Author Archives

Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

How the Clinton Foundation Was Born on a Private Plane En Route to Davos

Chevy Chase was on the plane with Bill Clinton. So was a former president of Brazil. The founders of Google. A former president of Mexico. And John Cusack.

They were all going to Davos, the Swiss resort that holds an annual conclave of the wealthy and powerful. The jet — arranged by a Saudi businessman — provided a luxurious living-room setting for a rolling discussion: Couldn’t the big names at Davos be doing more to solve the world’s big problems?

In the background, a Clinton staff member named Doug Band had an idea that would change the ex-president’s life.

“Only Bill Clinton could bring a group like this together,” Band thought.

Bill Clinton didn’t need Davos. He could do this himself.

David A. Fahrenthold, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman writing for the Washington Post about the evolution of the Clinton Foundation, which has transformed from a humble nonprofit centered on the ex-president’s library to a $2 billion global empire over the past decade.

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Spelling Skills and the Meaning of the American Dream

Photo by Erin M, Flickr

In 1931, the historian James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream as “a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.” His book, The Epic of America, may have popularized the term, but the dream dates back at least to the Declaration of Independence, with its invocation of equality and the pursuit of happiness. And since the early days of the Republic, it has been entwined with education, an achievement for which the ability to spell well served as a proxy—at least before spell-checking software came along.

Amy Crawford, in a recent piece for Smithsonian Magazine. Crawford looked at how social class in America shapes success—as reflected through the fates of the Spellbound cast, 13 years after the acclaimed spelling bee documentary’s release.

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What’s Behind the Surging Popularity of Music Festivals?

Photo by Anax44, Flickr

In its growth, Governors Ball is benefitting from and contributing to the festival explosion of the past decade, a trend that a new Eventbrite study (on the “Top 2014 Music Festival Trends and Insights”) claims has resulted in one in every five millennials attending at least one festival per year.

Though big, multi-day productions have thrived longer in Europe and South America — think Glastonbury, Primavera, and Rock in Rio —  than in the United States, festivals’ worldwide presence continues to expand, with locally based boutique shows like the Bon Iver-booked Eaux Claires and the biannual, two-stage Boston Calling sprouting up yearly. As the names and figures involved suggest, live music itself has become a vitally lucrative industry in the past decade: Corporate sponsorship of music (including festivals) ballooned to over $1.3 billion last year alone, and with live show attendance numbers now in the hundreds of thousands annually — Austin City Limits draws the biggest crowd with just under 200,000 patrons in 2013 — the festival boom hasn’t even come close to peaking.

Liz Nistico of the brat-pop duo HOLYCHILD, who’ll make their Governors Ball debut this June, believes festivals have exponentially sprouted in popularity over the past five years because they force people with (at least tangentially) shared interests to interact…Like Nistico suggests, when all the world’s music — sans a few big name holdouts — is available via Spotify just a few clicks away, its easy to forego interacting with other people when it comes to soundtracking our day-to-day lives.  Governors Ball is one in a trend of large-scale events with diverse lineups — which reflect the varied, blurred tastes and genres that’ve emerged in the wake of the web-driven democratization of music — pulling people in, making them more likely to dive into a mud pit in the middle of the day. 

Brennan Carley writing for Spin about the trio behind the Governors Ball Music Festival, and their plans to bring a country festival to New York City.

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Science Magazine’s 2013 Spoof Paper Sting Operation

Photo by Pixabay

On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.

I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.

John Bohannon writing for Science Magazine in 2013. Bohannon created a spoof paper and then submitted it to a plethora of open-access journals, many of whom accepted the paper. He uses this experiment as a lens to examine the lack of oversight at many open-access journals.

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How Vanity Fair Protected Their Caitlyn Jenner Exclusive

The magazine was concerned about leaks and took security measures “every step of the way,” including on the photo shoot [where they hired security and confiscated cellphones], in the VF editorial office and at the printing plant for the upcoming issue. The story and pictures were done on a single computer that was never connected to the Internet, with the assets put on a thumb drive every night and then deleted from the computer. The story was even hand-delivered to the printer.

