Search Results for: new york times

One Man’s Quest For His Vinyl and His Past

Eric Spitznagel | Old Records Never Die: One Man’s Quest for His Vinyl and His Past | Plume | April 2016 | 8 minutes (2,029 words)

Motivated by a potent mix of seller’s regret and old-dude nostalgia, a journalist sets off in search of the vinyl of his youth. And not just copies of albums he loved—Eric Spitznagel wants the exact records he owned and sold. It’s a premise that musician Jeff Tweedy describes as “not… entirely insane” in his preface to the book.  Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of Old Records Never Die. You decide.  Read more…

What Ever Happened to Planet Vulcan?

An orrery, or mechanical model of the solar system. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas Leveson | The Hunt for Vulcan: … And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe | Random House | November 2015 | 27 minutes (7,305 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The Hunt for Vulcan, by Thomas Leveson. In light of recent theorizing about a mysterious new Planet X, this story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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Not everyone follows a straight course to the person they might become.

In the 1830s (and still) number 63 Quai d’Orsay turned an attractive face toward the river. In the guidebooks already being read by that novel nineteenth-century species, the tourist, number 63 is described as a “handsome house”—one, the writers warned, that concealed a much more plebeian reality. Visitors—by appointment only, no more than two at a time, welcome only on Thursdays—would be ushered into a courtyard, and then on to the rooms where workers, mostly women, took bales of raw tobacco through every stage needed to produce the finished stuff of habit: hand-rolled cigars, spun strands of chew that became “the solace of the Havre marin,” gentlemen’s snuff. Most of the campus was turned over to laborers serving the machines—choppers, oscillating funnels, snuff mills, rollers, sifters, cutters, and more. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the works at the Quai d’Orsay would turn out more than 5,600 tons of finished tobacco per year, and was, according to the ubiquitous Baedeker, “worthy of a visit”—though indulging one’s curiosity carried a price: “the pungent smell of the tobacco saturates the clothes and is not easily got rid of.”

A spectacle, certainly, and as an early palace of industry clearly worthy of the guidebooks (themselves novelties). By any stretch of the imagination, though, the Manufacture des Tabacs was an odd place to look for someone who would become the most celebrated mathematical astronomer of his day—but not everyone follows a straight course to the person they might become. Thus it was that in 1833 a young man, freshly minted as a graduate of the celebrated École polytechnique, could be found every working day at the Quai d’Orsay, reporting for duty at the research arm of the factory, France’s École des Tabacs.

No one ever doubted that Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier had potential: he had been a star student in secondary school, winner of second prize in a national mathematics competition, eighth in his class at the polytechnique. But his early career offered no hints to what would follow. Funneled into the tobacco engineering section in university, he was more or less shunted directly toward the Quai d’Orsay and the task of solving French big tobacco’s problems.

It’s not clear whether Le Verrier actively enjoyed the life of a tobacco engineer—or merely tolerated it. Nothing in his later career remotely suggests he was a born chemist. But he was consistent: if given a task, he got down to it. Never mind all that early training in abstract mathematics; if required, he could be as practical as the next man, and so turned himself into a student of the combustion of phosphorus. That was useful research—tobacco monopolists care about matches. But whether or not he relished his job, he certainly got out as soon as he could. A position back at the École polytechnique opened up in 1836 for a répétiteur— assistant—to the professor of chemistry. Le Verrier applied, and as an until-then almost uniformly successful prodigy, had every hope. . . until the post went to someone else.

Le Verrier would prove to be a man who catalogued slights, tallied enemies, and held his grudges close. But he never accepted a check as a measure of his true worth. A second assistantship became available, this time in astronomy. He applied for that too. Never mind his seven years among the tobacco plants; Le Verrier seems to have believed that he could simply ramp up his math chops to the standard required at the highest level of French quantitative science. As he wrote to his father, “I must not only accept but seek out opportunities to extend my knowledge. [. . . ] I have already ascended many ranks, why should I not continue to rise further?” Thus it was that Le Verrier came into orbit around the great body of work left by that giant of French astronomy, Pierre-Simon Laplace. 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.
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Six James Beard Finalists You Might Have Missed: A Reading List

James Beard
James Beard, photo by Paul Child.

