Link day Wednesday: all the summer long reads you can handle, and a few you might not

25 December 2024

Summer reading lists abound, but some of us are more into long form journalism that Colleen Hoover. Nothing wrong with enjoying Ms Hoover's oeuvre - I hear her latest tome, a kaleidoscopic exploration of gender identity and shifting ethical boundaries between guards and detainees at CIA black sites, is really something. 

But say you're a joyless dweeb with no imagination or capacity for love like me - I got you, with more quality long reads than you can shake a stick at, shaking a stick being an excellent way to ward off people disturbing you when you're trying to read. 





The Lazy Reader: TLR's 24 for 2024








New York Magazine: 20 Most-Read Stories of 2024







If you need some lightening up - and even I can lapse into brief occasional flurries of cheeriness - here are some amusing individual articles:



1:30 p.m. I goddamn hate these fucking mozzarella sticks. The more of them I eat, the more I feel like I can taste every ingredient. Ingredients include: cardboard left in a hamster cage in the sun; acid.

4:05 p.m. Somehow, suddenly, the entire surface of my table is wet, which is great because it gives me something to do. Mopping up the mess with crumpled, limp napkins, I feel like a rat taking pride in my humble trash home.

8:14 p.m. Rooting around in my purse for anything that is not a mozzarella stick, I find the wrappers of two saltwater taffys given to me by my coworker Nitasha and text her about them. She advises me to wrap them around one of the sticks "and tell yourself it's candy," like a 19th-century London orphan with access to unlimited mozzarella sticks.



The Goop conference, which happened earlier this month in Culver City, California, was called In Goop Health, but I refuse to call it that. I could invent at least nine better names for the Goop conference right now. In Goop Company. As Goop as New. The Goop Life. Goop, Better, Best. Goop as Gold. Goop one, Beth! That Feels Goop. Daddy’s Goop Girl.



I’ve tried to come up with hypotheses for what happened. Maybe the staff just ran out of food that night. Maybe they confused our table with that of their ex-lover’s. Maybe they were drunk. But we got twelve kinds of foam, something that I can only describe as “an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport”, and a teaspoon of savory ice cream that was olive flavored.

 


“You’re My Present This Year”: An Oral History of the Folgers Incest Ad

When I first saw the ad, I thought: wait, are they fucking? (Then, every time after that: okay, they’re definitely fucking.) As I would come to learn, I was hardly alone. The reaction to the ad was an example of the internet at its most fun—the phenomenon of collectively realizing that the specific thing that you believed you’ve singularly noticed is actually a widely-held opinion. Memes, articles, and parody videos abounded. It even inspired a genre of vividly-rendered fan fiction known as “Folgerscest.”

 


The Siege of Fulton Avenue


The police were starting to act a little peculiar. Ringing the doorbell nonstop. Yelling things. Some of it was what you’d expect (“Open up!” “We’re gonna flatbed your car!” “You’ll never play lacrosse again!” “Think summer’s gonna be fun? Think again!”), but then they started targeting specific people. They … knew names.

 


Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever 


MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots.



Shipping Out aka A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again


I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lame projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator.

 


You Can’t Kill the Rooster


My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. “I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,” she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the dining-room table. “It’s nontraditional, but that’s the Rooster’s way. He’s a free spirit, and we’re lucky to have him.”



And, pathetically grasping any chance to tout my own work:


Exclusive extract from Go By Ninky Nonk: The Uncensored Oral History of In The Night Garden...


ANNE WOOD: The first day back on set and we were all pumped up. Everything was ready, the sets, the cast, the crew. We'd filled Upsy Daisy's room with the ghost orchids she insisted on, and supplied Igglepiggle with the half tonne of fresh wet sod he requested for his dressing room. I don't know what he did with it, but that's what he asked for.


IGGLEPIGGLE: Before I agreed to this interview, I said I wasn't going to talk about the sod. I think...I think we're done here. Turn the voice recorder off, man. Turn it off.

 

[At this stage, Igglepiggle stormed out of the hotel room, but after lengthy neogtiations agreed to continue the interview on another day]

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Back to Top