Search Results for: Terry Gross

Terry Gross, National Interviewer: 40 Years of Fresh Air

Photo by Will Ryan

This fall, Gross marks her 40th anniversary hosting “Fresh Air.” At 64, she is “the most effective and beautiful interviewer of people on the planet,” as Marc Maron said recently, while introducing an episode of his podcast, “WTF,” that featured a conversation with Gross. She’s deft on news and subtle on history, sixth-sensey in probing personal biography and expert at examining the intricacies of artistic process. She is acutely attuned to the twin pulls of disclosure and privacy. “You started writing memoirs before our culture got as confessional as it’s become, before the word ‘oversharing’ was coined,” Gross said to the writer Mary Karr last month. “So has that affected your standards of what is meant to be written about and what is meant to maintain silence about?” (“That’s such a smart question,” Karr responded. “Damn it, now I’m going to have to think.”)

Gross is an interviewer defined by a longing for intimacy. In a culture in which we are all talking about ourselves more than ever, Gross is not only listening intently; she’s asking just the right questions.

In The New York Times Magazine Susan Burton profiles “national interviewer” Terry Gross, who celebrates 40 years behind the microphone as the host of NPR’s Fresh Air.

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The Powerful Decide

Scott BerkunHow Design Makes the World | September 2020 | 1,696 words (6 minutes)

 

We rarely think of it this way, but the leaders of organizations are designers too. Organizational designers. By choosing the strategy, the budget, the culture and who they hire, they have more impact on whether good work is possible than anyone. CEO Alfred Sloan, who made good design central to his strategy for cars at General Motors in the 1930s, would never have called himself a designer. But his choices redefined how we think of a good car, as well as what the words design and designer mean for the world. We’re often told it’s people with great ideas or passion that make good work happen, but there’s a hidden and formidable truth. What makes good or bad design happen anywhere depends on who has the most power.

An organization could hire Maya Lin, Zaha Hadid or Bjarke Ingels, three legendary architects, but if their client ignored all of their suggestions, their skills would be rendered useless. When we see great works we often give the most acclaim to the designer, but as Michael Wilford wrote, “Behind every distinctive building is an equally distinctive client.” Designers and architects are often the center of attention when a work is finished, but along the way the client has the power to reject their ideas. Sometimes designers are hired as design theater, so the powerful can say “we have talented designers,” using their fame and reputation to help sell the project, even if that designer is mostly ignored.

Often there’s more than one person in power, and it’s their capacity to collaborate that defines what’s possible. Take, for example, the town of Missoula, Montana. It’s a small city with one very unusual characteristic: it has a city grid plan, but the central grid is oriented 45 degrees from the rest of the town. This makes it much easier to get lost, defeating a primary advantage of grids. What was the urban planner thinking? The answer is that there wasn’t just one plan, there were two, each led by factions that couldn’t agree.

Hand-drawn map of Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.

In the 1880s, two landowners, W.M. Bickford and W.J. Stephens, owned property near an old wagon road that ran diagonally through the area. They formulated their own plan to align with it, with all streets running in a grid parallel to the wagon road (which still exists today, shown with the dashed line below). They imagined an entire town called South Missoula, with this as the core.

Hand-drawn map of Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.

The problem was that another landowner, Judge Knowles, owned land to the north. He didn’t like the plan that Bickford and Stephens proposed. He thought the angled roads were a mistake, since they ignored the original master section plan that much of the surrounding area was using. But he also didn’t like the idea of there being a new town called South Missoula. He was able to get the Missoula government to agree to annex his property, and installed a true rectilinear grid plan.

Hand-drawn map of Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.

At the time most of the area was undeveloped, so the official plan didn’t mean that much until more roads were built and more people settled the area. There was still a chance for Bickford and Stephens to have their design become the dominant one. The pivotal factor was that an old bridge on the Clark Fork River, the Higgins Bridge, needed to be replaced. Depending on how it was positioned, it would support one grid plan over the other. Whichever road the bridge fed out to would become the primary thoroughfare.

