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How to Disappear

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Alex Difrancesco | Longreads | April 2017 | 8 minutes (2,070 words)

Last year in New York City, a 19-year-old engineering student named Nayla Kidd went completely off the grid. She changed bank accounts, cell phone providers, shut down her social media, and ditched her Ivy League college to move to Bushwick and become an artist and model, all without ever informing anyone in her life. Social media jumped all over the story, and then news outlets followed suit. Kidd was a missing person for around two weeks when the police finally found her.

I remember reading her post-discovery missive in The New York Post, complete with discussions about her fancy boarding school, full scholarship to Columbia University, calculated plans, the loving mom who had clearly sacrificed for her, and thinking it was a story of the ultimate callousness. She’d had everything, but she said the pressure was entirely too much, that she’d wanted to run away and have the fun life she saw in an East Williamsburg loft she was thinking of renting. I remember reading it, sitting there and staring at the the words while thinking of my own picture plastered across subways and bus stations. How could she do such a thing intentionally? Didn’t she understand what it was like to be truly lost, to need help? Didn’t she understand that so many people were, that it was not some game?

Perhaps I was jealous. When my mental illness made me a missing person in 2010, the NYPD suggested to my friends who reported me missing that I had run off to follow a band. Though my friends set up a cross-country network of activists looking for me in any of the places they thought I might have been, the NYPD did little. Had the cops accessed my bank account, or even looked at my Metrocard swipes (an investigation practice well-established by law enforcement by 2010), they’d have easily figured out that I wandered around the city aimlessly for days before taking a bus to my hometown and checking myself into a hospital. When I saw Kidd’s story, I thought of all the resources that had gone into her “case,” and all of those of us who really were lost, unhealthy, and scared, who were given little to no help.

Alone in a hospital bed that year, unknown, technically still “missing,” my head still a wash of paranoia and confusion, I began to entertain a fantasy. What if I moved to the Midwest? Changed my name? My gender? Grew a beard? They were thoughts I couldn’t remember ever before having had, but they seemed exactly like what I should do in that moment. I had a vision of myself, flat-chested, wearing a white Hanes T-shirt, a genderless pair of Levis, and combat boots. What if I disappeared from all the people in my life? Started over as someone new? I was not well at the time — I was also standing in front of the mirror thinking about a bug I was certain had entered into my skin and had been living in my bloodstream for years, something I now know is obviously not true — but having disappeared from everyone in my life successfully, I began to wonder, “What if I really need to disappear?”

Years later, it wasn’t until I remembered this fantasy that I began to empathize with Nayla Kidd.

Read more…

The Masterful Storyteller: A David Grann Reading List

Credit: Aidan Monaghan/Amazon Studios, Bleecker Street

David Grann is the ultimate writer’s writer. The reporter and staff writer for The New Yorker has a way of discovering nuggets of an idea (the bare minimum of a pitch), and then, through intrepid and painstaking research, crafting pieces that tend to stick with readers for years.

“Many of the characters are driven by obsession,” Grann once told Nieman Storyboard. “But I’m also interested in what these characters are obsessed with, so it’s not just their obsession, it’s the object of their obsession…I’m looking for multiple elements. On one level, there is a story that is compelling, there are characters that are interesting, but also there are some intellectual stakes.”

For his upcoming book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I., Grann details the murders committed against members of the Osage Nation—which subsequently became the first case investigated by the FBI—and spent more than three years researching and reporting events that happened nearly a hundred years ago. Josh Dean similarly had been interested in writing about the Osage Nation killings, when he was informed by his agent that Grann had, in Dean’s words, “been working on this book quietly for two years.”

Dean told the Longform podcast:

I literally fell out of my chair. I admire David Grann; he is one of the best at this thing. I read his stories voraciously. I know what David Grann is doing…One, I know he is going to do an amazing job. He has a two year head-start. If it hadn’t been him…why would I [write the book]? I went into a shell and drank for six days.

