Search Results for: interview

‘Cat Person’ and the Young Person

(Remains/Getty)

The year of our Lord 2017 was an overfull one, in which many things, both wretched and good and sometimes wretched-but-ultimately-good, happened. It was also the year a short story went viral.

“Cat Person,” a short story by Kristen Roupenian published in The New Yorker, was an unlikely viral sensation. Countless outlets produced think pieces and reactions. There were hordes of women for whom the story resonated, juxtaposed against the men who had such an aversion to the story, many could not even recognize it for what it was, frequently referring to it as an “essay” or an “article” when it was clearly short fiction. A Twitter account popped up to chronicle some of the male takes. The Cut put together a delightful video of cats responding to the story and the Awl published a version of the story from the cat’s perspective. The photo accompanying the story was, to some, off-putting: An extreme close-up of two mouths about to kiss. After reading the story, I agreed that it is perfectly suited to the story, but every time it showed up in my Twitter feed, I shuddered, said a mental “HARD PASS” and scrolled hurriedly.

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No Más Fantasía

Illustration by Zach Meyer

Chris Outcalt | Longreads | December 2017 | 16 minutes (4,461 words)

On a warm, sunny morning in November 2016, a few dozen people packed a county courtroom about 20 miles northeast of Denver, Colorado. Of the cases on the docket that day in Brighton, a working-class city of 34,000 situated amid the state’s plentiful oil and gas fields, one in particular drew the crowd: a hearing to determine the fate of Giselle Gutierrez-Ruiz, a 37-year-old man who’d been sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in a fatal highway shooting in 1997.

On that night nearly 20 years ago, Gutierrez-Ruiz, a kid in a strange country, left a dance club north of Denver around 10:30 p.m. He drove someone his older brother knew south on Interstate 25, the main north-south thoroughfare through the city. A few miles down the road, near the city limit, the passenger pulled out an Uzi and fired at cars on the highway, killing one person. Gutierrez-Ruiz didn’t learn a man had died that night for another eight days; he then cooperated with police, helping them catch the actual shooter. Nevertheless, even though he was a juvenile, he was charged as an adult and convicted for his complicity in the crime, which at the time carried a mandatory life sentence. I reported on Gutierrez-Ruiz’s case for several months throughout the summer and fall of 2015, and I attended his resentencing hearing. Like everyone else there, I was anxious to learn his fate.

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Longreads Best of 2017: Profile Writing

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

Seyward Darby
Executive editor, The Atavist

A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, GQ)

There was no piece of journalism in 2017 more honest or more raw than Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s profile of Dylann Roof for GQ. Its brilliance began with an enviable lede—”Sitting beside the church, drinking from a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, he thought he had to go in and shoot them” — and persisted for the duration of what proved to be an unlikely profile. Unlikely, because Kaadzi Ghansah didn’t set out to write it. She went to Charleston to cover Roof’s murder trial, planning to report on the families of his victims, but found herself drawn to the young man who sat, angry and silent and unfazed, day after day in the courtroom. She decided to profile a black hole, an absence, because she couldn’t not.

The story is unlikely, too, because of its style. Ghansah winds through Roof’s life like a criminal profiler. She collects evidence, data, interviews, and observations, then pieces them together for readers, showing where the connective tissue resides. She is an essential presence in the story, which is no easy feat to pull off, and the result is wholly organic. This is a story about race, class, anger, bewilderment, and division. It is also, as the headline “A Most American Terrorist” attests, a story about the current political moment. You come away from it knowing who Dylann Roof is, who Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is, and what America is—or, really, what it has always been.


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Longreads Best of 2017: Investigative Reporting

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

Rachel Morris
Executive editor, HuffPost Highline

Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades (Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, The New York Times)

From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories (Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker)

For Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey to expose Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual predator was a feat in itself, one that reporters had been attempting for years. But the culture-bending force of these stories was their dissection of how sexual harassment works, psychologically and operationally. Ronan Farrow’s raw, complex account of the experiences of women like Annabella Sciorra and Asia Argento, among many others, created a deeper, truer understanding of why women don’t come forward after an assault, or why some women may even maintain a relationship with their abuser in an effort to recover some sense of agency. That these women were willing to tell their stories in such intimate, unsparing detail is a testament to their courage — more than that, to their generosity — and Farrow’s exceptional care and sensitivity in gaining their trust.   Read more…

This Is How a Woman Is Erased From Her Job

Photograph by Kate Joyce

A.N. Devers | Longreads | December 2017 | 26 minutes (6,577 words)

This is a story about a woman who was erased from her job as the editor of the most famous literary magazine in America.

