Search Results for: new york review of books

The Admission

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Stacy Torres | Longreads | May 2017 | 26 minutes (6,472 words)

 

I didn’t go to Bellevue because I worried that’s where the real crazies went. Anytime you read about a gruesome crime in the papers, like a person pushing someone in front of a subway, the suspect was always “taken to Bellevue.” No thanks.

Years before, my mother had brought me and my three little sisters to Bellevue every few months, when she filled out paperwork for the government vouchers that gave us free groceries like milk, cereal, peanut butter, and tuna. We made this journey across town for five years, until my youngest sisters aged out of the program. Even then, the place smelled of desperation. Late mornings hordes shuffled in and out of the massive public hospital. My mother steered us through wide corridors where throngs of doctors, nurses, sick people, and other harried mothers dragging whiny children like us passed by in tidy procession, making the flooded hallways seem both chaotic and orderly. The WIC office sentenced me to hours of studying grubby floor tiles and floating dust particles, made visible in the sunlight streaming through the tall windows, while I squirmed in my shiny blue plastic seat, flanked by my mother and younger sister Erica. Every few minutes one of the twins broke up the monotony by flinging a bottle from their titanic double stroller onto the floor. Though I’d armed myself with a half-filled coloring book and errant Barbie, boredom always struck too early, leaving me to focus my mental energies on willing the clerk to call my mother’s number.

“No one gives out anything without wanting something back,” a heavy Black woman once grumbled to my mother halfway through one of our marathon waits.

“That’s right,” Mom said sympathetically as the woman refastened the army of pink plastic barrettes on her daughter’s head. With each tug of the brush her daughter winced, and she ordered her, “Stay still, girl.” What other choice did we have?

When I checked myself into a psychiatric unit almost 15 years later, at age 20, I went to Roosevelt Hospital. Roosevelt stood a block from my college and Columbus Circle, where my mother had worked years before, at the torn-down New York Coliseum building, as a secretary for a life insurance company. I’d gone to Roosevelt for childhood scrapes and falls, a broken collarbone when I was 5 and a hairline foot fracture at 11. John Lennon died there after being shot in front of the Dakota. His assassin went to the Bellevue prison ward. The day of my admission, my college sociology professor came with me, and together we slogged through the heavy, wet snow that had blanketed the sidewalks overnight. Fat flakes still fell as we walked the block from Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus to the emergency room. Read more…

Norma McCorvey Versus Jane Roe

Norma McCorvey and Gloria Allred leave the Supreme Court on April 26, 1989 after a Missouri abortion case failed to overturn Roe v Wade. (AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite)

Norma McCorvey | I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v Wade, and Freedom of Choice Harper Collins, 1994 | 19 minutes | 4,650 words

When journalist Andy Meisner met Norma McCorvey to work on her memoir, “she was cashing checks at the 7-Eleven” and living with her partner Connie Gonzalez in Dallas. The New York Times visited McCorvey before the book’s publication in the summer of 1994, and McCorvey showed the reporter the steel door they’d had installed after their house was shot at in 1989 — as well as her dream keeper, a closet full of prized coats, and a collection of clowns she had purchased for Gonzalez. “Once people read I Am Roe, I think they’ll understand where I’m coming from,” she told the Times. “I’m a simple woman with a ninth-grade education who wants women not to be harassed or condemned.”

A year later, McCorvey publicly converted to born-again Christianity — and later, to Roman Catholicism — and she would spend the next twenty years of her life campaigning furiously against the pro-choice movement and the abortion she never received. “Roe has been her life, but it’s no longer much of a living,” wrote Vanity Fair in 2013.

McCorvey died in Dallas of heart failure at the age of 69 on February 18, 2017. In her review of I Am Roe, Susan Cheever writes: Norma McCorvey is an angry shadow from the dark side of the American dream…That Jane Roe and Norma McCorvey are the same person is just another example of the randomness and absurdity of a politics marked by an unbridgeable gulf between myth and reality.”  I Am Roe is currently out of print, and this excerpt is courtesy of Harper Collins.

