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It's Never Too Late, Vol. 1

Continuing to brave the Indian Ocean, and continuing to die, only illustrates their desperation in a new, disturbing kind of light. This is the subtext to the plight of every refugee: Whatever hardship he endures, he endures because it beats the hardship he escaped. Every story of exile implies the sadder story of a homeland.

-From Luke Mogelson’s National Magazine Award-winning story, “The Dream Boat,” in The New York Times Magazine (November 2013).

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Britney Spears's Lost Album

A decade ago, Britney Spears worked on an album called “Original Doll” that she hoped would prove herself as a songwriter. Her record label denied the album existed even though Spears did a radio interview where she previewed one of the songs. At Buzzfeed, Hunter Schwarz writes about Spears’s lost album:

On “Take Off,” Spears sang about tolerance, love, and peace. Bell called it her version of Michael Jackson’s “Black or White.” “It was about being tolerant about gay people. It was gay people, discrimination, basically loving yourself and being connected,” Bell said. “I think it was ahead of Lady Gaga. I think people would have looked at her and thought she had something to say. It was ahead of its time. She talked about war and how war is wrong.” In 2013, Bell tweeted some lyrics from the song: “They say get ready for the revolution / I think we oughta find some sorta solution.”

But Jive wasn’t impressed. “I think maybe they thought it was not close enough to her brand,” Bell said. She called In the Zone “the filtered-down version of Original Doll, or the more pop version.” She “wanted to make a record that was more vibey and more personal and honest,” Bell said. Ultimately, Spears still hoped her songs would have their day. “I think she knew, I can come back to these songs later,” Bell said.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Confronting the Top Brass at The New York Times About Pay Discrepancy

Jill Abramson left the New York Times’s executive editor position today and was replaced by Dean Baquet, the managing editor at the newspaper. At The New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes about what happened behind the scenes:

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”

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Read Ken Auletta’s October 2011 profile of Jill Abramson

The Healing Power of Human Fat Tissue

In Aeon, Jalees Rehman, an associate professor of medicine and pharmacology at the University of Illinois, discusses the potential healing power of stem cells found in human fat tissue:

The discovery of regenerative cells within our fat has opened up new doors. As adult stem cells, they can be converted into tissues such as bone and cartilage and might provide long-sought relief for debilitating diseases such as chronic joint pain. As stromal cells, they are able to build and regenerate blood vessels, and could provide relief for millions of patients affected by poor blood flow to their vital organs. With scientists starting to engineer organs such as the heart, lungs, pancreas and liver from scratch, they are realising that ensuring blood supply to newly engineered organs is critical. The ability of cells derived from fat to grow blood vessels might make them central players in the future of organ engineering.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Class, Privilege and Wealth at Two Very Different High Schools

University Heights High School is located in one of the poorest congressional district in America, and six miles away, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School charges $43,000-a-year for tuition and is attended by the children of celebrities. In The New York Times Magazine, students from both schools discuss coming together to share their stories, talk about class and privilege, and find the things they have in common.

ANABEL: “I’m very lucky and privileged to have the parents I have. They’ve never stressed money in my life, which has given me an idea of success that isn’t based on money, but rather happiness and self-fulfillment. This may be because my family hasn’t ever openly struggled financially in my lifetime. I don’t usually think of money in a social context — who has more and who has less — but again, maybe this is due to the fact that I’ve never personally struggled to make money or get by.”

KIANA: “I went in there thinking none of the students at Fieldston would understand what any of the kids from my school go through on a daily basis, because they’re most likely all from rich households. But my partner and I had a lot more in common than I thought we would, and these kids were not stuck up like I thought they’d be. Some of them went through similar things that kids from my school have gone through — in some cases, maybe worse.”