In 2011, the New York Times ran Julie Bosman’s energetic and gregarious profile of Lorin Stein, the latest head editor of the famous literary magazine The Paris Review — a position for which she declared, “Bacchanalian nights are practically inscribed in the job description.” The profile portrayed Stein as an intellectual bon vivant who loved parties, party-boy banter, and debating literature as if it were the most important thing in the world.

We know now that Stein, by his own admission, abused his power with women writers and staff of the Paris Review. He has resigned from the literary magazine and from his editor-at-large position at Farrar, Straus and Giroux in response to the board of the Paris Review’s investigation into sexual harassment allegations and his conduct. We also know, by his own admission, that he did not treat literature as the most important thing in the world.

Stein himself admitted it in a cringeworthy 2013 online feature from Refinery29 focused not only on the magazine’s debaucherous parties but also on the interior decor of the Paris Review’s offices and fashion choices of the staffers, who were nearly all women. “It’s always been two things at once,” he says about the Review. “On the one hand, it’s a hyper-sophisticated, modernist, avant-garde magazine. On the other hand, it’s sort of a destination party.”

We now know, between this and Bosman’s piece, even without details of the accusations or reports printed in the Times, or the far worse accusations listed in the “Shitty Media Men” list, that these are glaringly honest portrayals of Stein’s priorities at the helm of the Paris Review. Unfortunately.

Also unfortunate was the error in Bosman’s piece naming Stein as the third editor to “hold the title in the magazine’s 58-year history, and the second to follow George Plimpton, himself a legendary New York social figure.” Stein was actually the fourth. Brigid Hughes, the editor who succeeded George Plimpton, had been inexplicably left out of the profile. She was also not mentioned in the piece announcing Stein’s successorship of Philip Gourevitch; although there was no factual error, she was simply ignored.

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The Complicated Politics of Rescue and Recovery

(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

As traffic fled Houston before Hurricane Harvey, a line of trucks towing small, flat-bottomed boats made their way into the city. The Cajun Navy would save hundreds of lives from flooded neighborhoods, and instead of rejecting their help, the government embraced it, entrusting much of the evacuation to this rag-tag band of individuals, preferring them over the Red Cross, and in some cases, the National Guard.

Miriam Markowitz followed the Cajun Navy for GQ in the days after the hurricane, when it became clear that the resources needed simply weren’t adequate. The Navy itself is small but organized. Begun in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina, it’s helped residents of Louisiana with almost yearly flooding, and travels to nearby states for help during big storms or hurricanes. It’s the kind of help that comes in the moment, and the Navy uses a walkie-talkie app to dispatch boats to specific locations. Even local Louisiana politicians are on board with the independent rescue squad:

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The Human Cost of the Ghost Economy

(Arno Masse/Getty)

Melissa Chadburn | Longreads | December 2017 | 12 minutes (3,090 words)

Last year I worked undercover at a temp agency in Los Angeles. While I took the assignment for an article I was working on, I’d also been unemployed for over a year. It seemed I was in that middling space of over-qualified for entry-level jobs, under-qualified for the jobs I most desired, and aged out or irrelevant as a labor union organizer, where I’d gained the bulk of my work experience.

One altered resume later I joined a temp agency and became the biggest ghost of them all, a member of America’s invisible workforce: people who ship goods for big box stores like Wal-Mart or Marshalls, sort recyclables for Waste Management, fulfill online orders for Nike, bottle rum for Bacardi. I’d found my squad, a cadre of screw-ups, felons, floozies, single moms, the differently abled, students, immigrants, the homeless and hungry, the overqualified and under-qualified, all of us ghosted by the traditional marketplace.

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There is a story about an invisible hand that guides the free market. There is a story about ghosts. There is a story about a ghost economy. The distance between the main employer, the company that hires the temp agency, and the worker who fulfills these gigs, allows for the same type of casual cruelty that is exchanged between people who meet on online dating apps.

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Temp jobs began after the second world war, offering work at companies like Kelly Girl, a billion-dollar staffing company based in Michigan, on a short-term basis. Today, the temporary or “on-demand” industry employs over 2.9 million people, over 2 percent of America’s total workforce. As temping has grown, the quality of jobs has deteriorated, and temps now earn 20 to 25 percent less an hour than those who work as direct hires, according to government statistics.

