Search Results for: new yorker

Jill the Ripper

Illustration by Lily Padula

Tori Telfer | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,226 words)

Before the Zodiac Killer named himself, before someone strangled poor JonBenét, before the Black Dahlia was sliced open, and before Tupac and Biggie were shot six months apart under eerily similar circumstances, someone was slinking through the slums of London, killing women.

This someone — a shadowy aichmomaniac, possibly wearing a bloody apron — left the women of the Whitechapel district in shocking disarray. Their intestines were thrown over their shoulders; cultish markings were carved into their cheeks. One of them was found without her heart. To most people who saw the crime scenes or read the papers, everything about this appeared to be the work of a man — the brutality, the strength, the misogyny. And so in 1888, when people started looking for the Ripper, they were looking for…well, for a Jack. Was he a mad doctor? A butcher? Queen Victoria’s weak-minded son? Everyone in Whitechapel found themselves peering nervously into the fog, wondering which normal-looking male passerby was actually a maniac.

Everyone, that is, except for a few lone voices, suggesting something totally radical: what if they should actually be looking for a Jill? Read more…

The Blaming of the Shrew

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,982 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

 
As night follows day, so must the announcement of a woman’s candidacy for high political office compel a verdict on her likability, a quality so ineffable that we can really only say we know it when we see it. And so rarely do we see it in people who aren’t men. Still, likability endures as our gold standard, our north star. Almost 20 years after Sam Adams polled voters on which candidate they would rather get a beer with, we are still obsessed with a candidate’s perceived likability and relatability, despite the fact that we now have the least conventionally likable or relatable president in history. This debating of female candidates’ likability while a man like Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office is confusing but it makes much more sense if you see the current political moment for what it is: our least compelling antihero show.

Whether the antihero show is in its twilight or we’re not quite ready to let it go, there is no doubt that it has been a huge cultural presence for the better part of two decades. As the proliferation of think-pieces around the 20th anniversary of The Sopranos premiere revealed that we’re still in the thrall of the show and the genre it spawned, it’s worth noting that the election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the land followed nearly two decades of tuning in to men who were supposed to be unlikable but whom we somehow liked enough to keep watching. Thinking about political likability and a world in which we say things like “President Trump” is kind of like looking at the wall of Homeland’s Carrie Mathison: it seems crazy but the connections are all there. And in this case, many of the threads lead back to television.

TV is a medium with a particular reliance on likability. Seeing a movie involves just one decision, but when we watch a TV show we must repeatedly make the choice to encounter its characters, tuning in week after week or, in the age of streaming, contributing to a show’s completion rate. When a show features a protagonist who is not conventionally “likable” — someone who does things we recognize as illegal, immoral, or just plain offensive — we must engage in some mental gymnastics. We either flip a switch and start seeing that character as a villain or we decide we’re going to excuse his behavior and continue to root for his success. With a television protagonist, if we choose the latter, it is something that we have to do over and over again, escalating our commitment to the character as his misdeeds pile up.

Trump’s path to the presidency was made smoother by a complex relationship to women and gender that finds its expression in pop culture, like television shows about bad dudes.

TV is also what brought us the concept of likability in politics in the first place because most of the time when we talk about likability, we’re really talking about the appearance of likability, and TV brought us unprecedented access to candidates’ appearances. Each emerging communication technology has changed the formula for successful candidacy and television’s contribution has been to reward a certain type of image. Most radio listeners called the first debate between Kennedy and Nixon a draw, but television viewers overwhelmingly perceived a Kennedy victory because of how Kennedy looked. When we consider TV’s role in the 2016 election, we should be thinking about the way in which television itself took Trump from a local D-lister to an icon of American success with a national profile, but also about the image that we now look for, how the medium has changed our expectations for main characters and, in doing so, changed our expectations for the main character of the country: the president.

And after an election in which we faced two very different potential main characters, we should acknowledge the role that gender plays, in politics and in television. Trump’s path to the presidency was made smoother by a complex relationship to women and gender that finds its expression in pop culture, like television shows about bad dudes. Understanding the mechanics of the antihero genre that came to redefine TV drama, particularly the ways in which the phenomenon of the likable unlikable man relies on the way that man interacts with women, might help us reckon with the politics of gender, and gendered politics, as we look toward another election cycle.

