An intriguing account of the Guinness World Records company: An organization that pays homage to human endeavor of any kind. But has some of the magic been lost over the years? Imogen West-Knights asks whether record-breaking has now become too much of a business — and entertains us with some of the obscure records that have been achieved along the way.
Furman keeps his GWR certificates, more than 700 of them, in a clear plastic box in his wardrobe. He has so many that he has stopped even applying for the certificates when he breaks a record. This is a man who knows precisely how many forward rolls will make you throw up, which brand of eggs are easiest to balance on a flat surface and which muscles in your feet fatigue first if you stand on a yoga ball for too long. He pulled out his copy of the first Guinness book, evidently well-thumbed, and read me the quote in the foreword about turning heat into light with the reverence an evangelical might quote a passage from the Bible.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/zQXPd4U
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/XsjhDdY
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
In today’s edition:
An investigation into the dangerous work conditions of marine observers.
A review of two new books on cars and contemporary society.
An essay on the international laws that govern the world’s oceans.
Personal reflections on a mysterious teepee and one’s connections to nature.
Lee van der Voo | Civil Eats | May 23, 2023 | 5,262 words
Marine observers collect data about the fish caught at sea and monitor the practices of crews aboard commercial fishing vessels. They are the eyes and ears on the water: the people that ensure safe and responsible fishing. But the canned tuna you eat may not be as safely caught as you think. As Lee van der Voo reports in this excellent investigation, the people tasked with upholding sustainable seafood standards face dangerous situations. Many of them, like Fijian observer Simi Cagilaba, experience harassment and abuse, while others have disappeared or been murdered at sea. Stronger safety measures, action from major retailers to push for better practices, and more robust technology to track illegal activities would help to improve observers’ work conditions. Van der Voo exposes the dark underbelly of Big Tuna, and will make you think twice about the origins of those tins of tuna in your pantry. —CLR
Adam Gopnik | The New Yorker | May 15, 2023 | 3,792 words
I recently spent a month living and working in a different Canadian city, walking distance to a couple of grocery stores, a hardware and a pet store, and a few local pubs. How wonderfully liberating it was not to need a vehicle to pick up some bread, fruit, and oatmeal. How lovely to be able to wander down to the pub for a pint in the evening and then walk home. We put miles and miles on ourselves that month, enjoying the outdoors. This luxury is one I would love to have where I live, but alas, transit service is infrequent and we must rely on a car to get around. It’s with this recent experience in mind that I enjoyed Adam Gopnik’s review of two new books about cars and society. Daniel Knowles’ Carmageddon decries cars as “agents of social oppression, international inequality, and ecological disaster.” Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise says that parking is a scourge, one that has compromised the quality of life in urban centers: “The American town lost its heart, became strip-malled and overrun, because the street front had been consumed by places to put the cars that brought you there,” writes Grabar. According to Gopnik, understanding that cars cause problems ignores the allure to own them. “Nonetheless, the argument for the car, like the argument for homeownership, resides simply in its appeal, an appeal already apparent to the majority of people on the planet,” writes Gopnik. “It is not only that the car provides autonomy; it provides privacy. Cars are confession booths, music studios, bedrooms.” —KS
Surabhi Ranganathan | The Dial | May 9, 2023 | 5,038 words
Most of us have an old-fashioned cartographic mentality of the earth. And that’s not our fault: Conflicts between nations over time have formed the lines that make up the world as we know it. But as waters rise, the boundaries between land and sea shift. What is the ocean? Who has freedom on the sea? These are the types of questions that Surabhi Ranganathan, a University of Cambridge professor focused on international law, history, and the ocean, poses in this essay. With Ranganathan as our guide, we’re taken on a delightful journey across the surface and into the depths of the sea, as she examines and predicts challenges that will emerge due to climate change. When a sovereign island nation sinks, what happens? What issues arise from an ever-expanding continental shelf? Could seasteading reimagine civilization? Ranganathan presents an elegant narrative of the world’s oceans that is at once curious and imaginative yet grounded. She considers the international laws and politics that govern and control the sea, and opens our eyes to new ways to remake the world. —CLR
Masha Udensiva-Brenner | The Delacorte Review | May 23, 2023 | 8,016 words
