Tavi Gevinson is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rookie.
"I just want our readers to know that they are already smart enough and cool enough."
Thanks to this week's sponsors, TinyLetter and Atavist Books.
Showing 25 articles matching fk33.cc_Magnesium Sulfate heptahydrate large granules Factory in China.
Tavi Gevinson is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rookie.
"I just want our readers to know that they are already smart enough and cool enough."
Thanks to this week's sponsors, TinyLetter and Atavist Books.
Mar 2014 Permalink
How Viennese psychologist Ernest Dichter transformed advertising:
What makes soap interesting? Why choose one brand over another? Dichter’s first contract was with the Compton Advertising Agency, to help them sell Ivory soap. Market research typically involved asking shoppers questions like “Why do you use this brand of soap?” Or, more provocatively, “Why don’t you use this brand of soap?” Regarding such lines of inquiry as useless, Dichter instead conducted a hundred so-called “depth interviews”, or open-ended conversations, about his subjects’ most recent scrubbing experiences. The approach was not unlike therapy, with Dichter mining the responses for encoded, unconscious motives and desires. In the case of soap, he found that bathing was a ritual that afforded rare moments of personal indulgence, particularly before a romantic date (“You never can tell,” explained one woman). He discerned an erotic element to bathing, observing that “one of the few occasions when the puritanical American [is] allowed to caress himself or herself [is] while applying soap.” As for why customers picked a particular brand, Dichter concluded that it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else besides—that is, the gestalt or “personality” of the soap.
The Economist Dec 2011 15min Permalink
The Republican candidate works a room, as excerpted from Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of the senator:
No one can do that day after day, week after week, for years ... without some rock-hard certainty that can't be milled away by nonsense and stress. He has to know: Why him? And: Why now? ... He has to know that he is The One. And if he's strong enough to keep going-if he's able, smart, and lucky-then, he'll get to the final twist in the road, when things catch fire, he can see how his words make the people feel, he can feel how those words now matter to him. He can make all the difference just by walking into a room. There are thousands of people -- and they want him. He and his campaign fill the lives of people who are almost strangers, and he takes over the life of everyone dear to him. He has to, it's all right -- because it's that important. Now, he knows: Not only should I be President, I am going to be President!
Richard Ben Cramer Frontline Oct 1996 15min Permalink
Sponsored
What can be salvaged from publishing? What does it mean to write for the 50% of US adults who have trouble reading? What happens to crime reporting when you cover every victim, every suspect, every murder with the same care?
Contents publishes open-source editorial ideas for new journalism, digital publishing, content strategy, and everything in between. Always free, always online, fresh each week.
We recommend their latest piece, "House of Cards" by Robin Sloan.
For information about sponsoring Longform, click here.
Rafe Bartholomew is the former features editor at Grantland and the author of Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me.
“I never saw it as something negative because [my dad] comes out, to me, at the end, extremely heroic. … He becomes this dad who I idolized as a bartender, a guy who would hang out with me and make me laugh, a guy I just adored almost every step of the way. I mean, of course, everybody gets into fights. But to me it was always so obvious that he had overcome the problems in his childhood, he’d overcome his own drinking problem, he’d done all these things, and by the time I was older, he’d even found a way to get back into writing and self-publish a couple of books of poems about the bar. So he’s sort of managed to tick off all those goals, just maybe not on the same schedule, maybe not in the most normal way.”
Thanks to MailChimp, V by Viacom, and 2U for sponsoring this week's episode.
May 2017 Permalink
Ian Coss is a journalist, audio producer, and composer. He is the host of Forever is a Long Time and The Big Dig.
“One thing that I really carried with me in making the show is a belief that bureaucracy is interesting. And that once you get through the jargon and wonky sounding stuff … beyond that it’s all just human drama.”
Dec 2023 Permalink
Sponsored
Our sponsor this week is Open Road Integrated Media, a digital publisher with a soft spot for the kind of classic writing we highlight every day on Longform.
In addition to new work, Open Road has published ebooks by legendary authors including William Styron, Gloria Steinem and David Halberstam. And starting today, we'll be making a monthly pick from their archives, a favorite book of ours that Open Road will make make available to Longform readers at a deep discount.
Up first: Rachel Carson's 1951 bible of the enviornmental movement, The Sea Around Us. Buy it today for 66% off or read an excerpt.
A visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships.