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The mythology of the antihero has him spring from David Chase’s head like a late ’90s Athena. In his book on the transformative shows of the late ’90s and early 2000s, The Revolution was Televised, Alan Sepinwall writes that Chase was fighting against “the notion that a TV series had to have a likable character at its center.” It was important to Chase that this new kind of protagonist not be rehabilitated, like Detective Sipowicz of NYPD Blue. There would be no redemption arc but instead further descent into whatever nefarious activities had characterized him as unlikable in the first place.

But there was a disconnect between this vision and the way viewers reacted to Tony Soprano and the other unreformed Sipowiczes who would follow in his wake. Chase has been known to complain about his audience’s relationship to Tony, cheering him on one minute and wanting to see him punished the next; Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, similarly expressed his surprise that fans were still “rooting for” Walt as his misdeeds became ever more serious and destructive. These kinds of fans have been criticized as “bad readers” missing the point of a groundbreaking new form. But I have always found showrunners’ professions of bafflement at audience reception to be disingenuous at best because the whole enterprise of the antihero show was to create a bad guy people would like anyway. Gilligan seems more in touch with his intentions when he recalls that he cast Bryan Cranston as Walter White because he recalled Cranston’s ability to convey “a basic humanity” in another otherwise unappealing character. When thinking about casting Jon Hamm as Don Draper, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner made a similar observation: “I asked myself a question: ‘When this man goes home to his wife at the end of the pilot, are you going to hate him?’ And I said, ‘No, I will not hate him.’”

Feigned surprise at audience reactions aside, it seems likely that the men who created these “unlikable” men understood that they would still need an audience to invest in them, and that such an investment would not be a slam dunk but would instead require delicate rigging. I like to break down the mechanics of the antihero in the following way:

The antihero is marked as special.

David Chase has said that he used to quote Rockford Files creator Stephen Cannell in the Sopranos writers’ room: “Rockford can be a jerk-off and a fool, but he’s got to be the smartest guy in the room.” The other Golden Age antihero shows followed this formula. Don is a creative genius (“It’s Toasted!”) and Walt is a talented chemist who regularly outsmarts very dangerous people. This distinction of being set apart is something the antihero has in common with regular heroes.

The antihero has interiority.

If, as Chase declared, his character was not going to evolve toward to a more sympathetic future, the case for sympathy would have to be rooted in the past or justified by the present. These shows gave their protagonists an interiority that made sympathizing with them feel less icky. This is where the antiheroes of the early aughts differed from a character like J.R. Ewing, who was also a popular bad guy protagonist. Therapy sessions and flashbacks, revealing monologues, and contemplative moments set to music all softened the blow of the bad things they did. Whatever interiority Chase, Gilligan, and Weiner allowed other characters, it always paled in comparison to that given to their protagonists. Like their smarts and talent, this was another way of distinguishing characters who would have ordinarily coded as villains and instead marking them as the hero of their story.

The antihero is stacked up against antagonists slightly to exceedingly more unlikable than he is.

To me, this is the real key to the antihero’s appeal. Being special and having a sympathetic backstory will only take a traditionally “unlikable” character so far, and there are plenty of movie and TV villains who have been given similar treatment. What separates a true antihero from a villain is that we’re in his corner, we want him to succeed. If we are to root for Don Draper, an identity thief and rampant philanderer, we need to see him opposite, say, a Pete Campbell type: lothario sans charm and talent. Walter White is the small business owner to Gus Fring’s Amazon. Villainy is not a fixed point, it’s a sliding scale. Real people aren’t neatly divided into Supermans and Lex Luthors. Most of us are equal parts potential for good and propensity for shittiness, a heady brew of good instincts and bad inclinations. Our virtue is contextual. While the nature of these men’s misdeeds are (hopefully!) of a different magnitude than our own, part of their appeal is certainly, as Gilligan suspected, the way they mirror our own humanity, the good and the ugly both. And we are able to focus on the former and excuse the latter when showrunners give us other characters who are less multidimensional and therefore easier to hate.