The Higgins Bridge was named after one of Missoula’s founders, C.P. Higgins, who just happened to be friends with Judge Knowles. They agreed to back the north-south alignment that Knowles had planned for, and worked together to influence citizens to take their side. Combined, they had far more influence than Bickford and Stephens, and when it came to a vote, the north-south alignment that Knowles wanted won. The citizens of Missoula would forever pay the price.

Hand-drawn map of Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.

At each intersection where the two grids meet, the single street from the north-south grid has to divide into two streets, with different names. These five-legged junctions at odd angles make it unnecessarily complicated and dangerous to find your way. The worst intersection, nicknamed Malfunction Junction, had six legs, and until its recent redesign (which took eleven years to complete) it was one of the most dangerous and frustrating intersections in America.

This kind of design-by-politics is common, in cities, nations and sometimes even in products themselves. People in power often prioritize their own interests, which means good design to them is that which helps them protect their power. The concerns of the people who will deal with the consequences, perhaps citizens, are secondary at best.

Hand-drawn map of Malfunction Junction in Missoula, Montana, by Tim Kordik.

Melvin Conway, a computer programmer, expresses this idea in a law that is named after him: “Organizations . . . are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”¹ In other words, the limitations of an organization’s politics are expressed in the design of the things they produce. When one landowner, or executive, doesn’t get along with another, the battle lines between them show up in the product itself, to the detriment of everyone.

This often surfaces in websites for large organizations, like government agencies or universities. Websites should focus on the most frequent things that people who visit need to do. Yet, leaders often assume that the view inside an organization is the best one to share with the world. But that’s like forcing someone who wants to watch a movie to think mostly about how it was made, the movie sets, the cameras, the lights and the producers, instead of experiencing the movie itself. Good movies work because of suspension of disbelief: they are crafted to make you forget about what went on behind the scenes, or that there were scenes, or sets, or lights, at all. Unlike the trap in chapter four, where the Segway project started with the technology first, this is a case of starting with the organization’s politics first. In both cases, it’s the people for whom, in theory, all of the work is being done who lose.

Public Domain.

On a global scale, there are similar stories. At the end of World War I, the Allies worked together to decide what to do with the remains of the Ottoman Empire, which covered much of what we call the Middle East today.

The British and the French worked out a secret plan, called the Sykes–Picot Agreement, which divided up Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine into areas run by the British or French government. There were three problems. First, François Georges-Picot and Mark Sykes were two mid-level diplomats acting on behalf of their European nations, who had their own agendas for the best use of these lands. Second, neither had a great a great understanding of the history of the people who lived on the lands they were redesigning. Third, the Arabs had been promised independence in return for their cooperation during the war and this pact broke that promise.

Nevertheless, they invented new nations and borders on top of hundreds of years of history and expected their new map, or nation design, to work.² Scott Anderson, author of Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, explains:

If you look at the Middle East today, there’s essentially five artificial nations that were created by Sykes–Picot, the most prominent ones being Iraq and Syria—and Jordan being another one. But anyone looking at Iraq and Syria today sees that the artificial borders that were created have now completely disintegrated . . . The lines crossed tribal lines. They divided up clans and sub-clans.³

After the act was ratified, riots and civil wars began. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it set in motion the Middle East we know today. In response to the unrest they had created, the British and French worked to take away the power that existing groups had. They gave it instead to weak leaders they could manipulate and who posed little threat of revolting. Britain and France did nothing to help soothe the ethnic, religious or linguistic divides they had intensified.

After World War II, the US and the Soviet Union inherited the responsibility from the British and French, maintaining many of the same nation borders using many of the same methods. And according to Anderson, it wasn’t until the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the Arab Spring, that the lid on the mess that Sykes–Picot had created by design finally came off.

