Search Results for: new yorker

The Gilded Age of (Unpaid) Internet Writing

Apple Computer / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (2,976 words)

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

In 1998, my first real job — at which I was terrible — was as an editorial assistant for a New York book publisher. My breathtakingly privileged days consisted of emailing mean jokes about the assistants I didn’t like to the assistants I did, and slacking off at my desk during my boss’s long lunches. That’s when I discovered these things called “webzines.” My 1993 black-and-white PowerBook had been powerful enough for abysmal college essays on Heinrich von Kleist, but not for something called a browser, so it was not until my entrée to the professional world and its professional-issue Windows 98 that I began “surfing the ‘Net” in earnest.

In the nascent years of online ubiquity — when CHHHHHHHHHH BEEboo BEEboo BEEboo became a household noise, and not just something for extreme nerds — the web was both very big and very small. In 1996 there were only 100,000 websites in the Whole Wide World. (Today there are almost two billion.) Plus, aside from a few early leaders in e-commerce, ’90s sites were usually personal homepages, accessible only to the visitor patient and accurate enough to type the precise address, down to the tilde. Alas, what made the webzines of the late ’90s the best was also what would end up making the internet the worst: anyone could publish anything about anything, and very few people expected to be paid.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Trump shakes Putin's hand
Photo by Chris McGrath / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer, Michael J. Mooney, Elisa Gabbert, Nicole Chung, and Ashley Fetters.

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

Falling in Love with Chicago at Night: An Interview with Jessica Hopper

University of Texas Press / Author photo by David Sampson

Ashley Naftule | Longreads | September 2018 | 9 minutes (2,464 words)

It takes a writer of considerable talent to gear-shift from meditations on mortality to goofy stoner daydreams (and not give the reader whiplash while she’s doing it). It’s a tonal trick Jessica Hopper pulls off over and over again in Night Moves, a poignant (and often hilarious) memoir of her time in Chicago in the early aughts. On one page, Hopper is solemnly reflecting, “You make peace with death’s swift manners and it raises you up”; on another, she’s wondering what it’d be like to run over a great poet with a dune buggy. Ruminations on aging, community, love, and friendships stand shoulder-to-shoulder with sharp, madcap anecdotes, like when a stranger at a nightclub says Hopper resembles “a kabuki donkey” on the dancefloor, or when a pair of socialites at a music festival are aghast at how she’s eating an apple directly off the core. The poetry and absurdity of existence are constant companions in the pages of Night Moves.

The veteran author’s easy grace with the written word comes as no surprise when you take her long career into account. Starting off as a D.I.Y. zine writer, Hopper quickly rose through the ranks to become a freelancer and contributor to publications like SPIN, Grand Royal, Rolling Stone, GQ, Punk Planet, and The Chicago Reader. She’s been an editor at Pitchfork, Rookie, MTV News, and the University of Texas Press. Her knack for juggling incisive cultural criticism with personal reflections and wry humor can be seen in her 2015 collection of music writing, The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic.

While music comes up often in Night Moves (“Loving the Smiths is one thing, but loving Morrissey is another thing entirely,” Hopper writes), it’s a book that’s more concerned with what happens just outside of and right next to the rituals of listening to records and going to shows. It’s a book about long bike rides to venues, the sadness of watching friends get blitzed on cocaine at dance nights, the joys of holing up in an apartment and reading back issues of The New Yorker while the city freezes outside. Hopper’s book is a testament to the pleasures of bumming around, the ecstasy of slowing down and enjoying the neighborhood and your friends before career and family and all the other milestones of adulthood start accelerating your timeline. Read more…

The Writer Alone

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Tajja Isen | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (3,511 words)

Imagine the kind of company I was: Between sixteen and twenty-three, solitude lit up the part of my brain that other people save for smoking breaks. How long it had been since my last bout and how soon till the next, when I’d finally slip away and breathe easy. If the smoker’s unit of time was the splintered hour, mine was the unbroken day. Real life did not begin until I was alone. Anything done around others was merely provisional, a wavering line between two points, during which my mind was mostly elsewhere — if I even showed up. To friends, I made out like I was put upon, as though these ascetic stretches were mandated by some higher-up. As if it didn’t feel a bit like playing god to cancel plans and sever a connection. I affected regret, but I thrived on these excisions; tiny cuts that whittled my world into a zone of focus. These, I believed, were the optimal, and probably only, conditions under which art could be made.