But alongside the Phil Leotardos and Gus Frings, those easier-to-hate people often ended up being women. Skyler White is the most obvious example. Walt was stacked up against all kinds of villains but none inspired the kind of vitriolic responses Anna Gunn famously described in a 2013 New York Times op-ed: the thousands of people who liked the Facebook page “I Hate Skyler White,” the posts complaining that Skyler was “a shrieking, hypocritical harpy … a ball-and-chain, a drag, a shrew, an annoying bitch wife.” Some fans of the show even conflated Gunn and the character she played. One message board post read: “Could somebody tell me where I can find Anna Gunn so I can kill her?” Reddit boards still use her as the bar against which all bad wife characters should be measured. Even the neo-Nazis who killed Hank and made Jesse their slave never raised viewers’ hackles the way Skyler did and still does years later. Fan reaction to Betty Draper was similarly harsh (apparently, the only way to make her “likable” was to kill her) despite the fact that the show was premised on the fact that her life was a lie Don had to tell her over and over.

Women were the accidental antagonists of shows about ‘difficult men,’ but what does it look like when a woman steps into the antihero mold, when it is a difficult woman at the heart of a series?

Sopranos viewers rarely saw Carmela this way because for the most part she declines to take on the role of antagonist. She is instead, as the psychiatrist in season three points out, an enabler. She doesn’t stand in the way of our guy but the show is still built on the foundation of a woman who could wear a man down. In his very first conversation with Dr. Melfi, Tony talks about his parents’ relationship: “My dad was tough. He ran his own crew. Guy like that and my mother wore him down to a little nub. He was a squeaking little gerbil when he died.” Viewers dutifully saw Livia Soprano as an antagonist and a burden Tony had to overcome. In their just released book The Sopranos Sessions, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller-Seitz write: “Tony adored the ducks in the pool because they were guarded by a mother who protected and nurtured them in a manner free of ulterior motive, of deceit and manipulation, of the urge to annihilate. Livia, for all her evident helplessness, is the most actively destructive force in the pilot, a black hole vacuuming up hope.” They’re talking about the episode where Tony runs over a guy who owes him money with his car but somehow it’s his elderly mother who is the most actively destructive force.

In interviewing Chase for The Sopranos Sessions, Sepinwall reminds him that he once said that The Sopranos, as an idea, began with his friends encouraging him to do a show about his mother. The Sopranos’ origin story is rooted in the trope of the “nagging harpy” and Chase himself suggests that the show was successful in large part because he imported domesticity into the mobster genre: “family shows were a women’s medium, and this was a family show. I thought this might be successful, or at least keep its head above water, because it would attract, unlike most Mob pictures, a female audience because of the family show aspect.” But the kind of domesticity of which he availed himself, one that would become a familiar element of shows about “difficult” men, was one in which women are set up to be either enablers or antagonists. Livia might have been the black hole, but all of the women in Tony’s life are implicated. In that same therapy session in episode one, Dr. Melfi asks Tony, “What’s the one thing your mother, your wife, your daughter all have in common?” His response? “They all break my balls.”


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Wives get the raw end of the deal in an antihero show. They are there to humanize the protagonist but we often see them as villains instead of the victims they truly are because, in opposing our guy, they stand in the way of the show’s plotline. Wives pose a problem in that they fail to deliver on what we perhaps subconsciously assume to be their role. These men provide for their families. They work hard — never mind how or what they do with their leisure time — so that their families can have what they need and all their wives have to do is not call them on it. Philosopher Kate Manne argues that a central dynamic of misogyny is the obligation by, or expectation of, women to give men “feminine-coded goods and service” like attention, care, sympathy, respect, admiration, security, and safe haven. There is, according to Manne, “the threat of withdrawal of social approval if those social duties are not performed, and the incentive of love and gratitude if they are done willingly and gladly.” Viewer response to characters like Skyler and Betty is the natural result of the expectation that wives are supposed to help, not hinder, their husbands. Carmela, on the other hand, explains to Dr. Krakower that her role is to “make sure he’s got clean clothes in his closet and dinner on his table.”