Many wonder why the Middle East seems to always be in trouble. Or the borders between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, or Nigeria and Cameroon. While there are many factors, one compelling lens is that people in power, often foreigners, chose the borders to be where they are. And powerful nations exert their influence on other countries for their own reasons, without understanding the history of why those efforts often fail.4

Americans don’t have to travel far to see the power of mapmakers. Gerrymandering, where politicians in office change voting district maps to keep themselves in power, is common practice. More disturbing is the way the US government, after WWII, chose home ownership as the way to rebuild the economy and shore up the middle class for the sixteen million Americans returning from the war (including one million African Americans).5,6 The Federal Housing Administration defined who could get loans, and their manual stated that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.”7 They made maps of which neighborhoods could get loans: green for yes, and red for no (thus the term redlining).

Through these policies, poor and black neighborhoods were denied loans, as well as the right to move to neighborhoods where loans would be made available. Most Americans assume the free market decides the fate of neighborhoods, and is why some struggle and others thrive, but that’s often not true. Rey Ramsey, former chair of Habitat for Humanity, explains that despite the history, “people are lulled to sleep thinking that certain things happened by default, rather than by design.”8

 

  1. A broader discussion of Conway’s Law can be found on Wikipedia.
  2. The Sykes–Picot map and a discussion of the agreement can be found on Wikipedia.
  3. Scott Anderson on Robert Siegel, host, All Things Considered, NPR radio program; transcript posted May 13, 2016.
  4. Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Times Books, 2007).
  5. US Department of Veterans Affairs, “America’s Wars,” pdf fact sheet.
  6. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “What Was Black America’s Double War?,” PBS.
  7. Terry Gross, “A ‘Forgotten History’ of How the U.S. Government Segregated America,” NPR, May 3, 2017.
  8. Rey Ramsey in Giorgio Angelini, director, Owned: A Tale of Two Americas, 2018 film.

 

This is an excerpt from How Design Makes the World, published in May 2020, lightly edited for Longreads.

The View From 5-Foot-3 (and a Half)

Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 |  9 minutes (2,497 words)

Okay, I’m not even that short, but I just watched Reese Witherspoon get called “untrustworthy” on Big Little Lies for being 5-foot-1 so I have to talk about it. I’m actually 2.5 inches taller than she is — I’m aware that insisting on that half inch makes me sound like a pedantic asshole — but that’s still short enough that when I lost half an inch it felt like a betrayal. I don’t know where that half inch went; all I know is that one day I was 5-foot-4, and the next I was 5-foot-3-and-a-half. Who cares, right? Terry Gross is 4-foot-11 and recently interviewed Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who is 5-foot-9 and asked the Fresh Air host if being short affected her. I could basically hear Gross’s shrug through the microphone. And same. But now that I think about it, that’s a heavy shrug.

Witherspoon was disparaged by Meryl Streep, who was playing the mother of a man who abused his wife. In a sense, the former was representing feminism; the latter internalized misogyny — that unpleasant habit we have of acting out sexism despite ourselves. What’s interesting is that most of us don’t actually need a Streep to do it. We’re pretty good at hacking away at our own self confidence, conjuring imaginary competitions with other women, isolating ourselves from them, all of which has the self-sabotaging effect of perpetuating the behavior that keeps us down. It’s not really about height, but height is as good a marker as any for how the world sees us and how we see the world (and ourselves in it) — in other words, for how trustworthy 5-foot-3-and-a-half becomes.

* * *

In the Big Little Lies scene in question, Madeline (Witherspoon) is at a coffee shop and notices Mary Louise (Streep), the mother of the guy she saw getting pushed to his death last season (it’s a soap). The way Madeline’s holding her muffin, that blush-pink blouse with the bow and the matching makeup and the black cardigan — she looks like such a lady who lunches. A small lady. While she is phonily consoling the older woman, Mary Louise suddenly exclaims, “You’re very short.” The face Witherspoon makes is perfect. She says, “Excuse me?” but with her head a little down so it looks like her entire face is puckered and she’s time traveled back to eighth grade when she was a 13-year-old girl saying, “What did you say, bitch?” to some bitch. Mary Louise kind of backtracks but not really: “I find” — somehow Streep manages here to look down at Witherspoon while looking up at her — “little people to be” — at this Streep ever so slightly toggles her head back and forth like she’s not tossing off a total insult — “untrustworthy.”  