Jason Abbruzzese explaining how Vanity Fair protected their Caitlyn Jenner exclusive in a piece for Mashable.

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Thought Catalog and First-Person Essay Industrial Complex

Thought Catalog homepage

And it has predicted a remarkable rise in juicy, first-person writing on the Internet. Consider the success of xoJane, which launched in 2011, or of The Washington Post’s “PostEverything” blog. On Medium.com and Jezebel, memoirish personal essays win big. CNN ramped up its “First Person” project in 2013. And Vox.com just recently followed suit. As of press time, the Ezra Klein-run explainer site is hiring a deputy editor for “Vox First Person.”

But Thought Catalog takes the self-expression emphasis a step further. Tellingly, staffers like senior writer/producer Kovie Biakolo don’t take the title Editor because, as she puts it, “I don’t actually perform edits to people’s work.” Biakolo says that the lack of editing can encourage writers to improve on their own. “My kind of attitude to that, especially because of how I allow my contributors to publish and how I deal with them, is that it’s going to make you a better writer if you are embarrassed by what you see,” Biakolo says. “Because you always want your name to be attached to good things. And you don’t want people to be humiliated. So I will edit for them after the fact, but I always tell them, ‘I’m not going to edit your work because I want you to do work.’ Like after it’s published, when they’re like, ‘Oh, could you please change this sentence, it’s really bad.’” She adds, “I think that writers should get in the habit of [editing their own work] again. I think the pen is being spoiled by the Internet.”

 Zach Schonfeld writing in Newsweek about the rise of Thought Catalog, an online publication that has seen “unimaginable growth” over the last five years.

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How the Modern Modeling Agency Came to Be

Photo by FordModels.com

This was a precursor for what would become the protocol by which models were paid for the rest of the century, but as Natálie [Nickerson] put it to Eileen [Ford] in their late-night Barbizon conversations, the system was back to front. According to Eileen, Natálie told her, “Models were treated as if they worked for the agencies, instead of the agencies working for them. There was too much sink-or-swim. Models needed to know exactly where they had to be for a job, and what they were supposed to bring with them, and the big agencies were not efficient in making sure their girls knew even such simple things. There was no career planning, no special training or care, no help with hair or makeup—no real system at all.”

So the two women decided to work out a system together. Eileen would act as secretary and booker to Natálie and to another model, Inga Lindgren, a Swedish beauty with high-arching eyebrows and meticulously manicured nails. Each model would pay Eileen $65 per month for her secretarial assistance and for making phone bookings, while Natálie would act as a discreet publicist and drummer-up of business, quietly recommending the energy and efficiency of Eileen’s services to other models. “I realized,” Natálie explained to Michael Gross, “that for any new operation to be successful, they had to have at least one top girl, and I was the model of the moment.” Natálie beat the bushes well. Eileen started working for her and Lindgren in the fall of 1946, and by March of the following year Natálie’s word of mouth and Eileen’s proven efficiency had attracted the signing of seven additional successful models—high-flying women who were all fed up with how men were handling their business. Each newcomer paid Eileen a further $65 for her services, which took her monthly income to almost $600—some $7,000 per year.

Robert Lacey writing in Vanity Fair about the history of Ford Models. Started by a pair of newlyweds in post-World War II Manhattan, Ford Models quickly became one of the most powerful agencies in the business and helped “launch the era of the supermodel.” Lacey’s Vanity Fair piece is adapted from his forthcoming book, Model Woman: Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty.

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Why Are Cities Still Subsidizing For-Profit Development?

Photo of Kansas City Live! by Wikimedia Commons

But at what point should cities make this decision to stop subsidizing for-profit development? And how do they know when enough is enough? That’s the question being asked in Kansas City and in cities around the nation as downtowns bounce back from years of abandonment only to find that developers still expect the aid they were receiving when downtowns were far less profitable places to be.

