Search Results for: language

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…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

The Talking Cure

Longreads Pick

In Providence, Rhode Island, the mayor hopes getting low-income parents to talk to their very young children more will help boost language skills and close the achievement gap.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 5, 2015
Length: 32 minutes (8,016 words)

Stories for Your Stocking: A Reading List of Holiday-Themed Delights

Think of this week’s reading list as a stocking filled with miscellaneous, holiday-themed delights.

1. “Why Do Jews Eat Chinese Food on Christmas?” (Justin Bolois, First We Feast, December 2014)

Restauranteurs and rabbis discuss about the diverse origins of this Christmas custom.

2. “Ask Polly: How Do I Deal With My Crazy Family Over the Holidays?” (Heather Havrilesky, The Cut, December 2014)

“Dysfunction abhors a vacuum,” writes Heather Havrilesky. The holidays are no exception. As the eponymous Polly, Havrilesky dishes advice about self-care, harmful family dynamics and more. Read more…

Autistic and Searching for a Home

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Genna Buck | Maisonneuve Magazine | Winter 2014 | 28 minutes (7,101 words)

MaisonneuveThis week we’re proud to feature a Longreads Exclusive from the new issue of Montreal’s Maisonneuve Magazine, about a young autistic woman who needs a home.
Subscribe

Read more…

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.

* * *

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…

The Rotten and the Sublime: A Reading List on Fermentation

Fermented products occupy a strange spot in contemporary food culture, being at once some of the most enduring staples of our diets — and some of the most faddish. From the fizzy kick of kimchi to avant-garde culinary experimentation in Copenhagen, here are five stories about our fascination with (and, sure, addiction to) deliciously rotten food.

1. “Why Bakers Love Their Mothers.” (Dana Goodyear, Food & Wine, November 2013)

Some of the oldest sourdough starters, dubbed mothers — “the bubbling, breathing slick of wild yeast and Lactobacillus bacteria that feed on flour and water” — date from the 19th century and are passed, like a heirloom, from one generation to the next. In this piece, Goodyear lingers on the moving emotional connections bakers develop with the bacteria in their kitchens.

Read more…

Necessary Roughness: Our College Pick

Journey Bailey played football for years and, after one concussion too many, came to in a hospital bed with a subdural hematoma. In his searing essay, Bailey writes about a football culture that kept him from revealing his symptoms to coaches who downplayed the seriousness of concussions. The power of Bailey’s writing comes from his voice. He’s a football player talking to other football players. He’s not a doctor or a concerned parent or an aging former athlete. He’s a a guy who speaks the language of locker rooms and long school-bus rides to away games. “[T]he next time you’re out on that field pushing for that first down or tackling that running back and you start to see stars, feel dizzy, or develop a headache that won’t go away, don’t ignore the signs in order to stay in the game,” he urges his fellow players. “Think about having tubes shoved down your penis. Think about having dents in your head. Think about crying yourself to sleep while trying to decide whether or not to buy a shotgun off of Craigslist and blow your brains out.”

Knock to the Head

Journey Bailey | The Huffington Post | December 8, 2014 | 10 minutes (2,408 words)

Leaving Fraternity Culture Behind: Our College Pick

This week, Wesleyan University administrators banned social events at a fraternity through the end of 2015. This rule came some months after the school decreed that all recognized fraternities must become co-educational within the next three years. Wesleyan administrators say they are acting in an effort to reduce the number of campus sexual assaults: “any campus-based organization that has sponsored events that create conditions with a higher risk of violence, including sexual assault, also will be held accountable.”

In an essay he wrote about leaving his fraternity, Wesleyan University senior Scott Ellman considered his school’s sexualized culture and his own discomfort within it: “I’d only recently begun to consider my complicity as a fraternity brother in the greater context of sexual violence in the American higher education system and how its corresponding language is deployed on college campuses across the country.”

Why I Quit My College Fraternity

Scott Ellman | Mic | July 11, 2014 | 13 minutes (3,238 words)

This Is Living

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Charles D’Ambrosio  | Loitering | November 2014 | 25 minutes (5,836 words)

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

Loitering: New & Collected EssaysFor our latest Longreads Exclusive, we are delighted to share “This Is Living,” an essay from Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering: New & Collected Essays, published by Tin House. Subscribe to Tin House and check out their book titles. Buy the book

I was seven and had a leather purse full of silver dollars, both of which, the purse and the coins, I considered valuable. I wanted them stored in the bank. At the time, the bank had an imposing landmark status in my map of the world, in part because it shared the same red brick as the public school, the two most substantial buildings in our town. As a Catholic school kid I did a lot of fundraising in the form of selling candy bars, Christmas stamps and fruitcakes, and my favorite spot for doing business was outside the bank, on Friday afternoons, because that was payday. Working men came to deposit their checks and left the bank with a little cash for the weekend. Today, that ritual is nearly gone, its rhythms broken, except for people on welfare, who still visit banks and pack into lines, waiting for tellers, the first of every month. But back then I’d set my box of candy on the sidewalk and greet customers, holding the door for them like a bellhop. Friends of mine with an entirely different outlook on life tried to sell their candy at the grocery store, but I figured that outside the supermarket people might lie or make excuses, claiming to be broke; but not here, not at the bank, for reasons that seemed obvious to me: this was the headquarters of money. Most of the men were feeling flush and optimistic, flush because they were getting paid and would soon have money in their pockets, optimistic because the workweek was over and they could forget what they had done for the money. On their way in I’d ask if they wanted to buy a candy bar and they’d dip a nod and smile and say with a jaunty promissory confidence that I should catch them on the way out. And I did. I sold candy bars like a fiend. Year after year, I won the plastic Virgin Marys and Crucifixes and laminated holy cards that were given away as gifts to the most enterprising sales-kids at school. I liked the whole arrangement. On those Friday afternoons and early evenings, I always dressed in my salt-and-pepper corduroy pants and saddle shoes and green cardigan, a school uniform that I believed made me as recognizable to the world as a priest in his soutane, and I remember feeling righteous, an acolyte doing God’s work, or the Church’s. Money touched everyone in town, quaintly humanizing them, and I enjoyed standing outside the bank, at the center of civic life. This was my early education into the idea of money. Read more…