While Killers of the Flower Moon will undoubtedly become a blockbuster hit one day (Imperative Entertainment paid a whopping $5 million for film rights), another of Grann’s works will debut in theaters this week. “The Lost City of Z” came to life as a New Yorker feature in 2005, and according to Grann, it was one of his rare pieces that felt incomplete as a magazine article. “It was the first piece I’d done for The New Yorker where I finished and I said, one, I’m not sick of it, and, two, there are so many more places to go. There were still doors to open,” he told Interview magazine. The article became a book, which was published in 2009, and now a film starring Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson.

Hunnam stars as Percy Fawcett, a turn-of-the-century English explorer who disappears in a quest to prove the existence of an ancient and influential civilization in the Amazon. In reporting Fawcett’s travels, Grann journeyed to the jungles where Fawcett vanished, as well as plumbed through his diaries and life, turning what had initially been a piece about this lost civilization into an all-encompassing biography—all the better for its adaptation to screen.

It’s impossible to compose a “best of” list for Grann’s writings, so below is a primer for some of his most compelling New Yorker pieces, which includes some of his earlier (and often overlooked) work. Read more…

In 1975, Newsweek Predicted A New Ice Age. We’re Still Living with the Consequences.

Antarctica
Penguins stand on a rock near station Bernardo O'Higgins, Antarctica, 2015. Photo: AP

Jack El-Hai | Longreads | April 2017 | 6 minutes (1,500 words)

Last year was the hottest on record for the third consecutive pass of the calendar. Glaciers and polar ice melt, plant and animal species go extinct at a rapid rate, and sea levels rise. Clearly the consequences of climate change are immense.

Does anyone out there think we’re at the dawn of a new ice age?

If we had asked that question just 40 years ago, an astonishing number of people — including some climatologists — would have answered yes. On April 28, 1975, Newsweek published a provocative article, “The Cooling World,” in which writer and science editor Peter Gwynne described a significant chilling of the world’s climate, with evidence accumulating “so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.” He raised the possibility of shorter growing seasons and poor crop yields, famine, and shipping lanes blocked by ice, perhaps to begin as soon as the mid-1980s. Meteorologists, he wrote, were “almost unanimous” in the opinion that our planet was getting colder. Over the years that followed, Gwynne’s article became one of the most-cited stories in Newsweek’s history. Read more…

The Elements of Bureaucratic Style

A United Airlines jets sits at the gate at Denver International Airport. (AP Photo/David Boe)

Colin Dickey | Longreads | April 2017 | 12 minutes | 3000 words

On Monday night, Oscar Munoz, the CEO of United Airlines, sent an internal email to his staff regarding the incident on Flight 3411 in which members of Chicago Aviation Security forcibly removed a customer who refused to give up his seat when asked. In the note, Munoz offered an explanation of events and a defense of both his employees and law enforcement. The email ended up on Twitter where its contents were roundly excoriated.

Munoz’s email is, in its own way, a work of art; a triumph of the willingness to pass the buck. It misstates objective facts and shifts responsibility onto the passenger, David Dao, who ended up bloody and dazed after the encounter.

As you will read, the situation was unfortunately compounded when one of the passengers was politely asked to deplane refused and it became necessary to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help.

What struck me as I read the email is how a careful and consistent use of syntax, grammar, and diction is marshaled to make a series of points both subtle and unsubtle. On Twitter, I referred to it as a “master class in the use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility,” and followed with a few tweets that highlighted its use of language to shift the blame on to the victim.