Read more…

The Story of Memory: An Interview with Paula Hawkins

Author photo by Alisa Connan.

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | May 2017 | 8 minutes (2,228 words)

 

Born in Zimbabwe on August 28, 1972, Paula Hawkins’ family moved to London when she was a teenager. Although writing fiction interested her in her younger years, her stories generally remained unfinished. After graduating from Keble College, Oxford, she took the practical route and entered the newsroom at The Times of London, where she became a well-respected financial journalist.

In her thirties, she wrote romantic comedy novels with titles like Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista, All I Want for Christmas, One Minute to Midnight, and The Reunion under the pseudonym Amy Silver, but this never proved a perfect match for her talents. Increasingly tight on money and disenchanted with writing lighter fare, she sent a partial draft of a new novel to her agent. It was unlike anything she had ever published: dark, twisted, and page-turning. Her agent went gaga. The rest is literary history.

The Girl on the Train
has sold about twenty million copies worldwide since January 2015, according to her publisher, and last year’s film adaptation grossed $173 million. Into the Water (out from Riverhead on May 2, 2017), is already destined to be a bestseller and DreamWorks recently purchased the film rights.

Like The Girl on the Train, Into the Water also concerns memory, unreliable narrators, and an obsession with the dark and macabre, but the novel is more complex, with interweaving narratives, narrative perspective shifts, and a cast of characters so complicated it surely deserves a front-of-book family tree for clarity.

I recently spoke with Hawkins about faulty memory, her rise to fame, her desire to be more literary, and the way her novels reflect the contemporary political climate.

Read more…

On Island: Journeying to Penal Colonies, from Rikers to Robben

Rikers Island (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, FILE), Robben Island (Roohi Choudhry)

Roohi Choudhry | Longreads | April 2017 | 14 minutes (3,556 words)

 

The Rikers Island jail complex, built on an island just off the borough of Queens in New York City, has been described as the world’s largest penal colony. It has seen its share of controversies, many of them involving issues of race. Rikers is no exception to the disproportionate and mass incarceration of Black and Latino people in the United States.

Over the past year, an independent commission, led by the former chief judge of New York, has studied the jail, and on April 2nd, it released its recommendation: shut down Rikers. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has also backed the recommended course of action, which aims to have the last inmate depart the jail within 10 years.

In place of Rikers, the plan proposes building smaller jails inside New York City’s boroughs to eventually house half its current number of inmates. At the heart of this proposal is the view that people who are sent to jail are from the community, not “other.” This view dictates that they should stay in the community during their jail term. That is, people who have been arrested or convicted should not be cast away on an island, out of sight, mind and empathy.

It’s an idea once espoused by the writer and activist Grace Paley in “Six Days: Some Rememberings,” the story of her time in prison, during which a fellow inmate tells her: “That was a good idea… to have a prison in your own neighborhood, so you could keep in touch, yelling out the window.” It’s also an idea in keeping with racial justice: Black and brown lives matter, and cannot be so easily discarded when they are seen.

In the following essay, originally published in March 2015 on The Butter, I explore these ideas by comparing Rikers to another racially charged penal colony that has already been closed down: Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. That island was once infamous for imprisoning Apartheid-era political prisoners (including Nelson Mandela), but is now a museum and tourist destination.

By commingling my journeys to both islands in this essay, I question what it means to banish our “unwanted,” whether because of crime, politics or disease, across the sea, far from the safety of our mainland. Is this impulse truly part of our nature? Using my experiences of these two places, I confront questions of nature, both of the land and of people, and how that nature collides with questions of race. Read more…

Adventures in Solitude: A Reading List

Photo: Paula Rey (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In my adolescence, summer was a time of self-improvement. I planned my reinvention meticulously. Come the fresh school year, I’d breeze through the doors of my high school with perfect hair, new clothes, and a laser focus. Of course, I had a limited budget, hair that refused to straighten completely, and a tendency to get discouraged or distracted by the slightest obstacle. To be honest, the fun wasn’t in the result. It was the daydreaming, the dog-earing pages of Seventeen and the endless bookmarking of WikiHow articles in Internet Explorer that made everything seem possible.

