Search Results for: new yorker

Misty Copeland’s Achievement and the Future of Ballet

“My goal is to become the first African-American principal dancer with A.B.T.”

-That’s Misty Copeland, in a 2014 profile in The New Yorker. She was promoted on June 30, becoming the first African-American female principal dancer in the American Ballet Theater’s 75-year history.

Copeland got her start in ballet when she was 13:

Cantine had a background in classical dance, and, after working with Misty for a short time she suggested that she try the ballet class at the Boys & Girls Club. “I wasn’t excited by the idea of being with people I didn’t know, and though I loved movement, I had no particular feelings about ballet,” Copeland said. “But I didn’t want to displease Liz.”

Cindy Bradley, who taught the class, told me, “I remember putting my hand on her foot, putting it into a tendu pointe, and she was definitely able to go into that position—she was able to go into all the positions that I put her into that day—but it wasn’t about that.” Bradley said she had a kind of vision, “right then, that first day, of this little girl becoming amazing.”

Copeland recalls her first class differently: “I was so embarrassed. I didn’t know anything that the other girls in the class knew; I thought I was doing everything wrong.”

In this segment for CBS, Copeland says the ballet world still has a long way to go in terms of embracing diversity:

“It doesn’t matter what color I am, it doesn’t matter what body type I have. … It’s something that’s going to take the ballet world a long time to get used to, and I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime. But it’s starting.”

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Interior of the United States Supreme Court. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

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

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

* * *

Read more…

Science, Chance, and Emotion with Real Cosima

Clone dance party. Photo via BBC America

Maud Newton | Longreads | June 2015 | 24 minutes (5,889 words)

 

BBC America’s Orphan Black seems so immediate, so plausible, so unfuturistic, that Cosima Herter, the show’s science consultant, is used to being asked whether human reproductive cloning could be happening in a lab somewhere right now. If so, we wouldn’t know, she says. It’s illegal in so many countries, no one would want to talk about it. But one thing is clear, she told me, when we met to talk about her work on the show: in our era of synthetic biology — of Craig Venter’s biological printer and George Church’s standardized biological parts, of three-parent babies and of treatment for cancer that involves reengineered viruses— genetics as we have conceived of it is already dead. We don’t have the language for what is emerging. Read more…

Defending Journalist Joseph Mitchell

In the April issue of the New York Review of Books Janet Malcolm wrote about the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell, and responded to Thomas Kunkel’s new Mitchell biography. The biography reveals how Mitchell invented some of his beloved material, which raises questions about larger journalistic standards, betraying readers’ trust, and what effect Mitchell’s invention and embellishment might have on the reputation of pieces like “Mr. Hunter’s Grave.” On this Malcolm is clear:

Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to. This is why they are journalists rather than novelists or short-story writers. They depend on the kindness of the strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads. Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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

* * *

Read more…

Argentina’s Stolen Children

Photo: BoNoNoBo

It sounds like something out of a bestselling dystopian novel, but it’s horribly real: in the 1970s, tens of thousands of so-called subversives were murdered by a despotic Argentinian government. What happened to their children? They grew up under the roofs of their parents’ killers. Distraught, the women of Argentina organized. Now, two of the most famous siblings in the country are under investigation–could they be children of the desaparecidos? Francis Goldman investigates in the New Yorker.

On April 22, 2010, the country’s four largest daily newspapers published a letter signed by Marcela and Felipe. “Like so many adopted children, we don’t know our biological identities, but like any other person we’ve formed our own identities in the course of our lives,” they wrote. “We’ve never seen any concrete proof that we are children of the disappeared. . . . The political use of our story seems unjust. . . . Thirty-four years ago our mother chose us to be her children. And we, every day, choose her to be our mother.” The letter did little to dispel the general impression of the siblings as captives, whose every utterance was controlled by Grupo Clarín and its lawyers, and it only added to the public’s perception of them as having a sense of aggrieved entitlement. Any adopted children born in Argentina in 1976, especially those with as many irregularities in their adoption records as Marcela and Felipe, could be subject to an investigation. The Noble Herreras’ long history of resistance made it look as if they were desperate to hide the truth.

