The Longreads Blog

A Moment of Zen: Seven Stories Looking Back at Jon Stewart’s Fake-News Legacy

Photo: Cliff

Tonight, Jon Stewart ends his 16-year run as host of “The Daily Show.” Here are seven stories looking back at how Stewart became the most influential fake-news anchor in the history of television:

1. Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America? (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, Aug. 15, 2008)

“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

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Starring in Japanese Reality TV

Photo by Karl Baron, via Flickr

Nagging questions and doubts remain. Have we somehow prostituted ourselves for the vicarious entertainment of television viewers? Has the private language, the intimate currency of our happy household, been debased by making it public? I had thought it would be ‘fun.’ I was wrong. But somehow it has felt like an education of sorts — perhaps in self-knowledge — however involuntarily acquired, however unwelcome the conclusions.

My husband and I, for example, have been forced to confront difficulties in our marriage. Under the pressure of Y-san’s gentle but probing, seemingly innocuous questions, a fine tracery of cracks mars the pleasant facade: how often do my husband and I actually talk? When was the last time we went out on a date, just the two of us? Do we gladly contemplate living together for the rest of our lives?

Professor Wendy Jones Nakanishi writing in Kyoto Journal about her family’s experience being filmed for a Japanese reality TV show. The show looks at the life of a foreigner in Japan.

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‘It Seemed a Sheet of Sun’: Reporting from Hiroshima, a Year After the Bomb

Image via Wikimedia

Seventy years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A year later, in The New Yorker, John Hersey brought chilling first-hand testimony from the city’s surviving residents.

As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.

Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower of tiles pommelled her; everything became dark, for she was buried. The debris did not cover her deeply. She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child cry, “Mother, help me!,” and saw her youngest—Myeko, the five-year-old—buried up to her breast and unable to move. As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children.

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Fox and Friends

Rachael Maddux | Longreads | August 2015 | 21 minutes (5,232 words)

 

The hounds of Shakerag Hounds, the oldest mounted fox hunt in the state of Georgia, are trained as pups to heed every note of their huntsman’s horn. They know a quick double-note means it’s time to head out into the field, three short bursts followed by a sad undulation means they’ve landed on a covert with no quarry, and three long, shimmying notes mean they’ve run their quarry to ground. It’s a fox these hounds are after, in theory—red or gray—but out here, just beyond the furthest reaches of metro Atlanta’s sprawl, they might find themselves on the trail of a coyote, a bobcat, an unlucky armadillo. Whatever they’re chasing, when they hear the horn’s three long, blooming notes, they know what to do. Three means let it go. Three means let it live.

John Eaton, Shakerag’s huntsman, likewise had the horn’s particular vocabulary ground into him at a tender age. He grew up in Somerset, England, the sixth generation of a fox hunting family. His grandfather was a huntsman, too, and his mother was a whipper-in, one of the hunt staff that rides along to keep the hounds (not “dogs,” never just “dogs”) in line. His family did the kind of fox hunting you think of when you think of fox hunting: tall boots, red and black jackets, black helmet, regal horses. The kind about which a character in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance quipped, “The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”

In the Britain of Eaton’s childhood, fox hunts operated pretty much as they had for half a millennium: as a combination sporting event, social gathering, and elaborate means of pest control. Back then, it was unheard of to call hounds off a quarry the way he now does as a matter of course—like a pinch hitter knocking one out of the park and walking off the field, or a fisherman hooking a big one then chucking his rod and reel into the lake. What’s the point of coming so close and giving up at the last moment? Why even bother at all? Read more…

Joyce Maynard on Taking James Patterson’s Online Course in Writing Bestsellers

Lately, just about every time I turn to Facebook or Twitter, I’m greeted by an ad or sponsored content about the online writing course bestselling thriller author James Patterson offers on the MasterClass site (where Dustin Hoffman, Annie Liebovitz, Usher, Serena Williams and others serve up the tricks to their trades, too). “Set out to write a bestselling book,” the copy advertising the course suggests. For an investment of just $90 and three hours of your time, it’s an enticing offer. But I haven’t bitten yet.