This summer is my twenty-seventh. I’m looking forward to self-reflection, but I won’t be switching shampoos or going on a shopping spree. Instead, I’m going to live alone for the first time.

Read more…

Contributor Guide

  1. Posts on Longreads.com
  2. Longreads Picks
  3. Weekly Top 5 Email
  4. Image Specifications and Tips

1. Posts on Longreads.com

General Tips

  • Be sure to add a featured image. Refer to the Image Specifications and Tips section below.
  • Enter an excerpt for your post. Excerpts should be under 160 characters long. If you don’t see the excerpt field in WP-Admin, you might need to manually display it via the checkbox in Screen Options at the top of the page.
  • Add a handful of relevant categories, such as “Quotes,” “Essays & Criticism,” and “Nonfiction.”
  • Add tags for additional keywords, plus the author and/or publication names as necessary. Add a maximum of 10-15 tags and categories total to ensure the post appears in the WordPress.com Reader.
  • Add a photo credit to images: In the WordPress media gallery, there is a “Caption” field. Add a photo credit naming the source and linking (using HTML) to the original. Example: Photo via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/skynoir/11224284884">John Smith, Flickr</a>
  • For very short quotes, you can use a larger, bolder font by adding class=”short” to the blockquote. For example: <blockquote class="short">This is the quote</blockquote>

Stories / Exclusives / Excerpts

All of our original stories get the feature article treatment, with large photos and centered headlines/deks. These should all be assigned to the “Story” category. See examples here:

https://longreads.com/category/story/

Dek

The dek is pulled from the “Excerpt” field in WordPress.

Example of a headline and dek on top of a Longreads Exclusive. The dek only appears like this for posts with the “story” or “top 5” categories.

Pullquotes

Add pullquotes to break up the text. They’re formatted like this:

<blockquote class="pullquote center">Here is a sentence copied from the story.</blockquote>

You can also change the alignment for pullquotes (replace the “center” class in the example with “right” or ”left”)

Example of a pullquote on Longreads.com.

Images & Videos

Add images or videos, depending on the story. You can embed most videos on other services (YouTube, Vimeo) by pasting the URL into the WordPress visual editor. To add more images, pick a spot in the story, then click “Add Media.” You can also center the image, or align it left/right.

Header Variations

Our original stories have four options for header treatment:

Here are live examples:

To choose one of these header variations, make a selection from the “Longreads Exclusive Options” panel in the WP Admin interface:

We don’t currently have any strict rules around when each header variation should be used. If you have an especially impactful featured image, give “Image Only” a try. If you have a vertically-oriented image, use “Dual Pane.” Give a couple of the layouts a try, and see which one looks better. Don’t hesitate to ask the group for feedback if you’re not sure.

The “Longreads Exclusive Options” panel also contains an experimental “Move the byline to the top” feature. This checkbox grabs the first paragraph (<p></p>) of the post and moves it up into the header.  It’s a little finicky, so be sure to verify that it worked before you leave it checked.

Here’s an example of a byline that should work, if you’d like to copy and paste it:

<p style="text-align:center;"><em>Author Name</em> | <em><a href="#">Longreads</a></em> | <em>June 2017</em> | <em>22 minutes (1,500 words)</em></p>

If you try the checkbox, but it doesn’t work, give Kjell a ping and he should be able to help. A known issue for the byline feature is that it sometimes will create unfortunate line breaks for longer bylines. We’ll figure that out. 🙂

Quote Posts

A quote post is short and simple, but it’s a great way to distill “what we’re reading,” what we love, and why we love it. A quote post is a short blog post that features a link to a story or book along with a notable excerpt or quote.