The James Beard Foundation announced the finalists for its 2016 food media awards last week, so it’s a great time to make a cup of tea and cozy up to some excellent food writing. You might have already read some of the nominees featured here throughout 2015 — “The Brief, Extraordinary Life of Cody Spafford,” “Straight-Up Passing,” “Corn Wars,” “The Second Most Famous Thing to Happen to Hiroshima,” “The Chef Who Saved My Life,” and “On Chicken Tenders,” which features some of the most passionate writing about fried snack foods to hit the internet’s tubes — but here are six more you might have missed:

1. “Ham to Ham Combat: A Tale of Two Smithfields” (Emily Wallace, Gravy, December 2015)

Worth it for the title alone, Emily’s piece wends from 350-year-old pro-pig promotional literature to the interstate tensions at the 1985 Ham & Yam Festival — with a pit stop to visit The Oldest Peanut in the World — in service of a single question: is the ham capital of the U.S. in Virginia, or North Carolina?  (And a runner-up question: Why does it matter?)

Read more…

Paul Beatty’s ‘The Sellout’ and the Racism of The Little Rascals

Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty. Image via PBS NewsHour

“That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

-Paul Beatty’s satirical novel The Sellout, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction (and now the 2016 Man Booker Prize), is a brutally funny-awful-sad-funny riff on racism in America, about an African American man who attempts to re-segregate his hometown — a fictional suburb of Los Angeles called Dickens. Beatty’s protagonist paints a border around Dickens, distributes “No whites allowed” signs to the local businesses, and gets help from a local celebrity, Hominy Jenkins, who was an understudy to Buckwheat and the last surviving cast member of the 1920s and ’30s serial “The Little Rascals.”

Through Hominy we also get a primer on the racist history of Hollywood — what was removed from public view, and what is still on display today. Beatty’s book led me back through my own childhood memories watching “The Little Rascals” in reruns during the early 1980s, unaware of the racist humor that was excised from syndication. Through The Sellout we get a tour of our ugly cultural past — Our Gang and Looney Tunes as just a start — and Beatty’s humor guides us through the injustices of the present.

Further reading:

• Interview with Paul Beatty (Scott Simon, NPR)
• New York Times Book Review (2015)
• An excerpt from The Sellout

The Story of a Marriage: Jenny Offill’s ‘Dept. of Speculation’

“The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.”

-From Jenny Offill’s wonderful 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation — the story of a married couple in Brooklyn, told through snippets of wisdom, anger, love, and bedbugs. In the New York Times Book Review, Roxane Gay called the book “joyously demanding because you will want to keep trying to understand the why of each fragment and how it fits with the others.”

Further reading:

You Can Do Anything if You Just Do it Slowly: An Interview with Lauren Groff

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | March 2016 | 12 minutes (3,332 words)

 

2015 was the year of Groff.

President Obama called her novel Fates and Furies his favorite of the year. The New York Times named it a bestseller. Amazon.com bestowed its top annual pick upon it. Seth Meyers and Charlie Rose even sat down for interviews with her.

But before all that, Lauren Groff wrote in the shadows.

After graduating from Amherst, when she thought she wanted to be a poet, Lauren worked at a bar in Philadelphia. Mixing cocktails at night and writing fiction during the day struck her as romantic. But on her first day of work, there was a double homicide at the bar. Her second day was September 11th, 2001. (“Seriously?” I say. “Seriously,” she says.)

At Amherst, Lauren was a rower. “There was this beautiful backlit fog rising off the river, and the banks were just pearly and beautiful, and it felt almost impossible to get our bodies moving in the cold,” she told The Amherst Student three years ago. “And Bill (Stekl, her coach) from his boat into his microphone shouts, ‘You can do anything — just do it slowly enough!’ And it’s almost been my motto in life. You can do anything. You just do it slowly enough.”

In 2008, after getting married, earning an MFA, turning thirty, and writing three unpublished novels, she saw her first glimmer of success: her debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton. In the years following she worked slowly. She wrote short stories and published another novel, Arcadia.

