The Longreads Blog

How the ‘Girls’ Cast Came to Be

There was always something distinctly Obama Era about Girls — the post-recession angst, the clunky conversations around race and diversity, the ability to worry about money, art, and love, rather than the looming end of constitutional democracy. So it makes sense that the sixth and final season of the show is about to start right as a new administration rolls in. Before it does, though, Lacey Rose at The Hollywood Reporter gives the show’s cast and creators (from Lena Dunham to Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner) the full oral-history treatment.

JENNIFER EUSTON, CASTING DIRECTOR It was 2010, and I’d done one or two network shows and did not have good experiences. Then Kathleen McCaffrey called and said: “I have this script. It’s Lena Dunham, and Judd’s attached.” I’d seen Tiny Furniture, and I’d worked with Judd, but I told her, “I’m not doing TV.” She kept hassling me; she had me sit down with Lena, and eventually she just wore me down.

APATOW We used a few people from Tiny Furniture. I was always a big proponent of Alex Karpovsky [the nebbishy Ray] as my personal way in, and Lena wanted to have [her childhood friend] Jemima Kirke play Jessa.

JEMIMA KIRKE (JESSA) I said no a couple of times. I was working as a painter at the time. Honestly, it was the money [that convinced me]. I was 24 and about to have a baby, so I was vulnerable, and the contract was very long. (Laughs.)

ALLISON WILLIAMS (MARNIE) I had just moved to L.A. from New York very dramatically after I graduated from college. I came in to audition, and we improvised a scene where I braided Lena’s hair, which was … dirty.

DUNHAM I called Allison before we cast her, and I asked her how she felt about nudity. She said, “I don’t want to do nudity.” I was like, “We have to get back to you. I’m gonna be naked, people are gonna be naked — that’s a big part of what this show is.” She told us she wasn’t scared of sex, she just didn’t want to show her vagina, her nipples or her butt — and she never did.

Read the story

StrawberryGate: Why Does Tom Brady Insist He Has Never Eaten a Strawberry?

Credit: Todd Shoemake/Flickr

What mattered during last night’s Super Bowl LI wasn’t the Atlanta Falcons’ collapse. It wasn’t the New England Patriots’ stunning comeback and overtime win—the first time ever a Super Bowl went into overtime—or that Tom Brady has cemented his status as the greatest quarterback of all-time. No, what mattered most about the 2016 Super Bowl is that Brady is a blatant liar.

Dayna Evans of The Cut spent a day this past fall with the Patriots’ quarterback during his suspension as part of the team’s Deflategate penalty, and her resulting piece is full of fantastic tidbits about a player who is famously vanilla off the field: Brady loves nothing better than relaxing in sweatpants and UGGs; he likes to read a book every now and then; and he has never eaten a strawberry in his life.

Tom Brady has learned that he doesn’t love strawberries or coffee by never having tried either at all, a commitment no mortal man could ever conceive of pulling off. “I’ve never eaten a strawberry in my life. I have no desire to do that.” Never? “Absolutely not.”

Read more…

In Makeover Culture, Authenticity Doesn’t Come Cheap

What is behind the contemporary obsession with makeovers? At Aeon, writer and scholar Michael Lovelock examines the cultural and economic forces that drive millions to Instagram hashtags like #transformationtuesday and shows like How to Look Good Naked.

The idea that we have an authentic self — a set of innate personality traits, desires, emotional and intellectual dispositions unique to us — emerged in the 18th century. Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau tried to move away from religion as a means of making sense of the world. Instead, they claimed that the purpose of life was to be true to an essential nature that defined who we are.

In the 21st century, the notion of the authentic self has solidified into common sense, with the routine demands to “be yourself” or to “be real.” This is partly a response to the perceived breakdown of collective structures that traditionally gave life meaning: religion, local community, extended family ties. The late philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has called this state of affairs “liquid modernity” — a description of how reliable anchors of group identity have given way to fluidity, insecurity, and individualism. The makeover offers an apparent solution to these social and cultural transformations. It encourages us to look inwards, to the very fabric of the self for meaning, purpose, and fulfilment.