It worked, at least for a while. I was militant about the time and space in which I wrote. I’d mimic the rhythms of different idols — Kafka’s wee hours worked well, as we shared a need for silence in houses stuffed with other lives; Franzen’s free passage from early rising to writing, an unbroken motion from one dream state to another. I briefly considered the Nabokovian retreat to drafting in the bathroom. Unpopular heroes, now, but I was very young, and men remain a benchmark for permission to take your work seriously. Franzen in particular compelled me; the way he made his dedication into a sort of faith. Stretches of The Corrections were written with shades drawn and lights off, the author blindfolded — presumably of his own accord — and his ears doubly blocked by plugs and muffs. This to keep the work “free of all clichés.” I admit to a curiosity about this method that still flickers.

Now, this kind of glass-blown aloneness feels like it’s fallen out of fashion; something consigned to a certain type of writer from the late nineties or early aughts, for whom the internet remains a thing to be poked with a stick from afar. I’ve been shaped by Franzen’s work more than it’s cool to admit, but in late 2018, it’s hard to conceive of a model of “genius” that’s aged worse than a white man alone in the dark, sensorily deprived in preparation to pass judgment on the culture. Who dares to cover his eyes, especially now? We tend, and rightly, to be suspicious of the artist who wants to hold herself apart from the quick, polluting current of opinion, yet still reserve the right to jump in and condemn it. The total opt-out has become the stuff of satire, the absurdity of privilege writ large, whether through its deliberate skewering in fiction or the razor-edged photographic negative of a magazine profile. Most people have lives. Read more…

Eight Days in September, A Decade Later

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

In the ‘Notes and Sources’ section of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s bestseller, Too Big To Fail, the New York Times financial writer and columnist details the extraordinary access he was given about the events of the Lehman Weekend—that is, the two days in mid-September 2008 in which the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America, and insurance giant AIG nearly collapsed.

“One CEO, whom I have known for several years, arrived at our first meeting with meticulous handwritten notes,” writes Sorkin. “‘I’m giving you them for the same reason I took them,’ he explained. ‘This was history in the making.'” While Sorkin’s gripping narrative not only illuminates the minute-by-minute details of the weekend, but also the lead-up to the events that nearly cratered the U.S. economy, his book wasn’t the first account to highlight the minute particulars and nuances of how close the nation came to another Great Depression—that would be James B. Stewart’s ‘Eight Days,’ which was published in the New Yorker about a month before Sorkin’s book debuted.

While Stewart’s reporting isn’t as encompassing as Sorkin’s, which is understandable given the level of access that Sorkin possessed — sources provided videotaped recordings of internal meetings as well as illustrations documenting the seating arrangement of fateful meetings — Stewart deftly navigated the topsy-turvy nature of a 72 hour period that has since afflicted multiple generations. The genius of ‘Eight Days’ is how seamlessly Stewart weaves weighty material into a feature of how Wall Street nearly broke America.

Referring to a Lehman failure, the Treasury official said, “We knew it would be awful.” At the same time, after months of turmoil, anyone still owning Lehman stock or commercial paper had to be considered a speculator. Perhaps investors would stop assuming that the government would bail out every wayward financial institution and adjust their risk-taking accordingly. “Everybody in some part of their brain thought it was a good thing for Lehman Brothers to go under,” the Treasury official said. “Was this ten per cent of the brain? I don’t know. . . . But the thought was there somewhere.”

At noon, Steven Shafran, a senior adviser at the Treasury, text-messaged his colleagues, “We lost the patient.”

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Eli Saslow on the Slow-Motion Toppling of Derek Black’s White Supremacism

Associated Press

Jonny Auping | Longreads | September 2018 | 19 minutes (5,065 words)

Before Richard Spencer became one of white nationalism’s poster boys, before Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos helped normalize stringently racist ideologies, before Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, and before the Charlottesville riots, no one was more suited and prepared to head this generation of prejudice than Derek Black.

Derek’s father, Don, founded Stormfront, the largest online community for racists. His godfather was David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard and probably the most notorious white nationalist alive. By his mid-teens Derek was living up to that pedigree. He hosted a daily radio show in which he advocated for an all-white America and denied the legitimacy of the Holocaust. By 2008, among his community, Derek was a prodigy.

