapes first one and then the others. He walks away. Read more…

John McPhee on One Word You Couldn't Publish in The New Yorker

Fuck, fucker, fuckest; fuckest, fucker, fuck. In all my days, I had found that four-letter word—with its silent “c” and its quartzite “k”—more shocking than a thunderclap. My parents thought it was a rhetorical crime. Mr. Shawn actually seemed philosophical about its presence in the language, but not in his periodical. My young daughters, evidently, were in no sense as burdened as he was. Or as I was. Or as their grandparents were. In the car in their middle-school years, they batted that word between the back and front seats as if they were playing Ping-Pong. Driving, and hearing those words reach a critical mass, I once spontaneously bellowed (in an even-tempered, paternal way), “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—I can say it, too!”

Well, maybe in a car, but not in The New Yorker, not in 1975, and I didn’t need to be told. I had been writing for the magazine for a dozen years. There were no alternatives like “f—” or “f**k” or “[expletive deleted],” which sounds like so much gravel going down a chute. If the magazine had employed such devices, which it didn’t, I would have shunned them. “F-word” was not an expression in use then and the country would be better off if it had not become one.

-John McPhee, in The New Yorker (now free for everyone), on the history of certain words in the magazine.

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Photo: Princeton University

Steven Soderbergh on Getting to ‘Yes’

This country is too fucking big. I honestly think… In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can’t come up with a set of rules that’s going to work for 350 million people. You’re just not. So we’re stuck. Robert Kennedy had this great quote: “20 percent of people are against everything, all the time.” That’s a big number now. And you know what? “No” is easy. “No” doesn’t require any follow-up, commitment. “Yes” is hard, “yes” has to be worked on. It needs a lot of people to keep it as “yes.” That’s where we’re at. When I’m president, we’re going back to the Thirteen Colonies, is what we’re going to do.

-Steven Soderbergh, in Esquire.

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Photo: elena_tubaro, Flickr

First Chapter: Dave Eggers’ Novel, ‘Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?’

Dave Eggers | Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? | June 2014 | 23 minutes (5,800 words)

 

BUILDING 52

—I did it. You’re really here. An astronaut. Jesus.
—Who’s that?
—You probably have a headache. From the chloroform.
—What? Where am I? Where is this place? Who the fuck are you?
—You don’t recognize me?
—What? No. What is this? Read more…

Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats

Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words)

 

1st

Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training.

Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the coming season. Each year it is another variation on the same theme: “This is Our Year” or “Is This Our Year?” or “Can the Royals Win it All?” or “Our Time” or “How Good are these Royals?” or “How Good are these Royals” or or or. It gets tiresome after growing up hearing it year after year, because the answer has always been the same. The answer is no. It’s not our time. It’s not our year. No, the Royals aren’t going to win it all. These Royals are not very good. No. Read more…

Trey Anastasio and the No-Analyzing Rule

BLVR: I’ve heard you guys had a no-analyzing rule for a while. You wouldn’t talk to each other about how the show went.

TA: That was for about a year. You come offstage and no one can say anything. At all. At all. Because everyone’s got their own perspective.

BLVR: Someone might think it’s a horrible show and another person could think it’s a great show.

TA: Today what I do is—I do this every night we play—I have a little quiet moment where I picture some guy having a fight with his girlfriend, getting into his car—the battery’s dead—then he gets to the parking lot and it’s full. Meets up with his friends. Comes into the show. I try to picture this one person having their own experience, and I picture them way in the back of the room. And I try to remember how insignificant my experience is, and how people’s experiences with music are their own thing. We put it out there, and if it’s of service to someone, great, but I try to get away from the idea that it’s even starting from us. And when you do that listening-exercise stuff, when I actually get into a moment where I’m only listening, I find that the music gets so much… beyond us. And I can tell that from the reaction I hear from the audience. It always feels more resonant if I can get my hands off it. If all four of us were here, they’d all be saying the same thing. It’s great as long as you listen to anybody but yourself. Anything but yourself.

BLVR: Seems to be true of life, just walking around.

TA: Right. It’s when I start applying my own fucked-up perspective to a show—so I had a bad day, whatever—that I start adding judgment to it. Or I play something and start judging what I’m playing. It’s just like that, walking around in life, that’s true! How often do I find myself walking around and being aware of my surroundings and not having some fucked-up internal dialogue in my head that never ends?

-Trey Anastasio, in a 2011 interview with The Believer.

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Photo: ctankcycles, flickr

'Orange is the New Black' is Back: A Reading List on the Representation of Prison

Now that we’ve all had a chance to finish watching Orange is the New Black (who am I kidding — we all binge watched it in a day or two, right?), I thought I’d share four pieces that clarify and critique the way prison is represented on the show. The first two pieces cover season one, for all you newbies out there. The second two address the most recent season.

1. “Five Formerly Incarcerated Women on Prison, Relationships, and Orange is the New Black.” (Kat Stoeffel, The Cut, August 2013)

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