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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A wooden empty chair in the middle of an empty room with a decorated checkerboard floor - stock photo (Photo By Busà Photography via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lakeidra Chavis, Jodi S. Cohen, Jennifer Smith Richards, Heidi Blake, Zandria F. Robinson, Michael Hall, and Eve Peyser.

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Willie Nelson’s 50-year Love Affair with Trigger, His Faithful Guitar

SPICEWOOD, TEXAS - MARCH 14: Detail view of Willie Nelson's Martin guitar "Trigger" during the Luck Welcome dinner benefitting Farm Aid on March 14, 2018 in Spicewood, Texas. (Photo by Gary Miller/Getty Images)

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

Willie Nelson’s been playing the same guitar — a Martin N-20 classical — since 1969. In this fantastic profile from 2013 at Texas Monthly, Michael Hall chronicles not only the life and times of Willie and his trusted sidekick, Trigger, but the laborious care and tending of a love-worn instrument that is the primary tool of a living musical legend. Trigger bears not only the marks of Willie’s playing style but also autographs from Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, and members of Willie’s staff and touring crew.

Erlewine looks forward to Trigger’s semiannual physicals. He oils the bridge and cleans the fretboard, the wood of which is so eroded it looks like waves between the frets. Then comes the lacquering. The mottled area just above the sound hole shows the effects of fifty coats of lacquer applied over 35 years. The darker parts are colored by dirt and dead skin that can’t be removed; the lighter parts are where Willie has dug deep into the spruce. Erlewine carefully rubs the gouges in the wood that run parallel to the strings between the bridge and the sound hole, a sign of the force with which Willie plays.

He inspects the wood along the curve at the top of Trigger’s body, where Willie’s right arm has rubbed for 43 years, and the scratches at the bottom of the sound hole that are left by the strap clip. He’s especially careful around the thirty or so signatures that are still legible. In the right light he can see the impressions left by others, names or parts of names fading into the wood, like faces receding into memory.

Finally he inspects Trigger’s maw, staring into its abyss. Willie has always insisted, in that Zen-like Willie way, that the hole is a good thing. “I always thought it enhanced the sound,” he says. And he may be right. Luthiers have long experimented with a second hole, and there’s a Hawaiian custom guitar company that crafts many of its acoustics with two of them. The thinning of the spruce around the hole has probably helped too. “You walk the line between strength and tone,” says Dick Boak, a longtime designer and archivist at Martin Guitars. “The wood that is missing may improve the sound. As you scratch away at the top, the diminished thickness of the membrane will most likely make the guitar sound better.”

All things considered, Erlewine says, the guitar is in pretty good shape—except for the frets. “There are certain notes that are just pffft!” he says. “Everyone around Willie knows it. They just shrug their shoulders and say, ‘He’s doing pretty well—he doesn’t want to change!’ ” Erlewine finally gave up trying to get Trigger re-fretted. “Willie’s living his life, and Trigger’s living it with him, with all the aches and pains that go along with it.” The truth is, the worn frets just force Willie to play with more force, more vibrato, more bending, more shaking, more attitude.

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Trigger

Longreads Pick

Willie Nelson’s been playing the same guitar — a Martin N-20 classical — for 50 years. In this fantastic profile from 2013, Michael Hall chronicles not only the life and times of Willie and his trusted sidekick, Trigger, but the laborious care and tending of an instrument that is the primary tool of a living musical legend.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Jan 21, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,257 words)

The Creator of the Shitty Media Men List Isn’t Done

Longreads Pick

Nona Willis Aronowitz profiles Moira Donegan, an emerging feminist author who once worried she’d be defined — and ruined  — by the google spreadsheet she created as a safe space for women in media to anonymously share their experiences of sexual harassment and discrimination.

Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Nov 18, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,212 words)

Stumbling Into Joy

Jill Douglas/Redferns

Kate Hopper | True Story | August 2019 | 46 minutes (9,120 words)

 

“[Playing music together provides an] opportunity of stumbling into joy, of having an essentially unedited, fresh, and electric experience . . . [which] is key to the girls’ futures.” —June Millington, member of Fanny, cofounder of the Institute for the Musical Arts

The year I turned forty-three, I was in pain almost all the time. It wrapped like a mammoth hand around my right rib cage, squeezing, squeezing. The culprit: a sluggish gallbladder.

Pain is like a feral animal; it’s unpredictable. It’s not just the physical discomfort that’s so disruptive; it’s also the fear of the pain’s return. So even when I had a good day, I knew it was short-lived. Would I feel okay tomorrow? Was it something I did? Or something I ate? Pain made me feel old. It also made me acutely aware of my own mortality.

Finally, after eight months of trying to address the pain on my own, I had my gallbladder removed. It took another six months for my digestion to stabilize, and when I finally felt better, I was relieved, but also a little shell-shocked. What had just happened?

I shifted into taking-stock mode. I was almost forty-four years old, and ideally I still had half of my life ahead of me. How did I want to live it? And what were my regrets? Luckily, I didn’t have many. I was happily married, with two wonderfully spunky, smart, healthy, and kind daughters. My work as a writer, editor, and coach, despite not paying very well, gave me great pleasure. I reasoned that even the hard stuff I’d experienced in my life, which I would have gladly avoided if given the chance, had taught me something and had, as the saying goes, made me stronger.