There’s a lot going on here, chiefly the clashing of present and past: Madeline is now, Mary Louise is then. You’ve got this younger woman who watched as her best friend’s abusive husband was killed, then covered it up without losing much sleep because he was a piece of shit and the (fictional) world is better off without him. Then you’ve got this older woman, the mother of the abuser, who believes her son was done wrong, not realizing that he was the one doing all the wrong. So, really, if you want to be Feminism 101 about it, this is the patriarchy confronting feminist progress and trying to subvert it. But it’s a lot easier to fight that when you’ve got Streep right in front of you than when she’s in your head.

I don’t think I’ve ever been reduced to my height like this, but it often defines how I think of myself. As a child I was often one of the smallest in my class, and while I would’ve preferred to be one of the tallest, at least I wasn’t one of the kids you don’t even mention. Like being short meant being original. Like at least I owned one superlative — if not the smartest or prettiest — and it wasn’t one that was obviously bad, like being the dumbest or the meanest (although the latter I kind of liked too). I think that all came less from my actual stature and more from wherever my shoddy self-esteem did. I saw my shortness as a stand-in for the interesting personality I was pretty sure I didn’t have. It was like a flipped Napoleon complex, which isn’t about his height — he was 5-foot-7! — but about being compelled by what you perceive as a disadvantage to overcompensate by being outsize in some other way. My perceived disability was that I was invisible, so I outsized the meaning of my shortness. (By the time I grew out of my height defining my originality, I was memorable for other things. Like my sparkling personality.)

We aren’t a very tall family, but it’s always made sense to me that the men are bigger than the women, like that’s how it’s supposed to be, Darwin-style. The women are dainty and elegant and the men can be whatever the fuck they want — they’re taller, just like they’re smarter. So from the start, height was a moral issue, and if there was a discrepancy between mine and any other girl’s, there was a problem with one of us. Every time I’d see a much taller girl I’d think, Jesus Christ, thank God I’m doing one thing right. As if it were a conscious decision I’d made, as if I had anything to do with how I looked. It’s gone the opposite way in adulthood; whenever I’m in a room with a taller woman, I feel way less visible. Actually, that’s a nice way of saying I feel like shit. I feel like a farmhand from the Middle Ages or like some dumpy nursemaid from *waves absently* that same era — an uneducated unsophisticated plebe. The best women — richer, smarter, prettier‚ are all tall and thin and long-limbed and I’m a runt.

Knowing that all of this has to do with historic myths about gender and health and beauty — not to mention that I literally cannot find a pair of pants I don’t have to hem — creates the shoe paradox, which is a thing I just made up but which is also very real. It’s the feeling of being very riot grrrl when you wear any sort of flat “unfeminine” shoe like a Converse or a Doc, like you are embracing your deficiency of not performing femininity appropriately (come to think of it, this is kind of an addendum to that short-being-original thing). The paradox comes in when you suddenly decide to wear heels, which don’t make you feel like a traitor but, on the contrary, imbue you with even more power because you are no longer suffering from that nonexistent deficiency. It makes no sense to me either, but then neither do the rules of a patriarchal society.