How Derek became a white nationalist is relatively obvious: He was a product of his environment. But in his new book, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, Eli Saslow dives into a much more complex and emotional journey: How Derek dug his way out.

Saslow’s detailed account of Derek’s time at New College in Florida — from his early double life as a student and white nationalist figurehead to his eventual public disavowing of his previous ideology in a letter to the SPLC — required interviews with classmates who publicly shunned him and ones who chose to engage patiently with him (including Jewish and immigrant students who reached out to him), as well as with committed white nationalists, included Derek’s immediate family. In his reporting, Saslow spent “hundreds of hours” with Derek himself, and gained access to personal emails, Facebook, and g-chats containing intense debates, which now serve as the gradual debunking of racist ideologies.

The former Pulitzer Prize winner took the time to speak with Longreads about Derek’s transformation, the rise of white nationalism in the U.S. and whether or not there’s a proper way to engage someone who promotes hateful rhetoric. Read more…

No, I Will Not Debate You

akindo / Getty, Composite by Katie Kosma

Laurie Penny | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,795 words)

“The media here is the opposition party.
They don’t understand this country.”
— Steve Bannon, to the New York Times

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury
when substituted for insight and understanding.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

* * *

There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.

Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.

This bad-faith argument is a repeating refrain of this low, dishonest decade, and this month it built to another crescendo. In the U.S., The New Yorker bowed to public pressure and disinvited Steve Bannon, Trump’s neo-nationalist former chief strategist, from its literary festival. And in the U.K., The Economist chose to do the opposite.

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On Being an Ill Woman: A Reading List of Doctors’ Dismissal and Disbelief

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Just months after I turned 18, I sat on the white crinkly paper of a patient bed, waiting for my first neurology appointment. I repeated, I am a Division I athlete, as if reminding myself of my athleticism would somehow erase the strange symptoms of fainting, blurred vision, and dizziness that had plagued me for the previous few weeks. The illness, like a flower from concrete, seemed inconceivable. I had been healthy my whole life.

The doctor rapped on the door, entered, and shook my hand before taking a seat. “The doc at your school called. Thinks you had a bad reaction to medication,” he said, referencing antibiotics I’d been prescribed for bronchitis. “He says you’ve had blurry vision, vertigo, two episodes of syncope.”

“Is syncope fainting?” I asked, feeling as though the language of my body had been translated into something incomprehensible. I wanted to snatch it back.

“Yeah, yeah,” he crooned. “You been running?”

“I’ve been trying,” I told him. Each attempt ended in a swell of vertigo and subsequent collapse. The assistant coach carried me to my trainer, who took my blood pressure and pulse, always murmuring, “you’re fine.” The athletic doctor assigned to our team, after performing several tests, had told me that I presented no abnormalities; he encouraged me to run.

The neurologist pulled out a mallet and tapped my knee. My lower leg reacted as it should, swinging forward like a pendulum. He told me to walk, and watched as I made my way from the bed to the door, and back again. “It’s fine for you to run,” he said, scribbling down notes. “I don’t see what’s holding you back.”

I left the appointment with a sense of unease. If the athletic doctor, a trainer, and a neurologist had seen me and told me I was fine, then was I really sick? At the time, I didn’t know how to advocate for myself while in the position of patient. I felt alone with my illness, scared of my own body.

Eight years have passed since then and, in my own continuing journey toward a diagnosis, I have felt a strange mix of emotions when reading narratives of other women being discredited by medical professionals. I feel outraged when I read about their attempts to voice symptoms, only to be silenced. Guilt — and a desire to work toward reforming our current medical system — washes over me when I am reminded of the extent of my own privilege.

The essays below are both a salve to the years of dismissal from doctors and a call to action. I’m inspired by other women’s efforts to advocate for themselves, practice radical empathy, change policy, and create resources so that other patients don’t endure the same harrowing experiences. When I hear my voice in chorus alongside them, I feel as though I’m somehow part of a community, or at least not alone anymore.

1. “PCOS. POC. Poetry. & Pilates” (Tiana Clark, Lenny Letter, April 13, 2018)

Tiana Clark tries to ignore symptoms of panic attacks, hair loss, brain fog, and more, until her ovary throbs with an excruciating pain that forces her to the walk-in clinic. There, a doctor waves Clark’s symptoms away with painkillers and, at an appointment with a white female gynecologist soon after, Clark’s self-diagnosis of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) is initially belittled.