Read the story

Mr. and Mrs. B

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Alexander Chee | Apology Magazine | Winter 2014 | 19 minutes (4,822 words)

 

This essay by novelist Alexander Chee first appeared in Apology magazine’s third issue (Winter 2014). Apology is a semiannual print journal of art, interviews and literature, created by ex-Vice editor-in-chief Jesse Pearson. The fourth issue is available for preorder. Our thanks to Alexander Chee and Apology for allowing us to reprint this essay here.

* * *

How could you, my friends would ask, when I told them. How could you work for someone like him? Do you ever want to just pick up a knife and stab him in the neck? Poison his food?

You would be a hero, one friend said.

I did not want to stab him, and I did not want to poison him. From our first meeting, it was clear, he was in decline. And as for how could I, well, like many people, I needed the money. Read more…

Reinventing One of Scotland’s Most Unpronounceable Whiskies

No one knows why Bruichladdich whisky tastes the way it does, but plenty of people think they do. In Reynier’s view, the distillery’s proximity to a shallow bay makes a difference. (Bruichladdich is Gaelic for “raised beach.”) When the tide goes out, across the road, algae are exposed to the air, which influences the spirit as it matures, giving it a maritime tang.

Officially, the company also credits its distinctive tall, narrow pot stills, the oldest of which has been in use since 1881. But McEwan differs sharply. “The shape of the pot is not significant, in terms of flavor—this is a kind of fairy story,” he says. “It’s the artisanal skills of the whisky-maker.”

Kelefa Sanneh, writing in The New Yorker about a London wine dealer’s mission to revive the revered  Bruichladdich distillery, on the Scottish island of Islay. Sanneh’s piece ran in February 2013.

 

Read the story

Corruption–and Copulation–in the Baltimore City Detention Center

Photo by Martin

Joyce Mitchell, alleged accomplice to two murderers on the loose from Clinton-Dannemora correctional facility in New York, is hardly the only prison employee to ever have allegedly aided—and had sex with—detainees. From Jeffrey Toobin’s “This Is My Jail” in the April 14, 2014 issue of The New Yorker:

Many relationships between guards and inmates appear to have been consensual, and initiated by the inmates. “When they started having these really young girls as guards, that’s when it really went downhill,” the former inmate Kevin said. “They get infatuated with the gang members.” In a way, the more serious the charges against an inmate, the more deference he would be accorded by the guards. “Most of the C.O.s, they was young,” Vernon, another former inmate, told me. “If you came in with high-profile charges, they would treat you with more respect. The big-time drug kingpins would be more likely to get what they want. The guards would worry about the repercussions if they didn’t. There were relationships in there. I saw a C.O. used to bring McDonald’s to this dude. That’s cause she was his baby mama.”…

…According to the government, Tavon White had sexual relationships with four guards and fathered five children by them. (One of the guards had “Tavon” tattooed on her wrist; another had the name on her neck.) An inmate and gang member named Jamar Anderson was involved with five guards. Female guards smuggled the contraband into the facility, concealing it “in their underwear, hair, internally and elsewhere,” according to a government filing. The guards were subject to cursory or nonexistent searches when they entered the premises, and they also brought in the cell phones for the inmates to use, even though correctional officers were forbidden to carry phones while working.

Read the story

The Beginnings of Ivan Ramen

Longreads Pick

From Lucky Peach‘s long out of print inaugural issue, an essay about what it’s like to operate one of Japan’s finest ramen restaurants while being a white Jewish New Yorker who sneaks rye flour into his noodle dough.

Author: Ivan Orkin
Source: Lucky Peach
Published: Jul 1, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,492 words)