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Under the Influence: Deeper Than Beauty

courtesy of Jakiya N. Brown / courtesy of Mina Gerges

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  8 minutes (2,145 words)

Part two in a three-part series on the influencer economy. Read part one, “White Lies.”

* * *

It’s hard to find an influencer who doesn’t fit the profile. I could’ve spoken to a blond female beauty Instagrammer easily. Or a blond male gamer, even. Everything else was a nightmare. Try coming up with a tech influencer who is not a man. Or a man of color who is anywhere near grooming but not drag. In order to find the Travelingfro, Jakiya Brown, an African American woman Instagramming the globe, I had to go to a series of black culture sites. I might have discovered Mina Gerges, who lives in Toronto like me, if I ever walked rather than ran through a Sephora (he’s in the new Canadian campaign), but it was a Twitter callout that eventually brought us together. Surprise: “gay, genderqueer Egyptian beauty influencer” isn’t much of an archetype. Now I’m actually questioning whether being an influencer is a real thing either.

“You don’t do influencing,” Brown explains. “That, to me, that’s not a job.” She sees influencing as a side effect of admirable skill in one area (or, in the famous cases — from Kim Kardashian to Gigi Hadid — of having a name already), a way of selling brands on the attention you already have. She remembers working in beauty marketing several years ago and getting a flood of barely legible, text-style emails from beauty bloggers demanding free products. It was an easy no every time. Speaking of easy nos, I slogged through a sea of influencer-speak — I am now immunized from ever using the word “journey” again — to parse how Brown and Gerges slogged their way through a sea of sameness to get the influencing industry to say yes to them. Here’s how they got past the filters by appealing to reality.

* * *

You may already know Gerges for his “celebrity recreations,” a series prompted by a break up. Some guy ditched him in 2014, but not before mocking Gerges for being effeminate, and the first thing he thought of was that image of Beyoncé with mascara running down her face from her “Why Don’t You Love Me” video. “So I did that,” he says. The response was polarized. Social media stars were big with The Youth at the time, but they weren’t as pervasive in the mainstream as they are now. Gerges had some people thinking he was hilarious, others thinking he was weird: “When I saw peoples’ reactions, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I think I’m on to something.’” So he went nuts, producing scrappy imitations of everything from Kim Kardashian’s intricate Cavalli at the 2015 Met Gala (beige curtain, paint) to Beyonce’s twinkling Givenchy (garbage bag, rhinestones). In January 2015, Buzzfeed’s David Mack picked up his site — “Bow down, Instagram bitches” — and that was it. Gerges’s discount replicas were everywhere from Time magazine to Kim Kardashian’s fingertips, and people even started to copy them (that part was annoying, he says). He began to think he could make a living from this thing.

At the same time, Gerges was in recovery, having started his account while struggling with anorexia. “It became so amplified by the culture around Instagram,” he tells me. “Thin, muscular, white men having hundreds of thousands of followers.” He was proof that looking right could make you popular. As if to double down on this cliché, as he got well and gained weight, commenters stopped praising his work and started criticizing his body. It got to the point that he couldn’t look at his own reflection without comments like “What the fuck happened to you?” running through his head. He searched online for other men who might be struggling like him — nothing. “I realized there were no men talking about it,” Gerges says. “We’re conditioned to just take it and be quiet because men shouldn’t be vulnerable.”

He tried to figure out a way to work with Instagram so he didn’t have to hate both the platform and himself. After five months, on February 19, 2018, he had it: Gerges posted a series of images of himself shirtless and disclosed his eating disorder to his followers. He explained how he got sick at the age of 20, how he would starve himself, how he would spend hours at the gym, how he never felt satisfied. The post was covered in Teen Vogue and Paper and has since received almost 11,000 likes. “It took a very long time, because I was horrified to do it,” Gerges explains. But it wasn’t a fairytale ending. A year later he was considering deleting his Instagram account entirely. His work had turned increasingly vulnerable and he was increasingly bullied. And he would later find it impossible to make a living off his site, having sent out media kits and getting rejected left and right. He had a bad experience with an agent (he jokes that he’s now both Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian in one). On top of all that, he felt discouraged watching all these white cis influencers constantly being hired. “There was not a single brand that wanted to work with me,” Gerges says, “not a single one.”

Then the brands got a kick in the ass. As the media awoke to representation, it confronted various industries, including the fashion and beauty machines, on their lack of diversity. Up-and-coming designers of color were more inclusive in their campaigns and on the runway, and old-school companies were shamed into progress. Fashion magazines started approaching Gerges; he landed the gig with Sephora and, more recently, an underwear campaign with Calvin Klein. That which had isolated him then — his gender, his sexuality, his race, his body type — now made him indispensable. In the aftermath of the Sephora campaign, Gerges told me he was researching Egyptian culture through history in order to come up with ways to queer traditionally straight historical narratives. He plans to get a friend to photograph him on film — “I don’t edit any of my photos,” he says, “I think that’s another way for me to introduce an element of vulnerability and honesty” — which he hopes to unveil as an Instagram series, probably at a scientifically suboptimal time for maxing out the likes. Because aside from not Facetuning his images, he doesn’t rely on apps to tell him when to post or how to hashtag. “My value is not that I have, like, a, fucking whatever percent engagement rate,” he says. “My value is my story, my value is who I am.”

