Author Archives

Mike Dang
Editor-in-chief, Longreads | Editorial, Automattic and WordPress.com

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

What Makes for a Perfectly Seasoned Dish?

In Wired, David Chang, a chef and restauranteur best known for founding the Momofuku restaurant group, explains his “Unified Theory of Deliciousness,” or what he believes makes a dish so good people will wait in long lines for it:

My first breakthrough on this idea was with salt. It’s the most basic ingredient, but it can also be hellishly complex. A chef can go crazy figuring out how much salt to add to a dish. But I believe there is an objectively correct amount of salt, and it is rooted in a counterintuitive idea. Normally we think of a balanced dish as being neither too salty nor undersalted. I think that’s wrong. When a dish is perfectly seasoned, it will taste simultaneously like it has too much salt and too little salt. It is fully committed to being both at the same time.

Try it for yourself. Set out a few glasses of water with varying amounts of salt in them. As you taste them, think hard about whether there is too much or too little salt. If you keep experimenting, you’ll eventually hit this sweet spot. You’ll think that it’s too bland, but as soon as you form that thought, you’ll suddenly find it tastes too salty. It teeters. And once you experience that sensation, I guarantee it will be in your head any time you taste anything for the rest of your life.

Read the story

The Wildlife Officers Trying to Get Florida’s Human-Alligator Conflicts Under Control

In light of the tragic story of the alligator attack on a toddler at a Florida Disney resort, The New York Times has republished Andrew Revkin’s 1988 story from Discover magazine about how human-alligator conflicts in Florida began to rise as the population in the state steadily increased and homes were built “on terrain that is transmogrified swamp”:

As increasing numbers of northerners flee to the Sunshine State, development is rapidly spreading inland from the state’s sparkling shores toward its flat, wet, sparsely populated interior. Ranks of expensive homes, often surrounding private golf courses and chains of man-made ponds, are being built on terrain that is transmogrified swamp.

With the help of a network of 14 professional trappers, [Lieutenant Dick] Lawrence, the alligator coordinator for a large swath of south Florida, responds to complaints ranging from alligators threatening pets to alligators in swimming pools. (“Usually, when they end up in pools, it’s somebody pulling a prank,” Lawrence says.)

Read the story

‘Silicon Valley’ Masterfully Skewers Tech Culture

'Silicon Valley' / HBO

At The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz takes us behind-the-scenes at the HBO comedy “Silicon Valley,” revealing how its writers and creators are so good at accurately skewering the tech world:

The show’s signature gag, from the first season, was a minute-long montage of startup founders pledging to “make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols,” or to “make the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints.” This scene was set at TechCrunch Disrupt, a real event where founders take turns pitching their ideas, “American Idol”-style, to an auditorium full of investors. Before writing the episode, Judge and Berg spent a weekend at TechCrunch Disrupt, in San Francisco. “That’s the first thing you notice,” Judge said. “It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’” After the scene aired, viewers complained about the lack of diversity in the audience. Berg recalled, “A friend of mine who works in tech called me and said, ‘Why aren’t there any women? That’s bullshit!’ I said to her, ‘It is bullshit! Unfortunately, we shot that audience footage at the actual TechCrunch Disrupt.’”

Read the story

Why Verizon’s Former Pitchman Is Working for Sprint

You might have noticed that actor Paul Marcarelli, who played a memorable role as Verizon’s “Test Man” for many years, has begun to star in commercials for Sprint, a rival telecommunications company. Why the switch? Some insight can be found in a 2011 profile of Marcarelli by Spencer Morgan in The Atlantic:

Among other things, his initial five-year contract had prohibited him from doing any other commercial work and stipulated that he not discuss any aspect of the Test Man campaign, including the particulars of his contract. (He is still reluctant to go into detail, since he remains under contract with the company.) A 2003 article in Ad Age—titled “Verizon Keeps ‘Test Man’ on Short Leash”—noted that the cellular firm “adamantly maintains … that the actor who plays [Test Man] should certainly not be ‘heard.’” (Indeed, Verizon had declined to verify Marcarelli’s identity even after Ad Age revealed it, in 2002.) The contract was amended in 2006 to include language articulating Marcarelli’s right to promote his own projects, but he still felt hemmed in by the need to protect the character—and with it, his income.

After nine years, Marcarelli was informed via email that Verizon was taking their advertising in a different direction, and Marcarelli was free to pursue other projects.

Read the story

Prince: 1958-2016

Photo: "Purple Rain" | Warner Bros. Pictures

Prince, the singer, songwriter, producer, and rock star, died this week at the age of 57. Here are six stories about the legendary musician.

1. Prince’s Obituary in the New York Times (Jon Pareles)

Prince recorded the great majority of his music entirely on his own, playing every instrument and singing every vocal line. Many of his albums were simply credited, “Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince.” Then, performing those songs onstage, he worked as a bandleader in the polished, athletic, ecstatic tradition of James Brown, at once spontaneous and utterly precise, riveting enough to open a Grammy Awards telecast and play the Super Bowl halftime show. He would often follow a full-tilt arena concert with a late-night club show, pouring out even more music.

Read more…

The 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The 2016 Pulitzer Prizes winners have been announced: The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum won the prize for criticism. Lin-Manuel Miranda won the drama prize for “Hamilton.” The New York Times’s Alissa J. Rubin won the international reporting prize for her work investigating the abuse of Afghan women. The Boston Globe’s Farah Stockman won the prize for commentary for her series examining race and education in Boston after busing.

A list of the all the winners and finalists can be found here. Below is a short list of other books and features that were honored today:

Explanatory Reporting: “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” (T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project)

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…

Writing Without Access: The Craft of the Write-Around

Mary H.K. Choi notes in her profile of Rihanna for Fader that Pulitzer-prize winner Margo Jefferson wrote a “killer write-around” of Beyoncé without the participation of Beyoncé’s camp. As we read along, we come to the realization that Choi’s Rihanna profile is also a write-around, and it’s expertly done. Read more…

Nancy Meyers on Writing a Film Without a Romance

Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro in 'The Intern'

In a conversation with New York magazine, Nancy Meyers talks about her new film The Intern, and why she didn’t want to write another romantic comedy:

I didn’t want to write another romance. I never wanted to write another scene in a restaurant between a man and a woman. I think David Mamet said, “There’s always the scene in a restaurant where the woman gets to talk.” I just didn’t have it in me to write one more of those things. And I felt sort of done with the romantic story. It just wasn’t what I was feeling. And I felt I’d covered that subject pretty well: to fall in love, and out of love, and be divorced, be Cameron Diaz’s age, or be Meryl Streep’s age. So I thought, A relationship between a man and a woman that’s not romantic, this is interesting. I’ve never done that. I think the age difference kind of really keeps the romance out of it. But I guess really, to be honest with you, if she were 60 or he was 35, I think they’d be wonderful together. But I think they’re both too cool and smart to ever have thought about it.

Read the story