Paradoxically, the logic of the makeover positions the external body as the site upon which inner authenticity is to be displayed — right before the market steps in to help us achieve this self-realization. Of course, there’s nothing magnanimous about the self-confidence sold to us in the form of a bottle of shampoo, a new dress, or a subscription to a gym.

Read the story

On Wearing a Hijab for the First Time: They Never Really Did See Me

Photo by Franco Folini (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Weeklings, Khirad Siddiqui reflects on wearing a hijab at age 13, as a young woman in Plano, Texas, seven years ago. She discovered “affirmation and reassurance” in the writings of Malcolm X, an American Muslim who also felt that his “peers failed to understand him as a complete and multifaceted human being.”

I can remember every moment of the day I first started wearing hijab. I can remember waking up early on my thirteenth birthday because I couldn’t contain the excitement I felt. I can remember the exact shade of the pink fabric, and the way it felt tighter than I had expected. I can remember my father’s smile, and the length of my mother’s hug. I can remember the slow morning drive through my hometown in Texas, and the way my parents asked me one last time before they dropped me off if I was sure this was what I wanted. I can remember the conviction of my answer. And, of course, I can also remember the fear. I can remember too the way my teachers would avoid eye contact with me, and I can remember how tentative my friends were when they asked if my parents had forced me into it, as if they were suddenly scared for me, or of me, or both. I can also remember how slowly, through stilted conversations and glares from passersby, I felt the world constrict around me. I can also remember how suddenly everything felt sharper: people’s voices, their smiles, and their comments. Nothing was friendly anymore. That day shaped me, and I remember all of it.

Read the story

Porochista Khakpour on Starving as a Young Novelist

Photo by Luigi Novi, via Wikimedia Commons

Lit Hub has a compelling essay by The Last Illusion author Porochista Khakpour — an excerpt from Scratch: Writers, Money and the Art of Making a Living, an anthology edited by Manjula Martin — about her struggle to survive early in her career as a novelist. At one point in 2007, while on book tour, she finds her bank account is overdrawn and she barely has enough money to eat. (Full disclosure: I have an essay in the collection as well.)

I call people, but I don’t want to ask for help. I want them to think of it as a humorous anecdote but not that it’s real, that my life is that difficult. After all, certain friends who are not involved in publishing think I am rich and famous. Why burst that bubble?

In the end, I borrow money from a friend of my boyfriend and take that walk of shame to a yellow cab, when I know there are buses and shuttles and subways and all sorts of only semi-impossible ways to get back to Brooklyn.

Later, when my publicist finds out, she is shocked. Why didn’t you call us?!

I give her some gloss-over answer, but I want to say, I don’t know whom to call, when to call, why to call. I am learning everything over again. I have become what the publishing world and media suspect of a debut novelist—suddenly, I am new to the universe, not just to being a novelist. I suddenly don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

Weeks later, I discover during another bad moment—as the value of the dollar plummets and oil is sky-high—that gold is at its peak. I sell what is left of family heirlooms to an old Iranian man in the Diamond District, who listens to a fraction of my story, gives me a decent deal, and tells me, “My boy in medical university; my girl, married and with baby. Your fault for being a starver of an artist, daughter.”

Read the story

What’s Left at the Bottom of Pandora’s Box

Writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Matt Black traveled through California, Ohio, and Maine, talking with, working alongside, and photo-documenting the working poor for Smithsonian magazine. They found lots of things they expected — long hours, low pay, financial uncertainty — and one thing they didn’t: hope.

Brown earns less than his wife, who is an administrative assistant and show coordinator for a software engineering firm. On paper, he said, their combined income might make it appear that they’re doing fine. But then there are the bills.

The biggest ones?

