The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

November 15, 2024 at 03:30PM

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In this edition:

• Not just living, but belonging
• The indelible simplicity of tattoo culture
• Where we read, where we dream
• A quest for the truth behind an icon
• Baring all for the hell of it

1. There Is No Place like Home, Whatever That Is

Jeannette Cooperman | The Common Reader | September 30, 2024 | 5,484 words

In my 20s and 30s, rootlessness made life more exciting. I traveled solo around the world, exploring cities that I decided to call home for months at a time. In between these trips, I always returned to California, back to my parents’ nest. Jeannette Cooperman encapsulates this nicely: “I fancy myself rootless—yet the isotopes of my childhood home are locked inside the enamel of my teeth.” I’ve since slowed down, but still feel like I haven’t planted roots anywhere: my husband and I have moved six times in 10 years. In this essay, Cooperman examines home from different angles, suggesting that people have their own definitions of the word, which evolves as our lives do. “In the first years of life, your home is your entire universe,” she writes. That childhood home might be familiar and comforting, as mine was (and still is, despite the bit of dread that’s inevitably tied to any parental visit). Or, as with Cooperman, it may not. “My great aunts lived upstairs and my grandparents downstairs, with me and my widowed mother tucked into the second bedroom,” she writes. “We always felt like boarders, though only now can I articulate that.” She also writes about finding home within her partner, Andrew: “He is home for me. And I hate that fact. I love my husband with every ounce of energy I possess, but if he is my home, what happens if he dies first? I am homeless, adrift forever?” Home, too, can extend beyond your front door to your neighborhood, where we “bond by territory,” where we find a community in which we belong. It’s this type of network that I continue to search for as an adult, and now a parent, in a time when people retreat into their private spaces more and socialize less. I appreciate Cooperman’s ruminations here because I think, perhaps obsessively, about what would make my ideal home. It’s an exercise that feels more urgent in times of despair—a constant wondering of where our true home is in the world, or if a perfect place exists for us. “If you have someplace like that to return to,” writes Cooperman, “why would you not?” —CLR

2. The Painful Pleasures of a Tattoo Convention

Jackson Arn | The New Yorker | November 11, 2024 | 2,979 words

“To get a sense of what an art form is all about, study the refreshments,” writes Jackson Arn in considering the New York Tattoo Convention (NYTC). Book launches have crudités and cheese; gallery openings offer flutes of bubbly beverages; and at the NYTC, it’s coffee, beer, burgers, tacos, and candy. Lots of candy in bowls, lots of eye candy in the form of tattoo ink. Arn acknowledges that the NYTC, which featured 300 artists, is neither the biggest nor can claim “being the coolest or the most respected.” So what is it that drew (pardon the pun) Arn to wander the aisles? A certain gritty purity, it turns out. The art itself may be intricate, but there’s a beautiful simplicity about tattooing in general. It’s not overrun by braying bitcoin bros. There is no ink oligarchy. There are colorful characters, but no bombastic buffoons. And as Arn explains, despite its increasing popularity, tattooing remains unsullied by close study or consumerism: “Sooner or later, every art gets scholarly journals,” Arn writes. “There must be dozens of journals devoted to tattoo studies, and yet the art seems to have resisted most attempts to intellectualize it—it remains, in 2024, proudly candy—and, by the same token, to convert it into something it’s not.” It is art, for art’s sake—one human decorating another with something meaningful they will wear for the rest of their life. How wonderful to discover surprise and wonder in a piece where I least expected it. I think it’s time to add a new tattoo to my own collection. —KS

3. ‘Here I Gather All the Friends’: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study

Andrew Hui | The Public Domain Review | November 13, 2024 | 2,607 words

Every so often, you happen upon a piece of writing in an unexpected place, about an unexpected topic, that feels like the perfect kind of surprise. This excerpt from Andrew Hui’s forthcoming book about libraries during the Renaissance is one of those surprises. Look, I’m no scholar. The idea of a book about libraries during the Renaissance doesn’t usually rev my engine. But increasingly, I’ve been interested in how we seek clarity and thoughtfulness in an age of distraction. (I’m not alone, judging from the popularity of bookstore and library porn on TikTok.) Maybe that’s why reading Machiavelli’s descriptions of his reading routine in exile struck a wistful chord somewhere in me. After a day spent outside, he’d come home, change into clean clothes, and immerse himself in the writings of his predecessors, taking notes all the while. “[F]or four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death,” he wrote to a friend. “I absorb myself into them completely.” Such focus could give even a threadbare farmhouse study the grandeur of a palace library; in fact, it was this very reading and writing that led to The Prince. Centuries later, Hui points out, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about reading in a similar way—treating the pursuit of truth as a sort of divinity. This is an academic essay, yes, but it’s also a deeply human one. We don’t all have libraries of our own like Montaigne, or even a modest studiolo. But we do have the power to leave the phone in another room and pick up a book. To think about what we’re reading. To talk about it with someone else. And in doing so, to maybe break free, just a little bit, from the constant info-churn that so dominates our lives. —PR