Her casual dismissal of my problem reminded me of what I’d so often seen living as a black woman in America: an erasure of my distress.

In this incisive, empowering essay, Clark highlights researched material about black women’s health care in the U.S., relays her own harrowing experiences with medical professionals, and emphasizes the importance of learning to advocate for herself.

2. “Memoirs of Disease and Disbelief” (Lidija Haas, The New Yorker, June 4 & 11, 2018)

By examining female narratives of illness ranging from Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill, Jennifer Brea’s documentary film Unrest, Susan Sontag’s canonical Illness as Metaphor, and Christina Crosby’s book A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain, among others, Lidija Haas reviews Porochista Khakpour’s Sick with an eye toward how storytelling can affect treatment, act as a form of escape, and undermine dangerous expectations of what a patient should be.

(Related: read an excerpt of Porochista Khakpour’s Sick here at Longreads.)

3. “Doctors Told Her She Was Just Fat. She Actually Had Cancer” (Maya Dusenbery, Cosmopolitan, April 17, 2018)

After experiencing coughing fits for three years, Rebecca Hiles visits the doctor, only to be told her condition is “weight-related.” Hiles is not the only one to be dismissed in this way; in this insightful and eye-opening essay, Dusenbery collects stories of women who have been fat-shamed by doctors rather than being treated with care, resulting too often in dangerous downward spirals in illness.

4. “The Reality of Women’s Pain” (Rachel Vorona Cote, The New Republic, March 7, 2018)

Rachel Vorona Cote situates Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain, a book about Norman’s arduous experiences receiving treatment for endometriosis within a long history of “wild theories about female anatomy” such as the “wandering womb” theory of Ancient Greece, Freud’s dismissal of patients as hysterical, and others.

As Norman communicates so powerfully, a woman’s relationship to her pain is a snarled coil of memory and socialization.

(Related: read Abby Norman’s Women’s Troubles, from Harper’s.)

5. “On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness” (Nafissa Thompson-Spires, The Paris Review April 9, 2018)

Nafissa Thompson-Spires not only chronicles the emergency room visit and appointments that led to her initial diagnosis of endometriosis, but also writes about what it means to be a woman with an invisible chronic illness, and her identity as a black woman within the realm of the medical world.

In Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks problematizes the persistent myth of the strong black woman. This myth contributes to real-life consequences in medicine and elsewhere.

6. “Checkbox Colonization: The Erasure of Indigenous People in Chronic Illness” (Jen Deerinwater, Bitch Magazine, June 8, 2018)

When Jen Deerinwater visits the doctor, her identity as “a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma” is erased by problematic intake forms that only include the options of “American Indian” or “Native American,” and she is often asked “degrading and humiliating questions” by medical professionals. Deerinwater lists a litany of ways in which Native people are ignored and mistreated by the healthcare system, resulting in lack of access to resources and treatments, shortened lifespans, and a host of other harms.

(Related: read other essays from the 15-part “In Sickness” series from Bitch Magazine.)

7. “Health Care System Fails Many Transgender Americans” (Neda Ulaby, NPR, November 21, 2017)

As of November 2017, 31 percent of transgender Americans lacked regular access to healthcare, due in part to how difficult it is for transgender people to find jobs. Neda Ulaby notes that “insurance companies and many medical professionals still treat them as though their bodies don’t make any sense,” which causes anxiety for trans people when visiting physicians, something Planned Parenthood is trying to ameliorate through staff training.

(Related: read Making Primary Care Trans-Friendly by Keren Landman, from The Atlantic.)

8. “A Matter of Life & Death: Why Are Black Women in the U.S. More Likely to Die During or After Childbirth?” (Meaghan Winter, Essence, September 26, 2017)

When Fathiyyah “Tia” Doster was pregnant, she began to feel bloated late one night. Luckily, she visited the hospital, where she safely delivered her baby. A diagnosis of hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, low platelet count (HELLP) syndrome left her hospitalized for more than three months, but alive. Other pregnant women are not so lucky. Meaghan Winter explores the historic backdrop of healthcare for black women, the current political climate which is threatening women’s access to insurance and clinics, and bias within hospitals, all of which have contributed to rising rates of maternal mortality.

The complex web of causes — which includes genetic predispositions, chronic stress, racial bias and structural barriers to health care — contributes to the racial disparity in maternal health.

