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Julia Wick
Julia Wick is a contributing editor for Longreads.

Vanity Fair’s Early Look into the Alleged Crimes of Robert Durst

Photo by HBO

The Jinx—a six-part documentary miniseries about alleged murderer and real estate scion Robert Durst—aired its final episode this past Sunday, a day after Durst’s real life arrest for the murder of his close friend Susan Berman. Berman was killed in 2000. In 2002, Ned Zeman profiled Durst (and his alleged crimes) for Vanity Fair. The excerpt below offers a window into Durst’s early friendship with Berman:

The second influence was Susan Berman. Acerbic and lively, talking a mile a minute, controlling the room, Berman was, by almost any standard, an exotic. She had shiny, black Louise Brooks-style hair, and she had stories. She’d spent her childhood in Las Vegas and Hollywood, where her classmates included Liza Minnelli and Jann Wenner. Her late father, Dave Berman, had run the biggest hotels on the Las Vegas Strip—the Riviera, the El Dorado, and, most notably, the Flamingo, where his only daughter’s portrait hung over the reservation desk. That Dave Berman had been a confederate of Mob bosses Meyer Lansky’s and Bugsy Siegel’s—that, in fact, he was a notorious gangster whom one detective called “the toughest Jew I ever met”—was Susan’s obsession. Bobby was fascinated. They’d both lost their mothers. They both had paternal issues. They became fast friends. He doted on Susie, as he called her.

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The Class That Teaches Doctors ‘Clinical Empathy’

Force credits “Oncotalk,” a course required of Duke’s oncology fellows, for the unexpected accolade. Developed by medical faculty at Duke, the University of Pittsburgh, and several other medical schools, “Oncotalk” is part of a burgeoning effort to teach doctors an essential but often overlooked skill: clinical empathy. Unlike sympathy, which is defined as feeling sorry for another person, clinical empathy is the ability to stand in a patient’s shoes and to convey an understanding of the patient’s situation as well as the desire to help.

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While empathy courses are rarely required in medical training, interest in them is growing, experts say, and programs are underway at Jefferson Medical College and at Columbia University School of Medicine. Columbia has pioneered a program in narrative medicine, which emphasizes the importance of understanding patients’ life stories in providing compassionate care.

While the curricula differ, most focus on self-monitoring by doctors to reduce defensiveness, improve listening skills (one study found that, on average, doctors interrupt patients within 18 seconds), and decode facial expressions and body language. Some programs use actors as simulated patients and provide feedback to individual doctors.

Sandra G. Boodman writing in The Atlantic about the importance of empathy to the craft of medicine.

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Why the Porn Industry Can’t Beat the Pirates

Photo by Pixabay

Keeping porn from getting ripped and posted is impossible. After having free pornography clips easily accessible for years, nobody expects that customers will ever buy DVDs in the numbers they once did. The porn industry’s sales figures are disputed; estimates range from a few billion to as high as $14 billion, a widely cited figure from a 1998 Forrester Research report that Forbes easily dismantled. But no one disputes that the percentage of revenues from DVDs has shrunk dramatically, and that piracy on the Internet shot up after the early 2000s. Takedown Piracy, which Glass founded in 2009, focuses on containing the damage.

Glass, who is dressed like an accountant, talks about the 2007 adult film financial crisis in terms of the broader recession. “It was really kind of a perfect storm of events there,” he tells me. “There was always piracy in general. But at least for adult, it went from being something in the back-shadowy corners of the Internet, or something that required a certain level of technical knowledge to acquire … [to] ‘push the little triangle button and the movie plays.’” With the accessibility came the assumption that porn should be accessible — that it wasn’t worth paying for. “People might have a certain guilt about pirating Guardians of the Galaxy or whatever, but porn — ‘ah, that’s porn,’” Glass says. “It’s considered ‘less than.’ And porn doesn’t have the revenue channels that a Guardians of the Galaxy might have. We’re not doing theatrical release. There’s not really merchandise.” Other barriers to marketing and fighting piracy are particular to porn. PayPal won’t do porn transactions, and Apple doesn’t allow any porn apps. Lawmakers are unlikely to support pornographers, and it’s difficult to legislate against piracy because many of the major tube sites are located outside the U.S.