“Mortgage and tuition,” Brown said, which amount to some $17,000 per year. “My stepson is in junior high school,” Brown explained. “He’s in a private school because our public school is garbage. That costs $8,000. You got to walk a fine line growing up black and poor. An education is an important thing. If we want to break the cycle, that’s where it starts, right there.”

As for the other expenses, food runs “three to four hundred a month.” The couple has one car, with a $350 monthly payment. Brown usually takes the bus to the Evergreen Laundry to start his 4 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift. They live paycheck to paycheck. “Save? I’m using everything I got to keep my head above water. It’s still always a struggle. I still ain’t made it where I don’t have to worry.”

I asked, Are you poor?

“I used to be poor. Poorness to me is you’re in a position to do things you don’t want to do,” he said, such as selling crack. “I might not make a lot of money, but I’ve got a job, I got a family, and I don’t have to be lookin’ over my shoulder. From where I come from, it’s night and day. What I’ve got that I didn’t have is hope.”

Read the story

‘There Is Something Distinctly Grown-Up About Being Attracted to Tiny Things’

At Harper’s, Alice Gregory ruminates on the world of miniature collecting, and explores why people make and admire such tiny things.

It is difficult for me, in the presence of miniatures, not to feel like a pervert. Tiny things have always filled me with a devious and urgent covetousness. “Delight” is too casual a word to describe it, and not at all physical enough. The first and last thing I ever stole was a Sudafed-size doubloon from a friend’s pirate-themed Lego set. I needed it. More than twenty years have since passed, but preventing myself from buying Polly Pocket sets on eBay is a feat of near-constant diligence. Sometimes I slip up, though, see a tiny thing I simply must own, and breathlessly buy it. The lining of my purse was once destroyed by the tines of several miniature forks that I kept stashed away for almost a week; on my mantel sit lead soldiers and ceramic seals, a single reduced radish, and a U.S. passport smaller than a Chiclet. They gather dust and puzzle friends. I don’t see myself as a trinkets person, and yet when I heard of a woman at the fair who hid her extensive miniatures collection at her son’s house so that her husband would never learn of it, I thought to myself, “Good idea,” and made a mental note to maybe one day do the same.

It feels gluttonous—and good—to hoard so much sensual detail at once. Miniatures are the most concentrated form of extravagance I know, a decadent combination of ontological and visceral attraction. There is wickedness to it, a pleasant brand of self-disgust. The masochistic ecstasy of seeing myself as a monster when next to a miniature is unshakeable. A hand never appears more sun-ravaged than when cradling a ticking grandfather clock that is the height of a stick of chewing gum and carved from an especially fine-grained pearwood. Nothing compares more favorably to a hangnail than a christening gown for a doll’s doll, made of embroidery thread so thin it must be sewn with acupuncture needles.

Read the story

‘It Was Too Good To Be True’: A Case of Scientific Fraud

In 2011, Diederik Stapel, a bright social psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was suspended for fabricating data on a study that brought him much praise. At the Guardian, Stephen Buranyi profiles the team of researchers from the university’s psychology department, Chris Hartgerink and Marcel van Assen, who have since focused their research on scientific fraud.

Stapel had a knack for devising and executing such clever studies, cutting through messy problems to extract clean data. Since becoming a professor a decade earlier, he had published more than 100 papers, showing, among other things, that beauty product advertisements, regardless of context, prompted women to think about themselves more negatively, and that judges who had been primed to think about concepts of impartial justice were less likely to make racially motivated decisions.

His findings regularly reached the public through the media. The idea that huge, intractable social issues such as sexism and racism could be affected in such simple ways had a powerful intuitive appeal, and hinted at the possibility of equally simple, elegant solutions. If anything united Stapel’s diverse interests, it was this Gladwellian bent. His studies were often featured in the popular press, including the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, and he was a regular guest on Dutch television programmes.