Read more…

Amazon’s New Stores Aren’t Happy to See You Either

(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

It’s come to this: We’re now eulogizing giant corporate retail chains. Suburban D.C. will lose one of its largest bookstores when the 20-year-old Barnes & Noble flagship in Bethesda closes at the end of this year. Rumored to be one of the largest and highest-trafficked Barnes & Noble locations, second only to New York’s Union Square, the store was at the center of the development of Bethesda Row, an avenue of retail outlets that now includes a Kate Spade, Sur La Table, and The North Face, making professorial Bethesda into the kind of suburb that commands $10.5 million for a “downtown” penthouse. The Barnes & Noble was the beginning of this transformation, and now it has come to the end. Read more…

Choosing Mother India

Upside down road sign reading "Wrong Way"
Wrong Way by Helen Melissakis via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Born in New Jersey to a family of Indian descent, Kanan Gole chooses India over America by moving there for work. In “Going the Right Way” on The Smart Set, Gole explains why she made that choice and how it’s perceived by the Indians around her.

My decision to move to India to work was primarily motivated by my need for a stronger understanding of my heritage. There’s no other way to truly understand my Indian software except living where my parents lived. I look like an Indian, can dress like one, can sometimes speak like one too (though that is under construction), but I wouldn’t live up to the title “Indian.” It is difficult to define immigrant kid identity, so I try not to do it at all. I am simply part Indian, part American. Which parts? That’s too technical for me, a subject that will cause me unnecessary angst, and possibly one that won’t be resolved. Life is good, I must say. But people insist that only an idiot would move from the land of the dollar to the 68-times-weaker rupee.

Read the story

Contributor Guide

  1. Posts on Longreads.com
  2. Longreads Picks
  3. Weekly Top 5 Email
  4. Image Specifications and Tips

1. Posts on Longreads.com

General Tips

  • Be sure to add a featured image. Refer to the Image Specifications and Tips section below.
  • Enter an excerpt for your post. Excerpts should be under 160 characters long. If you don’t see the excerpt field in WP-Admin, you might need to manually display it via the checkbox in Screen Options at the top of the page.
  • Add a handful of relevant categories, such as “Quotes,” “Essays & Criticism,” and “Nonfiction.”
  • Add tags for additional keywords, plus the author and/or publication names as necessary. Add a maximum of 10-15 tags and categories total to ensure the post appears in the WordPress.com Reader.
  • Add a photo credit to images: In the WordPress media gallery, there is a “Caption” field. Add a photo credit naming the source and linking (using HTML) to the original. Example: Photo via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/skynoir/11224284884">John Smith, Flickr</a>
  • For very short quotes, you can use a larger, bolder font by adding class=”short” to the blockquote. For example: <blockquote class="short">This is the quote</blockquote>

Stories / Exclusives / Excerpts

All of our original stories get the feature article treatment, with large photos and centered headlines/deks. These should all be assigned to the “Story” category. See examples here:

https://longreads.com/category/story/

Dek

The dek is pulled from the “Excerpt” field in WordPress.

Example of a headline and dek on top of a Longreads Exclusive. The dek only appears like this for posts with the “story” or “top 5” categories.

Pullquotes

Add pullquotes to break up the text. They’re formatted like this:

<blockquote class="pullquote center">Here is a sentence copied from the story.</blockquote>

You can also change the alignment for pullquotes (replace the “center” class in the example with “right” or ”left”)

Example of a pullquote on Longreads.com.

Images & Videos

Add images or videos, depending on the story. You can embed most videos on other services (YouTube, Vimeo) by pasting the URL into the WordPress visual editor. To add more images, pick a spot in the story, then click “Add Media.” You can also center the image, or align it left/right.

Header Variations

Our original stories have four options for header treatment:

Here are live examples:

To choose one of these header variations, make a selection from the “Longreads Exclusive Options” panel in the WP Admin interface:

We don’t currently have any strict rules around when each header variation should be used. If you have an especially impactful featured image, give “Image Only” a try. If you have a vertically-oriented image, use “Dual Pane.” Give a couple of the layouts a try, and see which one looks better. Don’t hesitate to ask the group for feedback if you’re not sure.