Once you see the degree to which the antihero show is dependent on marriage and heteronormativity, you can’t unsee it. The role of a wife in an antihero story is not incidental but integral: domestic antagonists are a large part of the reason we feel OK about rooting for bad guys like Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Don Draper. These shows taught us to look for the humanity in our male protagonists and ignore it in the women who stood in their way. Television audiences’ identification with and adoration of male antiheroes were the canaries in the coal mine, warning us of the ease with which we might see villains as victims and vice versa.

Looking back, it’s painful to admit that for many in the electorate, Hillary Clinton was the Skyler to Trump’s Walt, the Betty to his Don. We had already spent years seeing her as the Carmela to Bill’s Tony, implicated in her husband’s misdeeds by dint of staying with him, forever tainted by her own moral compromises that, while they paled in comparison to his, were for some reason less forgivable and rendered her eternally “unlikable.” It made sense, then, that when Clinton took a jab at Trump’s penchant for avoiding paying taxes while explaining her plan to raise taxes on the wealthy during the third debate, Trump interrupted to call her “such a nasty woman.” This one, he seemed to be telling viewers at home, is a Skyler.

So where does this leave us, in art and in politics? Are we ready for a female candidate who is – like all of the male candidates over the last 230 years, like all of us – human? As I write this, about half of the announced Democratic candidates for president are women so it is likely that gender will play a starring role this election cycle. Similarly, as television diffuses like so many essential oils over ever-increasing platforms, there are more opportunities than ever before for female-centered shows. How have we done with female characters? Have depictions of women sharing a screen with unlikable men changed at all? Are we able to see the “humanity” that Gilligan identified at the heart of Walter White’s appeal in people who aren’t men? Women were the accidental antagonists of shows about “difficult men,” but what does it look like when a woman steps into the antihero mold, when it is a difficult woman at the heart of a series? What is it, actually, that makes a woman difficult?

When we talk about antiheroes, we’re really talking about the kinds of bad behavior we can countenance and the kinds we can’t, the conditions that need to be met for us to overlook bad behavior; the way we take the sum of some people and not others. Thinking about when and how we extend our understanding and forgiveness is key to understanding the genre and our world. Deconstructing the antihero genre may help us better examine our own attitudes toward women.

This is the first installment of an unscientific and hardly exhaustive journey through shows about difficult people, many of whom are women. Next up? The Good Bad Wives of Ozark and House of Cards.

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Sara Fredman is a writer and editor living in St. Louis. Her work has been featured in Longreads, The Rumpus, Tablet, and Lilith.

 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk

Teen Girls Finally Get to Touch Themselves

Netflix / Netflix / Hulu

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 9 minutes (2,569 words)

There was a time when people believed masturbating would leave them blind, hairy-palmed, and STD-riddled (okay, the last one was me — I was a kid in the nineties). The ancient Sumerians were down with it — for both men and women — but two centuries of moralists ruined masturbation for everyone. Even now, the act isn’t especially celebrated, particularly if you’re a girl. It’s hard not to think of boys specifically when studies show that kids learn to jerk off from their friends and the media, rather than from their parents or schools. And while I can’t think of one teen movie where a boy isn’t caught with their hands full (of semen), I can barely think of one where a girl is. I read Deenie like everyone else — apparently Judy Blume’s balls-out approach to female masturbation is still rare in YA 46 years later — but there was a dearth of girls getting themselves off in pop culture and, perhaps accordingly, a dearth of girls talking about it in my actual life. This made me feel all those things that have since become stereotypical themes when it comes to women and masturbation: shame, guilt, like there was something wrong with me.

Read more…

The Science of Dreaming

Photo by Eddie Kopp / Unsplash

Jessica Gross | Longreads | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,551 words)

In 2011, when she was in college studying abroad in Peru, Alice Robb ran out of reading material and picked up a copy of Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Her initial skepticism quickly dissolved, and she and a friend spent the summer practicing LaBerge’s tips: they recounted their dreams to each other; they did “reality tests” during the day to trigger similar checks while sleeping. Robb began keeping a rigorous dream journal and found that, after very little time, she began remembering her dreams in detail.