Olinka and Drazen are artists, and after some time passed, they did what artists often do: they put their feelings on display. They became investigators into the plane wreck of love, bagging and tagging individual pieces of evidence. Their collection of breakup mementos was accepted into a local art festival. It was a smash hit. Soon they were putting up installations in Berlin, San Francisco, and Istanbul, showing the concept to the world. Everywhere they went, from Bloomington to Belgrade, people packed the halls and delivered their own relics of extinguished love: “The Silver Watch” with the pin pulled out at the moment he first said, “I love you.” The wood-handled “Ex Axe” that a woman used to chop her cheating lover’s furniture into tiny bits. Trinkets that had meaning to only two souls found resonance with a worldwide audience that seemed to recognize the same heartache all too well.
Shannon Service Brink Magazine May 2011 20min Permalink
Susan Casey is the former editor of O and the author of three New York Times bestselling books. Her latest is Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins.
“The funny thing is people often say, ‘You must be fearless.’ I’m always afraid of whatever it is. But for whatever reason—I think it’s partly naïvety, partly just overwhelming curiosity—I am also not going to let fear stop me from doing things even if I feel it. Unless it’s that pure…you do have to listen to your body sometimes if it tells you not to do something that could result in you really never coming up from falling on that 70-foot wave.”
Thanks to MailChimp, HelloFresh, and Squarespace, and for sponsoring this week's episode.
Nov 2016 Permalink
Michael Barbaro is the host of The Daily.
“I don’t think The Daily should ever be my therapy session. That’s not what it’s meant to be, but I’m a human being. I arrive at work on a random Tuesday, and I do an interview with a guy like that, and it just punched me right in the stomach.”
Thanks to MailChimp, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Blinkist for sponsoring this week's episode.
Oct 2017 Permalink
Jennifer Senior is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her article ”What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind” won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Her most recent article is ”The Ones We Sent Away.”
“I'm at the point where I'm only thinking about the big questions and the difficulty of being a human as what matter most. That's what I want to keep focusing on. Our common frailties, our common bonds, our common difficulties. Because clearly we are not going to bond politically as a nation, right? … But we can bond over our kids with disabilities. About the fact that we grieve, that we love, that we lose people. That we have friends that we love, friends that we hate. We have friendships that we miss, we have friendships that we can't live without.”
Aug 2023 Permalink
Tessa Hulls is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and The Capitol Hill Times. Her new book, a graphic memoir, is Feeding Ghosts.
“This project is the thing I have spent my entire life running from. I was incredibly determined to never touch this, either personally or professionally. … It was more an eventual act of resignation than a desire.”
Mar 2024 Permalink
Sponsored
Read and relax with your iPad or Kindle with Prop 'n Go resting on your lap.
Featuring a thin, contour base of memory foam and 14 easily adjustable angles, Prop 'n Go is ideal for those who desire effortless comfort while reading anywhere. Portable and convenient, Prop 'n Go’s anti-slip surface also keeps your gadget resting firmly in place, making it the best iPad stand for bed and on the couch.
The future proof design of Prop 'n Go allows you to upgrade and switch tablets and gadgets of all shapes and sizes, anytime.
Available at PaddedSpaces.com and Amazon.com with free shipping for $34.95.
Sponsored
Fairway Solitaire is an addictive and witty iOS game that combines the classic card game, solitaire, with golf. Rated five out of five stars on iTunes, Fairway Solitaire was the 2012 IGN People’s Choice Award for Best Mobile Card Game.
Here's what USA Today had to say: “Every once in a while a game comes along that’s so engrossing you can’t simply put it down… add Fairway Solitaire to that coveted list… even if you’re not a fan of golf.”
For a limited time only, get a free code for the full version of Fairway Solitaire on iPhone and iPod! Visit giveaway.fairwaysolitaire.com.
Sponsored
Our sponsor again this week is Aeon, a great new digital magazine covering ideas and culture. Aeon publishes an original essay every weekday, several of which have been picked for Longform. Here are three recent favorites:
No Drama, King Obama, by Edward L. Fox
In Javanese culture, a ruler must stand chivalrously above strife: cool, intelligent and self-contained. Sound familiar?
Mortal Remains, by Thomas Lynch
The dead are no longer welcome at their own funerals. So how can the living send them on their way?
Animal Spirits, by Stephen T. Asma
The more we learn about the emotions shared by all mammals, the more we must rethink our own human intelligence.
Read those stories and more at aeonmagazine.com.
The author comments on the medium of the graduation cliché while still advancing it:
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.
David Foster Wallace Kenyon College May 2005 15min Permalink
Matthew Klam is a journalist and fiction writer. His new novel is Who Is Rich?.