Examples: http://blog.longreads.com/category/quotes-2/

It can be helpful to think of a quote and headline or angle that is different from the original story’s headline or angle. Often quote posts work well for surfacing a different story that’s buried deeper inside of a longer piece or inside a book.

Example of a headline rewrite for one of our quote posts.

Quote posts usually begin with a short introduction by you, followed by the quote. You can also do it the other way around: first quote, then context. The latter works best if the quote itself is short. If the excerpt is longer than a couple sentences, then it can be better to start with your own introduction, so people know why they should keep reading.

We usually don’t use more than 3-4 paragraphs to excerpt from the story. Quotes are meant to be quick, notable moments from a story. Exceptions can be made for books, since readers will be taken to a book purchase link rather than the full free story.

For direct quotes in the post, use <blockquote></blockquote> tags.

Every quote post should include a red button to “Read the story” “Read the interview” or (for Amazon links) “Get the book”. This is the code for that button: <a class="button-red">Read the story</a>

 

Interviews

Same as “Story” above but also include “Interviews” category and use bold text for interviewer questions.

Example: https://longreads.com/2017/03/14/ariel-levy-interview/

Reading Lists

A reading list is a list or essay with a collection of links with summaries / excerpts.

See examples here: http://blog.longreads.com/category/reading-list-2/

All list items will be linked and wrapped in <h2></h2> tags. Include the title, and in parentheses, add the author, publication and year if not current.


2. Longreads Picks

Longreads Picks are stories that we recommend. Picks are shown to users in the feed on the right side of the homepage, and on our picks page: https://longreads.com/picks/

In technical terms, Picks are a custom post type (CPT) on Longreads. All that means is that they work a little differently than posts do.

To add a new pick:

  1. visit https://longreads.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=lr_pick and select “New Pick” on the top left.
  2. Enter a title and a short description for your picks. You can see examples here.
  3. Below the main content box, there’s a new box with some additional fields:
  4. Click “Add Author” and start typing the name of the article’s author. This text box will auto-suggest matches from our database. If the author is brand new, you’ll need to visit this page, and add them manually first. Then go back to your pick, refresh the page, and try adding the author again. You can add multiple authors if necessary.
  5. The Publisher box works the same way. If your pick is from a new Publisher, you can add them first from this page.
  6. Enter the URL publsher date, and word count. No need to add tags or a featured image.
  7. Hit publish or schedule the post when you’re ready.

3. Weekly Top 5 Email

The Longreads weekly newsletter goes out every Friday between 3pm-4pm ET. It’s manually built in MailChimp. Here is a brief checklist on preparing each week’s newsletter.

  1. Once you have your Top 5 picks, create a draft blog post, titled “The Top 5 Longreads of the Week.” Use previous versions for formatting code.
  2. In Mailchimp, under “Campaigns” in the top nav, create a new Campaign by going to a previous week’s “Longreads Weekly” campaign, and selecting “Replicate” from the dropdown menu.
  3. Doublecheck that “Recipients” list is “Weekly Longreads Email” (You shouldn’t have to change anything.) Then click “Next”
  4. Under “Setup” leave all settings the same but change the date under “Name your campaign”.
  5. Skip the “Template” section and go straight to “Design” to make the following changes:
    • Click “Edit” on the “Longreads Weekly” section to change the email date and change any intro language or links if necessary. Click “Save and Close” when finished.
    • Click Edit on the Top 5 and story promos section. In this section you will update the Top 5 links and story links, along with their promo images and language.
    • Edit the post grid at the bottom. You can add, hide, or remove rows of stories using the buttons on the top left. Always add stories in groups of two — don’t leave one of the grid cells empty.
    • In the story grid, please make sure to crop the images to 1024px wide by 585px tall. You can do this within Mailchimp by choosing “Edit” when hovering over the image, then selecting “Edit” on the right. There’s a “Crop” tool in the Mailchimp image editor.
  6. In the “Confirm” section, first select “Preview and Test” in the upper right menu and “Enter Preview Mode.” You will see desktop and mobile versions of the emails. This is also a good place to test all of the links. Be sure to check all the links for all the story picks, headlines, images, and “Read Now” buttons.
  7. Close out of the window, and under “Preview and Test,” select “Send a Test Email” and send the email to yourself, Kjell, and at least one other Editor.
  8. Check the email and links.
  9. Before you send the email, be sure to FIRST publish the Top 5 Longreads blog post live, and check that your Top 5 link matches the live Top 5 blog post.
  10. Under Confirm, double check that the email will go to the “Weekly Longreads Email list.”
  11. Hit “Send” in the bottom right corner, and enjoy your weekend!