In short, she began taking her dreams very seriously — a stance that she has maintained since. In her new book, Why We Dream, Robb, a science journalist, presents a comprehensive and compelling account of theories of and research on dreaming from ancient times through the present day. Throughout, she displays an intense respect for what our minds do while we’re sleeping, and the findings she presents — that dreaming is essential for sanity, that analyzing our dreams can be revelatory, that dreams can be used as diagnostic tools and even manipulated for our own mental health—corroborate her conviction that, as a culture, we would benefit from paying more careful attention.

Robb and I met at a bar near where she lives in Brooklyn to talk about dreams’ predictive power, what it’s like to make your dream journal entries public (hint: uncomfortable), and what closely observing our dreams can offer.

Toward the end of the book, there is a line that moved me so much: “I like seeing proof that even while I’ve been unconscious, I’ve been alive.” It seems to me that dreams as proof of life — so then, maybe, as defense against death — is a pivotal concept in this book.

I used to have a lot of trouble sleeping and I was kind of afraid of sleep. A lot of people have compared sleep to death, and being unconscious is a scary thing to think about. But paying attention to my dreams and improving my dream recall and seeing that there’s actually so much going on in my mind while I’m asleep has made sleep feel more like a lively time — more integrated with the rest of my life and waking hours — rather than this weird period where I just shut down. Read more…

Reckoning With Georgia’s Increasing Suppression of Asian American Voters

Getty / Associated Press / Flickr CC / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Anjali Enjeti | Longreads | December 2018 | 18 minutes (4620 words)

 

Early on November 6, Election Day, Kavi Vu noticed that some voters appeared distressed as they exited Lucky Shoals Park Recreation Center, one of five polling places in Gwinnett County, Georgia. A volunteer with the nonprofit, nonpartisan civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta (“Advancing Justice”), Vu had been standing outside to answer questions about voting and offer her services as a Vietnamese translator.

When she began asking the mostly African American, Asian American and Latinx voters about their voting experiences, she learned that after 2.5 hour wait times, many of them had voted via provisional ballots.

Why? As it turned out, Lucky Shoals was not their correct voting location. “A lot of people had lived in Gwinnett County their entire lives and voted at the same location and all of the sudden they were switched up to new location,” Vu said.

So when poll workers offered voters the option of voting at Lucky Shoals with provisional ballots, rather than driving elsewhere to wait in another line, the voters took them up on it. They left with I’m a Georgia Voter stickers, and printed instructions for how to cure their ballots. But poll workers didn’t verbally explain to the voters that they’d need to appear at the county registrar’s office within three days to cure their ballots, nor did the poll workers make it clear that the votes would not count at all if the voters failed to do so. What’s more, as the day wore on, poll workers ran out of the provisional ballot instructions altogether.

Vu was alarmed. In an attempt to reduce the number of voters using provisional ballots, she began offering to help voters locate their correct polling place using the Secretary of State website. That’s when poll workers repeatedly began confronting her about her presence outside of the polling place. “They told me to stop speaking with voters in line, even after I explained what I was doing.”

By mid-afternoon, Vu counted some 100 voters who had wrongly reported to Lucky Shoals. When she finally left eight hours after arriving, she was “heartbroken,” over the dreadful conditions at the polling place and the number of votes by minority voters that would likely never be counted.

Read more…

The Neanderthal

Illustration by Lily Padula

Jen Gilman Porat | Longreads | December 2018 | 14 minutes (3,447 words)