In the end, Winter offers strategies for health providers, reformers, and patients and their families to implement necessary change.

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir of running and illness.

Twelve Longreads for Aretha Franklin

NEW YORK - JANUARY 09: Soul singer Aretha Franklin reviews a copy of her album "Aretha Franklin - Soul '69" at Atlantic Records studios on January 9, 1969 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Aretha Louise Franklin was born in a small house on Lucy Avenue in Memphis, south of where the Mississippi River borders the city, on March 25, 1942. By the age of 2, she moved to Buffalo, NY, and then by 4, Detroit, where she’d live most of her life and where she died this Thursday morning, at the age of 76. Her father, Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin presided over a congregation at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. Aretha began singing there as a child, and through his connections, she met Sam Cooke, Dinah Washington, Clara Ward, and Mahalia Jackson, all innovators who would influence the kind of musician she became. At 18, Aretha Franklin signed to Columbia Records, the recording home of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. She released seven albums, then moved to Atlantic in 1967, where she released the string of recordings for which she is most well known, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Lady Soul, and Aretha Now. 

Franklin became commercially successful and critically lauded. She earned 18 Grammy Awards and dominated the now defunct category for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance with 23 nominations and 11 wins. (Anita Baker won it the second most, with 5 wins). What a female vocalist was and could be, inside and outside the soul tradition, was and is forever altered by what Aretha did behind her piano. “She is the reason why women want to sing,” Mary J. Blige told Rolling Stone.

I love ethereal Aretha, when she sang atop the flutes in “Daydreaming.” But I also love how the bridges in  “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Ain’t No Way  sound like a crisis, a love panic, and the slow build and back and forth with her backing vocalists in “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” Aretha Franklin’s catalog is vast and deep, spanning decades, registers, genres. Here is a list of my favorite longreads for and about her so far.

1.“Aretha Franklin, the ‘Queen of Soul,’ Dies at 76,”  John Pareles, New York Times, August 2018.

The New York Times’ official obituary, with full exposition of the chapters of her life. 

2. “The 50 Greatest Aretha Franklin Songs,” Rolling Stone, August 2018.

“Respect,” recorded in 1967, penned originally by Otis Redding, is number one.

3. “How Aretha Franklin Created “Respect,” Carl Wilson, Slate, August 2018.

It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that Aretha’s flip of Redding’s more conventional, male-dominant song of domestic conflict and desire into a hymn of sexual and political liberation paralleled the creative subversion in those sermons. Her most distinctive rewrite, the addition of the “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/ Find out what it means to me” bridge—which it’s still shocking to recall was completely absent from the original—has a touch of a preacher’s pedagogy, the moment when the celebrant might focus in on a scriptural passage and muse, “Think of this word, ‘respect.’ What does the Lord mean when he uses it? What does it mean, for example, within your own home?” But to keep proceedings from getting too heady, she immediately cuts in with language from the street: “Take care, TCB” (meaning “take care of business”) and “sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me” (meaning … well, that’s up to you).

4. “Aretha Franklin’s Astonishing ‘Dr. Feelgood,'” Emily Lordi, The New Yorker, August 2018.

Emily Lordi, author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and American Literature, walks us through a live performance of Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood” at the Fillmore West.

5. “Aretha Franklin Was America’s Truest Voice,” Ann Powers, NPR, August 2018.

In this tribute, Ann Powers says, “Everything popular music needs to be is there in Franklin’s songs.”

6. “A Song for Aretha,” Nell Boeschenstein, The Morning News, February 2011.

The author recalls a life of listening to and watching Aretha.

I don’t claim to know what a woman’s got to do to make it in America these days, or ever. I am still only beginning to feel my way in that darkness. That said, when I look at, listen to, or think about Aretha Franklin, I recognize in her person what I want one day for myself. In her I see a certain awareness that life is difficult and life is wonderful and that, either way, you pick up and carry on with your shoulders as square and your voice as strong as you know how to make them. Either way, you pick up and carry on with an awareness that the world out there is larger than any me or you, her or him, but also that you and me, he and she is where it all began in the first place. In her I see a way of living that is equal parts heart and head, a way which never loses sight of priorities. She has remained stalwart in her conviction of self. And that means something these days, as I sometimes wonder whether being oneself even matters anymore.