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We No Longer Drop Dead as Frequently as We Used to

Jacob M. Appel practices medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and his writing has appeared in numerous literary journals. In the Kenyon Review, Appel’s “Sudden Death: A Eulogy” examines living in a world where we no longer suddenly drop dead as frequently as we used to:

The exact rate at which we are not dropping dead is difficult to calculate: while the government keeps meticulous records on the causes of our deaths, and the ages at which we perish, it makes no effort to estimate the speed of our grand finales. Nonetheless, as a physician, my anecdotal sense is that we’re not dying nearly as suddenly as we once did. “When I started as an intern,” an elderly colleague recently observed at a staff meeting, “most patients only stayed in the hospital for a day or two. Either you got better or you didn’t. Lingering wasn’t part of the protocol.” Today, in contrast, lingering is the norm. Insurance companies force you out of the hospital, not rigor mortis. Where a generation ago, the expectation was for men to retire at sixty-five and keel over at sixty-seven—the basis for the pension plans now bankrupting municipal governments—a massive myocardial infarction in one’s fifth or sixth decade is no longer inevitable. Stress tests and statins and improved resuscitation methods mean we are more likely to survive to our second heart attack, live beyond our third stroke. Life ends with a whimper, not a bang.

That is not to say that the Grim Reaper never arrives on a bolt of lightning: I’ve lost a medical school mentor to a plane crash, a neighbor to suicide, a childhood friend to a brain aneurysm. Thousands of Americans, smoking less but eating more, still do succumb to heart attacks in their fifties and sixties. But we greet these swift departures not only with grief, as we have always done, but also with a sense of indignation simmering toward outrage. In an age of prenatal genetic testing and full-body PET scans and rampant agnosticism, all varieties of death strike many of us as anathema. Death without fair warning becomes truly obscene.

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Photo: Pargon

Nora Ephron's Son Describes a Rare Glimpse of His Mother's Vulnerability

Last year, Jacob Bernstein wrote about his mother Nora Ephron’s last days for The New York Times Magazine. In the following excerpt, Bernstein writes about the moment he learned that his mother’s aggressive blood disorder had turned into leukemia and saw his mother in a rare state of vulnerability:

When I arrived in her room, my mother was crying. She cried a lot that first night, and then, the next day, she cried some more because she was certain Christopher Hitchens had done no such thing, and she was devastated at the thought that she might not be as brave as him about death.

It terrified me to see her cry like that. She loved me, showered me with gifts, e-mailed or called every time I wrote something that made her proud. But even after all the weekly meals, the shared vacations, the conversations about movies and journalism and the debt ceiling and Edith Wharton, I still viewed her with a mix of awe and intimidation. It wasn’t often that I caught a glimpse of her vulnerability.

Now there she was, in her Chanel flats and her cream-colored pants and her black-and-white-striped blouse, looking so pretty and so fragile as she dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex; and I finally understood what she meant when she said she was a bird — that she wasn’t just talking about her looks but something inside as well.

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Photo: TechCrunch

Weezer's 'Blue Album,' Twenty Years Later

He was cute; he was vulnerable; he had glasses. Really cool glasses. His hair was unfortunate; his features were delicate; in his videos, he could never quite hold eye contact with the camera. He wore sweaters a lot, and he sang about wearing the sweaters; he was a sweater-wearing dude, that Rivers Cuomo. He sang at you on the radio. He loved you, more desperately than anyone ever had, or would.

If you happened to be of a certain age when “The Blue Album” came out-let’s say, for the purposes of total non-specificity and universal relatability, “exactly twelve years old”-the highly sweater-centric single from that album, and the revelation that its singer was in fact good-looking, opened up a whole new landscape of sexual possibility.

Sady Doyle, in The Awl (2010), on Weezer. Read more on music from the Longreads Archive.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Story of a Journalist Turned Wedding Photographer

Just the other day, I received an e-mail from a photographer looking for an internship. His short note almost brought me to tears: “I come from Sarajevo, Bosnia, and my life has put me though many challenges. I am saying this because I have had the chance to see the worst in humans and was lucky enough to survive it. Since then, I have made it my goal to help people record their happiest moments, because those moments are rare and precious, and one never has too many of them.”

Matt Mendelsohn, in the Washington Post (2007), on switching careers from photojournalist to wedding photographer. Read more on weddings from the Longreads Archive.

Photo: Dmitri Markine