I grew up in a ramshackle house across from some woods. Many a day, I would trot over the grass and disappear into those trees — dragging the family dog behind me — on an adventure dependent on the book I was reading (searching for pirates during my Swallows and Amazons era, looking for magic trees amidst The Faraway Tree phase). These memories enveloped me as I read Masha Udensiva-Brenner’s beautiful essay about Manhattan’s only natural forest, Inwood Hill Park. As a child, Udensiva-Brenner also found wonder in trees, spending hours playing at Inwood Hill and taking particular delight in a clearing holding a mysterious teepee and flower circle (I would have been thrilled by such a discovery). Udensiva-Brenner now recognizes her childhood memories may be hazy: The woman who made the teepee, Isabel Amarante, thinks she first built it much later. But facts and dates are irrelevant — everyone remembers something different about the teepee. What is important is that it is a place of solace for the many people who go there. For Udensiva-Brenner and Amarante, both immigrants, it is a place to feel a connection: to place, to the past, to nature. The parks department has a less romantic notion of this unlicensed structure. Udensiva-Brenner attempts to stay neutral in her reporting of the battle between Amarante and the park rangers to keep the teepee down, but I suspect she would be delighted if it popped up once again. —CW
Mikey O’Connell | The Hollywood Reporter | May 18, 2023 | 5,573 words
In our 14 years as a couple, there is only one TV show that my husband and I have watched together consistently, and it’s Top Chef. (He leaves Outlander to me; I pass on Painting with John.) We’re not rabid fans like the people who, as this oral history of the series details, paid to go on a cruise with the hosts and several popular contestants and judges. “What really stayed with me is a lady, incredibly inebriated, running down the hallway to me,” season 10 winner Kristen Kish recalls. “I assume she was going to hug me but ended up fully licking my right cheek.” However, we never miss an episode of the show, which offers a window into the diversity and difficulties of the culinary world. Top Chef prompted me to master the art of risotto — a work in progress — and I’ve never been so excited to tell my husband, well, pretty much anything as I was to announce that I’d seen Padma working out at our gym while she was filming the Washington, D.C., season. This is all to say that I loved THR’s oral history, which is making the rounds online as the show’s 20th season wraps up. The season, which features contestants plucked from Top Chef‘s various international productions, is a testament to the show’s cultural impact. In related news, thank goodness producers didn’t go with the alternate title Grillers in the Mist. —SD
Audience Award
This editor’s pick was the most popular among our readers this week:
Maxwell Strachan | Vice | May 17, 2023 | 6,339 words
As an experiment in work-life balance and personal productivity, Maxwell Strachan gave ChatGPT complete control over scheduling his day-to-day household, personal, and work tasks. At first, the bot’s cheery veneer seemed to help take the guesswork out of creating a personal schedule; however, its complete lack of emotional intelligence made for some awkward — if not potentially damaging — interactions with Strachan’s wife, Jessica. —KS
from Longreads https://ift.tt/CqbRBfl
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/XsjhDdY
As Top Chef‘s twentieth season heads toward the finish line, producers, hosts, and contestants dish on the history of the wildly popular reality series. Come for the alternative titles (Grillers in the Mist!), stay for the skinny on a cruise attended by some of the show’s most rabid fans:
BERWICK Bravo is fortunate enough to have many shows that have a serious fandom to the point of real passion — and, maybe in some cases, obsession.
LIPSITZ But Bravo didn’t have a show like this. After spending so much time with the chefs, we started talking about possibilities and pushing the network on these ancillary projects. Not just the foreign distribution, but the cookbooks, the cookware, the frozen meals, the cruise.
BERWICK That was just a boat full of 2,000 Top Chef fans. Hubert Keller, a Michelin star chef, deejayed.
KRISTEN KISH (SEASON 10 WINNER) What really stayed with me is a lady, incredibly inebriated, running down the hallway to me. I assume she was going to hug me but ended up fully licking my right cheek. I now avoid very drunk people.
COLICCHIO I thought it was going to be a lot worse. After a few days, the people started to chill out. It was actually kind of fun.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/UyGup4w
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/MlFDoOa
A young French man named Louis came home one day in 2018 and saw a small red plastic brick sitting in his driveway. Right away, he knew something was wrong. Dive into the world of AFOLs — Adult Fans of Lego — and a crime that pitted two childhood friends against one another:
As months passed with no progress on the case, Louis began trying to solve the crime himself. Late at night he would chat on Discord with 13 of his AFOL friends from around the world: gamers, students, chess players, professionals. Acting as Lego detectives, they crafted a list of suspects and pored over it for motivations and clues. Maybe it had been an avid collector who prized Louis’ Clone Scout Walker so much he was willing to break in to get it? Or perhaps a member of the Polish Lego gang suspected of robbing French toy stores was now targeting Lego influencers? They scoured websites in the lucrative Lego secondary market — Brick Link, Brick Economy, Brick Picker — searching for serial numbers that matched the stolen sets and checked garage sales around Paris. “It’s very exhausting,” Louis says, “because you have thousands and thousands and thousands of sellers.”
