Search Results for: oral history

How New Edition Avoided ‘Heart Break’

Longreads Pick

“The reality is, and will always be, we were in a moment. Nobody—I don’t think—really understood the history that was being made.” The members of New Edition give an oral history of the making of Heart Break, their quadruple platinum album, originally released in 1988.

Source: The Undefeated
Published: Jan 24, 2017
Length: 20 minutes (5,194 words)

Longreads Best of 2016: Under-Recognized Stories

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in under-recognized stories.

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Michael J. Mooney
Dallas-based freelance writer, co-director of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

You Are Not Going to Die Out Here: A Woman’s Terrifying Night in the Chesapeake (John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post)

I saw this story posted and shared a few times when it first ran, but in the middle of an insane election cycle, it didn’t get nearly the attention it deserves. This is the tale of Lauren Connor, a woman who fell off a boat and disappeared amid the crashing waves of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s about the search to find her, by both authorities and her boyfriend, and about a woman whose life had prepared her perfectly for the kinds of challenges that would overwhelm most of us. This is a deadline narrative, but it’s crafted so well—weaving in background and character development at just the right moments, giving readers so many reasons to care—that you couldn’t stop reading if you wanted to.


Kara Platoni
A science reporter from Oakland, California, who teaches at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of We Have the Technology, a book about biohacking.

Michelle’s Case (Annie Brown, California Sunday)

A clear-eyed, thought-provoking retelling of Michelle-Lael Norsworthy’s long legal battle in hope of becoming the first American to receive sex-reassignment surgery while in prison. Her lawyers argued that the surgery was medically necessary and withholding it violated the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But, they argued, rather than grant the surgery and set a legal precedent, the Department of Corrections instead ordered her parole. The piece is a nuanced take on what it’s like to transition in prison—at least 400 California inmates were taking hormone replacement therapy when the article was published in May—where trans women are vulnerable to sexual assault and survivors are placed in a kind of solitary confinement, stuck in limbo in a prison system where it’s unsafe for them to live with men, but they are generally not allowed to live with women. And it asks a bigger question: What kind of medical care must the state cover?


Azmat Khan
Investigative Reporter, New America Future of War Fellow.

Nameplate Necklaces: This Shit Is For Us (Collier Meyerson, Fusion)

At first, it may seem like a simple essay about cultural appropriation, but this opus on the nameplate necklace is so much more than that. It is a beautiful ode to black and brown fashion. It is a moving history of how unique names became a form of political resistance to white supremacy. And it is the biting reality check Carrie Bradshaw so desperately needed. Read more…

In China, Searching for Mysterious Gaps in the Family Tree

Imogene Lim's family: Grandmother Chan with seven of her eight children in Vancouver. Lim's mother, Lillian, is next to her mother, second from right. Mary is on the far left. Lillian and Mary fled Hong Kong during World War II. IMOGENE LIM

Veronique Greenwood | Atlas Obscura | December 2016 | 19 minutes (4,867 words)

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Veronique Greenwood, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

In southern China, not far from where the rice paddies fade into the urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta, there is a place that used to be called the Four Counties. It’s farming country still, even in this age when everyone seems to be heading to make their fortunes in the cities. Small villages of low, tile-roofed houses speckle the landscape. People carry bamboo baskets full of root vegetables on their backs. Stray dogs trot purposefully through the village lanes, eyes alert for kitchen scraps. In the summer, the subtropical sun is like a hammer; in the winter, cold rain sweeps the fields.

It was to this place that Imogene Lim came in 2009. She had just a little bit of information to go on. But Lim, a Canadian anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to Tanzania to observe tribes of former hunter-gatherers, was on a voyage of discovery. And with the help of local authorities, she soon reached the object of her quest. She returned this year for a visit. In a Guangzhou hotel room this fall, having recently arrived from the Four Counties (now five, after a redrawing of borders), she took out a photocopied booklet. The cover showed a calligraphic title, proclaiming it to be a genealogy, and inside were page after page of branching diagrams. It had been given to her by a cousin in the village.

“This is my father,” she said, pointing to a name deep into the pages. Underneath it, in a language she cannot read or speak, it says, “Went to Canada, communication lost. Number of children: Unknown.”

