Search Results for: oral-history

Editor’s Roundtable: Just Put Some Eyes On There (Podcast)

Cynthia Breazeal, roboticist and social robotics pioneer, is pictured with Jibo, a personal assistant robot. (Matthew Cavanaugh for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On our June 14, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Books Editor Dana Snitzky share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Grub Street, The New Yorker, Gay Magazine, and The Verge.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


0:20 How a Cash-Strapped Start-up Became the Internet’s Food-Nerd Utopia. (Chris Crowley, June 18, 2019, Grub Street

“The ultimate distillation of a conversation going on with all the slow bits cut out and all the best parts included.” – Aaron Gilbreath

In 2006, Ed Levine launched Serious Eats, which quickly became a go-to place on the internet for the food obsessed. To coincide with Levine’s memoir, Grub Street created a “meta-food experience” by speaking with writers involved in the early days of the website. The Longreads team discusses how the oral history format seems to get people to lower their filter and allow personalities to come to the forefront. They also talk about the ambitious lengths people went to to get a story during this period of the blogging internet, and how that ambition often wasn’t reflected in the low rates and long hours they worked. 

8:20 The Strange Story of a Secret Literary Fellowship. (Daniel A. Gross, June 16, 2019, The New Yorker)

The Optics of Opportunity. (Hafizah Geter, June 19, 2019, Gay Magazine)

“Racism isn’t a revelation, it’s ever-present and we’re always dealing with it.” – Dana Snitzky
“And it’s not a surprising reveal at the end of a story.” – Catherine Cusick

The team discusses the New Yorker’s story about a secret literary fellowship funded by Barnes & Nobel owner Leonard Riggio’s family foundation and a rebuttal companion piece to the story from Gay Magazine.

Geter is a main character in Gross’s piece and both writers were participants in the fellowship but, as our editors discuss, the structure and framing of the pieces differ greatly. In Gay Magazine, Geter asks who gets to tell a story and critiques the New Yorker’s editorial choice to frame Gross’ piece as a story about wealth. The editors question the down-the-rabbit-hole structure, which posits racism as a mystery’s big revelation, rather than, as Geter shows, the glaring center of the story, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. The team talks about how opportunity and predation are intertwined, and the difference between people who feed hope and those who feed on it.

24:08 They Welcomed a Robot Into Their Family, Now They’re Mourning Its Death.  (Ashley Carman, June 19, 2019, The Verge)

“I didn’t expect my friendly home robot to die.” – Catherine Cusick

Jibo was one of the first social robots engineered to normalize the notion of “a robot in every home,” to appeal to children, and to become part of the family. Jibo’s eyes, facial recognition responsiveness, and personalized greetings fostered a bond with owners, who developed pet-like affection for the dancing digital personality. Now, the company that makes Jibo has been bought out, and Jibo owners have been put on notice. His servers are shutting down “soon,” but no one knows exactly when.

The editors talk about how to say goodbye to a robot you didn’t expect to “die,” the challenge of trusting the reliability of something that corporations can unplug at will, and how consumer relationships to home assistants are complicated by their intentional emotional appeal.

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

Editor’s Roundtable: Gossip, Dirt, and Reality (Podcast)

Cannabis seedlings
Cannabis seedling. (Angela Weiss / Getty Images)

On our May 31, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Head of Fact-checking Matt Giles, Senior Editor Krista Stevens, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Kotaku, and The Globe and Mail.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


1:04The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s’ Most Decadent College” (Lili Anolik, May 28, 2019, Esquire

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes somebody a genius at a young age… if I go on to become a genius, I will not be a young one.” —Kelly Stout

The team discusses Esquire’s oral history of Bennington College as told by Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tart, Jonathan Lethem, and their contemporaries at the storied Vermont liberal arts college. They talk about literary celebrity, youthful genius, and reading pieces that feel like they’ve been written specifically for your own cultural touchstones.