They found nothing. But they did reach one conclusion: This was not just a crime about money. The thieves left behind other valuables in Louis’ house, and the destruction of his builds seemed too violent, too targeted. The smashed sets, the dismembered Minifigs: It felt more like a massacre than a burglary. This, Louis and his fellow sleuths decided, was a crime of passion. As Jehan Mesbah, one of Louis’ friends, tells me, “This had to be about vengeance.”
from Longreads https://ift.tt/5smzhiY
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/MlFDoOa
A former Marine argues that it’s no surprise Daniel Penny, the man who killed Jordan Neely on the New York City subway, served in the armed forces, or that his legal team is from a firm founded by former officers in the Army National Guard Judge Advocate General’s Corps:
Understanding the integral relation between the warriors at home and abroad is crucial to understanding the war. So is understanding how this war’s apologists are constantly flipping upside down hierarchies of race and capital, and moral universes altogether. Where the slightest aggressions of the dominated get sold as existential threats, and the regular, disproportionate death-dealing of status quo devotees is marketed as noble necessity.
After Neely’s killer turned himself into authorities, received a second degree manslaughter charge, and was released on bail, Florida governor Ron DeSantis tweeted:
We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets of law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine . . . America’s got his back.
DeSantis encouraged his followers to contribute to the killer’s legal defense fund, an effort reminiscent of the right rallying behind Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three men, killing two, during protests against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Yet DeSantis himself is a former JAG officer credibly accused of complicity in suspicious deaths and abuse at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. So his rhetoric supporting Penny’s actions should also call to mind Trump’s pardons of arraigned war criminals like Eddie Gallagher and Mathew Golsteyn, or further back, chauvinist support for Lieutenant William Laws Calley after the My Lai massacre.
When you’re the eternal good guys, it’s remarkable all the bad things you can get away with doing. Here or anywhere. Plain-clothed or uniformed. The gap between the virtuous mythology and vicious actuality keeps expanding, just like your imperial birthright.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/5kFsKxC
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/MlFDoOa
As I write this, there are two episodes left. Soon, there will be none. Although Jesse Armstrong’s decision to end Succession with its fourth season is doubtless wise — it’s a relief to know the show won’t dwindle past its sell-by date like so many other cultural behemoths — the thought of no more new installments to feverishly anticipate, and then devour, remains a deeply depressing one.
It’s in the very nature of episodic television, where you watch a group of characters face a distinct set of challenges week after week, year after year, that you come to care about the people you’re watching. After all, if you didn’t care, then why would you keep watching? That’s what I tell myself, anyway, whenever I’ve found myself worryingly invested in the lives of the Roys, the deeply dysfunctional family at the heart of the TV megahit.
The Roys, by just about any measure, are awful people. The owners of a gargantuan right-wing media empire, perennially battling over who will inherit the kingdom from their ailing octogenarian patriarch, their concerns are borne of avarice and pride and immense self-interest. Almost every relationship depicted on the show is a transactional one, and any brief flicker of kindness is quick to be extinguished. We’re left in little doubt that none of the four adult Roy kids would have amassed any power under their own steam; that they’re afflicted with varying degrees of ineptitude has proven no barrier to their standing.
Nevertheless, I’ve become fascinated by, and even — somewhat guiltily — fond of these dreadful, ruinous nepo babies. However much they wound each other and the poor souls unlucky enough to cross their paths, the richness with which they’re drawn by the virtuosic writers and played by the spectacular cast exposes the warped vulnerability beneath their obscene privilege. Succession is deeply, lavishly funny, and peppered with some of the silliest and most creative uses of profanity that television has ever hosted, but the whole series is built on a foundation of tremendous sadness. These people may have all the money in the world, but as the last four seasons have shown us in vivid, lacerating detail, their cold, loveless lives inspire little envy.
Guessing how this whole internecine struggle will ultimately resolve feels like a futile task, although it hasn’t stopped me from doing so. When a happy ending for any of the show’s core characters would likely be disastrous for the world in general, it’s hard to even know who or what to root for.
So in an attempt to escape pointless prognostication, I’ve been thinking about a different aspect of its massive success over the last five years — the many astute, amusing, and illuminating articles that it has inspired. After all, great writing begets great writing, so it stands to reason that the commentary around Succession would be some of the best around. Here are just five of the wonderful pieces written during the course of its phenomenal run, covering the show’s style, substance, and real-world inspiration.