* * *

Before Jakiya Browne started @travelingfro, she had a lucrative marketing career in New York with L’Oréal and Coty, for which she scouted talent online. “I would stay on YouTube, like, all day watching these bloggers,” she tells me. But even back in 2014, finding influencers who weren’t interchangeable was a bit of a chore. “The ‘I just got out of college, I fell into YouTubing, now I’m a millionaire’ — we didn’t really want those types of girls,” Brown explains. On one of the influencer trips she hosted, however, she met the kind of woman she realized she herself wanted to be, the kind of woman who creates and sustains a brand outside the confines of an office. “It wasn’t like, ‘I want to become an influencer,’” she clarifies (she will repeat this a few times during our interview), but she was tired of the corporate grind and wanted to travel.

Brown quit her job in 2016. She roamed the world for a year, which sounds impossible, but she supported herself with the “substantial” savings she had amassed over her career and supplemented that with consulting gigs for smaller beauty brands. Still, she had a strict budget: $1,000 a month. In places with a lower cost of living, like Mexico and Eastern Europe, it wasn’t hard to stick to that. Otherwise, she stayed with people she had met during her marketing career. “I just started getting scrappy,” she says, “which is like: creative on how not to spend money.” Once Brown grew a following, her room, board, and transit were covered by sponsored posts. “People were always like, ‘How did you get these brand partnerships when you had like 3,000 followers?’” she says. “I know how to convince them that it’s more than just numbers.” That she was a black female traveler was “low hanging fruit” — there weren’t that many women of color in the travel space — but her high engagement helped too. She only had a few thousand followers but got hundreds of comments per post, which means that a brand could appeal to a market that wasn’t entirely white, and this market would bring sustained attention. Brown thinks she earned her audience’s loyalty by being honest not only about the good, but also about the bad, like whether or not she had the stamina to keep traveling indefinitely. That, and she was good on camera (Brown was an early Instagram Stories adopter), which many influencers weren’t: “If you couldn’t talk to your audience like your friend, and you were super awkward, people disconnected.”

The Travelingfro is now a brand that has had more than 100 clients, offering courses, consulting, and workshops to help “tired nine-to-fivers” find the freedom to “do the things they love, like travel the world.” Last fall, Brown took some time to refine her brand, which included researching literature on digital marketing. In that time, she realized she could marry her marketing and social media experience in order to teach influencers the business side of things. As she wrote in a recent post sponsored by Numi Organic Tea, “Keep building. Show up even when no one shows up. Keep going when everyone thinks you should stop. Keep following whatever it is inside that keeps you from giving up. Watch what happens.” Why a tea company? Because tea is part of her morning routine. Brown only works with brands as long as they work with hers. “If you’re working with, like, detergent one day, and then like plant food the next day, and then like these boots the next day, and then AmEx cards the next day, you’re a walking billboard,” she says. “I’m not about that.” She’s about keeping expenses down, rolling contracts, spacing out your earnings to account for dry spells — in short, being practical. “No exchanges,” she adds. “Like a backpack? I can’t eat that.”

As a marketing veteran, Brown used to know the industry standards, such as they were — companies apparently have piles of cash for influencing that they divvy out arbitrarily — but she doesn’t care anymore. She prices according to how much time and work goes into her posts. “If I feel like I am worth $2,000 for two Instagram stories, that’s what I feel,” she says, to which I say: Jesus. But that’s not even on the high side: at one point, Brown revealed that within a recent quarter she made $50,000, which happens to be my annual income. “You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, things are great, I’m rich,’” she says. “Then something happens and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m broke.” (Usually I’m just broke.) Apparently influencers serially undervalue their worth, particularly influencers of color who see an overrepresentation of white faces. Brown thinks the opposite should be true — in any other industry, the rarer something is, the more valuable it tends to be.

* * *

Neither Brown nor Gerges set out to be influencers, which is probably why they are so good at it. Instead of conforming to the industry standard, they exploded it. Gerges injects the beauty field, which has been largely marketed as white and female, with Middle Eastern queerness. Brown, a black woman traveling the world, also dominates a space that has been overrepresented by white bodies. Which makes her all the more savvy about how precarious it all is. “Instagram can pack up and go any day,” she says. “You do not own that space. You don’t even own the content on there.” I hate to use this term (especially since she didn’t), but Brown diversified in order not to stake her entire livelihood on one platform. Most influencers, however, in her experience don’t have a plan B — a book or a workshop or some other source of income. “They’re all kind of riding this wave,” she says. “Until there is no more wave.” Gerges is doing everything he can to ensure that he is not one of those people. For him, the work goes way beyond appearances. “It’s not just an aesthetic or a filter that you toss on every photo,” he says. “It’s about a larger idea.” Whether or not anyone else can see that is out of his control. But influencing on its own is definitely precarious considering the dilution of the industry by superficial infiltrators who pose as something more. “I hope that people can get to a point where they can differentiate between what’s actually authentic,” Gerges says. “And what is just fabricated to look authentic.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Tom Junod Remembers Fred Rogers: “You Were a Child Once, Too”

Getty Images

At the Atlantic, Tom Junod recalls his friendship with Fred Rogers 16 years after Fred’s death. Junod and Rogers traded 70 emails around the time Junod’s Esquire profile of Rogers, ‘Can You Say…”Hero”?’ was published in 1998. The author considers the movies made about Rogers’ life, as well as how Fred would have responded to today’s routine mass violence and the growing lack of civility in political discourse.