A couple of years ago, I purchased a pair of 23andMe kits for myself and my husband, Tomer. I intended to scientifically prove that Tomer’s most irritating behaviors were genetic destiny and therefore unchangeable. I’d grown tired of nagging him — oftentimes, I’d hear my own voice rattling inside my brain in the same way a popular song might get stuck in my head. I needed an out, something to push me toward unconditional acceptance of my husband. My constant complaining yielded zero behavior modification from on his part; on the other hand, it was changing me into a nasty micromanager. I briefly considered marital therapy, but that’s an expensive undertaking, costing much more than the $398.00 one-time fee for both DNA kits. Plus, couples’ therapy could take a long time, requiring detours through our shared history. In much appealing contrast, 23andMe, promised to launch us straight back to our prehistoric roots, to an earlier point in causality, one that might provide Tomer with something akin to a formal pardon note, thereby permitting me to stop fighting against him, once and for all. I imagined we could help others by way of example too, for what long-married woman has not suffered her husband’s most banal tendencies — the socks and underwear on the floor, the snoring? Not me, actually, because my husband puts his used clothes in the hamper, and I’m the snorer. Really, I’m probably blessed as far as masculine disgustingness goes. But my husband is flawed in one repulsive way: his barbaric table manners.

I have no doubt this is a genetic situation, for even back when we were first dating, I’d shuddered upon seeing my father-in-law poke through the serving bowls of a family-style meal with his bare hairy hands. My husband’s father has also been caught eating ice cream directly from the carton (the thought of which I now appreciate for its built-in binge deterrent). Moreover, my father-in-law eats like a caveman-conqueror, reaching across dinner plates to pluck a taste of this or that from his mortified tablemates. A family dinner looks like a scene straight out of Game of Thrones, minus any crowns. And so, when my husband first began to exhibit similar behaviors, I had to wonder: Had I suffered some rare form of blindness previously? Did some barrier of unconscious denial gently shield my eyes each day, year after year, but only at mealtimes? It was as if a blindfold suddenly fell from my face, or as if Tomer had finally removed a mask from his own. My gentleman turned into a beast, seemingly overnight.

I watched with horror, one Sunday evening, as my husband served himself a plate of meat and vegetables with his hands. His fingers ripped skirt steak in lieu of cutting it with a knife. He abandoned his fork altogether, and I lost my appetite.

Had Tomer suffered some obscure symptom of the mid-life crisis? Or was this a regressed state? During a phone conversation with a close friend, I described my father-in-law’s vile eating manners and wondered if his pre-existing condition had grown contagious. She suggested Tomer’s change of behavior might indicate an epigenetic effect; she’d read somewhere that some aspects of our genetic code lie in wait and get activated along the way. Apparently, some inherited traits remained invisible for years, hiding patiently in our cells until: Surprise! Just when you hit middle age and are totally comfortable in your own skin (despite the new fine lines around your eyes and those brown circles that are hopefully age spots and not melanoma), some new biological fact of your genetic code makes itself manifest, waking you up from your mid-age slumber.

Another interesting detail I could not ignore: Around the same time Tomer stopped liking forks, he’d adopted the Paleo diet, (versions of which are known as the caveman diet). He’d cut all processed foods from his intake, eating nothing but meat, nuts, vegetables, and fruit. Prior to going Paleo, he’d suffered from a severe case of irritable bowel syndrome and relied on bread products, thinking that challah and croissants were the softer, gentler foods. I suspected a gluten allergy and told him to lay off all the Pepperidge Farm cookies. I probably even told him to “eat like a caveman,” but I only meant for him to eat a more natural and gluten-free diet, in order to heal him, which in fact, it did.

“My stomach is no longer a quivering idiot,” Tomer said, and he said it more than once, to countless friends and family members, until he’d worked up a complete narrative on how he’d triumphed over his very own stomach. And each time he told this story, he lifted his shirt, pounding his fists upon his midsection. His proud smile began to appear, well, wild and hungry, as if he’d tamed his digestive system but in doing so, had activated a primitive gene and sacrificed his own civility.

Shortly thereafter, I came across an article pertaining to Neanderthal DNA. According to modern science, the Neanderthals and our prehistoric ancestors mated, leaving many of us with a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA. I did more Googling and learned that 23andMe can tell you how much Neanderthal DNA you carry. Although they do mean different things, in my mind’s eye, the words “Neanderthal” and “Caveman” summoned identical images: that of savage meat-eating maniacs ripping raw meat from bone with fat fingers and jagged teeth.