Succession is an American-set series with a largely British writers’ room, and Hannah Mackay’s essay posits that the push and pull between those broadly opposing national sensibilities is one of the chief factors in its success. Mackay describes how Succession has never followed the U.S. network tradition “of depict[ing] power in its most potent, aphrodisiacal form,” instead hewing more to the U.K.’s innate cynicism by depicting the frighteningly influential Roys as “inept, fragile, [and] lost.” She examines that theme through an aesthetic lens; with both the Roys’ sartorial choices and the spaces they inhabit exhibiting a distinct lack of character, this is not a show that makes being fabulously wealthy look all that fabulous.
Three exhausting years after Mackay’s piece was published, it’s fair to say that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are feeling far warier of the powerful than they were in January 2020. Still, positioning Succession as the product of utter disillusionment with the one percent is, if anything, more on point now than it was back then.
By contrast, nobody in Succession dresses well, a sign of the show’s refusal to sign up to traditional US TV aesthetics when it comes to depicting wealth and power – and a tribute to the show’s much-lauded costume designer Michelle Matland (it’s famously much harder to dress shows in which people have bad taste, or no taste, than it is to dress shows in which people make flamboyant and creative choices, which are more fun). Everybody in Succession has the means to dress well — but nobody has the confidence to make a flamboyant choice, sartorially or otherwise. Stepping out is too dangerous.
As the UK and US drift ever further into uncharted political territory, it has begun to feel that there are no longer any consequences to anything. The US president has been accused of sexual harassment by more than 20 women, and yet he is still the president. Both he and his British counterpart continue, so far, unhindered by the growing whiff of scandal and corruption. We can end up feeling like Reggie Perrin ourselves, running pointlessly into the sea to make a point nobody wants to hear. But at least we have Succession to watch while we’re doing it.
However much their gargantuan privilege and venomous behavior patently suggests that they don’t deserve our pity, to be a fan of Succession is to find yourself, again and again, feeling sympathy for some immensely rich devils.
Emily St. James had already written an essay for Vox about how the show depicts the effects of growing up with an abusive parent, and here she lays out how the four Roy kids’ dynamics with their father demonstrate a typology known as the four Fs of trauma response: fight, flight, fawn, and freeze. She also discusses how the show’s love of wide shots enables Succession to more fully display how the family drama affects and discomfits innocent bystanders.
Kendall, meanwhile, takes and takes and takes his father’s abuse, but eventually, he gets frustrated and fights back, as he’s been doing all season. He’s the most ineffectual of his siblings in this episode, but there are still a few moments where his “fight” impulse engages: when he enters the family’s suite and tries to bully them into holding everything together, for example, or when he gets onstage to read the names of the victims of the cruise line scandal that’s plaguing the company. Kendall likes to make himself the biggest, easiest target — a fairly classic “fight” response that can also be attuned to protecting younger siblings.
After all, Succession’s wide shots often capture the random other people who end up trapped in a room with the Roys, forced to watch them play out their elaborate psychodramas. And most of the time, those other people are nowhere near as rich as the Roys, because who possibly could be? Their reactions to what the Roys say and do serve to deepen our understanding of the family’s many dysfunctions.
When Michael Schulman’s New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong was published just as the third season of Succession was drawing to a close, it seemed like the only thing anyone on the internet was talking about. That was not good news for Strong.
Although not an out-and-out hit piece, it’s still difficult to read Schulman’s vivid, engrossing profile without wincing. It paints Strong as someone who at best approaches the role of Kendall Roy with a full-throatedness that borders on the unhealthy, and at worst applies a self-serious dedication to his craft that makes him almost impossible to work with. The profile is littered with painfully specific details about Strong’s intense acting philosophy — Strong calls his technique “identity diffusion” — along with quotes from cast and crew members who remain unconvinced of the technique’s necessity.
Strong, who is now forty-two, has the hangdog face of someone who wasn’t destined for stardom. But his mild appearance belies a relentless, sometimes preening intensity. He speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence, especially when talking about acting, which he does with a monk-like solemnity. “To me, the stakes are life and death,” he told me, about playing Kendall. “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.” He does not find the character funny, which is probably why he’s so funny in the role.
