Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *

It’s not uncommon for artists to be associated with a particular cultural moment: think Hemingway and interwar Europe or vintage Lady Gaga and the onset of the age of virality. What is rare is for a cultural moment to be so strongly linked to a specific artist like the `90s — specifically the first, pre-internet half — are with Winona Ryder.
At Hazlitt, Soraya Roberts digs deep into Ryder’s career to find out why we (or at least a certain subset of “we,” mostly born between the mid-seventies and mid-eighties) struggle to decouple the artist from the period in which she got lodged in our collective psyche.
We cannot see Ryder without seeing the grunge era. In the New York Times Magazine in 2011, Carl Wilson riffed on the “20-year cycle of resuscitation” that had finally turned to Gen-X nostalgia. “In intimate terms, nostalgia is a glue that reinforces bonds of solidarity and shared experience,” he wrote. “And it’s a reminder that it matters not only that an idea or an image was created, but when — that things speak most fully in chorus and counterpoint to other events and concepts of the same era.” As Tavi Gevinson told Entertainment Weekly in 2014, “how I feel when I see pictures of teen Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp holding hands in leather jackets, like, nobody can match that.”
The only person that can come close is Winona Ryder now, because embedded in Winona Ryder now is Winona Ryder then. She carries her past with her. The teen actress who sought to make her own life nostalgic before it had even passed her by peeks out from within the woman Marc Jacobs now imbues with nostalgia — she is a Russian nesting doll of reminiscence. That Winona Ryder’s image makes more of an impression than her current performances — in The Ten, The Last Word, Stay Cool — confirms our culture’s chronic desire to preserve the past rather than accept the present.

Cody Delistraty | Longreads | February 2016 | 14 minutes (3,672 words)
“The most stylish chef in the industry,” according to Vogue Paris. “A fairy tale child,” according to fashion editor André Leon Talley, “straight out of a gothic novel.” The grandson of Maxime de La Falaise, a 1950s beauty who wrote for American Vogue and played muse to Andy Warhol. The nephew of Loulou de La Falaise, the afflatus of Yves Saint Laurent. The great-nephew of Mark Birley, who ruled London nightlife with Annabel’s and Harry’s Bar. And on and on.
Daniel Le Bailly de La Falaise has always had much to live up to.
Yet even from his younger years, Daniel parried the pressure with aplomb. He modeled for Vogue Paris as a wispy seventeen year-old. He acted in plays on the West End alongside Michael Gambon. It was the same path of aristocratic, creative urbanity that his forebears lived so well.
But one day, he realized it wasn’t quite the life for him.
“I asked myself the question of whose career I coveted and I couldn’t really come up with the answer,” Daniel told me over the phone from Bolinas, California. “I wanted control over what my life would be and cooking was something that I had always done.”
So cook he did.
He was slated to start work at the River Café, a respected Italian eatery on the banks of the Thames, but his great-uncle Mark Birley challenged him. “If you’ve got the balls, if you’ve got balls, Danny, you’ll start at Harry’s Bar,” Daniel recounted him saying in reference to the members-only Mayfair restaurant founded by his great uncle. “He thought I’d make a week and in the end I did years there.”
Today, Daniel lives mostly on an estate near Toulouse, France, with his wife, Molly, and infant son, Louis. He manages Le Garde-Manger de La Falaise, an exclusive line of oils and vinegars sold at Selfridges in London and at Claus in Paris, and he is the author of a recent book from Rizzoli called Nature’s Larder.
But his central work remains cooking. He cooks for himself, his family, and his friends, but he also caters celebrity and fashion events, which take place mostly in Paris, London, and Milan. He catered Kate Moss’ wedding and, most recently, he was in charge of a 125-person dinner at the Château de Courances in northern France for the Olsen twins’ fashion brand, The Row.
Although Daniel’s provenance is one of sophistication and blue blood, he eschews pretension. His favorite food is spaghetti alle vongole and, as he puts it, “there is no better luxury than really distilled simplicity.”
Daniel spoke to me about the pressures of aristocracy, the sexuality of food, and what cooking for the rich and famous really takes. Read more…

Ciudad Juárez, Mexico was once known as the global murder capital. It’s no longer the world’s most dangerous city, but violence still haunts the town just over the border from El Paso, Texas. Alice Driver, a filmmaker, writer and photographer whose work focuses on human rights, feminism, and activism, has written extensively about Juárez. Her searing 2015 book More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico deals specifically with the disappearance and murder of women in Juárez. The work, which grew out of her dissertation, blends theory with stories and interviews to explore not just the violence against women in Juárez, but also how that violence has been represented in media and culture. As Driver writes:
“To talk about feminicide is to talk about violence against women in all its manifestations, and in Juárez one of the most visible of those is disappearance. When women are murdered, their bodies don’t always appear. Often they disappear, and so the violence becomes unregistered, unrecorded, and seemingly invisible. This book is about the ways in which those bodies, whether identified or nameless, have been represented in literature, film, and art.”

We found that it was easier to keep an audience laughing than to start them up all over again.
—David Zucker, in New York magazine, on how he and his co-directors, Jim Abrahams and brother Jerry Zucker, approached comedy and rapid-fire joke delivery with the classic 1980 movie Airplane!. Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker broke down the origins of their classic joke “…don’t call me Shirley.”

