Posts tagged longreads

A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.

When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a pencil, using the reading board to write on onionskin typewriter paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid.” He places the paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an X. The page completed, he clips it facedown on another clipboard that he places off to the right of the typewriter.

Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.

He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

George Plimpton, The Paris Review. Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21.

In a 9,000 word interview from 1954, Plimpton and Hemingway discuss writing and craft, and gossip about their contemporaries.

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved The Kentucky Derby runs tomorrow. As you prep yourself with refreshing adult beverage make sure to reread and share Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal article, and Ralph Steadman’s illustrations, on the event.  ESPN’s Grantland republishes it — with light commentary — here.

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved

The Kentucky Derby runs tomorrow. As you prep yourself with refreshing adult beverage make sure to reread and share Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal article, and Ralph Steadman’s illustrations, on the event. 

ESPN’s Grantland republishes it — with light commentary — here.

101 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories: Conor Friedersdorf's annual collection of the very best that journalism has to offer.

Infra Congo

The Democratic Republic of Congo is a perennial occupant on the list of the world’s most unfortunate places. Over the past 15 years, 40 armed groups have waged rebellions, counter-rebellions and outside incursions to control either the country or a desired part of it.

The result: over 300,000 killed, another 5 million deaths due to disease and starvation, hundreds of thousands of rapes, countless mutilations.

Last summer, Richard Mosse began exhibiting and publishing his photos from Eastern Congo in a series of work he calls Infra.

The name comes from the Aerochrome film Kodak created in 1942 that Mosse used to shoot his subjects.

Via No Caption Needed:

Aerochrome is a false-color reversal film designed, according to Kodak, “for various aerial photographic applications, such as vegetation and forestry surveys … monitoring where infrared discriminations may yield practical results.” More to the point, it was intended for military purposes and in particular camouflage detection as it rendered the reflections of infrared and green typical of healthy foliage in strong red tones, making it stand out against the façade of dead and dying leaves—often seen in diluted magenta tones—used to conceal the enemy. In short, its purpose was to make the invisible visible.

The result of Mosse’s use of Aerochrome are the highly saturated images seen here. In a review of his work, the Guardian suggests the striking visuals deconstruct cliched war porn and make us reconsider what is actually happening: 

But where this technology was invented to detect enemy positions in the underbrush, Mosse uses [Aerochrome film] to make us call into question pictures we thought we understood. These are the images we take for granted from Congo: the ruthless militia commander, the rape victim, an unwitting peasant. But in Mosse’s pictures, Congo’s photographic clichés are represented in a counterpoint of electric pink, teal blue and lavender. By representing the conflict with an invisible spectrum of infrared light, he pushes us to see this tragedy in new ways.

Mosse described his work in an interview with Aperture last summer. In it he discusses the history of representing warfare and trying to capture what is “real”.

Photographic realism has become so inscribed upon twentieth-century depictions of war that we often forget that there were other forms before it: the panorama, the history painting, even 3-D spectroscopic views of the battlefield. In the past, this is how the public understood their wars—as distant sweeping landscapes of enormous scale and detail. I feel that early war photographers like Mathew Brady and Roger Fenton were influenced by these precedents. But they were soon forgotten with small-format technologies, and with changes in the way that wars were fought during the twentieth century. Warfare is constantly evolving; it has recently become abstracted, asymmetric, simulated. We are so removed from the experience of war in the West that I feel the genre may shift once more. The realist forms that were so powerful throughout the twentieth century may now be obsolescent.

In my practice, I struggle with the challenge of representing abstract or contingent phenomena. The camera’s dumb optic is intensely literal, yet the world is far from being simple or transparent. Air disasters, terrorism, the simulated nature of modern warfare, the cultural interface between an occupying force and its enemy, the martyr drive in Islamic extremism, the intangibility of Eastern Congo’s conflict—these are all subjects that are very difficult to express with traditional documentary realism; they are difficult to perceive in their own right. Very often I am fighting simply to represent the subject, just to find a way to put it before the lens, or make it visible by its very absence. This process is inherently “Romantic” because it often requires a retreat into my own imagination, into my own symbolic order.

But the real is central to my interests, as it’s something that eludes conventional genres, particularly Realism. The real is at the heart of contemporary global anxiety; proximity to the real is endured by us all. But I feel that the real is only effectively communicated through shocks to the imagination, precipitated by the Sublime. That may seem like an archaic term, but what I’m referring to here is contemporary art’s unique ability to make visible what cannot be perceived, breaching the limits of representation.

Visit Mosse’s Web site for more images from this series. The Aperture interview along with other coverage of his work can be read here.