Molly Lambert writing in Grantland about the Adult Video News awards.

What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Cinderella Story’?

To try to figure out what exactly that story is and why we still have it, we have to separate out the folk tale that is Cinderella, though, from the turn of phrase that is “Cinderella story.” Americans will call almost anything a Cinderella story that involves a good thing happening to someone nice. We slap that title on movies and books, but also on basketball games won by tiny schools full of scrawny nerds, small businesses that thrive and even political ascendancies that upend established powers.

The actual Cinderella tale, while a nebulous thing that can be hard to pin down with precision, is more than that. There’s very little that’s common to every variant of the story, but in general, you have a mistreated young woman, forced to do menial work, either cast out or unloved by her family. She has an opportunity to marry well and escape her situation, but she gets that chance only after being mistaken for a higher-status person, so she has to get the man who may marry her to recognize her in her low-status form, which often happens either via a shoe that fits or some kind of food that she prepares.

Linda Holmes, writing for NPR about the “endlessly evolving” story of Cinderella.

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How ‘Body Worlds’ Inspired People to Leave Their Bodies to Science

Photo by Brett Neilsen

Why do people leave their bodies to science, or more specifically medical research? And what exactly does that entail for them, after the fact? Writing for The Guardian, David Derbyshire delved into these questions, exploring the motivations behind donation, as well as what the actual process looks like. In the excerpt below, he discusses the touring Body Worlds show—”a display of dissected human corpses preserved using a process called plastination”—and its effect:

Body Worlds artfully straddles the line between education and entertainment. When it first came to London in 2002, it generated controversy for the way the bodies – skillfully preserved by replacing the water in cells with resin and then artfully dissected – were arranged.

More than 40 million people have seen a Body Worlds show worldwide; 180,000 people saw the most recent in Newcastle. The show features all von Hagens’ trademark qualities. It is thought provoking, technically accomplished and playful. At the entrance, visitors encounter a skeleton in a running pose handing a baton to a figure made of soft tissue. On closer examination, both figures turn out to be from the same donor. Another body was dissected in the pose of a fisherman with hundreds of body parts suspended in mid air on fishing lines, a version of the “exploded” diagrams normally seen in a children’s Dorling and Kindersley science book. It says something about the human response to corpses that the atmosphere in the exhibition was cathedral like. Outside the voices of children filtered through from the nearby cafe. But inside, among the bodies and tasteful dark drapes, tones were muted. At the exit is a consent form, filled in by an anonymous donor – a reminder that these are not plastic mannequins, but once living people. Von Hagens has no shortage of donors. His exhibitions have used 1,100 bodies – but he claims to have another 12,100 living donors signed up. One is Emma Knott, a PR consultant in London. “I was so inspired after I saw the exhibition], which is why I made that decision,” she says. But does she have reservations? “Not really, I mean let’s face it I’m going to be dead.” For her, the attraction lies in encouraging people to get excited about science and anatomy. “The bodies looked so incredible and beautiful and I just thought that would be a fantastic thing to leave once you have left the world – to be preserved in that fashion.”

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Is This the Future? What Dinner With a Disney MagicBand Is Like

Be Our Guest Restaurant Photo by Ricky Brigante, Flickr

Disney has spent a billion dollars developing, testing and implementing their new MagicBands, which connect wearers to a vast and unseen system of sensors throughout Disney World. The deceptively simple looking little rubber wristbands are engineered to remove  all of the “friction” from the theme park experience: you can swipe onto rides, avoid long lines, and even purchase a soda, all with a flick of the wrist. Is this the future of invisible technology? And what does it feel like to experience it in action?