4:32 ‘The Hills’ Made Reality TV What It Is. Now It’s Back. (Irina Aleksander, May 23, 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

“The cast members in ‘The Hills’ reboot are the LA Lakers of reality TV.” —Matt Giles

Irina Aleksander goes long on the seminal reality show’s reboot. The team talks about the shift from ’90s reality shows like The Real World to the Reality 2.0 shows that emerged in the early aughts, as well as the tension between being a “serious person” and watching certain reality television. They also speculate about MTV’s bridging of fiction and “real life” by casting The OC’s Mischa Barton, and Matt pulls off a masterful one-to-one comparison of every Hills character to his or her NBA Lakers counterpart. LC is obviously Kobe.

11:06 Lakers 2.0: The failed reboot of the NBA’s crown jewel (Baxter Holmes, May 28, 2019, ESPN)

“Really well-written explanatory journalism, that also happened to be about a workplace drama.” —Catherine Cusick

ESPN’s look at how dysfunction has plagued the Lakers this season breaks down the complexities of team dynamics in a way that makes it accessible beyond the realm of NBA fans. Holmes brings personality clashes, leadership, and management discussions to life in a way that reminds both readers and fans that sports teams are also workplaces for hundreds of people.

15:44 Shady Numbers And Bad Business: Inside The Esports Bubble (Cecilia D’Anastasio, May 23, 2019, Kotaku)

“Who counts as a reader and what counts as a view… is reading something engagement? Is viewing something reading?” —Catherine Cusick

Cecilia D’Anastasio reports on the unregulated world of esports metrics, audience inflation, and who benefits from the narrative that esports is the next big thing. The team discusses the challenges of building and tracking an audience online, the conflict of self-reporting metrics in the absence of trusted third-party standards, and the implications for outsized investments that may have been based on inflated numbers. 

19:21 Canada’s saddest grow-op: My humiliating adventures in growing marijuana (Ian Brown, May 19, 2019, The Globe and Mail)

“Weed, it turns out, is very, very finicky to grow.” —Krista Stevens

After Canada’s legalization of marijuana last year, Ian Brown’s editor proposed that he try growing marijuana. Using a Grobo hydroponic kit that tracks growing conditions and automatically nourishes the plant, Brown decided to run his experiment at work — much to the chagrin of his colleagues, who hounded him about the smell. Was the end product up to snuff? 

The team discusses the generational stigma that can still surround marijuana use, as well as the importance of a journalist’s voice, humor, and personality in writing a successful DIY piece.

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

The World of Nora Ephron: A Reading List

Nora Ephron (Photo by Munawar Hosain/Fotos International/Getty Images)

Every Thursday, I wake up and perform the same routine: I drive to downtown Durham, NC, park and walk to the bakery for a coffee, then cross the street and unlock the bookstore I work at. I crank Dusty Springfield up, sweep the mats, straighten the display cases, and flip the open sign around. Occasionally, someone will wander up and try to come in, five minutes before open, at which point I can offer one of those tiny retail mercies — outsized, and ultimately more rewarding for me then them — and say, it’s fine, really, go ahead and come on in.

It’s a nice sequence, though it’s not lost on me that while doing my job I’m also reenacting a scene, one I’ve secretly carried close since high school. Few movies made it into my parents’ strict North Carolina household, but You’ve Got Mail did, somehow, and the opening reel played on loop in my head for years: Meg Ryan skipping down the steps, buying her coffee, rolling up the gate to her bookstore. It’s autumn in New York; the trees blaze with color and the Cranberries are playing. The scene was adhesive not just because it was a prelude to romance, but because it was a vision of adult life was that funny and smart and paid attention.