But as Stapel’s reputation skyrocketed, a small group of colleagues and students began to view him with suspicion. “It was too good to be true,” a professor who was working at Tilburg at the time told me. (The professor, who I will call Joseph Robin, asked to remain anonymous so that he could frankly discuss his role in exposing Stapel.) “All of his experiments worked. That just doesn’t happen.”

Read the story

How A Simple Mistake Can Put You on the Street: Why Grandpa is Homeless

Photo by Doug Waldron (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Pacific Standard, Rachel Nuwer reports on the aging homeless population of California and how something seemingly innocuous — like forgetting to renew your driver’s license on time — can instigate a downward spiral into poverty and homelessness that skyrocketing rent and street-inflicted trauma can extend, sometimes indefinitely.

Life was stable for Herb until 2013, when he “got lazy” and neglected to renew his truck-driver license. He didn’t realize the severity of his error until he applied for a new license but could not pass the written test. Although Herb quickly landed a job as a security guard at a fast-food restaurant, even working overtime didn’t provide enough for him to make ends meet. He fell behind on rent and was evicted.

Herb experienced that unfortunate reality firsthand. Last winter, his car got towed, taking his security-guard uniform and most of his remaining possessions with it. He never got the car back — he didn’t have the funds. Unable to dress for work, he stopped going, and spent the next two months on the streets. He panhandled, flashing his veteran’s ID as he asked for spare change, and was sometimes reduced to eating out of dumpsters. To survive the winter chill, he slept bundled up in several layers of pants, shirts, and blankets. Once, a cop tried to shoo him from a doorway, and Herb begged him to take him to jail instead, so he would have a warm place to sleep. The officer told him, “I’m not taking you to jail, but you can’t stay here.”

“I was really down,” Herb says. Yet he still counted himself lucky. “A lot of the people I met on the street were on meds and should have been hospitalized,” he says. “They really couldn’t take care of themselves.” But even a strong, able-bodied person like Herb will soon be broken down under those conditions. At one point he began suffering from severe chest pains, so he checked into Oakland’s Highland Hospital, where he remained for five days. “The stress got to me,” he says. “The hospital people told me, ‘Herb, just being on the streets is messing you up.’”

Read the story

Living the American Dream in Comer, Georgia: The Garden of Refugees

Photo by Udo Schröter (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Oxford American, André Gallant tells the story of Eh Kaw Htoo, a Karen refugee from Myanmar — a man who “extolled the redneck’s work ethic” and helped build a community of 150 Karens who sustain one another by living frugally and sharing the bounty of the land in the rural community of Comer, Georgia.

I met Eh Kaw in 2012, when I approached him as a reporter for the Athens Banner-Herald to tell his story to our shared community. Those first meetings enchanted me. In our earliest conversations, Eh Kaw explained that the Karen’s ability to keep gardens, trap rabbits in nearby woodlands, and slaughter chickens helped his people retain their cultural identity.

From the beginning, I loved Pa Saw’s food: roselle green and chicken skin soup, eggplant and anchovies in turmeric, hot dogs and canola greens scooped with rice mounds into sweet gum leaves. The debtless and quasi-agrarian lifestyle she and other Karen adhered to stirred a primal gene somewhere within me. After I reported that first story, we became friends, and in 2014, I attended a party to celebrate Eh Kaw and Pa Saw becoming U.S. citizens. Dozens of people gathered around a buffet table anchored by goat stew—the whole animal (organs but no hide) cooked in a tall pot. A few months later, I went to a joint wedding of four Karen couples, after which we dined at an outdoor buffet on tables hewed from pine trees.

Every few months, I returned to Comer to visit Eh Kaw and the other Karen. On one trip, he took me to various Karen houses to show off their infrastructure.

Each home we visited was organized in a similar fashion to Semoeneh’s property but adapted to the particular footprint of the lot. The houses were made of materials ranging from cinder block to clapboard, and every yard teemed with life: vegetables, poultry, the odd goat, droplets of brook water falling from minnow-snatching nets, a horde of shoes at the back door arranged as a roll call for those snoozing inside.

Read the story