Writing for Wired, Cliff Kuang investigated the genesis of the MagicBand, along with the implications of Disney’s billion dollar bet on the technology. In the excerpt below, Kuang describes dinner at Disney World, MagicBand style:

If you’re wearing your Disney MagicBand and you’ve made a reservation, a host will greet you at the drawbridge and already know your name—Welcome Mr. Tanner! She’ll be followed by another smiling person—Sit anywhere you like! Neither will mention that, by some mysterious power, your food will find you.

“It’s like magic!” a woman says to her family as they sit. “How do they find our table?” The dining hall, inspired by Beauty and the Beast, features Baroque details but feels like a large, orderly cafeteria. The couple’s young son flits around the table. After a few minutes, he settles into his chair without actually sitting down, as kids often do. Soon, their food arrives exactly as promised, delivered by a smiling young man pushing an ornately carved serving cart that resembles a display case at an old museum.

It’s surprising how the woman’s sensible question immediately fades, unanswered, in the rising aroma of French onion soup and roast beef sandwiches. This is by design. The family entered a matrix of technology the moment it crossed the moat, one geared toward anticipating their whims without offering the slightest clue how.

How do they find our table? The answer is around their wrists.

Their MagicBands, tech-studded wristbands available to every visitor to the Magic Kingdom, feature a long-range radio that can transmit more than 40 feet in every direction. The hostess, on her modified iPhone, received a signal when the family was just a few paces away. Tanner family inbound! The kitchen also queued up: Two French onion soups, two roast beef sandwiches! When they sat down, a radio receiver in the table picked up the signals from their MagicBands and triangulated their location using another receiver in the ceiling. The server—as in waitperson, not computer array—knew what they ordered before they even approached the restaurant and knew where they were sitting.

 

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The Maestro as Detective

At a mere 31 years old—practically an infant in classical music years—British conductor Robin Ticciati is already a major maestro. He made his La Scala debut at 22, making him the youngest conductor ever to grace the podium at the world’s most famous opera house. Two years later he was named principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and he is now the musical director at the UK’s Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Though notoriously media-shy, Ticciati allowed violinist and writer Clemency Burton-Hill to shadow him over a period of months, through meals, conversations and conducting engagements. The resulting More Intelligent Life profile provides a vivid window into his life and work.

How does a man who has already found so much success find new ways to engage classic material? It seems Ticciati isn’t afraid of doing a little detective work:

He now strives to engage both head and heart. “I might read a symphony score for the first time and read it like a novel, and get awash with feelings. And then I might look at it going, ‘hmm, so there it goes to the supertonic, he’s used that inversion to get to there, there’s a three-bar phrase, there’s a seven-bar phrase…’” A lover of words, he often tackles an opera text first. “I might have a month of reading the libretto, without even the notes, and then gradually I’ll put it all together.” Contemporary music is another story. “I probably won’t do a Schenkerian analysis [of the structure],” he laughs. “I’ll probably just look at it and go, ‘how the hell am I going to beat this?’ Every departure point is always different, so every process is always different.”

What is consistent is his desire to be “investigative”, going to primary sources—letters, biographical material, contemporary theorists, “quite academic stuff, but one sentence can make you go, ‘God, maybe those ten bars could be done like that!’ Or there’ll be a throwaway moment in a letter, like [the violinist Joseph] Joachim just happening to mention to Schumann, ‘you know, I’ve been really playing at the tip a lot today, and it’s created this effect, like snowflakes’.” Ticciati’s melodious voice drops, as it often does, to an awed near-whisper. “One line, from one little letter that you don’t even need to share with anyone, can colour an entire movement of a symphony when you conduct it.”

It is this detail, he says as his pigeon arrives, that enables him to “go beyond painting in primary colours”. The next stage is the essence of conducting: how to convey his interpretation to the musicians who actually make the noise? “That’s the beauty of it,” he says, gnawing at a wing and proffering his plate again. (“Go on, have some, shovel a bit of bacon on there.”) “You have to have a physicality, so you can get up in front of an orchestra, lift up your arms and tell them how to play the music—everything: dynamic, phrasing, colour, shape, speed, emotion—by not saying a word.”