As for Fred: It’s true that he lost, and that the digitization of all human endeavor has devoured his legacy as eagerly as it has devoured everything else. But that he stands at the height of his reputation 16 years after his death shows the persistence of a certain kind of human hunger—the hunger for goodness. He had faith in us, and even if his faith turns out to have been misplaced, even if we have abandoned him, he somehow endures, standing between us and our electrified antipathies and recriminations like the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square in a red sweater. He is a warrior, all right, because he is not just unarmed, outgunned, outnumbered; he is long gone, and yet he keeps up the fight.

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The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Laura Lippman | Longreads | November 2019 | 17 minutes (4,147 words)

1.

I am firmly in the camp that believes we need new interests and new goals as we age. At 60, I have taken up tennis and am dutifully working my way through Duolingo’s basic Italian lessons. Recently, a friend and I decided to pursue Stephen Sondheim completist status, attending productions of every musical for which he has written music and/or lyrics. Alas, our crowded calendars keep us from being as nimble as we need to be. Passion in the Philippines would have been amazing, but we couldn’t even make it to The Frogs in suburban Detroit. Clearly, we’re going to be at this for a while.

But this past spring, we managed to bag a New York production of Merrily We Roll Along, a Sondheim work that has been vexing dramaturges since its original 1981 Broadway run of only 16 performances. Based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, it moves backward in time, centering on a three-way friendship that has fractured beyond repair. Mary, who always had a thing for Frank, has become a bitter alcoholic. Frank has ignored the work he does best, composing, in order to become a mogul, at which he is mediocre. Frank and Charley no longer speak at all. Because the story moves from their crabby old age (40-something!) to their more hopeful 20s, we see the fallout before we hear the bomb. The suspense is not fueled by whether Frank and Charley will patch things up, but the origin of the feud. Who did what to whom?

That reveal comes quickly, one advantage of a backwards-moving story. The fifth or sixth song, depending on the production you see — people are forever tinkering with Merrily — is a bravura rant. Charley breaks down on a live television show while discussing his writing partnership with Frank. Which comes first, Charley is asked, the words or the music. The contract, he replies, then launches into “Franklin Shepard Inc.,” a laundry list of his friend’s shortcomings.

The song builds, his rage builds. But just as Charley appears on the verge of one of those musical theater transitions that was mocked in Spamalot’s “The Song that Goes Like This,” he stops himself and begins to speak-sing softly. He misses Frank. He wants him back.

His argument is contradictory. He compares friendship to a garden that has to be tended, then, shades of Elizabeth Bishop, says “Friendship’s something you don’t really lose.” The tempo begins to build. He’s out of control and he knows it. Very sneaky how it happens . . . Oh my god, I think it’s happened. Stop me quick before I sink. He ends with a few vicious, well-chosen words about Frank’s obsession with money. The friendship is irrevocably broken. It’s unclear what can’t be forgiven — the stinging words or the public airing of the grievance.

Absent this kind of betrayal or falling-out, most friendships don’t end so definitively. These no-ending endings can be hard to process. Our culture long ago made peace with the fragility of matrimony, but we still have high expectations for friendships. If you really care about someone, you should be able to pick up where you left off, no matter how long it’s been. Friendship’s something you don’t really lose, right?

Hold my beer, Charley. It’s Frank’s turn to sing.
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Lindy West is Preaching to the Choir

Jenny Jimenez / Hatchette Books

Sara Fredman | Longreads | November 2019 | 17 minutes (4,696 words)

 
The title of Lindy West’s new book, The Witches Are Coming, derives from a New York Times column West wrote in October 2017 about the then-unfolding of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Woody Allen had warned against creating “a witch hunt atmosphere,” where men have to worry about their every move, and West was not having it. Or, more precisely, she was all too ready to have it. “The witches are coming,” she wrote, “but not for your life. We’re coming for your legacy … we have our stories, and we’re going to keep telling them.” For West, there is witchcraft to be found in truth-telling, a power that she says “by definition cannot be likable.” 

Likability is in the news again, with the New York Times reporting this week that 41% of voters surveyed who support Joe Biden but not Elizabeth Warren say they agree with the statement that most of the women who run for president “just aren’t that likable.” But, as West and I discussed when we spoke over the phone last month, likability is hardly an objective category. It depends as much on who is doing the liking as it does on who is being liked. In other words, audience — or in the case of politics, the makeup of the electorate — matters. The Witches Are Coming knows its audience. It isn’t aimed at the Woody Allens or the Donald Trumps of the world; its title functions as more of a mantra for would-be practitioners of its witchcraft than a warning to potential victims. And the truths West tells in The Witches Are Coming will likely find a cadre of would-be witches eager to like them. Over the last decade, West has gone from a local Seattle favorite to a writer with a national profile, a best-selling memoir, Shrill, and a well-received TV show of the same name. In one of her essays, West cheekily addresses racists but she acknowledges that her writing isn’t for everyone, least of all Trump supporters. Instead, she talks about the value of preaching to the choir — in her words, the ones “who show up every week.” 