The “Longreads Exclusive Options” panel also contains an experimental “Move the byline to the top” feature. This checkbox grabs the first paragraph (<p></p>) of the post and moves it up into the header.  It’s a little finicky, so be sure to verify that it worked before you leave it checked.

Here’s an example of a byline that should work, if you’d like to copy and paste it:

<p style="text-align:center;"><em>Author Name</em> | <em><a href="#">Longreads</a></em> | <em>June 2017</em> | <em>22 minutes (1,500 words)</em></p>

If you try the checkbox, but it doesn’t work, give Kjell a ping and he should be able to help. A known issue for the byline feature is that it sometimes will create unfortunate line breaks for longer bylines. We’ll figure that out. 🙂

Quote Posts

A quote post is short and simple, but it’s a great way to distill “what we’re reading,” what we love, and why we love it. A quote post is a short blog post that features a link to a story or book along with a notable excerpt or quote.

Examples: http://blog.longreads.com/category/quotes-2/

It can be helpful to think of a quote and headline or angle that is different from the original story’s headline or angle. Often quote posts work well for surfacing a different story that’s buried deeper inside of a longer piece or inside a book.

Example of a headline rewrite for one of our quote posts.

Quote posts usually begin with a short introduction by you, followed by the quote. You can also do it the other way around: first quote, then context. The latter works best if the quote itself is short. If the excerpt is longer than a couple sentences, then it can be better to start with your own introduction, so people know why they should keep reading.

We usually don’t use more than 3-4 paragraphs to excerpt from the story. Quotes are meant to be quick, notable moments from a story. Exceptions can be made for books, since readers will be taken to a book purchase link rather than the full free story.

For direct quotes in the post, use <blockquote></blockquote> tags.

Every quote post should include a red button to “Read the story” “Read the interview” or (for Amazon links) “Get the book”. This is the code for that button: <a class="button-red">Read the story</a>

 

Interviews

Same as “Story” above but also include “Interviews” category and use bold text for interviewer questions.

Example: https://longreads.com/2017/03/14/ariel-levy-interview/

Reading Lists

A reading list is a list or essay with a collection of links with summaries / excerpts.

See examples here: http://blog.longreads.com/category/reading-list-2/

All list items will be linked and wrapped in <h2></h2> tags. Include the title, and in parentheses, add the author, publication and year if not current.


2. Longreads Picks

Longreads Picks are stories that we recommend. Picks are shown to users in the feed on the right side of the homepage, and on our picks page: https://longreads.com/picks/

In technical terms, Picks are a custom post type (CPT) on Longreads. All that means is that they work a little differently than posts do.

To add a new pick:

  1. visit https://longreads.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=lr_pick and select “New Pick” on the top left.
  2. Enter a title and a short description for your picks. You can see examples here.
  3. Below the main content box, there’s a new box with some additional fields:
  4. Click “Add Author” and start typing the name of the article’s author. This text box will auto-suggest matches from our database. If the author is brand new, you’ll need to visit this page, and add them manually first. Then go back to your pick, refresh the page, and try adding the author again. You can add multiple authors if necessary.
  5. The Publisher box works the same way. If your pick is from a new Publisher, you can add them first from this page.
  6. Enter the URL publsher date, and word count. No need to add tags or a featured image.
  7. Hit publish or schedule the post when you’re ready.

3. Weekly Top 5 Email

The Longreads weekly newsletter goes out every Friday between 3pm-4pm ET. It’s manually built in MailChimp. Here is a brief checklist on preparing each week’s newsletter.