4. Image Specifications and Tips

Blog Posts and Exclusives

Images for blog posts should be at least 1456px wide. This allows for them to display at full retina resolution on desktop monitors. Landscape images tend to work best, but portrait images can be used from time to time as long as the minimum width is met. Featured images for exclusives are displayed larger than they are for regular blog posts. These images should be 2400px wide by 1400px tall. This is an image ratio of 12:7.

Emails

To keep load times down in emails, images should be no more than 1200px wide. You can resize to this width in Mailchimp. For images in the bottom grid, crop to 1024px wide by 585px tall.

Stock images

We usually use AP Images for our paid stock photos. Ping an automattician to purchase.

The following sources are great for finding Creative Commons photos. Be sure to include credit when necessary.

Other tips:

  • Ping Kjell for help with illustrations for Exclusives.
  • We’re generally welcome to use book and magazine covers when promoting/excerpting stories they include.

The Bitter History of Law and Order in America

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Andrea Pitzer | Longreads | April 2017 | 11 minutes (2,800 words)

 

During his heady first days in office, Donald Trump developed his now-familiar ritual for signing executive orders. He began by swapping a large sheet of paper for a hinged portfolio, then he started revealing the signed documents to onlookers a little awkwardly, crossing his forearms to hold the folio up, or bending it backward to show the press his signature. Finally, he perfected the motion by turning the open folder completely around to face the audience, displaying it from three angles, as if delivering tablets of law from Mount Sinai. By the end of the week, he seemed pleased with this bit of theater in which he could star as the president. The ritual, of course, became a meme.

Shortly after he perfected this performance, Trump signed three executive orders promoted by the White House under the heading “Law and Order.” The first required the Attorney General to look at crimes against law enforcement; the second directed the AG to create a task force on crime reduction and public safety, with specific mention of illegal immigration; the third delegated cabinet members to review strategies for finding and prosecuting international drug cartels. All three called for studying crime rather than implementing new programs—they also heightened anxiety over purported crime by blacks and immigrants while making it seem like only Trump was willing do something about it.

Read more…

‘I Thought, Well, We’ll See What Happens!’: Iconic Editor Nan Talese on Her Marriage and Career

For Vanity Fair, Evgenia Peretz profiles 83-year-old iconic editor Nan Talese, who rose through the ranks of one publishing house after another before being given her own eponymous imprint at Doubleday in 1990. Aside from being one of the most powerful women in publishing, Talese is also known as one-half of one of the most interesting and curious marriages in recent history. One of the underpinnings of her union with famously non-monogamous New Journalism pioneer Gay Talese is a pledge she made to him early on that she wouldn’t ever impinge on his “freedom”—an agreement that allowed him to have many affairs, some supposedly in the name of “research” for his book about the loosening of sexual mores in the free love era. The profile comes just as Gay plans to write a book about their marriage.