Still, it’s possible that even West’s devoted audience isn’t entirely ready to hear all of the truths she’s here to tell. The essays in The Witches Are Coming cover a wide range of seemingly disparate topics, from the #metoo movement to climate change; Ted Bundy, Adam Sandler, and Joan Rivers all get chapters, as does a 90s culture that West believes taught her that activism was lame. They share an emphasis on the power of voice: Who gets to speak and share their stories? How do we react when those stories are shared? And they often dwell on the ways in which we try to avoid having hard conversations about our culture. What the essays don’t do is provide any easy solutions. When I spoke to her, West was comfortable saying she doesn’t have all the answers and the book functions as a series of questions that attempt, at various points, to challenge, inspire, and reassure an audience she assumes is ready to take on the cultural challenges we face as we head into the third decade of the millennium. 

* * *

Sara Fredman: Shrill told a specifically feminist story: what it’s like to walk around the world in a woman’s body, and in your particular body; what it means to try and fit yourself into like cultural and physical spaces that aren’t built for you. The Witches Are Coming pans out quite a bit and engages more broadly with politics and systemic inequities and what it means to live in our culture right now, particularly for marginalized groups. What compelled you to use this wider lens? How was the writing process different for this book as opposed to Shrill

Lindy West: Well, part of it is that there’s something vulnerable and very raw and sort of overexposed about writing memoir and I needed a break from writing memoir. So that was part of it but I think that a hallmark of the Trump era is this feeling of being overwhelmed. I’m not one of those people who thinks that this is a good thing because it’s forcing people to wake up. But I do think that it has forced a lot of people to confront how many different things are broken in our country and the ways that he’s been able to exploit those broken systems and the ways that his fans absolutely relish that brokenness. It’s really been a dark and scary time. And I just felt like that feeling of being overwhelmed is such a part of this time, so I wanted to address it in some way. I’m not an expert in anything, I don’t have a degree in policy. I’m just a person who I think is a relatively good communicator and I have this platform and this book is my attempt at gathering in all of the different parts of this great, big, overwhelming mess as best I can, trying to hold them all together and look at them at the same time and be honest and accountable about reality. That’s what this writing process felt like to me. I don’t know anything special but the point of the book is hopefully to make people feel less alone and hopefully to galvanize people a little bit. It’s the same as writing a list. If you can put something down on paper in a way where you can look at it all at once, it becomes less daunting. And you can’t cover everything but this was my attempt at trying to consolidate it so you can start cutting it up into bite-sized pieces. 

It reminds me of when my daughter was dealing with anxiety as a really little person and I spoke to a child psychologist who said you have to name it before you can deal with it. And I feel like that’s so much of what you’re doing, naming it for us. Not that we don’t know, obviously, what we’re dealing with, but getting it down on paper is the first step because it’s so overwhelming. 

Yeah, and it’s also scary to look at because it’s so much more comfortable to be in denial. 

Once you start looking at like — “oh my God, what do we do?” — it’s really scary. And I think a lot of people — particularly privileged people and especially white people — who have the luxury of living in denial to a great extent, that’s really seductive. And I think that the first step absolutely is just naming what’s happening around us and what’s happened before us. That’s just the first step to repairing some of these really deep illnesses in our society. 

But I’m interested in how you conceive of your audience. Is there an element in this book, do you think, of preaching to the choir or do you see it as galvanizing those who would already tend to agree with you but just might be complacent or think that there’s not much they can do? Do you think you might change anyone’s mind? 

I know that I have changed people’s minds with my writing before because I hear from them. I clearly did not write this book for Trump supporters to read and be like, “Huh, I never thought about that.” Obviously that’s not going to happen. I don’t feel any kind of qualms about preaching to the choir. I get accused of that a lot and I’m like, great, the choir is who shows up every week. And we have a lot of shit to do and if the choir is feeling despair and doesn’t know what to do with themselves, I have some ideas for them and I would like them to feel energized and galvanized and I would like them to not feel hopeless. The choir is who’s showing up because they want to be preached to so I don’t really mind when people say that about my work. I don’t think everything has to be changing people’s minds. And I don’t know that there are many books that are going to reach across that partisan divide. I think that’s the work of very, very long, slow culture change or one ultra-charismatic politician TBD who maybe hasn’t been born yet. 

When I teach argumentative writing, I usually start our discussion by asking if the students can give an example of a piece of writing that changed their minds because I think it’s extraordinarily difficult to change someone’s mind. And it’s always a very interesting discussion but this semester, one of my students said that he used to be anti-abortion and then started seeing all these Twitter threads of women talking about their abortions and they changed his mind. And I was flabbergasted because when does this ever happen? But then it was like, “Oh my gosh, that was on Twitter.” And I bring this up because you started the Shout Your Abortion movement on Twitter and, in this book, you write that “personal story telling is an engine of humanization, which is in turn an engine of empathy.” So here I have this kid who’s telling me he changed his opinion on abortion because of Twitter threads but Twitter can often be this toxic wasteland for women. What do we do about the fact that this is a major platform for changing minds but it’s also the main arena for policing and punishing women’s voices? What would be your advice for women who want to try to change the world by sharing their stories but don’t want to participate in an abusive garbage platform?