How the Daily Mail Got its Groove On

The Daily Mail is England’s most popular paper and its Web site recently surpassed the New York Times’ as the world’s most visited.

Last week it won nine British Press Awards.

In a longread, the New Yorker explorers England’s media landscape and the Mail’s present, past and future.

Via the New Yorker:

The Mail’s closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News. In Britain, unlike in the United States, television tends to be a dignified affair, while print is berserk and shouty. The Mail is like Fox in the sense that it speaks to, and for, the married, car-driving, homeowning, conservative-voting suburbanite, but it is unlike Fox in that it is not slavishly approving of any political party. One editor told me, “The paper’s defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs.” Nor is the Mail easy to resist. Last year, its lawyers shut down a proxy site that allowed liberals to browse Mail Online without bumping up its traffic.

The Mail presents itself as the defender of traditional British values, the voice of an overlooked majority whose opinions inconvenience the agendas of metropolitan élites. To its detractors, it is the Hate Mail, goading the worst curtain-twitching instincts of an island nation, or the Daily Fail, fuelling paranoia about everything from immigration to skin conditions. (“WITHIN A DAY OF HIS ECZEMA BEING INFECTED, MARC WAS DEAD,” a recent headline warned.) A Briton’s view of the Mail is a totemic indicator of his sociopolitical orientation, the dinner-party signal for where he stands on a host of other matters. In 2010, a bearded, guitar-strumming band called Dan & Dan had a YouTube hit with “The Daily Mail Song,” which, so far, has been viewed more than 1.3 million times. “Bring back capital punishment for pedophiles / Photo feature on schoolgirl skirt styles / Binge Britain! Single Mums! / Pensioners! Hoodie Scum!” Dan sings. “It’s absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail.” The Mail is less a parody of itself than a parody of the parody, its rectitudinousness cancelling out others’ ridicule to render a middlebrow juggernaut that can slay knights and sway Prime Ministers.

The Longform Guide to Early Computing: As the new iPad debuts, a look back at the greatest stories ever written about the first computers.

Washington correspondents from newspapers around the country were as unabashedly partisan during the 1800’s as the Washington newspapers themselves. As Bernard A.Weisberger points out in his book Reporters for the Union, a journalist might describe one senator as having “a fawning, sinister smile; a keen, snaky eye; . . .his whole air and mien suggesting a subdued combination of Judas Iscariot with Uriah Heep.” The speech of a senator who shared the reporter’s partisan views, however, was “full of marrow and grit, and enunciated with a courage which did one’s heart good to hear.” No one complained about biased coverage because no one expected anything different.

Partisan journalism survived as the dominant approach to covering political news until the end of the 19th century. But around that time, two forces, both related to the rise of a national economy, began to militate for change in the ethic of partisan journalism. First, a large class of readers developed who were educated and interested in receiving accounts of political news that did not try to make up their minds for them. Second, wire services such as the Associated Press—which, as the telegraph spread, were serving more and more newspapers in every part of the country—decided that partisanship was bad business. In the course of pleasing one party’s newspapers, the wire services would displease not only the other party’s, but also all of those readers who wanted their news unleavened with overt political bias.

Michael Nelson, Virginia Quarterly Review. Why the Media Love Presidents and Presidents Hate the Media.

Our Presidents Day reading brings us to the history of American political journalism. 

Library sex began with high hopes. Long before the era of the public library, stories of sex among books were set in private collections, in secluded humanist studies. The protagonist of Antonio Vignali’s 1526 La Cazzaria (The Book of the Prick) examines a collection of raunchy books and manuscripts in a private study as he awaits the arrival of a lover. The presence of smutty works in progress is telling: there is an elegant cross-pollination here. Books inspire sex, sex creates books—and all within the four walls of the library.

Avi Steinberg, The Paris Review. Checking Out.

A brief history of libraries, librarians and sex in which we learn that “again and again,” in contemporary library-porn lit, “the neglected love life of the librarian is a stand-in for the doomed state of the library generally.”

We’re at the start of a revolution in the ways marketers and media intrude in — and shape — our lives. Every day, most if not all Americans who use the internet, along with hundreds of millions of other users from all over the planet, are being quietly peeked at, poked, analyzed and tagged as they move through the online world. Governments undoubtedly conduct a good deal of snooping, more in some parts of the world than in others. But in North America, Europe, and many other places, companies that work for marketers have taken the lead in secretly slicing and dicing the actions and backgrounds of huge populations on a virtually minute-by-minute basis. Their goal is to find out how to activate individuals’ buying impulses so they can sell us stuff more efficiently than ever before. But their work has broader social and cultural consequences as well. It is destroying traditional publishing ethics by forcing media outlets to adapt their editorial content to advertisers’ public-relations needs and slice-and-dice demands. And it is performing a highly controversial form of social profiling and discrimination by customizing our media content on the basis of marketing reputations we don’t even know we have.