“The New Yorker had hyped me with this “20 Under 40” thing…and when the tenth anniversary of that list [came], somebody wrote an article about it. And they found everybody in it, and I was the only one who hadn’t done anything since then, according to them. And the article, it was a little paragraph or two, it ended with ‘poor Matthew Klam.’”
Thanks to MailChimp, Casper, and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.
Aug 2017 Permalink
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
“I think the job is just paying a bunch of attention. If you're a person like me, where thoughts and worries are intruding on your consciousness all the time, it is a great relief to have something to just over-describe and over-pay-attention to—and kind of just give all of your latent, usually anxious attention to this one thing. That, to me, is a great joy.”
Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
Feb 2021 Permalink
Anna Sale is the host of Death, Sex & Money. Her new book is Let’s Talk About Hard Things.
“What hard conversations can do is—you can witness what's hard. You can be with what's hard. Admit what's hard. That can be its own relief. … Some hard conversations … are successful when they end in a place that's like, Oh, we're not going to agree on this. … I think you can get used to the feeling of feeling out of control and that makes them less scary.”
Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.
May 2021 Permalink
Ben Smith is the media columnist for The New York Times. He was the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.
“I do think there's some kind of personality flaw deep in there of wanting to like, you know, find stuff out and tell people.... I'm not sure that's a totally sane or healthy personality trait, but it is definitely, for me, a personality trait…. I think that in political reporting, certainly, there's a kind of reporter who thinks that their job is basically to pull the masks off of these monsters. And I generally tend to think all these people—with some exceptions—are weird and complicated and often doing really awful things. But they aren't necessarily irredeemable or impossible to understand. They're interesting.”
Oct 2021 Permalink
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer for New York Times Magazine, the host of Netflix's How To Change Your Mind, and the author of nine books. The latest is This Is Your Mind On Plants.
“I have found myself at two distinct points in my history having this transition from being the journalist, learning at the feet of these people, to becoming an advocate. And it’s an awkward role for a journalist, but at a certain point it would be kind of false to pretend you didn't have points of view, that there weren't directions in which you think the world should go. And the great thing about doing narrative nonfiction is that editors cut you a fair amount of slack at the end of a 10,000–word piece to say what you think.”
Jul 2022 Permalink
Sponsored
The NBA Finals tipoff tonight, with LeBron James gunning for his third straight title. Unquestionably the best player in the world today, James would become one of the best of all-time with another championship.
But he'd still only be halfway to Michael Jordan.
Our latest pick from Open Road Media's archive is the greatest book ever written about the NBA's greatest player: David Halberstam's Playing for Keeps. It tells the story of Jordan's rise, his talent, his unrivaled competitiveness and how the NBA capitalized on his massive appeal.
The book is trademark Halberstam, thorough and fascinating. One of our favorite parts: the chapter on Jordan's first championship, which is available free on Longform.
Download Playing for Keeps between now and June 9 for the special price of $4.99 at Amazon, Apple or Barnes & Noble.
Paul Ford is a writer and programmer.
"You don't really read a newspaper to preserve journalism, or save great journalism, or to keep the newspaper going. You read it because it gives you a sense of power or control over the environment that you're in, and actually sort of helps you define what your personal territory is, and what the things are that matter for you. As long as products serve that need—as long as books allow you to explore spaces that it's otherwise really hard for you to explore and so on—I think people will continue to read them."
Sep 2012 Permalink
Sponsored
Our sponsor this week is MATTER, the new home for great longform writing about science, technology, and the ideas that are shaping our future. Each month MATTER publishes a major new piece of journalism, and for just 99c a month, subscribers get to read it wherever they want — on the web, for their Kindle or iPad, or even as an audiobook — as well as a slew of other benefits.
You can get a free taster with Do No Harm, a harrowing investigation into a condition that makes sufferers want to amputate their own limbs.
Or sign up now to read the latest release, The Ghost in the Cell: an extraordinary account of families riven by violence and the scientists who are trying to pinpoint the cause.
Sponsored
Our sponsor this week is Aeon, a great new digital magazine covering ideas and culture. Aeon publishes an original essay every weekday, several of which have been picked for Longform. Here are three recent favorites:
Spaced Out, by Greg Klerkx
Living in space was meant to be our next evolutionary step. What happened to the dream of the final frontier?
There’s an App for That, by John-Paul Flintoff
What to eat, when to meditate and whether to call your parents: can self-monitoring tools make a difference?
This Is Humankind, by Polina Aronson
If my grandfather could survive the Siege of Leningrad and still distinguish between a German and a Nazi, so can I.
Read those stories and more at aeonmagazine.com.