4. Santa Maria

Myriam Gurba | Places Journal | October 24, 2024 | 6,287 words

The sculpture stopped me in my tracks. Made of “wooden hat forms, fabric, wooden beads, twine, metal, paint, and human hair,” according to the Whitney Museum’s website, The Elder is a crude rendering of a figure with arms and eyes raised skyward, as if in prayer, ecstasy, or both. A plaque positioned next to it offers viewers information about the artist: John Outterbridge. Born 1933. Greenville, North Carolina. My hometown. A place that “isn’t known for much,” as Myriam Gurba writes in this essay about her own hometown of Santa Maria, California. Learning about an exceptional artist who once trod the ground I did for the first 18 years of my life felt like a jolt. He wasn’t familiar, but why not? Because he was Black, and I am white, and Greenville remains deeply segregated? I wanted to know more. I still do. Gurba provides a roadmap. Her own jolt came from realizing that a photo in her dad’s office, which had mesmerized her as a kid, was famous. It was Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, which reminded Gurba “of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a work I’d seen pictured in a library book about Italian Renaissance art.” When Gurba learned that the photo was taken near Santa Maria, she became obsessed with figuring out exactly where it was shot. She wanted to stand in the footsteps of history, an impulse I share. But trying to place the photo is only part of this story. Gurba also engages in a reckoning with her upbringing and with the legacy of Lange’s photo—including the fact that the subject is widely assumed to be a white woman, when in fact she was Indigenous. “Migrant Mother shaped my moral imagination,” Gurba writes. “I don’t think it would be a bad idea to give this folk saint her own folk shrine . . . a whitewashed crucifix plunged into the dirt. A glass of water. A hamburger. Two bottles of beer. A slice of peach pie. A timing chain. A stack of coins. A bowl of acorns. A wreath of daisies. A pinch of Oklahoma dirt.” —SD

5. ‘It Wasn’t Sexual in Any Way!’ 50 Years of Streaking – By The People Who Dared to Bare All

Simon Hattenstone | The Guardian | November 6, 2024 | 4,755 words

I would happily go for a drink with any of the people featured in this illuminating piece on the history of streaking. Not in the hope that they would whip their clothes off, but because each has a certain joie de vivre, rare to find nowadays. Although streaking can be used to draw attention to various issues, Simon Hattenstone focuses on the people who have bared all just for a laugh. There are different levels of the fun-seeking streaker. Michael O’Brien, for example, unveiled himself just once, drunkenly, at an England-France rugby match, before pursuing a quiet career as a stockbroker. Then there is Mark Roberts: 583 streaks and counting. Yes, Roberts has trotted his beer-toned body across a public arena 583 times. (He claims if he were an Adonis he would “be a poser.”) This stalwart of streaking has a career ranging from Wimbledon and the Olympics to the Super Bowl. (He even branches out from sporting events on occasion: “I did the Queen three times!”) Erika Roe, another one-and-done-streaker, made such an impression at her Twickenham rugby match dash that it’s still what she is best known for, 42 years later. She isn’t thrilled by this, which leads to possibly one of my favorite quotes of all time: “I couldn’t give a monkey’s rusty fuck about being written off as a streaker or what people think of me.” Hattenstone nods to some serious stuff—legal ramifications, etc.—but mainly revels in the delightful characters and butt-based puns painted on people’s wobbly bits. There are photos for when your imagination fails you, and I particularly enjoyed the ones of flustered-looking British policemen attempting to cover people’s modesty with their helmets. We need a treat, so this week please bask in the warm glow of a full moon. —CW

Audience Award

What was the most-read editor’s pick of the week?

The Weeds Are Winning

Douglas Main | MIT Technology Review | October 10, 2024 | 2,744 words

Should you ever doubt humanity’s endless creativity, consider the list of ways weed scientists have devised to kill the pesticide-resistant weeds we’ve had a hand in creating: Steam. Lasers. AI. Pulverizing machines. Electrocution. Irradiation. Main’s piece is an engaging and accessible jaunt through the efforts weeds make to live, and the pains we increasingly go to in the name of our kale caesars. —MW

from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/15/top-5-longreads-340/
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