And this was it — the thing that sold me on 23andMe: the chance to determine one’s degree of Neanderthal-ness. Without any consideration of all the possible consequences of submitting one’s DNA to a global database, I ordered two kits, grinning and convinced that my husband’s result would show a statistically significant and above average number of Neanderthal variants in his genome. Since Father’s Day was only a month away, I decided I’d giftwrap the kits upon arrival too. I’d kill two birds with one stone.
Read more…

The Longreads 2018 Holiday Gift Book Guide

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Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2018 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.

Books about being alone and really owning it.

Patricia Hampl on the Ladies of Llangollen, who were famous for wanting to be left alone; Stephanie Rosenbloom on eating alone; and an interview with novelist Ottessa Moshfegh in which she strongly advises against leaning in.


Books about family. 

Meaghan O’Connell and Juan Vidal on the surprise and profundity of becoming new parents; Nicole Chung and Laura June on the complexities of family connection across the generations when grappling with adoption or estrangement; Christian Donlan on the grief and joy of parenting while gravely ill; and Issac Bailey on his family’s resilience in the wake of his brother’s imprisonment.


Books for the women in your life who are mad. 

Gemma Hartley on emotional labor, Brittney Cooper on black women’s eloquent rage, and Rebecca Traister on the political power of women’s anger.


Books of investigations, inquiries, and revelations. 

Karina Longworth reveals how Hollywood’s women were caught in Howard Hughes’ web of lies; Rachel Slade solves the sinking of El Faro; Alec Nevala-Lee unravels the joined-at-the-hip origin stories of Scientology and American science fiction; Susan Orlean investigates the mystery of the Los Angeles Public Library fire; Brantley Hargrove follows in the footsteps of a storm chaser killed by the largest tornado every recorded; and Tim Mohr chronicles the forgotten role of punk rock in the fall of the Berlin Wall.


Books that explore the bounds of physical and mental health, illness and medicine, mind and body.

Porochista Khakpour, in a searing memoir about surviving a misdiagnosed chronic illness, questions the possibility of total recovery; Terese Maire Mailhot, in a lyric memoir about PTSD as a result of childhood trauma, attempts to reclaim her narrative and reconnect with her people; Christie Watson remembers her twenty years as a nurse before becoming a novelist; Kristi Coulter meditates on her newfound sobriety and a culture of silence around women’s addiction; Marina Benjamin ruminates on insomnia, plumbing the depths of sleep and wakefulness; and Michele Lent Hirsch studies the invisible lives of young women with chronic illnesses


Histories that challenge our understanding of the past.

Colin G. Calloway‘s biography of George Washington conscientiously locates him in a very Indian world; Julia Boyd points out that the Third Reich was a popular tourist destination; Linda Gordon explains the sway the KKK held in state governments in the early 20th century; Shomari Wills chronicles America’s first black millionaires; Peter Ackroyd reveals the history of gay London; and Stefan Bradley remembers the fight for civil rights in the Ivy League.


Books about dating and marriage.

Elizabeth Flock on the years she spent living with married couples in Mumbai to better understand their marriages; Kelli María Korducki on the feminist history of breaking up; Viv Albertine on dating again in her fifties. 


Follow the money.

Anand Giridharadas on the elite, Disneyfied world of Ted Talks and philanthropy as self-help for rich people; David Montero on the global corporate bribery network; Sarah Smarsh on growing up rural and working class. 


Fiction and memoirs that reflect on the way we live now, illuminating our present and hinting at possible futures.

Nick Drnaso‘s Sabrina is haunted by the menace of conspiracy theories and fake news; Ling Ma‘s Severance imagines a world in which office drones keep going to work and posting on social media even though it’s the apocalypse; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah‘s Friday Black points out that being black in America already is a dystopian nightmare; Olivia Laing‘s Crudo was written in real time during — and is about living through — the collective traumatic experience that was the year 2017; Jamel Brinkley‘s A Lucky Man revolves around the lucklessness of black boyhood and manhood; Nafissa Thompson-SpiresHeads of the Colored People is a witty, darkly comic look at a supposedly post-racial America; Kiese Laymon‘s Heavy critiques a nation unwilling to come to terms with its traumatic past; Thomas Page McBee‘s Amateur tries to understand why men fight; and Sharmila Sen‘s Not Quite Not White explores how integral whiteness can be to our idea of Americanness.