Ephron cherished the use of routine in her movies, in much the same way that she cherished the use of references — movies, books, songs — to make us feel as if we’re pulled into a greater narrative, one at once familiar and inevitable. Years after first watching the movie, I’d walk through Washington Square Park, smack dab in the middle of a thrilling autumn, as my friend SJ delivered an impassioned monologue about how messed up it was for Joe Fox to actively deceive Kathleen Kelly through an online avatar. (Now we have a set of unflattering romantic shorthands — catfishing, ghosting, benching — not yet available to Ephron in the ’90s.) In theory, I probably agreed with SJ, but I was new to the city and new to dating and not yet entirely deformed by cynicism. Mostly, I was distracted by how much the argument itself seemed pulled from an Ephron film: two friends (Ephron loved, and lingered, on the banter between friends) walking through a park, tugging their coats closed and arguing about love and narrative and the movies.

Somehow, You’ve Got Mail turns 20 this year. The landscape of romance and the social mores and New York has all changed (Amazon now representing a much less charming evil than 1998’s Fox Books), and my own relationship with her writing has changed, too. I’m less sure than I was, 10 years ago, about what she was trying to say. Still — I think the language she offered up for love and revision is as relevant as ever, and as happily easy to rip off. “Everything is copy,” Nora Ephron liked to say in reference to her omnivorous approach to art. Increasingly, I feel it’s just as true to say of the people who watch her movies and feel the tug of longing, of wit, and of attention.

1. “Nora Ephron’s Potato-Chip Legacy” (Matt Weinstock, June 28, 2012, The Paris Review)

In Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” last year, the most important — or at least, most quoted, most tweeted — line comes when the titular heroine is called into the office at her Catholic school. They’re discussing college options. It’s clear, the nun tells her, that she loves Sacramento. “I guess I pay attention,” Lady Bird says, at which point the nun looks at her intently. “Don’t you think that’s the same thing? Love and attention?”

Matt Weinstock makes a similar point about Ephron’s working definition of love, as found in a typical Ephron film — that anecdotal evidence of love can be found in the things you notice about another person, as when Harry delivers a monologue on New Years Eve, in When Harry Met Sally, about the amount of time that it takes Sally to order a sandwich, or when Sam describes his ex-wife in Sleepless in Seattle. Succinctly: “She could peel an apple in one long, curly strip. The whole apple.”

The beautiful thing about Weinstock’s piece is how closely it examines her flaws. It’s not mean-spirited, but it does take careful account of the inconsistencies of Ephron’s body of work, and the ways that she seemed to edit out her neuroses, or at least, outsource them to her characters. No matter. It’s a love letter, deeply felt, that doesn’t just pay attention to the quippy highlights of her legacy. The list of Sally’s idiosyncrasies that Harry rattles off, after all, aren’t all things that he necessarily likes about her. They’re his way of saying he’s paying attention.

2. “An Oral History of You’ve Got Mail,” (Erin Carlson, February 13, 2015, Vanity Fair)

Crisp white blouses, crab cake lunches on set, her aversion to the color blue — Delia Ephron, Meg Ryan, Hallee Hirsh (the actress that played Annabelle Fox — F-O-X!), and assorted cinematographers and producers from “You’ve Got Mail” gather to discuss Ephron’s relationship with her set, which of course also comes out to a conversation about her relationship with New York City.

John Lindley (cinematographer): [Nora] grew up in Los Angeles, right, but she had a love and a loyalty to New York that exceeded any native New Yorker that I ever met. She lived on the Upper West Side when we made that movie, and it was a little love story to the Upper West Side. And one of the things that I remember her saying is that many people think of New York as this monolithic, intimidating place. But when you live there, you realize that what it is: a bunch of little villages. And her little village was the Upper West Side.

3. “Nora Ephron’s Final Act,” (Jacob Bernstein, March 6, 2013, New York Times Magazine)

Ephron didn’t tell a lot of people that she was dying from Leukemia—an act of privacy that confounded her admirers, who’d grown accustomed to tracking her life, both onscreen and on paper. Wouldn’t a woman so intent on using her life for material (divorce, heartbreak, insecurities, messy purposes, dreams) want to write about her final act? Jacob Bernstein, Ephron’s son, wrestled with this idea enough to write a beautifully intensive piece on the last days of her death — and then, following in his mother’s footsteps, to turn it into art (“Everything is Copy,” his documentary, is available on HBO).