We all have people we feel this way about. One friend says she learned to live from listening to Ella Fitzgerald. My mother says she learned from reading Eudora Welty. Joan Didion certainly showed an uncharacteristic amount of admiration for someone when she wrote of Georgia O’Keefe, “Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keefe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it.”

For me, Aretha reigns with the strength she finds in vulnerability. Flaws, heartaches, mistakes, the stuff of life: These are the things she takes to heart, claims as her own. By claiming, she can then turn them around and offer back to us what she has learned. She can say, “Look at this. Feel this. This is us, don’t you see?” I wish for my own voice what Aretha’s has had from the beginning: a sense of self so strong that she had to open her mouth and sing to keep from exploding, to keep herself whole.

7. “Soul Survivor,” David Remnick, The New Yorker, April 2016.

Remnick’s profile of Franklin includes thoughts from former President Obama and a recollection of her December 9, 2015 performance of “A Natural Woman” at Kennedy Center Honors.

8. “Aretha Franklin, 1942-2018: Long Live the Queen of Soul,” Kelley Carter, The Undefeated, August 2018.

A heartfelt recollection from Detriot native writer and documentarian Kelley Carter:

I had backstage credentials and I wanted to see if I could get some time with her — just one quote for my would-be story. Because of the story about her failure to pay bills, she’d cut the Free Press off. No interview requests were granted. Not even to talk about her iconic song and its forthcoming anniversary. But in a room backstage at an awards show, I could be somewhat anonymous.

I raised my hand and she called on me. I’d heard a rumor that she loved the version of “Respect” that this blue-eyed soul group from Ann Arbor, Michigan, The Rationals, had recorded. A crew of white boys from Washtenaw County had taken an Otis Redding track and somehow did something to it that made Franklin and her sisters, Erma and Carolyn, take notice. It was my chance to get something from her. And I would have taken anything from her to help push whatever my story on her ended up being.

I remember her looking out at me as I asked. I purposefully coughed over my affiliation’s name because I knew the disdain she had for the Free Press. She gave me what I was looking for. It was a quick reply; she was humored. “We added the sock-it-to-me’s to it,” she said, looking down on me from a stage in that small room. I could tell for a brief moment that she was thinking of her sisters, who had died long ago: Erma from throat cancer and Carolyn from breast cancer. I saw it in her face. The memory was dancing in her mind.

When I asked my mother, a longtime Detroiter, to tell me what the summer of ’67 in Detroit was like during the thick of the riots, the summer Franklin’s song hit No. 1, I was taken aback as she shared with me how men and women were running in the streets, shouting back at police officers, “Sock it to me!” as they were trying to stay alive, clearly inspired by Franklin’s anthem, which had hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in early June.

9. “The Man with the Million Dollar Voice: The Mighty but Divided Soul of C.L. Franklin.” Tony Scherman, The Believer, July 2013.

This deep dive into the life and preaching artistry of Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father, casts a light on the talents of her parents.

If Aretha did grow up unhappy, her relationship with C.L. would have played a major role. The favorite child bore the weight of a demanding father’s expectations and constant, intrusive attention. Aretha craved C.L.’s approval. “[She]… would do anything to please [her father],” said a later friend. It was far from a healthy relationship. But as a performer, Aretha couldn’t have asked for a better teacher and model than the Rabbi. The tonal variety, for instance, that he wrung from his big voice found an echo in Aretha’s virtuosic shading. No less an authority than Ray Charles saw little difference between the two Franklins’ styles. “She’s got her father’s feeling and passion,” said Brother Ray. “When C.L. Franklin, one of the last great preachers, delivers a sermon, he builds his case so beautifully you can’t help but see the light. Same when Aretha sings.”

10. “Aretha Franklin Was More Than Just A Great Voice,” Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed, August 2018.

11. “Aretha Franklin Was a Revolutionary Act in Pop,” Rashod Ollison, Virginian Pilot, August 2018.

I don’t remember my life without the sound of Aretha Franklin’s voice. It was a constant in my home. Her music was something of an altar for my mother, as she returned to Franklin through good and bad times. This became true for me as well. No matter the song, be it the mournful wail of “Ain’t No Way” or the stomping funk of “Rock Steady,” Franklin’s voice gave me a solid sense of place. This was especially true, given that my family moved so much when the rent became too high. But one thing never changed: Franklin providing solace through the surface noise of well-worn vinyl. Her 1972 “Amazing Grace” album, the legend’s glorious return to gospel during the peak of her pop career, has been a musical balm for years. I have never been without a copy.