“Urban leaders still tend to overpay for development because they internalized low civic self-esteem bred by decades of being told they were too polluted, too dangerous, or too school-deficient to attract investment,” says Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, an organization that advocates for economic development policies that lead to better job opportunities for working families. “When the back-to-the-cities trend started taking root, albeit very unevenly, cities were so glad to finally land deals that they routinely overpaid, not having a solid grasp of the demographic and market forces they should have been channeling instead of subsidizing. It’s especially true for retail and entertainment projects, which generate very poor-quality jobs. I have yet to find a city that has figured out how to ‘take the foot off the pedal’ and stop over-subsidizing, even when gentrification becomes a problem.”

Sandy Smith writing for Next City about Kansas City’s KC Live development, and and why cities are still paying developers to build in their downtowns—despite the fact that many downtown areas have become profitable again.

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How Would You Design a Memorial for World War III?

Architect Maya Lin was a senior at Yale when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In a 2000 essay for the New York Review of Books—which she began writing around the memorial’s completion in fall 1982 and then put aside for nearly two decades—she reflects on how she came to enter in the competition, and the concepts behind her design. After seeing a notice announcing a competition for a Vietnam veterans memorial, Lin’s funereal architecture seminar decided to adopt the design idea as their class’s final project. In the excerpt below, she delves into the class’s previous assignment:

At that point, not much was known about the actual competition, so for the first half of the assignment we were left without concrete directions for what “they” were looking for or even who “they” were. Instead, we had to determine for ourselves what a Vietnam memorial should be. Since a previous project had been to design a memorial for World War III, I had already begun to ask the simple questions: What exactly is a memorial? What should it do?

My design for a World War III memorial was a tomblike underground structure that I deliberately made to be a very futile and frustrating experience. I remember the professor of the class coming up to me afterward, saying quite angrily, “If I had a brother who died in that war, I would never want to visit this memorial.” I was somewhat puzzled that he didn’t quite understand that World War III would be of such devastation that none of us would be around to visit any memorial, and that my design was instead a pre-war commentary. In asking myself what a memorial to a third world war would be, I came up with a political statement that was meant as a deterrent.

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Fairyland: Memories of a Singular San Francisco Girlhood

Alysia Abbott with her father Steve Abbott, 1983. Photo courtesy of Alysia Abbott.

Alysia Abbott | Fairyland, a Memoir of My Father | June 2014 | W. W. Norton & Company | 17 minutes (4,188 words)

After his wife died in a car accident in 1973, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moved with his two-year-old daughter Alysia to San Francisco, a city bustling with gay men in search of liberation. Fairyland, a Memoir of My Father is that daughter’s story—a paean to the poet father who raised her as a single, openly gay man, and a vivid memoir of a singular and at times otherworldly girlhood. As noted in The New Yorker, the memoir, which vividly recalls San Francisco in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, “doubles as a portrait of a city and a community at a crucial point in history.”  Our thanks to Abbott for allowing us to reprint this excerpt here.

***

I called him Eddie Body. At four years old, language was my playground. “Eddie Body’s not anybody! Eddie Body’s not anybody!” I’d repeat, relishing the near symmetry of the sounds. Eddie Body was Dad’s new boyfriend, his first serious relationship after our move to San Francisco in 1974. There’d been different men—good-looking men, funny-looking men, almost always tall and skinny and young—that I found in Dad’s bed in the mornings. But it was different with Ed. He was the only one with whom I became close. He is the only one I can remember. We spent six months living with Eddie Body. I loved him.

A twenty-two-year-old kid from upstate New York, Eddie Body had moved to San Francisco to get away from his pregnant wife, Mary Ann. He’d made a pass at my dad one afternoon over a game of chess in the Panhandle Park. Soon after, Ed moved into our apartment, a four-bedroom Victorian located a few blocks from Haight Street.

Haight-Ashbury’s “Summer of Love” had ended in 1968 with the arrival of heroin and petty crime. For years the neighborhood was dominated by bars, liquor stores, and boarded-up storefronts. But rent was cheap and soon my father, along with scores of other like-minded searchers, moved in, setting up haphazard households in the dilapidated Victorian flats that lined Oak and Page streets. Many of these new residents, if not hippies themselves, shared an ethos of experimentation and free expression. Many also happened to be gay. Read more…