I’m not sure how much my outspokenness has to do with how I look as opposed to how I feel, but my size appears to affect how people react to it and, sort of, how I do too. Basically, I have this idea of myself as a bulldog-chihuahua, some small, pugnacious cartoon animal — growing up, my aunt called me chooha, or mouse, because I squeaked — like a fightercock with no real power. Scrappy. It seems like a lot of guys see me that way too, as endearingly mouthy but ultimately unthreatening. It has the dual effect of being simultaneously flattering and demeaning. That extends to my perceived helplessness, too. On planes I’ll be reaching for my bag in the overhead compartment and some dude will stretch over me and grab it, then smile like I’m an adorable idiot in a losing battle that he would’ve just as happily laughed at but decided on chivalry instead. I know that’s what some of them think, because it’s sometimes what I think when I’m helping someone smaller than me. When I have to ask for some item in a store that’s on an unreachable shelf, I hear myself invariably flirting with the clerk and it feels triumphant that there’s a reason to allow a (preferably hotter) person to help me. And I hate myself for it.

When I’m alone with a guy who’s bigger than me, regardless of how he looks or even how stupid he might be, I’m instinctually deferential. I thought this was weird until my editor just noted that it’s “a pretty understandable safety mechanism, no?” YES (although now I am actually questioning how stupid I am). (Ed. note: not remotely stupid.) But I think it also has to do with my even more problematic ingrained belief that most men are smarter than me (I know, I know) as well as being stronger than me (generally true). So height, regardless of the other person’s agency, becomes this zone of self-reflection where ultimately the shorter I am the less substantial I am. But then there’s the boyfriend paradox, which is not unlike the shoe paradox. I’m dating a guy right now who’s 5-foot-10, which means that when we hold hands, I can only really comfortably grab his last two fingers — yeah, it’s cute — but that also means that hugging him, because he can envelope me, feels more secure. The paradox here is finding comfort in belittling myself, which, magically, works no matter the height. I dated a guy who was 5-foot-6 and thinner than me — “I’m indie thin!” — and while hugging him felt more equal, the fact that he was thinner than me was more noticeable because we were basically the same size, which was like facing a constant living reminder that I’m unable to not be fat. The point being that internalized misogyny ensures that YOU WILL NEVER WIN.

Being a short woman in a group of women can make me as self-conscious as being a short woman in a group of men. With men I’m always struggling to be heard, although I don’t know how much that has to do with being short and how much that has to do with just being a woman. It’s fucking annoying and either makes me louder than usual or more quiet. Women don’t have to do anything to diminish me, they just have to be standing there. Most of my friends are about the same height as me, but when I’m with one who’s much taller I always feel like Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy — you know, the con man greaser who wheels and deals. I have no idea why I think I look like Dustin Hoffman. No, I do; it’s because I have this conception of myself as small and savvy and naughty and taller women generally as a bit more, well, Jon Voight as naive gigolo. It’s funny because when I’m with someone the same height as me, I’m less conscious of how I look; I’m not an outlier, so it’s a nonissue.

None of this has literally anything to do with who any of us actually are. It has to do with the false ideas I (we) have of myself in the presence of men and other women and the false ideas I (we) have of men and other women and how those things work together to make me (us) self-destruct.

Ironically, the Ratso Rizzo thing probably also comes from my unwillingness to be overlooked. I’m very much “I’m walkin’ here!” when someone taller stands in front of me at a concert or sits right in front of my face at a movie theater. It’s usually a man and I usually want to stab him for being inconsiderate even if he isn’t aware. BE AWARE! Speaking of stabbing, I’m not actually short enough for my height to determine how safe I feel. I think I would feel as unsafe alone at night with a man walking behind me even if I were 6 feet tall, because I assume men are stronger than me regardless of their size. What I do notice is that I have intense anxiety in a crowd that I might not have if I were able to see over everyone’s head. I remember this psychologist relating my anxiety to my size. She said that she commonly got small women coming in and she compared us to small birds or squirrels — you know, how they’re skittish and their hearts beat really fast? Because they’ll basically be trampled or eaten if they don’t have hyperawareness. Maybe that’s what reads as untrustworthy in shorties, their lack of trust in not being stomped.  