I don’t know. I’m certainly not telling people that they need to get off Twitter. I love Twitter. I think Twitter is incredible in a lot of ways and I had a lot of fun on Twitter and I learned a lot on Twitter. All of that is real and if people can find a place, a way to navigate Twitter that feels safe and productive to them, that’s great, you know, go ahead and stay. I left Twitter because of the president. It wasn’t so much the getting trolled all the time. I just felt ethically disgusting validating that platform or embracing the platform with my presence. So while I do think it might be a net gain for the world if we all left Twitter and let it die and move to a different platform, I don’t know what that platform is. That’s all well and good to suggest but in practical terms, it doesn’t really do much for us. We don’t have it yet. Shout Your Abortion happened on Twitter 100% and I know firsthand that that movement has changed a lot of people’s lives. And it’s just one of many absolutely incredible spontaneous outpourings of truths that have happened on Twitter that have changed a lot about the landscape that we live in. So I don’t have anything wise to say beyond that it sucks. Some people get to use this platform and have fun and feel safe and laugh and goof off with their friends and some people, in order to do any of that, have to figure out how to armor themselves against really, really violent, horrific abuse. And the fact that it’s racialized and it’s gendered, it’s just a really apt and a really disgusting reflection of our society at large. If I had a solution for our society at large, I promise I’d tell everyone. It’s real tricky because people absolutely need that platform and there’s a lot of good stuff happening there. I choose to not be there, but I don’t begrudge people who do. And even though I don’t have a lot of faith in them, I hope that Twitter continues to try to make that space safe for everyone. And maybe they’ll figure it out. 

That idea of how some people get to exist very benignly, safely and other people have a totally different experience of the world, you touch on that in your chapter on Ted Bundy and likability, which kind of fed my soul because I write a series for Longreads on TV antiheroes and gender, trying to figure out why we find it so easy to like men who do bad things and so hard to like women who do anything at all. Your argument is that likability is a con and that it can’t possibly be an objective criterion in our sexist, racist culture, which I found very compelling. But you also have a TV show and, I think, in the opinion of most critics, you created a likable character in Annie Easton. 

I know. 

Although there was some criticism that I remember seeing when season one came out that she wasn’t shrill enough, which I guess meant that she was so likable that she was unlikable, which hilariously and sadly proves your point. Can you talk a little bit about the process of creating that character? Did you fall into the likability trap at all? Were there discussions of “we want audiences to like this character” or “I’m crafting the character in such a way” in order to get audiences to like or relate to her? 

Yeah. I’m sure I’ve absolutely contradicted myself in print because I definitely have said that part of my purpose in the show, part of my goal, was to create a fat person that you like because I just think that that’s such an excellent way to change people’s minds — if you can fall in love with this character that you’re used to seeing as a kind of negative archetype, a stock character, a sidekick, a sort of broken person, a work in progress. If you can make a fully realized human being that people care about in a genuine way, then that might affect the way that they think about the fat people around them in their lives. So I’ve certainly said that in interviews and then I condemned myself in my book, which I hadn’t realized, so thank you for pointing that out. You’re always working within the confines of the culture that you’re working in. I guess maybe you can exploit that system to a degree. 

I think that the way it’s been set up like likability is a con. My argument in the series has basically been that these stories of antiheroes have been told in such a way that it stacks the deck for liking a certain character. We wouldn’t ordinarily like a mob boss or a meth kingpin, but because we get these backstories, because we see that they’re just trying to provide for their families and they’re thoughtful, they get interiority, all that stuff, and we find ourselves rooting for them in spite of ourselves because it’s been stacked. It’s all about how you construct a narrative. And so I think it’s so cool and fascinating to be thoughtful about that, but for the kind of character who doesn’t usually get that kind of narrative structure. 

Yeah and also, you know, Annie is not likable universally. I am, in the chapter, talking more about the idea of this sort of blanket, nice, universal likability that actually isn’t what we’re going for in the show. There’s plenty of people who are mad about her abortion, who hate her for being fat even though she’s nice. But I think you’re right. I think if you are a flattened person, then your likability can only be hollow. And all it can do is pander to stereotypes and traditional gender roles. But if you can make a character that is alive, it’s likable in a much more nutritious way. And you’re still within the confines of a fucked-up culture and there’s stuff about Annie that I’m sure is problematic in some way. But everything is just this kind of weird dance. You’re trying to position yourself in this matrix of fucked-up forces. 

I think it’s a complex thing but I think it’s telling that you were able to create this character who you want to root for despite the fact that she was doing all of these things that have not traditionally been likable characteristics. So that’s moving the needle but also probably reflective of the fact that so many women saw themselves for the first time in this character and that we have more women’s voices in pop culture criticism and all that stuff to say “this is a great portrayal.” So I guess it’s all about representation. Which is another topic that you talk about a lot. You’ve spoken about it in Shrill and in this book as well. And the chapter on likability comes right after the chapter on Adam Sandler, which argues that all Adam Sandler movies share a number of major unnerving qualities. I’m the same age as you and I’ve always seen myself in your arguments that so much of pop culture when we were growing up just wasn’t for us. I’m finding that part of adulthood for me is figuring out what I actually like because so much of my youth was spent subconsciously shaping myself to fit a pop culture that wasn’t created by people like me. 