  1. Once you have your Top 5 picks, create a draft blog post, titled “The Top 5 Longreads of the Week.” Use previous versions for formatting code.
  2. In Mailchimp, under “Campaigns” in the top nav, create a new Campaign by going to a previous week’s “Longreads Weekly” campaign, and selecting “Replicate” from the dropdown menu.
  3. Doublecheck that “Recipients” list is “Weekly Longreads Email” (You shouldn’t have to change anything.) Then click “Next”
  4. Under “Setup” leave all settings the same but change the date under “Name your campaign”.
  5. Skip the “Template” section and go straight to “Design” to make the following changes:
    • Click “Edit” on the “Longreads Weekly” section to change the email date and change any intro language or links if necessary. Click “Save and Close” when finished.
    • Click Edit on the Top 5 and story promos section. In this section you will update the Top 5 links and story links, along with their promo images and language.
    • Edit the post grid at the bottom. You can add, hide, or remove rows of stories using the buttons on the top left. Always add stories in groups of two — don’t leave one of the grid cells empty.
    • In the story grid, please make sure to crop the images to 1024px wide by 585px tall. You can do this within Mailchimp by choosing “Edit” when hovering over the image, then selecting “Edit” on the right. There’s a “Crop” tool in the Mailchimp image editor.
  6. In the “Confirm” section, first select “Preview and Test” in the upper right menu and “Enter Preview Mode.” You will see desktop and mobile versions of the emails. This is also a good place to test all of the links. Be sure to check all the links for all the story picks, headlines, images, and “Read Now” buttons.
  7. Close out of the window, and under “Preview and Test,” select “Send a Test Email” and send the email to yourself, Kjell, and at least one other Editor.
  8. Check the email and links.
  9. Before you send the email, be sure to FIRST publish the Top 5 Longreads blog post live, and check that your Top 5 link matches the live Top 5 blog post.
  10. Under Confirm, double check that the email will go to the “Weekly Longreads Email list.”
  11. Hit “Send” in the bottom right corner, and enjoy your weekend!

4. Image Specifications and Tips

Blog Posts and Exclusives

Images for blog posts should be at least 1456px wide. This allows for them to display at full retina resolution on desktop monitors. Landscape images tend to work best, but portrait images can be used from time to time as long as the minimum width is met. Featured images for exclusives are displayed larger than they are for regular blog posts. These images should be 2400px wide by 1400px tall. This is an image ratio of 12:7.

Emails

To keep load times down in emails, images should be no more than 1200px wide. You can resize to this width in Mailchimp. For images in the bottom grid, crop to 1024px wide by 585px tall.

Stock images

We usually use AP Images for our paid stock photos. Ping an automattician to purchase.

The following sources are great for finding Creative Commons photos. Be sure to include credit when necessary.

Other tips:

  • Ping Kjell for help with illustrations for Exclusives.
  • We’re generally welcome to use book and magazine covers when promoting/excerpting stories they include.

Building In the Shadow of Our Own Destruction

"A Vision of Sir John Soane’s Design for the Rotunda of the Bank of England as a Ruin," by Joseph Gandy, 1789 (Sir John Soane Museum)

Colin Dickey | Longreads | April 2017 | 12 minutes (3,060 words)

 

In the opening pages of Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald describes the Antwerp nocturama, a zoo enclosure of simulated darkness designed to allow visitors to watch nocturnal animals in their natural environment. Sebald finds himself fixated on a raccoon compulsively washing a piece of apple, an animal whose work goes “far beyond any reasonable thoroughness,” he writes, as though this “would help it escape the unreal world in which it had arrived.” In the same way, perhaps, I’ve been reading Sebald compulsively for the past few months, as though through this act I might find the means to escape the unreal, topsy-turvy world of this grim winter.

Sebald is often called a Holocaust writer—all his major works deal with the Nazi genocide, some more explicitly than others. But his writing is often more concerned with a crisis in European modernity, one that can be traced back as far back as the Napoleonic Wars—a crisis in which the Holocaust was a horrifying, but nearly inevitable by-product. No historical tragedy arrives, ex nihilo, like Athena from her father’s forehead. Rather, Sebald traces and patterns that are laid out decades, perhaps centuries in advance, often in plain sight. They ostentatiously draw attention to themselves, though we have no desire to recognize them. Rather than focus on cartoonish depictions of Nazism as some anomalous evil, Sebald looked for the ways that fascism grew from the innocuous and banal aspects of European culture—from textile manufacturing, to psychotherapy, to architecture.