Last year, he played the Yippie activist Jerry Rubin in Aaron Sorkin’s film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” While shooting the 1968 protest scenes, Strong asked a stunt coördinator to rough him up; he also requested to be sprayed with real tear gas. “I don’t like saying no to Jeremy,” Sorkin told me. “But there were two hundred people in that scene and another seventy on the crew, so I declined to spray them with poison gas.”
Succession consistently questions whether any of its core characters are even capable of love — and yet there’s no set piece the show prefers to a wedding. Three of the four seasons have plotted their most vital events around these seemingly damned unions, the fairytale promise of happily ever after making a caustic backdrop to palace intrigue and corporate skullduggery. And with the Roys having almost limitless funds at their disposal, their weddings are always eye-wateringly extravagant.
In her piece for The Ringer, Alyssa Bereznak digs into the role these opulent affairs play on Succession, talking to the production designers who “adopted a role as a Roy family wedding planner” and exploring how the weddings are often our best shot at gleaning details from the Roy kids’ little-mentioned but tumultuous upbringings.
Just as far-flung family members fill in the blanks of the Roy progeny’s upbringing, so does the sprawling property chosen for Shiv’s wedding. “The house, Eastnor house, was, in the story line, a special one of the family’s country estates,” said Newman, who decorated the set for the episodes “Pre-nuptial” and “Nobody Is Ever Missing.” As Connor recounts to Willa when they arrive, one of the homes became a “thorn in Caroline’s side” because she was screwed out of inheriting it. Elsewhere, Caroline gestures at portraits of all of her “disreputable slave-owning ancestors.” “In Eastnor Castle there’s wonderful bits of art,” Newman said. “Even wallpapers and the furnishing, carpets and rugs and things like this, nothing is new. Everything has a personality, has a history and a provenance. … That’s the key, is that it’s layered.”
While creator Jesse Armstrong has cited various inspirations for the Roy family, the one that comes up the most often by far is the Murdochs. From an elderly patriarch who refuses to acknowledge his mortality, to the two sons and a daughter battling over the crown, to the noxiousness of their right-wing media empire and its influence over a disturbingly demagogic presidential candidate, it’s hard not to see their shadow looming over Succession.
Though Sherman’s piece contains only glancing mentions of the show (amusingly, one of the conditions of Rupert Murdoch’s recent settlement agreement from fourth wife Jerry Hall was that she wasn’t allowed to pitch story ideas to the writers), the details of how running a multibillion dollar company is so regularly entwined with the petty squabbles of a troubled family demonstrate that, despite its more ridiculous twists and turns, Succession has been far truer to life than one might think.
He long wanted one of his three children from his second wife, Anna—Elisabeth, 54, Lachlan, 51, and James, 50—to take over the company one day. Murdoch believed a Darwinian struggle would produce the most capable heir. “He pitted his kids against each other their entire lives. It’s sad,” a person close to the family said. Elisabeth was by many accounts the sharpest, but she is a woman, and Murdoch subscribed to old-fashioned primogeniture. She quit the family business in 2000 and launched her own phenomenally successful television production company. Lachlan shared Murdoch’s right-wing politics and atavistic love for newsprint and their homeland, Australia. “Lachlan was the golden child,” the person close to the family said. But Murdoch worried that his easygoing son, who seemed happiest rock climbing, did not want the top job badly enough.
Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/MudboZA
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/MlFDoOa
Marine observers collect data about the fish caught at sea and monitor the practices of crews aboard commercial fishing vessels. They are the eyes and ears on the water: the people that ensure responsible, safe, and sustainable fishing. Lee van der Voo’s eye-opening investigation into Big Tuna’s practices makes clear that the tuna we eat may not be as safely caught as we think — and that the people tasked with upholding sustainable seafood standards risk their lives each time they board a boat. Many, like Fijian observer Simi Cagilaba, experience harassment and abuse. Others have disappeared or died at sea.
Canned tuna accounts for two-thirds of the $42 billion industry worldwide. The companies behind the Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, and StarKist brands control the largest share of those cans. It is this multi-billion-dollar haul that entices vessels from all over the world to hunt what is arguably the largest and most lucrative wild protein supply left on Earth. But while marine observers protect the fish, there are scant protections for the observers themselves. Sometimes, the job is a little like being sent behind enemy lines to make sure that the other army plays fair.
It is common for formal inquiries like Cagilaba’s to be abandoned, languishing in a state of perpetual unresolve, and for problem boats to vanish into the opacity of the tuna supply chain, while issues aboard go unresolved. Yet a combination of technology, policy, and consumer pressure on suppliers could actually keep the problem from happening in the first place.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/lqSBiNP
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/MlFDoOa