All her life, she subscribed to the belief that “everything is copy,” a phrase her mother, Phoebe, used to say. In fact, when Phoebe was on her deathbed, she told my mother, “Take notes.” She did. What both of them believed was that writing has the power to turn the bad things that happen to you into art (although “art” was a word she hated). “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh,” she wrote in her anthology “I Feel Bad About My Neck.” “So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”

4. “On the Front Lines With Nora Ephron” (Lawrence Frascella, July 8, 2013, Rolling Stone)

What kind of generation did Ephron think she was writing to? Her movies were often cultural close studies, taking her essayistic impulse to diagnose and putting it to screen. In 1993, on the cusp of stardom — before Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail — she debriefed with Rolling Stone’s (patently misogynistic) Lawrence Frascella about the state love in the 90’s.

The younger persons that I know, especially the ones in California, I don’t even think they have sex. They have business dinners and business breakfasts, sometimes two business breakfasts. But I believe very strongly that underneath all of that is just a bunch of romantic stuff. Everybody’s got it. That’s one of the reasons Tom Hanks’s character moves to the Northwest. He goes from Chicago, which is your modern, work-driven urban environment, to Seattle, which is – let me tell you, after three days there with my husband, Nick says, “This is a city where people have chosen lifestyle over work.” And he’s right. There are cities like this all over America, full of people who are kayaking and living the good life.

5. “You’ve Got Mail” (Casper Ter Kuil, February 20, 2018, On Being)

Like me, fanboy Casper Ter Kuile grew up loving “You’ve Got Mail,” and he freeze-frames that experience — of growing up in the age of AOL, and watching too natural-born enemies bumble blindly toward each other on a chat room — beautifully, here. In the late 90’s, it hadn’t become quite creepy to chat with strangers on the Internet—novelty still had its grip — but it also hadn’t become normal to the point of banality, either. There was plenty of room for projection.

MR. TER KUILE: Right. She doesn’t even know, really, who he is. And she says, at some point, “I just wanted to write this down. So good night, dear void. Even if it’s just going into the void, good night, dear void.” And I remember, like, I wrote that in my diary to myself. [laughs] I really thought I was that kind of person.

MS. PERCY: Oh, my God.

MR. TER KUILE: Just, like — yeah, just, like, you have so many feelings, and where is it all going? And I think that’s what I love about this movie, is, yes, it’s a love story, but they don’t meet until the very last scene of the movie. The story is really about an idea of someone. And I met my husband online, so there’s an echo in my own life here. But there is a — the story and the love that builds inside both of these characters is one of longing, and of really projection onto the unknown of what might be. And I’m someone who always lives kind of in the future. I love to think about future plans. And I think this movie is so much about that — that it’s — you get to create perfection in your mind before it even happens.

6. “An Interview with Nora Ephron,” (Kathryn Borel, March 1, 2012, The Believer)

Enough attention is directed at the aesthetics of mid-90’s romantic comedies, that it’s easy to forget that Ephron led a prodigious career as a journalist, for over a decade, before co-writing her first script with her first husband, Carl Bernstein, in the mid-70’s (she began her career as a mail girl at Newsweek, and went on to be promoted and, eventually, sue Newsweek in the class action lawsuit that was serialized in Amazon’s lamentably short-lived show, “Good Girls Revolt.”) Her 2006 interview in The Believer, though, devotes some nice attention to her years at the Post and Esquire, and the making of Ephron as a writer.