It was in architecture that Sebald saw the most telling indicators of the inevitability of the camps, often in the most unlikely of places. In Austerlitz, Sebald’s narrator meets up with the novel’s eponymous protagonist in Brussels’ Palace of Justice, reputed to be the largest courthouse in the world. Built in the 1880s, the Palace is a massive accumulation of stone organized haphazardly, such that many of its corridors and stairways lead nowhere. Sebald sees a paranoid logic in such a building, meant as an awe-inspiring monument to justice,  yet containing a lawless rabbit warren of hallways—a belief that marble and brick can forestall death itself. There was an anxious psychosis in the late-nineteenth century that led to greater and greater structures, each trying to outdo the last, further exacerbating a death drive. “At the most,” Jacques Austerlitz tells the narrator about this palace, “we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”

The Palais de Justice in Brussels, Belgium was begin in 1866 and finished nearly twenty years later. It is said that Hitler admired it as one of his favorite structures, but during the liberation of Brussels, retreating German troops set it on fire, heavily damaging the building. (Wikimedia Commons)

Read more…

‘London Was, But Is No More’

a panorama of London skyscrapers just before sunrise
Photo by Colin via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Iain Sinclair, in the London Review of Books, mourns his constantly-transforming city. There was never just one London, but for Sinclair, London as he understood it is crumbling, and his essay is a loving, fascinating, melancholy, rollicking look at how technology and globalization are transforming urban spaces.

Drifting in a lazy, autopilot trajectory, my own cloud of unknowing, down Bethnal Green Road towards the pop-up shopping hub by the London Overground station at Shoreditch, I register a notice in a window that says: ‘No coffee stored overnight.’ Once upon a time, white vans (for white men) were nervous about their tools and ladders, but now the value is in coffee, barista coffee, gold dust: the marching powder of the shared-desk classes who are hitting it hard in recovered container stacks and bare-brick coffee shops glowing with an occult circle of pale screens and fearful concentration. Why do these digital initiates always look as if the screens hold bad news, as if the power is on the point of shutting down permanently, leaving them disconnected in outer darkness?

That coffee sign was a border marker, preparing me for a series of designated smoking areas, puddles of stubbed-out cigarettes, and a chain of opportunist businesses promoted by oxymorons: FREE CASH, IMPERIAL EQUITY, CITY SHEEPSKINS, RESPONSIBLE GAMBLING, TAPAS REVOLUTION, PROPER HAMBURGER. And of course Sainsbury’s Local. When, in truth, there is no local left. Those signs confirm the dissolution of locality. The last London, Smart City, is nervous about unreformed localism, nuisance quarters with medieval borders clinging to outmoded privileges, like schools, pubs, markets or hospitals hungry for funds and resistant to improving the image of construction.

Read the essay

Why Should a Website Decide Where You’re From?

colorful map of eastern europe with pushpins connected by pieces of yarn
Photo by Cali4Beach via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

In Real Life Mag, information accessibility and data use expert Zara Rahman explores the limits and coercive power of a ubiquitous internet interface: the location drop-down menu. Aside from forcing people to make artificial choices, location drop-downs also assume a stable location, something that many people don’t have, and never did.

Digital technologies seem to have ignored how people actually move around in geographic space: It’s relatively new that some of us have fixed locations or even addresses at all, and in some regions, nomadic cultures still exist. In Somalia, over a quarter of the population is nomadic; in Mongolia, just under a third are still nomadic, moving from place to place with their herds. Seasonal migration from rural areas to urban ones is a way of life for many, or from poorer countries to richer ones, as Bangladeshi migrant workers who find work in countries in the Gulf do. For millions, location is and always has been fluid and complex, dependent upon a myriad of factors, from climate to the economy to geopolitics.

Read the essay