* * *

A few scenes after the “untrustworthy” one in Big Little Lies, Madeline bumps into Mary Louise again in her real estate office because this is a soap and everyone’s always bumping into everyone else. Madeline has since exchanged her black flats for a pair of grapefruit stilettos, and Mary Louise notices: “I see you’re wearing heels.” At that Madeline confronts her about being an asshole and Mary Louise apologizes and explains that she had some shitty best friend in boarding school (of course) who made her this way: “She was just an itty-bitty little thing with a big bubbly personality that was designed to hide that she was utterly vapid inside. You remind me so much of her and I suppose I punish you for that.” Witherspoon’s face, again. And Streep, again, does this great thing, where, when Witherspoon basically tells her to eff off and walks away, Streep gives her shoes another look and chuckles, with an “Oh, sweetie” cock of the head. Like the idea that Madeline could transcend who she is is endearingly pathetic.

At the risk of playing into the sexist tradition of pitting women against one another, there’s a frustrating feeling that Mary Louise — who is only five inches taller, by the way — has won. That her misogyny has insinuated itself into Madeline to the point that she has actually changed the way she looks in order to appease it. But it’s only a short (ha) stay. Madeline later comes to the rescue of her best friend, Celeste, who is Mary Louise’s daughter-in-law, who vaguely gestures to some kind of emergency. Mary Louise, distraught, asks, “What kind of an emergency?” To which Madeline shruggingly replies, “The kind short people have?” As Madeline walks away you notice she’s wearing running shoes. I love how the connection between two women — Madeline and Celeste — can act as a shield against sexism (in this case, Mary Louise’s). Would that we could all be that strong. Which makes me think of the poll I tweeted asking how tall everyone thought I was. The majority answered 5-foot-5, almost the same height as Streep. I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t make me feel better, but I’m working on it.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Working to Preserve Traditional Gospel Music

AP Photo/Ron Frehm
The golden age of gospel music overlapped with the civil rights movement, yet approximately 75 percent of the music has already been lost, its records destroyed, undocumented, and thrown away over generations. At Oxford American, Will Bostwick writes about historian Robert Darden’s efforts to collect, catalogue, and digitize what’s left in the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, an archive at Baylor University in Texas. So how did so much of gospel get lost?

Ask them why, and the answer gets complicated. “Part of it is racism,” Darden says. “Part of it is economic.” Part of it has to do with the consolidation in the music industry (some record companies hold the copyrights to these songs, but, lacking financial incentive, don’t make them available in any form). And the last part, as he sees it, is the religious aspect of this music. Marovich put it to me this way: “When I was growing up, there was always, in our neighborhood, a couple of guys in white shirts and black ties that wanted to talk to you about Jesus. And you wanted to run the opposite direction from those guys. . . . Gospel is a little frightening to the unknowledgeable.”

In February of 2005, Darden wrote an op-ed in the New York Times lamenting the loss of these treasures from gospel’s golden age: “It would be more than a cultural disaster to forever lose this music,” he writes. “It would be a sin.” The apparent imbalance of that remark stuck with me. By any honest standard, we sin regularly. A cultural disaster seems like a much more grievous affair. But I also had the feeling that he was onto something—that the loss of this music was a moral failing born out of a history of oppression and neglect. He explained to me that when he wrote that, he had in mind Jim Wallis’s (at the time controversial) claim that racism was America’s original sin.

The day the op-ed came out, Charles Royce, an investor from New York with no particular ties to gospel music, called Darden and asked what needed to be done to save what remained of the music. With Royce’s funding, and with the institutional support of Baylor University libraries, Darden and his colleagues started the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. In a 2007 interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Darden said, “We see it as kind of like those seed banks up around the Arctic Circle that keep one copy of every kind of seed there is in case there’s another Dutch elm disease. I just want to make sure that every gospel song, the music that all American music comes from, is saved.”