Totally. 

And actually Adam Sandler was a notable exception in one tiny little way. His Hannukah song was like the first time my religion had a major pop culture moment. But that was literally the one thing. 

I mean, I almost put it in the book that “O.J. Simpson, not a Jew” is an incredible joke. It’s a very, very good line. 

It was so of a moment. You could write a chapter on that. 

Yeah, for sure. 


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So I guess I’m wondering whether you think things have shifted enough. Is it that pop culture has become a bigger tent such that it speaks to girls and young women in the same way it does to boys and young men? Or has it just become fragmented? You have teenage daughters. Do you feel that it’s different now? 

It’s definitely different. I don’t know that it’s like, you know, “Oh, we fixed it.” It’s so much better, there’s so much more diverse representation, different ways to be a girl on TV, than there were when we were growing up. But still 99% of the actresses on TV look exactly alike and lo and behold, that’s what all the teenage girls at my daughters’ schools happen to strive to look like. And that’s just exactly the same as it was when we were teenagers. But at the same time there’s a lot more depth and breadth to the female characters and the different kinds of women’s stories that we see on TV. I mean, when we were kids, you couldn’t have interracial couples. I was at Jezebel already when Cheerios had an ad with an interracial couple and people lost their minds. So that was 2012 at the earliest. So things absolutely are moving and shifting. My daughters are so clued in. They’re so on top of the media that they consume and monitoring it and policing it and thinking critically about it. And that’s another thing that Twitter has, I think, taught a lot of young people. It’s just a constant global conversation churning about every single thing in the world. And so my daughters are hyperaware of racist bullshit and sexist bullshit and homophobic bullshit in the media around them and it’s amazing. In a different interview, someone asked me: How do you equip your kids to navigate the sort of media landscape? And I think I kind of rambled on about, you know, “You gotta be honest with them and always talk to them like they are smart and they can handle it and don’t dumb things down,” blah, blah, blah. But I’m realizing in this moment that my real answer is, don’t worry about it, they got it. My daughters are so much smarter about media literacy.

I feel like I was so dumb. I feel dumb compared to them. 

Yeah. And the thing also about them is they’re not embarrassed to be militant. 

I really appreciated that activism chapter. It was cheering.

I worry about it being a little bit, um, too sweeping, too broad, because I’m ultimately talking about my own experience in high school, but it’s definitely real. 

You talk about how activism was viewed when we were in high school, how save the whales was a punchline, like, “Oh, you care about this? Pretty lame.” And the fact that we grew up in that culture, I mean it’s so sad.

So sad. 

What could we have done if that wasn’t the predominant cultural attitude toward activism? 

And it was absolutely by design, you know? People did that to us and that’s so messed up. 

Changing topics from the future to the past, your Joan Rivers chapter made me think about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel because the show is supposed to be loosely based on Joan Rivers and other early female comics. But in your chapter you point out the crucible Joan Rivers operated in. There were such limited choices facing women in comedy and she was shaped by the forces around her. If she wanted to do this thing, she needed to work in a certain way. And the show takes a totally different route. It allows its protagonist to remain likable — there’s that likability again — while killing it as a female comic. She gets to keep her humanity and also do comedy. And she’s pretty and everybody loves her but nobody sexually harasses her. Except for maybe comments, like, [old timey voice] “What’s that broad doing here?” Nobody’s grabbing any locations on her body. Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker’s TV critic, made a very similar point when she wrote about the show. But I think that your chapter on Joan Rivers offers this kind of sliding doors alternative story that the show could be telling and it would be a heavier show and less triumphalist. And I know you’ve worked in comedy and you’ve written about the role that comedy plays in culture and the responsibilities of its practitioners. It seems to me like an example of what you talk about in “choosing the lie,” right? 

Totally. 

It’s enjoyable entertainment but maybe another example of how we choose to gloss over the things that make us uncomfortable. 

Yeah, and that does a great disservice to women who are struggling in that field or in any similar field where, you know, we can just tell a story about a plucky gal who excels in her job and doesn’t face any of those really dark complications, if she’s even able to get there at all. There are so many people who were run out of comedy by sexist creeps. We don’t know who they are, we don’t know how many of them there are, we don’t know their names because they never got to do it. So I think it is easy to be like, [old timey voice] “Well if you just try hard and you got good jokes, anyone can do it!” That’s just bootstraps again. Like, if you failed, you must not have tried hard enough or you must not have been good enough when really there are — not to be a broken record — but there are massive, powerful, entrenched systems in place that move the ride for some people and make it impossible for other people, or at least very, very painful and grueling. And you’re not going to fix that, you’re not going to fix the world, if you don’t look at those honestly. 

I thought about the Chip and Joanna Gaines chapter when the whole Ellen and George W. Bush thing happened. 

Right, I thought about it too. “Oh, my chapter!” 