Books of journeys, adventures, and migrations.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro on the scrappy New York teen who stowed away on a 1928 expedition to Antarctica; Laura Smith on vanishing as a way to reclaim your life; William E. Glassley on his geological expeditions to Greeland to uncover the world’s oldest secret; Lauren Hilgers on Chinese political dissidents building a new life in New York; Eileen Truax on Mexican immigrants living in fear of deportation in America; and Lauren Markham on Salvadoran teens seeking safety far away from home.


Books about faith.

Meghan O’Gieblyn‘s essays hinge on faith and feeling left behind in the Midewst; R.O. Kwon‘s novel The Incendiaries tests the fault lines of lost faith and violence; Jessica Wilbanks‘ memoir is a search for her childhood faith’s origins.


Cultural studies and criticism.

Maya Rao on the patriarchal mentality in the oil boomtowns of North Dakota; Elizabeth Rush on the first areas of the U.S. affected by rising sea levels; Elizabeth Gillespie McRae on the white mothers who violently opposed school integration in the South; Rowan Moore Gerety on daily life in Mozambique, one of the world’s fastest growing economies; Christopher C. King on Europe’s oldest surviving folk music tradition; Agnès Poirer on the intellectual life that flourished in postwar Paris; Alice Bolin on our obsession with dead girls; Michelle Tea on the perils of queer memoir; and Natalie Hopkinson on art as political protest.


Books that are about just one specific thing.

Susan Hand Shetterly on seaweed, Richard Sugg on fairies, Michael Engelhard on polar bears. 

 

Happy holidays!
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James Baldwin and the Lost Giovanni’s Room Screenplay

(Photo by Anthony Barboza/Getty Images)

Michael Raeburn was in his early 30s when he first met James Baldwin in 1974, a chance encounter at the London book launch for If Beale Street Could Talk. Raeburn was an aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter, with just one short film on his resume, while Baldwin was a literary giant, an essayist, and a civil rights activist. The connection between the two was instantaneous. “He was an extremely influential figure in my life,” Raeburn says. “We were very strangely connected in an almost psychic way. I knew when he would arrive somewhere—he’d travel to New York City, and I would be aware of when he’d arrive at his house.” Read more…

A Mysterious Crack Appears: Past Trauma and Future Doom Meet in “Friday Black”

A sinkhole opened up in Philadelphia on Monday, January 9, 2017. Matt Rourke / AP

Alana Mohamed | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,988 words)

There is a certain genre of viral news story that we recycle every so often: odd activity on the earth’s seemingly stable surface that, while probably having a reasonable explanation, is reported on with breathless excitement when its cause is still unknown. “Mysterious Crack Appears In Mexico,” one headline shouts. “Mysterious crack appears in Wyoming landscape”; “A giant crack in Kenya opens up, but what’s causing it?”; “Splitsville: 2-Mile-Long Crack Opens in Arizona Desert”; “The White House lawn has developed a mysterious sinkhole that’s ‘growing larger by the day.’”

The follow-up stories (“Giant Wyoming Crack Explained”; “Let it sink in: The White House sinkhole is no more”) rarely gain the same traction. The mystery offers a chance to surrender control, an increasingly tantalizing option in a world algorithmically engineered to offer us the appearance of optimized choice. We choose, momentarily, to believe in something bottomless and chaotic. Read more…

When Richard Nixon Declared War on the Media

(Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

More than 40 years ago, Richard Nixon subtly changed the modern presidency. During past administrations, the American news media had always been referred to as “the press,” but Nixon, whose contentious relationship with the nation’s newsrooms was longstanding, tweaked that policy, and began labeling the press as “the media,” a term he felt sounded more ominous and less favorable. As Jon Marshall wrote in 2014 for The Atlantic, Nixon was the first president to exclusively use this term, and while subsequent presidents were similarly at odds with those whose job it is to hold the country’s chief executive in check, none were as vitriolic as Nixon.

Read more…