That moment, for me, was not Heartburn. It was a piece I wrote in Esquire called “A Few Words about Breasts.” I knew when I finished writing that piece that either it was going to be a huge success or be judged as a kind of “Who needs to know any of this?” kind of thing. One or the other was going to happen, but I absolutely knew that both were possible. By the time I did Heartburn, I was around forty. I had a very clear memory of being at my typewriter in Bridgehampton, where Carl [Bernstein] and I had had a house—that was now in the divorce—but we were still using it at alternate times. I was supposed to be writing a screenplay. And when I started writing, sixteen pages of that novel came out in two days. I thought, Oh, I’ve found it. The whole time the marriage was breaking up and I was in a state of complete torment and misery, I knew that this would someday be a funny story. I absolutely knew it. It was too horrible. It was too ridiculous not to be.

7. “Nora Knows What To Do,” (Ariel Levy, July 6, 2008, (The New Yorker)

This is one of the New Yorker’s best-paired profiles, with Ariel Levy a charming, adaptable match for Ephron’s rapid-fire banter. She also manages to pull a difficult trick, which is that her profile is an entirely reverent one which also finishes, in the last three paragraphs, with a modest pan of Julie & Julia. And yet, the register of the piece — staged thematically over award dinners and lunches across New York (if it has any flaws, it’s probably that too much time is probably devoted to Ephron’s tidy eating habits) — is still adoring, and probably gives us as much insight into the prismic mind of the icon as we’ll get.

Ephron detests whining: you can acknowledge a problem, but only in the service of solving it. “Nobody really has an easy time getting a movie made,” she said. “And furthermore I can’t stand people complaining. So it’s not a conversation that interests me, do you know? Those endless women-in-film panels. It’s, like, just do it! Just do it. Write something else if this one didn’t get made.

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Sarah Edwards s a freelance writer whose work has been published in The Village Voice, NewYorker.com, and The Baffler, among others.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Christophe Morin / IP3 / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas; Phil Klay, Harley Rustad, Michael Graff, and Alan Siegel.

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The Making of Nirvana’s Most Vulnerable Album

Kevin Estrada/MediaPunch/IPX

In the 25 years since Nirvana last performed, we’ve seen a slew of posthumous releases and documentaries. One of the most enduring monuments to the band’s brilliance is their 1993 MTV Unplugged performance. Yes, they played a rare acoustic set. They played Leadbelly and David Bowie covers, and were joined by the Meat Pupppets. But the show contained an affecting vulnerability that still cuts right through people like me, who are old enough to have watched the show when it first aired. Kurt laughed. He talked with the crowd. The audience wasn’t moshing or jumping around. Fans were enchanted, especially when Kurt spoke with them one-on-one after the show. Unplugged became one of the band’s best selling albums. For The Ringer, Alan Siegal talks with the musicians, producers, and fans who made this historic night happen.

Craig Marks (editor, Spin): When he did “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” it wasn’t one of those things where a month later, or a week later, or a year later, you’re like, “That was great,” even though you didn’t really know it at the time. You knew the dead second that it was happening that you were witnessing something phenomenal. You didn’t really even know he had it in him. It was that good.

Bobcat Goldthwait (comedian-filmmaker): When they did that song, I remember the hair standing up on my arm.

Beth McCarthy-Miller (director, MTV Unplugged): That song told a thousand tales. It felt like he was singing all the pain that he had through that song. It was crazy.

Charles R. Cross (journalist-Cobain biographer): You get the sense that he’s just gonna fall apart, it’s like a car without its wheels, and yet, in the end, he plows through it.

Gillian Gaar (journalist): The thing he did, and he did it in a number of Nirvana songs, you’ll notice, [is] where he’ll be singing full bore, going all out, but then in the final verse he’ll go up an octave. And then really ratchet the energy up.

Scott Litt (producer, MTV Unplugged in New York): It fucking killed me—particularly where he paused before the end and gasped.

Amy Finnerty (Vice president of music and talent, MTV): The breath in between the breath. He made time stop. Time just stopped.

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25 Years of Vibe Magazine

Courtesy of VIBE

For Billboard,  Dan Charnas compiles an oral history of Vibe magazine, the first issue of which was published in September, 1993. Founded by Quincy Jones in partnership with Time Warner (and still publishing digitally today), the magazine represented a “new black aesthetic” that “championed hip-hop but thought broad and wide about the genre’s connections to the past and the future.”