I joined a temp agency and became a member of America’s invisible workforce: people who ship goods for big box stores like Wal-Mart or Marshalls, sort recyclables for Waste Management, fulfill online orders for Nike, bottle rum for Bacardi.

To think of The Ghosted is to think of injustice, a cataloging of fist-fights, tuberculosis, detention centers, scabies, crabs, lice, roaches, hot plates, Section 8 housing, laborers hiding under blankets in the backs of trucks, children lying stiff against the tops of trains, assembly lines in windowless heat-filled rooms — a type of economic violence many consumers try to close their minds to. We do not want to think of them because of what it says about us.

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Things People Don’t Want Their Kids to Do

An obviously bored boy in a balcony box in 1948
Bert Hardy / Picture Post / Getty Images

At The Atlantic, Helaine Olen interviews philosopher Martha Nussbaum and law professor Saul Levmore about their new book, Aging Thoughtfully: Conversations About Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, & Regret. Their conversation takes on a number of taboo financial subjects, including some real head-scratchers about wealth like how “we need to remember that not all children have rich parents.”

The burden of managing wealth can apparently inspire some salty debates. You’d think, for example, that most parents would want their kids to volunteer, but if those children historically weren’t welcome in the workplace, Nussbaum says, “their time is really at a premium.” You might like to “imagine that you’re making the world a better place” while you’re alive, Levmore says, but “in a funny way, it’s easier to do that when you’re dead.”

You could give your kid some money before you die, but then you might have to “watch your kid not go to work every day, or watch your kid misuse the money,” or watch your kid audition for opera training:

Nussbaum: Why do I give to the Lyric Opera and not so much to other opera companies? It’s mostly gratitude for the involvement and the performances that I’ve enjoyed over the years.

Levmore: I do the same, but I don’t like it. I wish they’d just raise prices. I would much prefer that they just charge the price to keep it alive and if they couldn’t afford it, then things would close down or there’d be fewer of them. But I’m sure Martha and I disagree about this.

Nussbaum: Well, I disagree because I think the art form is really wonderful and very important and right now prices are already so high that young people are discouraged. So I want, really, to lower the prices.

Levmore: Nothing stops the opera from subsidizing young people if it’s a good investment. I don’t really see why taxpayers as a whole should be supporting the opera.

Nussbaum: They do have programs, not only to include new audiences but to train young singers. But that’s one of the things the philanthropy supports. And maybe that’s not ideal, but…

Levmore: No, I don’t think it’s ideal. You know a lot of these young singers are children of wealthy people.

Nussbaum: Many trained there are not the children of wealthy people. They win a nationwide audition in which five people win out of about 10,000 that initially complete.

Levmore: You should look at the numbers of where these people come from. Most poor people are immigrant families who wouldn’t want their kids training to become opera singers. It’s not a reliable source of income.

Nussbaum: Most people don’t want their kids to do lots of things. But they do it.

Levmore: They do? Not in my family!

Nussbaum: Ha! Well, I mean, look at my daughter: She’s working for animal rights, making a very, very low income.

Levmore: Yeah, she comes from a comfortable family.

Nussbaum: But what I’m saying is that artists and singers are drawn from all walks of life. Typically, they get their start when they’re in some undergraduate program and they learn that they have this wonderful talent. And then they might come from any kind of income class.

Levmore: Well, they’re wealthy enough to go to college.

Nussbaum: But I mean the state universities.

Olen: I want to jump in—you’re never going to agree on this, right? Let’s talk about why people often give more to charity as they get older.

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Longreads Best of 2017: Sports Writing

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

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Mary Pilon
Contributor to The New Yorker, Esquire, and Vice. Previously on staff at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Author of The Monopolists and The Kevin Show (March 2018)

Is This the NFL’s First Female Player? (Lars Anderson, B/R Mag)

I’m a sucker for high school sports stories, but Anderson’s examination of Becca Longo isn’t just a showcase of a plucky talent, it also challenges long-held assumptions about the league’s recruitment pipeline. Longo is the first woman to earn a football scholarship to a Division I or Division II school, and Anderson offers a fascinating window into the training and psyche required to become be an ace-level kicker. In lesser hands, the story could have been mawkish or puffy, but Anderson’s prose is sharp, layered, and will likely be reread when we see Longo in the Super Bowl one day.

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Longreads Best of 2017: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2017. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

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