Winters are long and cold in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s easternmost province, but the language that describes the many local varieties of rain, wind, and ice is anything but dreary. In Hakai Magazine, Emily Urquhart digs deep into the rich lexicon Newfoundlanders — from First Nations people to Basque and Irish immigrants — have assembled over the centuries to talk about the world around them.
Stories, like songs, are told with cadence and tone, timing, and, most importantly, attention to language. Perhaps there simply weren’t enough words to describe the erratic weather and rock-lashed land, the complex history of the people who settled there, and the boundless sea that surrounded them. Maybe the regional lexicon was not simply the result of limitation—the isolation of the outports—but a response to the limitlessness of the natural and social landscape.
The vocabulary is fluid. It’s an ongoing dialogue, and it’s as captivating and elusive as the Newfoundland fairies. Preservation efforts are constantly underway, from the b’ys (read: dudes) on George Street outdoing one another with local slang to the academics who collect and study this kind of talk like specimens in a jar. But it’s the artists who’ve cornered the market on heritage language in the province.
Marlene Creates, for example, captures the language of the natural world in her poetry and visual art, which are equal parts aesthetic and political. And what wordsmith could resist terms like glim, a light seen across a distant ice field, or swatch, a rivulet of open water in ice? There is an onomatopoeic quality to these words that lends itself to lyrical language: sketch, for the thin layer of ice that rests on the water; sish, both the word that describes a boat running through slushy water and the resulting sound. You can hear the crackle in brickle ice, which is easily shattered. Way ice is more straightforward, in that a vessel can navigate its broken pans.

I’ve always been fascinated by how narrative journalism gets commissioned, reported, and published–but the most perplexing part of the entire system is the continued power imbalance between writers and publishers.
This imbalance persists in spite of the internet “democratizing” publishing. More digital publishers are embracing feature writing, but the process behind the scenes feels stuck in the past–a time-consuming marathon of unanswered emails and rejection. Read more…

J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz | The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy | Viking | Sep. 2015 | 19 minutes (4,835 words)
The Good Story is a new book-length discussion between J.M. Coetzee—a nobel laureate renowned for the complicated treatments of morality, accountability and truth in his work—and Arabella Kurtz, a clinical psychologist with a background in literary studies. The following excerpt is the book’s sixth chapter, and appears courtesy of Viking Books.
****
In this chapter:
Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and their truth status. Postmodern ‘as if’ notions of the truth. What ‘as if ’ therapeutic solutions might look like. Treating reality, in literature, as simply one fiction among many. Delusions and the truth status of delusions: the case of Don Quixote. Quixote’s challenge: Is an invented ideal truth sometimes not better than the real truth? The truth status of memories. Historians and how they deal with past (remembered) events. Settler societies and unsettling memories of an often genocidal past.
The patient’s story as a subjective truth. Enacting that truth in the consulting room: a case history. Incomplete truths, and the therapist’s role in filling out the missing parts. Progression from subjective truth to fuller subjective truth. ‘Authenticity’ as an alter- native term to subjective truth. The importance of holding on to the notion of truth. Truth as process in psychoanalysis (Hanna Segal). The moment of recognition (recognising the truth) in therapy.

Gentrification isn’t simply the process of urban change through the rise in property values. It involves power dynamics between people in control and people at their mercy, and often between the white majority and working-class minorities. One group affected by gentrification is artists. In Radio Silence, Ian S. Port writes about the way musicians continue to get squeezed out of cities like San Francisco, Paris and New York, about how their departure changes the character and economy of the cities that benefited from their cultural contributions, and about the impermanence of bohemia. Complicating the picture is the fact that artists and bohemians are often gentrifiers themselves, moving into lower-income neighborhoods early in the cycle in order to capitalize off of low rent. Not everyone sympathizes with ousted musicians, yet many of us who listen to music benefit from their ability to create it. Port’s piece originally appeared in April, 2015. The magazine says it’s their most talked about story.
This influx of newcomers raised unsettling questions. If San Francisco was already going the way of gentrified Manhattan—as Borsook described it, “a slightly faded kosher butcher shop replaced by an Italian fusion restaurant, what was the rehearsal space for a dance troupe become a lawyer [now tech company] loft”—where would the artists go? There’s a limited supply of dense, thoroughly urban places in the United States, and only a handful of large ones west of the Mississippi. If the newfound tastes of the upper-middle class and the wealthy made it so artists couldn’t afford to dwell in those places, what then? What would happen to bohemia when artists were shunted to more sprawling and affordable cities? A spread-out burg like Los Angeles might foster its own pockets of artistic activity, but there’s a vast difference between that sort of scattered bohemia and the concentrated energy of, say, North Beach in the 1950s.
San Francisco’s dot-com boom went bust in the early 2000s, and as its wealth evaporated, the city was jolted back toward normalcy. “For Rent” signs papered the windows of apartment buildings on Geary Boulevard from the city center out to the Pacific Ocean. Some artists and musicians who had left were able to return, bolstering the bohemian community that remained. Young people still came to San Francisco to find success in creative fields. With a little searching for the right living situation, one could find a room at a price that would leave plenty of time for making art after making the rent. John Dwyer lived on Haight Street in those days, and he could be seen riding his chromed bicycle around town during the hours normal people were at work.

Here are five stories about the sociopolitics of stripping down.
Kyle Chayka took his first figure drawing class at age 12. He discusses intention versus interpretation and nakedness versus nudity in this thought-provoking essay about figure drawing.
But as long as you approach it with the right mentality there’s no wrong way to go about figure drawing. Replicating the infinitely complicated human form might get easier over time, but it’s never perfect. What matters are the qualities you bring to the drawing, the artificial work of art that comes from the physical body as it exists in the world. In a way, the artist brings a lie to the fact.
You must be logged in to post a comment.