Mimi Valdes (editorial assistant, 1993-94; assistant editor, 1994-95; style editor, 1997-98; executive editor, 1999-2002; editor-at-large, 2002-03; editor-in-chief, 2004-06): Jonathan [Van Meter, editor-in-chief 1992-93] booked Madonna and Dennis Rodman as a cover. And Eddie Murphy’s publicist was mad as hell that Madonna was getting the cover over Eddie. We all wanted Eddie over Madonna, so we were upset about it too. When [word of the cover choice] started to get out in the industry, we all felt the need to save Vibe’s reputation.

Scott Poulson-Bryant (senior editor/writer, 1992-96): I said [to Jonathan], “The staff needs to have a conference. People are really not happy about this.”

Van Meter: I said, “This isn’t The Village Voice. We’re not unionized. You can’t come in here representing the staff.”

Valdes: We were all standing by waiting for Scott to give us the go-ahead to come in. When Jonathan saw us, he got really upset.

Van Meter: I felt like I was losing control. And I said [to Scott], “You’re fired.” People in the hallways started crying. Mimi Valdes was screaming as if she’d just found out her mother was shot and killed. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I made it worse.”

Poulson-Bryant: He came to my office: “You’re not fired. Look, we’ll have a staff meeting.”

Quincy Jones: I was staying away from editorial policy. I got involved when Jonathan put the Beastie Boys on the cover and told me he was following up with Dennis Rodman and Madonna. He had already shot it!

Van Meter: I guess Quincy was getting a lot of shit from people for putting the Beastie Boys on the cover, and when he sees the Madonna cover, he went crazy.

Jones: I said, “Over my dead fucking body! That’s the way you blow an urban magazine.”

Van Meter: Madonna was queen. You can’t not put her on the cover. I couldn’t conceive of killing the best cover story we had done so far. [Quincy and I] ended up having a fight on the phone, and I smashed my phone into a thousand pieces and cleared off the top of my desk onto the floor. I think I said, “I quit.” I went home. And then the phone calls started. Everyone tried to get Quincy to change his mind. Even Madonna called me at home. She was really pissed.

Jones: I called Madonna and I said, “I’m telling you as a friend: it’s not personal, but you cannot pander with an urban magazine this early.” She said, “Quincy Jones, you and I can take over the world if we want to. See you around, pal.” I haven’t talked to her since then.

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The Underground Magazine That Helped Shape Portland, Oregon

Snipehunt 1994, cover by Sean Tejaratchi, courtesy of Portland Mercury

It’s hard to imagine now, but Portland used to be a tiny ignored little city that a lot of bands didn’t want to play and national media largely ignored. Those were sweet times. In that relative cultural isolation, a poster artist named Mike King started a music fanzine named Snipehunt to both harness and serve Portland’s small arts community. Enlarged and fully realized by editor Kathy Molloy, her volunteer team designed, edited, published, and distributed the magazine themselves. Snipehunt had a devoted following and helped launch the careers of its then-unknown freelance writers. Then in 1997, it abruptly quit publishing, and Molloy ghosted everyone and moved to British Columbia.

In an oral history for the Portland Mercury, local writer Joshua James Amberson goes on his own snipe hunt for Molloy, and he lets those who were involved with her artistically piece together the magazine’s creation and influence. One artist called Molloy “the punk mayor of Portland.” Molloy remains a mystery who, like her magazine, cannot be found online. Thanks to Amberson, Snipehunt now sort of has web presence.

The scene that inspired Snipehunt featured bands that weren’t getting media coverage and writers and artists without an outlet. The magazine soon became a breeding ground for local creators, and its contributor list is a peek at the kind of local talent and energy emerging during that time: novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond, current Portland city commissioner Chloe Eudaly, filmmaker and installation artist Vanessa Renwick, local writer and publisher Kevin Sampsell, novelist Rene Denfeld, Crap Hound and Liar Town creator Sean Tejaratchi. For many of the contributors, Snipehunt was their first publication, their first opportunity to regularly try out their ideas on an audience.