But it’s her latest novel, Fates and Furies, that brought fame.

A meditation on marriage and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone, Fates and Furies struck a cultural nerve. Robin Black in The New York Times Sunday Book Review called it “a novel of extraordinary and genuine complexity,” and its strikingly inventive plot and evocative prose put it in rarefied company for contemporary fiction.

Yet Lauren won’t revel in her success. She has three new projects she’s working on, not to mention the two sons she’s raising with her husband, Clay, in Gainesville, Florida, where she lives. Fates and Furies has turned her into a modern literary icon, but she maintains the slow and steady pace that brought her success in the first place.

I spoke with Lauren about everything from artistic narcissism to Véra Nabokov to critic James Wood, as well as her winding road to success, the pressures of newfound literary fame, and what it feels like to have the President of the United States love your book.

Read more…

One-Minute Readings: Ben Montgomery Remembers Journalist Michael Brick

Above is a brief tribute to journalist Michael Brick, who died in February at the age of 41. The video features Tampa Bay Times writer Ben Montgomery reading from Brick’s 2006 New York Times story, “Dusk of the Drummer” — and it’s one of many pieces featured in a new collection, Everyone Leaves Behind a Name: True Stories, published by The Sager Group. Proceeds from the book will go to Brick’s wife and children.

In a brief note, Montgomery tells us:

When journalist Michael Brick died from colorectal cancer in February at the age of 41, he left behind a wife, three kids and a body of work that rivals the best of the best. His friends collected his stories in a remarkable anthology, along with original essays from greats like Tom Junod, Gary Smith, Charles Pierce, Amy Wallace, Michael Paterniti, Dan Barry, Chris Jones, Kurt Eichenwald and Wright Thompson. Sales benefit Brick’s family, and the book solidifies his place in American letters.

Thank you, Ben, for sharing, and you can purchase the book here.

Shopping for Forbidden Fruit

Limiting access often increases desire. I call this the velvet rope effect. Some of the appeal is psychological. Some of this is a quality differential. On The New York Times Style Magazine blog, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi writes about proxy services which help Western shoppers navigate the Japanese online marketplace and buy the goods retailers refuse to sell outside Japan. Language is only one of the barriers here. The other is disinterest. Many Japanese clothing and lifestyle companies simply don’t want to sell their products overseas, and not just the boutique limited edition items either, but, as Zaidi put it, “a single pair of the 20,000 available units of the megabrand’s standard-issue jeans.” Zaidi’s piece ran in May 2015.

I turned up a number of forbiddingly impersonal and expensive proxy services before seeking direction from nerds on sneaker forums. The proxy service I chose is called SpeBid, run through a creaky community-style message board by a half-Japanese half-Nigerian man named Spencer (or Spe). For $30 a year plus arcane surcharges, Spe buys, bids on and reships wonderful stuff to “subscribers” all over the world. Per Jay Gatsby, “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall”; but a proxy never proffers anything you don’t already know you need.

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The Freelancers’ Roundtable

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Eva Holland | Longreads |February 2016 | 25 minutes (6,339 words)

 

There’s been more talk than usual lately about the state of freelance writing. There are increasing numbers of tools for freelancers: among them, the various incarnations of “Yelp for Journalists.” There’s advice floating around; there are Facebook support groups.

With the exception of one 10-month staff interlude, I’ve been freelancing full time now for seven and a half years. I’ve learned a few things along the way, but I also still have a ton of questions, and often feel as if I’ve outgrown some of the advice I see going by in the social media stream.

So I gathered a handful of well-established freelance writers and asked them to participate in a group email conversation about their experiences and advice. Josh Dean is a Brooklyn-based writer for the likes of Outside, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science. Jason Fagone lives in the Philadelphia area and has recently published stories in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Matter, and Grantland. May Jeong is based in Kabul, and has written for publications including the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and Al-Jazeera America. (She managed to fit in her contributions to this roundtable while reporting from a remote corner of Afghanistan, so thank you, May.) As for me, I live in Canada’s northern Yukon Territory, and my work has appeared in AFAR, Pacific Standard, Smithsonian, and other places on both sides of the border. Read more…