Read the story

‘Many Immigrant Stories and Refugee Stories Need to Be Understood as War Stories’

Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen. Photo by Rex Features via AP Images

Author Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his novel The Sympathizer, about a communist double agent during the Vietnam War who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon.

Nguyen, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of 2017’s collection The Refugees, was born in Ban Me Thuot and came to the United States as refugee in 1975, moving with his family to San Jose. In a 2016 Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, Nguyen spoke of the importance of the connection between refugee and immigrant stories and war stories: Read more…

Carrie Fisher on Sharing Her Private Life, and on Her Mother, Debbie Reynolds

GROSS: You’ve been very open about your life and — or, you know, comparatively open about your life.

FISHER:
Spread eagle.

GROSS: (Laughter) And certainly, you know, you’re very revealing in your new memoir. Have there been consequences in your life for, you know, what some people might think of as oversharing?

FISHER: Oh, I think I do overshare, and I sometime marvel that I do it. But it’s sort of — in a way, it’s my way of trying to understand myself. I don’t know. I get it out of my head. It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things. Otherwise, I don’t know — I felt very lonely with some of the issues that I had or history that I had. And when I shared about it, I found that others had it, too.

GROSS: Have there ever been consequences when someone overshared about you?

FISHER: No, that would be really hypocritical.

— From “Fresh Air’s” interview with Carrie Fisher in November. The actress and writer, most famous for her work in the Star Wars franchise, died on Tuesday at the age of 60.

Update: Carrie Fisher’s mother, the actress Debbie Reynolds, has died at the age of 84 one day after the death of her daughter.

From "Singin' in the Rain"

From “Singin’ in the Rain”

In her interview with Terry Gross, Fisher says:

I just admire my mother very much. She also annoys me sometimes when she’s, you know, mad at the nurses. But, you know, she’s an extraordinary woman, extraordinary.

There are very few women from her generation who worked like that, who just kept a career going all her life and raised children and had horrible relationships and lost all her money and got it back again. I mean, she’s had an amazing life, and she’s someone to admire.

Read the interview

Mark Haddon: ‘Ultimately, There Is No Narrative Without Death’

Photo: Rory Carnegie

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2016 | 15 minutes (3,709 words)

 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was Mark Haddon’s first novel, and the one that made him famous. Told from the perspective of an emotionally limited young man named Christopher, the book has sold millions of copies and is now being performed on Broadway. But Haddon was writing long before Curious Incident, including many books and picture books for children, and has been just as prolific since.

Haddon’s new short story collection The Pier Falls deals largely in darkness. The descriptions, soaked through with detail, often verge on the grotesque. In the title story, a pier collapses, bringing many lives with it, a process Haddon details with excruciating exactitude. In “Bunny,” we witness the effects of the protagonist’s obesity, while in “The Weir,” a newly separated middle-aged man saves a young woman from a suicide attempt, yielding an unlikely friendship. Haddon and I spoke by phone about the infusion of death and destruction in his work, his writing process, and his fascination with writing about fatally arrogant men. Read more…

Liar: A Memoir

Rob Roberge | Liar: A Memoir Crown | February 2016 | 23 minutes (5,688 words)

When Rob Roberge learns that he’s likely to have developed a progressive memory-eroding disease from years of hard living and frequent concussions, he’s terrified at the prospect of losing “every bad and beautiful moment” of his life. So he grasps for snatches of time, desperately documenting each tender, lacerating fragment. Liar is a meditation on the fragile nature of memory, mental illness, addiction, and the act of storytelling. The first chapter is excerpted below.

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Read more…

David Bowie, 1947-2016

Illustration by: Helen Green

The legendary musician died on Sunday of cancer. At the Awl, Alex Balk writes: “If you are under the age of 40 you live in a world he helped make, whether you’re aware of it or not. His importance transcends his work in a way that only a few other artists of his generation can claim.” Here are six stories about the rock star who left a mark on music, fashion, and art. Read more…