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Featured Longreader: Jonah Ogles, an associate editor at Cincinnati magazine. See his story picks from the magazine, plus more from The New York Review of Books, Outside magazine, plus more on his #longreads page.
Featured Longreader: Jonah Ogles, an associate editor at Cincinnati magazine. See his story picks from the magazine, plus more from The New York Review of Books, Outside magazine, plus more on his #longreads page.
Coming Wednesday, Feb. 29!
The New Republic and Longreads present: “Uncovering the Cover Story,” featuring Rachel Morris, Eliza Gray, Alec MacGillis, Timothy Noah, and The New Republic Editor Richard Just.
Washington, D.C., 7 p.m., Free
Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics:
Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him and Mrs. Krabappel to engage in Bull Durham-inspired extramarital shenanigans. Canseco’s wife rejected the scene, and the staff had to do a last-minute Saturday afternoon rewrite when Oakland came south on a mid-August road trip.
Instead of Lothario, Canseco got to play hero, rushing into a woman’s burning house to rescue her baby, then cat, followed by a player piano, washer, dryer, couch and recliner combo, high chair, TV, rug, kitchen table and chairs, lamp, and grandfather clock. Requesting the new sequence turned out to be the wiser move. Canseco and his wife had nearly divorced earlier that year before reconciling, and a week before “Homer at the Bat” aired, Canseco was arrested by Miami police for chasing down and ramming his wife’s BMW twice with his red Porsche at 4:30 a.m. After the chase ended, he allegedly got out of his car, came over to his wife’s driver-side window, and spit on it.
“The Making of ‘Homer at the Bat’.” — Erik Malinowski, Deadspin
See also: See also: The Making of ‘Nevermind’ (Excerpt from ‘Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge’) — Mark Yarm, MTV Hive, Sept. 19, 2011
Flechtheim was driven out of Germany by the Nazis—and many works from his galleries are now in private collections and museums around the world. A lawsuit brought by his heirs raises questions about provenance:
Works in the MoMA online database today with Flechtheim in their provenance histories were sold prior to 1933, meaning they are legally deemed to have been acquired absent any Nazi persecution, though, as Mr. Dascher put it, ‘Flechtheim was confronted with anti-Semitism already before 1933, even as a German officer during World War I.’ Museums around the world that now possess works the Nazis sold off can and do claim that they have them legally, even though some of the art may have come through galleries like Flechtheim’s, shuttered under anti-Semitic persecution.
See also: “The Goddess Goes Home.” — Ralph Frammolino, Smithsonian, Oct. 1, 2011
Featured Longreader: Writer Eva Holland. See her story picks from Vela Magazine, Outside magazine, Esquire, plus more on her #longreads page.
[Fiction] A woman on an Arctic cruise encounters her past:
At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.
Among the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. She’s had enough of men for a while. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them. She doesn’t need the cash, not anymore. She’s not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. Surely she has at last achieved this modest goal.
Nick Roses is a 22-year-old Hollywood agent who specializes in working with child actors. But former clients say he’s scamming families with promises of Disney stardom:
Howard Meltzer, a longtime casting director, calls Roses “Bernie Brillstein in a 20-year-old’s body.” Many others in Hollywood deem him either a gimlet-eyed child prodigy prone to the occasional youthful indiscretion or a shark-eyed huckster with the face of a Mouseketeer. Or both.
Roses’s status as a communal lightning rod began in April, when the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office charged him with seven counts of, in essence, criminal Hollywood skulduggery. Parents of children that Roses represented complained that he, among other things, baited them into moving to Los Angeles and becoming clients at a poorly run management company which bilked them out of money. In July, the case was settled when he pleaded no contest to violating a new law prohibiting managers from charging fees to clients for the promise of work or auditions. Such fees are deemed red flags by the Hollywood Establishment; mainstream talent managers work on a commission basis—they don’t make a penny until the client does.
What happens when your teenage son is obsessed with nuclear research and wants to experiment in the backyard? How 17-year-old Taylor Wilson found support from his family and a group of scientist mentors:
Kenneth and Tiffany agreed to let Taylor assemble a “survey of everyday radioactive materials” for his school’s science fair. Kenneth borrowed a Geiger counter from a friend at Texarkana’s emergency-management agency. Over the next few weekends, he and Tiffany shuttled Taylor around to nearby antique stores, where he pointed the clicking detector at old radium-dial alarm clocks, thorium lantern mantles and uranium-glazed Fiesta plates. Taylor spent his allowance money on a radioactive dining set.
Drawn in by what he calls ‘the surprise properties’ of radioactive materials, he wanted to know more. How can a speck of metal the size of a grain of salt put out such tremendous amounts of energy? Why do certain rocks expose film? Why does one isotope decay away in a millionth of a second while another has a half-life of two million years?
“The Boy Who Played With Fusion.” — Tom Clynes, Popular Science
The Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane on banking, risk and how to bring social and financial equity back into the system:
Consider the effects of the too-big-to-fail problem on risk-taking incentives. If banks know they will be bailed out, those holding their debt will be less likely to price the risk of failure for themselves. Debtor discipline will therefore be weakest among those institutions where society would wish it to be strongest. This encourages them to grow larger still: the leverage cycle isn’t merely repeated, but amplified. The doom loop grows larger. The biggest banks effectively benefit from a disguised, and growing, state subsidy. By my estimate, for UK banks this subsidy amounts to tens of billions of pounds per year and has often stretched to hundreds of billions. Few UK government spending departments have budgets this big. For the global banks, the subsidy can reach a trillion dollars – about eight times the annual global development budget.
Ex-president and CEO Michael Woodford says he tried to blow the whistle on fraudulent accounting related to $1.6 billion in transactions. He was then fired:
Woodford, 51, recounted how he had just returned from Hong Kong, having fled Tokyo after a board meeting in which Olympus Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa had fired him. The cause for dismissal, according to Woodford: his insistence that Olympus officials come clean about a series of questionable purchases dating to 2006, totaling $1.6 billion, none of which had been adequately reported in the company’s consolidated financial statements. The deals had been approved by Kikukawa and the Olympus board, yet in several cases the parties receiving the sums were not even clearly identified in Olympus’s books. (At least one Japanese magazine had strongly hinted that the Yakuza were beneficiaries of some of these shady deals.) Woodford, frustrated by the board’s stonewalling, had hired the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct an independent audit of the suspicious transactions. For several weeks leading up to his dismissal, he had been calling the board to account for these transactions, and eventually demanded the board’s resignation. Instead, Woodford was purged. And now he was running for his life.
“The Story Behind the Olympus Scandal.” — Karl Taro Greenfeld, Bloomberg Businessweek
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