Inside the restaurant, a glass shatters. Ticciati grimaces in sympathy with whoever dropped it. After a moment he says, “It’s a beautiful sound, though, isn’t it?”

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How the Hand Painted Rock ‘n’ Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip Came to Be

Photo by Weho City, Flickr Rock N’ Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip Exhibit Reception - July 30, 2013

Driving down the Sunset Strip has always felt a little like being in a magazine. The billboards loom and beckon, towering and untouchable and yet still totally in your face. Today they advertise luxury brands and new TV shows, but once upon a time—back when the Sunset Strip was at the heart and soul of rock ‘n’ roll—they were hand painted musical monoliths, larger-than-life variations on album art and psychedelic interpretations of soon-to-be hit records. As Hunter Oatman-Stanford put it, “in the 1970s, you knew you’d made it big if your record label paid for a hand-painted billboard on the Strip.” The hand painted rock billboards on the Strip were an art form specific to LA’s car culture, intended not for gallery walls but to be seen through a windshield at cruising speed, and preferably with the convertible top down.

According to the Los Angeles Times, each billboard took roughly ten days to produce, with costs ranging from $1,200 to $10,000. Craftsmen would hand paint the illustrations on individual wood panels at warehouses in Mid City, before ultimately reassembling the pieces on location in the wee hours. And they were by nature ephemeral—each was destroyed after its contract ended.

Luckily for us, a photographer named Robert Landau documented many of the billboards during their roughly decade-and-a-half heyday (from 1967 to the advent of MTV in the early 1980’s). Landau was a teenager living with his dad in the hills above the legendary Sunset Strip Tower Records when he first started documenting the fleeting masterpieces, shooting with a Nikkormat camera and Kodachrome film. A few years ago, he published a complete catalog of his photos with Angel City Press, and in a few weeks the billboards will finally grace museum walls, when an exhibit of Landau’s work opens at the LA’s Skirball Cultural Center.

Over at Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford has interviewed Landau about his work and the billboards themselves. Below is a short excerpt:

Collectors Weekly: Who started the music industry’s billboard trend?

Landau: As far as I can tell, it was the Doors in 1967 for their debut album. I talked with Jac Holzman—the head of Elektra Records who signed the Doors—while writing my book. In 1967, he had just come out here from the East Coast and opened an office on La Cienega Boulevard, not far from Sunset Boulevard, and it occurred to him that billboards were being used for everything except promoting records and music. A lot of radio stations where popular disc jockeys worked were farther east on Sunset, and he knew they drove on the Strip, and that the entertainment industry in general was based there.

The Doors were really into it; the whole band even climbed up on top for a photo shoot. Jim Morrison was quoted as saying he thought it was cool he’d be hanging over the Strip like a specter. I think at that time, it cost about a thousand dollars a month, which was quite a bit of an investment then. Elektra signed on for a year, and they had several different billboards. Little by little, the other record companies caught on.

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Looking at Five Generations of a Single Dutch Family to Understand the Genetics of Violence

Photo by Pixabay

A short piece published in BBC Magazine explored the science of whether murderers are born or made. A British neurocriminologist named Adrian Raine has made a career out of studying the brains of violent criminals. Raine was the first person to conduct a brain imaging study on murderers, and has since scanned the brains of numerous homicidal individuals, looking for similarities. Raine’s brain scanning studies found two similarities in the brains of nearly all his participants: 1) reduced activity in the pre-frontal cortex, which means less emotional impulse control, and 2) over activation of the part of the brain that controls our emotions, called the amygdala. According to the BBC, Raine’s study suggests that ” that murderers have brains that make them more prone to rage and anger, while at the same time making them less able to control themselves.” Childhood abuse could be a factor because of the damage it can cause to the brain, particularly to the pre-frontal cortex. But, as the BBC put it, “only a small proportion of those who have a terrible childhood grow up to become murderers,” which brings us to the next possibility: genetics. Are there genetic factors that predispose us to crime?