12. “Lady Soul, Singing it Like it Is,” Time, June 1968.

In her first Time cover story, its writers try to understand soul.

But what is soul? “It’s like electricity —we don’t really know what it is,” says Singer Ray Charles. “But it’s a force that can light a room.” The force radiates from a sense of selfhood, a sense of knowing where you’ve been and what it means. Soul is a way of life —but it is always the hard way. Its essence is ingrained in those who suffer and endure to laugh about it later. Soul is happening everywhere, in esthetics and anthropology, history and dietetics, haberdashery and politics—although Hubert Humphrey’s recent declaration to college students that he was a “soul brother” was all wrong. Soul is letting others say you’re a soul brother. Soul is not needing others to say it.

Where soul is really at today is pop music. It emanates from the rumble of gospel chords and the plaintive cry of the blues. It is compounded of raw emotion, pulsing rhythm and spare, earthy lyrics—all suffused with the sensual, somewhat melancholy vibrations of the Negro idiom. Always the Negro idiom. LeRoi Jones, the militant Negro playwright, says: “Soul music is music coming out of the black spirit.” For decades, it only reverberated around the edges of white pop music, injecting its native accent here and there; now it has penetrated to the core, and its tone and beat are triumphant.

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At Home on Carmine Street

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Abigail Rasminsky | Longreads | August 2018| 14 minutes (3,400 words)

 

When the two stragglers let the door clatter shut behind them, I turn the lights in the restaurant’s dining room all the way up and zip over to the stereo. For the past few months, we’ve been blasting the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” while closing. We all sing You may ask yourself, my God, what have I done? while manning brooms and mops and rags, none of us aware that we are singing of our own lives. At the chorus, we give in, drop what we’re doing and dance: Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…

I stack the chairs and tables as I’ve been taught, sweep crusts of bread and remnants of lettuce off the tiled floor, grab the register drawer with the remaining cash — 200, 300 bucks tops, since I’ve been emptying it steadily all night — while, behind the counter, Emily cleans the cappuccino machine and stashes the whipped cream, milk, and pie in the fridge. Tom drags the mop over the floor I just swept, the bucket for dunking sitting at the lip of the kitchen.

During the day, the place is bustling with people — upstairs, downstairs, out front, gates open all summer long. But now it’s 12 a.m. at The Grey Dog on Carmine Street in the West Village, and everyone else has gone home.

I leave Emily and Tom singing in the dining room, and carry the money from the register, platter-like in one hand, through the swinging doors of the upstairs kitchen, down the narrow, slippery staircase, past the dishwashing station and the baker’s area, where the croissants and scones are warmed at 5:30 a.m., past the catering department, where two Irishmen make platters of Caesar salad and triangular-cut sandwiches all morning to the sounds of NY1, and get to the restaurant’s windowless, corner office. I unhook the mass of keys from the loop of my jeans and let myself in. Sammy, the resident cat, slips past my ankles. The office reeks of cigarettes and pot.

Up on the desk, I count the cash, separating crisp bills from soft ones, count it again, and add it to the change drawer under the desk, which is always stacked with rows of 1s, 5s, 10s, 20s, and a couple of 50s — $1,000 or $2,000 total. Much of that night’s profits — but not all — have already been rolled up, wrapped in elastic bands, and dropped into a heavy metal drop box in the corner of the room.

When I’m done, I switch off the lights and lock the door behind me, making sure that Sammy is inside. If I forget — as I have before — the cat wandering the restaurant will set off the alarm at 3 a.m. and my boss will get a call from the police: There’s been a break-in.

Just as I turn around to walk through the unlit basement and bound back up the stairs, I see Emily in the semi-darkness. There is a gun by her right ear, its barrel pointing at me. Her body is bigger than usual these days — she’s 27 and six months pregnant with her second child, a mistake courtesy of a quick fuck in the restaurant’s downstairs bathroom with one of the cooks. They broke the sink off the wall, and now here she is, shuffling along the slick floor, belly first, with a man at her back, pushing her slowly into me, toward the office door at my back. I can barely see his face; it is nuzzled behind Emily’s hair and concealed by the panic on her own face.

Emily and I stand frozen in the underground quiet, looking at each other.

Then it hits me: The door.

I didn’t lock the front door.

Emily whispers, “Open the office.”
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