Joseph Turow, The Atlantic. A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click.

A longread excerpt from Turow’s new book The Daily You.

In the brief history of photography, 175 years or so, a lot of it has been going out someplace and bringing back your image as a trophy, as a spoil or as a treasure and I think those days are ending pretty quickly.

The photographer Paul Shambroom to Wired’s Rawfile. In Digital Age, Sourcing Images Is as Legitimate as Making Them.

In a lengthy Q&A with Wired, Paul Shambroom suggests that photography is rapidly evolving — morphing might be a better word — into a field that includes working with and collecting the world’s digital output as seen on Flickr, Picassa, Facebook and other photo sharing platforms, as well as new(ish) tools that let us mix, match and mashup that output such as Microsoft’s Photosynth.

He also goes futuristic and thinks that some day we’ll be able to take a picture anywhere in the world without actually being there.

Read on.

Amazon and Long-form Journalism

Anecdotal evidence is trickling in that Amazon is turning into a legitimate outlet for long-form journalism.

For example, Marc Herman recently wrote about Libya for The Atlantic and then turned his additional reporting into a Kindle Single selling for $1.99. Current result: the title is in Kindle’s top 500 and Herman is on pace to recoup the costs of his Libya trip.

Over at GigaOm, Matthew Ingram writes:

As newspapers and even magazines have declined in both reach and financial health, there has been a lot of concern expressed about the future of journalism — particularly longer-form or what some call “investigative journalism.” This is arguably where the most value lies, especially when breaking news can easily be aggregated by outlets like The Huffington Post or distributed widely for nothing. But how does this kind of journalism pay for itself? Herman’s example is one potential answer to that question: it pays for itself when readers subsidize the writer directly for content that they appreciate.

What's Old is New, and Vice Versa

The Economist explores social networking history with a look at Martin Luther and the Reformation. The general takeaway: “Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation.”

Interesting is the how Luther’s “95 Theses” and other pamphlets spread throughout Germany and Europe:

The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a “networked public”, rather than an “audience”, since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany.

Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther’s sympathisers recommended it to their friends. Booksellers promoted it and itinerant colporteurs hawked it. Travelling merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author’s involvement.

Pamphlets and printing aside, Luther and his allies used the multimedia of the times to further spread their message. Namely, woodcuts and song.

It was not just words that travelled along the social networks of the Reformation era, but music and images too. The news ballad, like the pamphlet, was a relatively new form of media. It set a poetic and often exaggerated description of contemporary events to a familiar tune so that it could be easily learned, sung and taught to others. News ballads were often “contrafacta” that deliberately mashed up a pious melody with secular or even profane lyrics. They were distributed in the form of printed lyric sheets, with a note to indicate which tune they should be sung to. Once learned they could spread even among the illiterate through the practice of communal singing…

…Woodcuts were another form of propaganda. The combination of bold graphics with a smattering of text, printed as a broadsheet, could convey messages to the illiterate or semi-literate and serve as a visual aid for preachers. Luther remarked that “without images we can neither think nor understand anything.”

H/T: Kottke.org.

Speaking of Piracy

On Thursday the House Judiciary Committee will vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Meanwhile the Protect IP Act is making its way through the Senate.

As the Center for Democracy and Technology writes, “If passed, these bills would cripple online innovation, chill online free expression, subvert the inner workings of Internet security, and compromise user privacy.”

At 1WebDesign, they’ve put together the following list of resources for background on SOPA and PIPA:

Don’t Censor the Net has resources for signing petitions and contacting representatives here.

Mexico’s Drug War The Guardian is publishing an important and eye-opening series that explores Mexico’s ongoing drug war.  The series mixes media with stories presented in a variety of formats. For example: Text: The US gun smugglers recruited by one of Mexico’s most brutal cartels  Interactive: Mexico’s war on drugs: stories from the front line Video: Mexico drug wars: ‘the majority of the weapons used by the cartels are coming from the US’ Image: Still from an interactive timeline indicating that Mexican media organizations estimate 45,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence over the past five years.

Mexico’s Drug War

The Guardian is publishing an important and eye-opening series that explores Mexico’s ongoing drug war. 

The series mixes media with stories presented in a variety of formats. For example:

Image: Still from an interactive timeline indicating that Mexican media organizations estimate 45,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence over the past five years.