A breakthrough came in 1993 with a family in the Netherlands where all the men had a history of violence. Fifteen years of painstaking research revealed that they all lacked the same gene.

This gene produces an enzyme called MAOA, which regulates the levels of neurotransmitters involved in impulse control. It turns out that if you lack the MAOA gene or have the low-activity variant you are predisposed to violence. This variant became known as the warrior gene.

About 30% of men have this so-called warrior gene, but whether the gene is triggered or not depends crucially on what happens to you in childhood.

The research in question was conducted by Han Brunner, a Dutch geneticist working out of a teaching hospital in the Netherlands’ oldest city. Brunner’s research was first published in Science in October 1993, and that same month Sarah Richardson wrote about it for Discover magazine in an article entitled “Violence in the Blood.” Richardson’s piece is fascinating, especially in its explanation of how the geneticists used different clues to determine the origin of the aggressive behavior. This is how it begins:

One day in 1978 a woman walked into University Hospital in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, with a problem: the men in her family. Many of them–including several of her brothers and a son–seemed to have some sort of mental debility. Gradually, as the clinical geneticists who counseled the woman got to know her and her family, the details of the strange behavior of the woman’s male kin emerged. One had tried to rape his sister; another had tried to run his boss down with a car; a third had forced his sisters to undress at knife point. Furthermore, the violent streak had a long history. In 1962 the woman’s granduncle had prepared a family tree that identified nine other males with the same disorder, tracing it as far back as 1870. The granduncle, who was not violent himself–he worked in an institution for the learning disabled–had apparently come to suspect that something was terribly wrong with his family.

Three decades later, and 15 years after the woman’s first office visit, geneticist Han Brunner and his colleagues at the Nijmegen hospital think they’ve figured out what that something is. Some of the men in the woman’s family, they say, suffer from a genetic defect on the X chromosome- -a defect that cripples an enzyme that may help regulate aggressive behavior. If Brunner and his colleagues are right, it would be the first time a specific gene has been linked to aggression. That means their finding cannot fail to be controversial.

See the stories:

1. “Are Murderers Born or Made?” (BBC Magazine)

2. “Violence in the Blood.” (Sarah Richardson, Discover)

 

All Comedy Will Be Canceled: How the BBC Prepares for the Eventual Death of the Queen

No one lives forever, not even monarchs. In a recent piece for Business Insider UK, Rob Price explored the slightly morbid topic but deeply fascinating topic of what will happen in Britain when 88-year-old Queen Elizabeth II’s reign comes to an end. The Queen has been on the throne for over six decades, during which time 12 different Prime Ministers have served Britain (as well as 12 US Presidents). Price posits that her eventual death will be the most disruptive event in Britain in the last 70 years, affecting all aspects of British life. In the excerpt below, he discusses how this will play out on the BBC:

Assuming the Queen’s passing was expected, the news will spread at first via the main TV channels. All BBC channels will stop their programming and show the BBC1 feed for the announcement. The other independent channels won’t be obligated to interrupt their regular programming. But they almost certainly will.

At the BBC, anchors actively practice for the eventuality of the Monarch’s passing so they won’t be caught unaware on their shifts. The BBC’s Peter Sissons was heavily criticised for wearing a red tie to announce the Queen Mother’s passing (as seen above), and the BBC now keeps black ties and suits at the ready at all times. Presenters also run drills in which they’re required to make sudden “spoof” announcements that are never broadcast.

The last death of a Monarch was in 1952, and the BBC stopped all comedy for a set period of mourning after the announcement was made. The Daily Mail reports that the BBC plans to do the same again today, cancelling all comedy until after the funeral.

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