Ellen commented and said, “Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean I’m not gonna be friends with them.” But in your chapter on Chip and Joanna, you write: “The partisan divide is not insignificant or cute.” So how did you feel about that whole kerfuffle?

Like everything else, it’s just really complicated. It would have been incredibly powerful if Ellen had made some public statement like, “You know what? He’s my friend and I really love him as a person, but it’s true that he did XYZ horrific things to the LGBTQ community and I feel …” You know what I mean? I think more transparency is always really powerful. But also, she’s walking a tightrope. 

Right. So what do we say to people who, like Chip and Joanna, are trying to shelter in this neutrality cocoon and walk that tightrope? What do we, as consumers of pop culture, do about that? 

I don’t know, like, constantly bitch about it on Twitter? I don’t know. I think that part of this book, that I try to get into over and over and over again, is that all of this stuff is really messy; there’s not a perfect system. I think that it’s good to always encourage people to be principled and transparent and honest. Ellen or Chip and Joanna could have used those moments as an opportunity to have a complicated, candid conversation and they chose not to. And I understand that there are probably teams of publicists telling them what to do. 

Same with the candidates who got that question, you know, about “friends who aren’t like you.”

Yeah, I mean, you know what? I don’t have any friends who are homophobic, right-wing, racist monsters. Monsters is not a productive term. People, real people. I don’t have those people as my friends and I frankly don’t understand how that would work. But I also recognize that I live in Seattle and I live in a bubble and I am not confronted with messy situations. I couldn’t find you a Trump supporter if you were gonna give me $1 million. I don’t even know where to look. And so I recognize that it’s more complicated than that. I think all we can do is continue to have these conversations in public and resist falling into absolutely useless clichés like “I don’t need all my friends to believe the exact same way as me.” Like, yeah, I don’t need all my friends to root for the same sports team as me but I do need all my friends to feel the same way I do about racism and homophobia and transphobia. I do need that and I think that that is a virtue. I think that that is a good thing.

Right, and the stakes of being kind to people who are not being kind on a much grander scale with major systemic consequences. 

Yeah, and that doesn’t mean that we have to — I’m not advocating violence. Look, if there are people in your life that believe horrific things and you love those people and you care about them, of course you don’t have to cut those people out of your life. But I do think that a great start would be to at least try to communicate with them in a real way, like not in a contentious way where you’re arguing about politics, but in a human way, like we’re talking about human beings and people’s lives. It’s yet another question to which I don’t have a perfect answer because, you know, I think I said this in the book that we’ve torn down some old systems and we haven’t built new ones yet and we’re still kind of beta testing, we’re troubleshooting. I think that most people are good, or at least mean well and want to be kind. And I think a lot of people are really controlled by fear and resentment and I don’t think that that’s insurmountable. But I also don’t know how to fix it, except for doing what I’m already doing, which is using my platform to say the same eight things over and over and over again until I die. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

* * *

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Reporter Uncovers Airbnb Scam. Airbnb Shrugs, Pockets Money

(Photo Illustration by Miguel Candela / SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

When reporter Allie Conti got a call from her Airbnb host 10 minutes before she was supposed to check in to her rental in Chicago, “Andrew” claimed the toilet had backed up, making the unit unavailable. The good news, he said was that he had a larger place he managed nearby. Little did Allie know that she stumbled on an Airbnb scam involving nearly 100 property listings in eight cities run by fraudsters manipulating Airbnb’s weak policy standards and enforcement. What’s worse? Airbnb’s pathetic non-response deserves a zero-star review. Read her story at Vice.

The bad news, which went unstated, was that I had unknowingly stumbled into a nationwide web of deception that appeared to span eight cities and nearly 100 property listings—an undetected scam created by some person or organization that had figured out just how easy it is to exploit Airbnb’s poorly written rules in order to collect thousands of dollars through phony listings, fake reviews, and, when necessary, intimidation. Considering Airbnb’s lax enforcement of its own policies, who could blame the scammers for taking advantage of the new world of short-term rental platforms? They had every reason to believe they could do so with impunity.

That was it. No one at the company ever agreed to speak on the record about the specifics of what I uncovered. Nor would anyone answer any of my questions about Airbnb’s verification process. As far as what obligation it has to people who have fallen victim to a scam on Airbnb’s platform, the company only said in an email that it is “here 24/7 to support with rebooking assistance, full refunds and reimbursements” in cases of fraud or misrepresentation by hosts. Maybe Airbnb couldn’t get more detailed about its verification process because it doesn’t have much of one at all. I had asked the company about three accounts—Annie and Chase, Becky and Andrew, and Kris and Becky. Annie and Chase’s account has been deleted, and the two others no longer have any listings posted, which, due to Airbnb’s messaging constraints, means I could not message them for comment. Of the six other accounts I’d connected to the scheme, five are still active weeks later. Only Kelsey and Jean’s has disappeared from the site.

Even if my scammers had been slightly foiled, there was no guarantee that they couldn’t just start fresh with new profiles. The system was still in place. Airbnb has created a web of more than 7 million listings built largely on trust, easily exploitable by those willing to do so. Maybe it’s not so surprising that the company would rather play a half-assed game of whack-a-mole than answer basic questions about their verification process. For every person who doesn’t receive a complete refund, Airbnb makes money.

Read the story