Read more…

Behind the Scenes of Children’s Television: A Reading List

Children’s television programming is always colorful, sometimes educational, and often bizarre. A human-sized hamster wheel? A talking chair? Grown men going to bat for a herd of rainbow-colored ponies? These stories explore the art and economics of making television for kids.

1. “‘It Smelled Like Death’: An Oral History of the Double Dare Obstacle Course.” (Marah Eakin, A.V. Club, November 2016)

Nickelodeon’s hit game show, Double Dare, aired in the late ’80s and early ’90s (with a season-long remount in 2000), and one of its biggest draws was its obstacle course. The A.V. Club spoke to host Marc Summers, the producers and a variety of set designers about the gallons of whipped cream, baked beans and Gak it took to make the messiest show on TV. Pro tip: Don’t eat while reading this. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

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Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories

Longreads Pick

An oral history of Prince’s life and career, as told by his friends.

Source: GQ
Published: Dec 8, 2016
Length: 60 minutes (15,000 words)

The Moment Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’ Changed Course

KAHANE CORN COOPERMAN(field producer, later co-executive producer, 1996-2015):

I produced a field piece, with Stacey Grenrock Woods as the correspondent, about a guy, Alexander P., who had been a rock star in Ukraine and came here and was now a waiter in a hotel restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This piece may well have been in the works before Jon arrived. But it airs, and after the show you have a postmortem. And Jon was not happy. He said, “Your targets are just wrong. They shouldn’t be people on the fringe. Our targets need to be the people who have a voice, and that’s politicians, and that’s the media.”

STACEY GRENROCK WOODS(correspondent, 1998-2003):

I heard Jon was very unhappy with that piece, and I don’t blame him at all. I didn’t like it, either, but it was given to me. I think it ended up being a policy-changing piece.

-From a new oral history of The Daily Show, by Chris Smith, excerpted in Vanity Fair.

The Month That Killed the Sixties

Longreads Pick

An oral history of how everything went to hell in December 1969. Fred Hampton was killed by the police, the hippie spirit died at Altamont, and the Weathermen went underground.

Source: Random House
Published: Sep 22, 2016
Length: 32 minutes (8,161 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photograph By John Francis Peters For The New Yorker

Below, our favorite stories of the week.

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STAT: My Daughter’s MS Diagnosis and the Question My Doctors Couldn’t Answer

"Nearly 24 years later and still just that crazy about my kid." Photos courtesy of the author.

Maria Bustillos | Longreads | September 2016 | 40 minutes (10,049 words)

 

I.

In the first days of 2014, in her senior year at Oberlin and just a few days before the winter term she’d arranged to spend in France, my daughter Carmen’s legs went numb. First her feet got all tingly, then her ankles, calves, and knees. Over three days or so, the numbness crept up to the base of her rib cage, and then stopped. But it didn’t go away—a weird sensation all in her skin, almost as if the whole lower half of her body had been anesthetized. Shingles, the internist told us—really?—okay. The acupuncturist, too, told us he’d been seeing anomalous cases of shingles cropping up in younger people. Carmen seemed to get a little better, and off she went to Paris; the tingling and numbness subsided slowly over the next several weeks, just as we’d been told they would, and the episode faded from memory. But about a year later, they came back again: Not shingles, after all.

Carmen in a hospital bed, uncharacteristically quiet and gloomy, the dark jungle of her curls against slick, plasticky polyester pillowcases. IV steroids, and more and more tests. Legs pretty numb, still. From pregnancy onward, I imagine, most parents harbor a cold little drop of inward fear, even as each day passes peaceful and undisturbed, through birth and babyhood and all the playdates and sleepovers and math tests, rock shows and summer vacations; at any moment, perhaps, from out of nowhere, comes the pounce. Here it is, then. Multiple sclerosis: I didn’t know anything about it really, beyond calamity, wheelchairs, and Annette Funicello. Instant by instant I composed my face and steeled myself as best I could for… what?

For every cliché in the world, naturally. A soul-wracked family, just like the ones you’ll see every day on the Lifetime Channel and the evening news; a brave young person, scared and in trouble; you register a fleeting hope that things will work out for them, in fact or fiction, as you flick to the next station. Now it’s your turn, but you won’t be changing the channel. Can this thing be treated? What is it? How do I discover how bad this will get? Or maybe let me just jump out this motherfucking window this minute, because I’m going to die of the panic alone.   Read more…