A typical issue of Snipehunt had interviews with local and national bands, pages of comics from independent artists, scene reports from West Coast cities, oddball prose pieces, political action coverage, and pages of reviews—albums, zines, live shows, films, and books. It was a broad take on DIY culture, loosely based in the punk scene but covering artists and subjects far beyond the imposed limitations of that world.

With the magazine’s history largely absent from the internet, its name unfamiliar to the majority of current Portlanders, and physical evidence of its existence difficult to come by, I reached out to a couple dozen of its contributors to provide me—and the rest of new Portland—with a much-needed history lesson.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Four Nudes by Jules Pascin
Four Nudes by Jules Pascin (Photo by Barney Burstein/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Elizabeth Bruenig, Michael Hobbes, Jesse Barron, Matthew Walsh, and Alan Siegel.

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How Women Survive the World: An Interview with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Associated Press / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Naomi Elias | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,372 words)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, drug lord Pablo Escobar ruled over all of Colombia as if it were his kingdom. Escobar’s lethal combination of cleverness and ruthlessness allowed him to evade capture for years. A real-life boogeyman, his presence altered the atmosphere, layering everyday Colombian life with toxic tension: an opposition leader looking to curb the expansion of Escobar’s drug empire was assassinated, communities were terrorized by car bombings, and paramilitary recruiters transformed young boys into cold-blooded soldiers. Fear and uncertainty were normal states of mind for people who grew up in this era, people like Colombian-born writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras, who channeled her memories of this formative chapter of her life into a captivating debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.

In Fruit of the Drunken Tree, we are introduced to the Santiago family; Chula, age 7, her sister Cassandra, age 9, and their parents, who all live together in a gated community in Bogotá, Colombia. The Santiago family’s moderate wealth generally insulates them from contact with the criminal elements terrorizing the city’s lower-income neighborhoods, but this all changes when the family hires Petrona, a teenager from a poor guerilla-occupied slum, as their new maid.

At only thirteen Petrona is her family’s primary breadwinner, a burden that weighs heavily on her. Chula, enamored with the new occupant of her home, finds herself attempting to unravel the mystery that is Petrona, a girl of few words and many secrets. This curiosity eventually lands Chula in trouble — Petrona’s desperate attempts to juggle her duty to her family and her pursuit of the milestones of youth, like first love with a young guerrilla soldier, push her to engage in riskier and riskier behavior, and Chula’s deepening involvement entangles her in a violent conspiracy. Read more…

A Kendrick Lamar Syllabus

Kendrick Lamar performs at the Grammys on January 28, 2018. (Christopher Polk/Getty Images for NARAS)

Last month, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth won the Pulitzer Prize in music for his 2017 album DAMN. It’s the first work of hip-hop to be commended since the award for musical composition was created in 1943. Most winners have been classical musicians, and a few, like Wynton Marsalis and Ornette Coleman, composers of jazz.

The Pulitzer board noted that DAMN. “offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” The album’s selection updates and redefines conceptions of music and high culture — it is canon expanding and its reverberations and aftershocks should be significant.

DAMN. is Lamar’s third album, and while it is spectacular, I don’t think it’s his most thrilling. good kid m.A.A.d. city, from 2012, succeeds more on the plane of hip-hop aesthetics, with its structurally sound story arc. To Pimp a Butterfly, from 2015, was more melodically lush, and it magnetized a rising tide of political fervor: The single “Alright” became a protest anthem, and every major release by a popular black musician afterward seemed to form a politically-charged chorus.

Lamar has made a career of delivering prescient, complex work that is sometimes fiery and discordant, and other times deeply meditative or grief-stricken. But his work always feels honest. With the significance of his Pulitzer in sight, I offer a small selection of the insightful writing on Lamar that has published in the years since his debut.
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