In 1981, when Thy Neighbor’s Wife came out, something discomfiting was starting to happen to Nan and Gay: their power in the world began to shift. Gay’s book was critically panned, not for the substance, which reviewers barely paid attention to, but for the salaciousness of its author. “What was alleged was I was doing frivolous research. Getting my jollies, hanging around massage parlors, getting laid, getting jerked off, all that,” says Gay, whose reputation dimmed. An active member of the writers group PEN, he’d been on the verge of becoming its next president. But in light of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the women of PEN revolted, and he resigned. Nan’s career, meanwhile, was skyrocketing. In 1981 she was named the executive editor of Houghton Mifflin, the old-line publishing company based in Boston; she’d commute there while still running the New York office. Gay believes her rise was at least partially tied to his downfall. “She started getting a lot of publicity about Thy Neighbor’s Wife . . . . What about this guy’s wife? This guy’s wife is Nan Talese. She’s this terrific, revered editor, and she’s married to this disgusting guy.”

But, for Nan, who still saw herself first as Gay’s champion, the power shift hardly felt like comeuppance or victory. His bad reviews, and his fallen reputation, were as devastating to Nan as they were to Gay. She defended him publicly, as she does today. “I think most of the press told more about the reporters than it did about Gay,” she says. And so, for the next few years, life continued as it had before, in keeping with the pledge—only, now the pressure had intensified for Gay, as he was looking to recapture literary greatness. There continued his long periods of absence, notably in Rome, where he went to research Unto the Sons, about his ancestors in Italy. There continued romantic entanglements on the road. “I don’t want to degrade people by representing the whole all-star cast of women. I could, but I won’t,” says Gay.

Read the story

Leave Them Alone! A Reading List On Celebrity and Privacy

Todd Williamson / Invision for JDRF / AP

I read Alana Massey’s essay collection, All The Lives I Want: Essays About My Friends Who Happen to be Famous Strangerswith a pencil in hand. I read it behind the counter at work when it was quiet and customer-free. I read it in bed, long after my partner and cat had fallen asleep. I read it in Starbucks when I should’ve been writing but needed inspiration. Massey is a writer I’ve followed since I became interested in journalism. I admired her incisive blend of pop culture and literary criticism. I especially loved when she wrote about religion—Massey spent time at Yale Divinity School—because I went to a conservative Christian college and I was yearning to see how I could translate my weird, vaguely traumatic religious background into beautiful sentences. I bought her book as a reward for myself for meeting a writing deadline.

This reading list is partially inspired by Massey’s excellent writing about the way our society honors and rejects celebrated women—and also about society’s inclination, if not blatant desire, to know every little detail about our favorite celebrities and judge them according to our own arbitrary moral standards. (I’m not immune to this: I spent ten minutes in bed Googling potential paramours of one of my favorite YouTube stars, even though I know it’s none of my damn business.) Why do we feel like we own celebrities—not just their art or their products, but their images and their personal lives? What do celebrities owe us, if anything?

Read more…

‘Smoking freebase has pretty much been my job for the past year.’

Writer Cat Marnell speaking on a panel in 2012
Cat Marnell speaking on a panel in 2012. (Photo by edenpictures via Flickr, CC BY 2.0).

In the New Yorker, Naomi Fry writes about Cat Marnell’s new memoir, How to Murder Your Life. Fry’s piece is part review, part analysis of women’s addiction stories.

In the familiar eschatology of addiction memoirs—David Carr’s “The Night of the Gun,” say, or Bill Clegg’s “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man”—an ambitious protagonist is bested by the wearying force of substances, only to later conquer his dependency and return, relatively unscathed, to the more wholesome business of achievement and success. But both “You’ll Never Eat Lunch” and “How to Murder Your Life” are remarkably honest in foregrounding the invidious parallelism of their subjects’ multifarious drives. It turns out that, for some addicts, drug use doesn’t just subvert ambition—it also mimics it. For Phillips, the deal-making stops, but the same desires that fuelled her career trajectory continue to animate her addiction. “Smoking freebase has pretty much been my job for the past year,” she writes of a particularly extreme period. And even after she quits cocaine, she begins exercising compulsively so as not to become a “fat tub of goo.” “Had she figured out a new and exciting addiction?” she wonders after injuring herself working out, describing the pain in a swollen ankle as “little jolts all along the way . . . painumb, painumb, painumb,” beating rhythmically like so many ticks on a never-ending workday clock.

Read the review