Author Joyce Maynard gave in to the temptation. At at the Observer, she reports on the experience:

…In my ungenerous moments, I confess to having harbored a certain not-particularly-attractive level of bitterness over the success of writers like John Grisham and—above all others—James Patterson, a man who holds the title as the world’s best-selling author, publishing so many novels a year that he needs a whole stable of collaborators just to keep up with the demand…

…I entered into this project with a large measure of skepticism—worse, even: I entered anticipating that his lessons might offer up some great comedy material—by the time the last lesson was over, and Mr. Patterson (Jim, to me, now) had set me loose to write my best seller, I had developed genuine respect for the man. Even affection. If I met him at a book festival some day, and the opportunity arose, I’d greet him like an old friend.

What changed? For starters, Mr. Patterson possesses an abundance of good, solid common sense and some genuinely valuable wisdom. Not necessarily about the art of writing, mind you. But about storytelling. And at the end of the day, if you ask me (and more importantly, if you ask readers and book buyers), that’s what matters most. A person can write the most beautiful, lyrical sentences (as James Patterson will be the first to tell you, he does not), but if the story doesn’t grab a reader by the throat, and—having grabbed on—hold her there, none of the rest may matter all that much.

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What is Sista Grrrl’s Riot? Punk Music, Collaboration and Revolution

Photo: Kate Milford. Punk musician Tamar-kali Brown, founder of Sista Grrrl Riots, performs at Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in 2010.

Vice’s new vertical, Broadly, is off to a strong start with reporting like Gaby Bess’ “Alternatives to Alternatives: the Black Grrrls Riot Ignored.” Tamar-kali Brown, Maya Glick, Simi Stone, and Honeychild Coleman founded Sista Grrrl Riots, an alternative safe space for black women punks to rock out and revolutionize. The founders continue to support each other and other women making music to this day.

On their first flyer:

“It was a lipstick heart with our silhouettes in it, like Charlie’s Angels, and we had weapons. I brought my father’s machetes and BB guns for our shoot.” But unlike the flyer’s silhouetted BB guns and machetes would suggest, the riot’s real ammunitions were electric violins, bass guitars, and the raging voices of women who were lifelong punk outsiders. On this momentous night at Brownies, a now-defunct rock club on Avenue A, these four women had found their place, playing to a packed crowd who could finally see versions of themselves onstage.

If you bore passing witness to this night, you might have casually referred to Brown, Glick, Stone, and Coleman as Riot Grrrls, if you didn’t know any better. They were girls. They were angry. They were tired of playing shitty gigs and taking a backseat to the boys. But these women would scoff at the thought of designating themselves “Riot Grrrls,” or just plain correct you. “You had Riot Grrrl,” Brown explained, “and this was a Sista Grrrl’s Riot.”

Their dedication to visibility and representation, in addition to sisterhood and killer musicianship, should not be underestimated:

The Riot Grrrl box may have been decidedly off-limits in the eyes of Brown and other black women who couldn’t see themselves in the movement, but as [Rhonda] Davis points out, these women shirked boxes, created their own wave, and reclaimed rock for black women. After all, rock music is black music. While the Sista Grrrls didn’t see themselves in Riot Grrrl or in the men they had been playing with in bands, they saw themselves in each other. “I got what Riot Grrrl was about. I didn’t think it was exclusive, but it didn’t feel inclusive to me,” said Brown. “I didn’t see myself or my story, and so that’s why Sista Grrrl came about later on–out of other women of color that I knew who were punk rock and navigated that scene and had similar feelings about it. Sista Grrrl was my response to Riot Grrrl because it just felt super white.”

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My Undertaker, My Pimp

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (edited)

Jay Kirk | Harper’s | March 2002 | 29 minutes (7,333 words)

This essay by Jay Kirk first appeared in the March 2002 issue of Harper’s, where it was edited by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Our thanks to Kirk for allowing us to reprint it here.

***

For a year I worked in an office where I spoke to dying people on the telephone every day. The office was that of a funeral-consumer watchdog, which meant that we kept an eye on the funeral industry and helped the imminently bereaved and imminently deceased to make affordable funeral plans. Above my desk I kept an index card with a Faulkner quotation, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” On a particularly bad day I scratched out the last word and changed it to “nothing.” Read more…

On DJ Kool Herc and a Seminal Moment in Hip-Hop History

Photo by edenpictures

Journalist Jeff Chang’s 2005 book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop offers a history of hip-hop culture, and he’s particularly good at capturing the 1970s Bronx neighborhood party scene that helped start it all, with a young Jamaican-born DJ named Clive Campbell—who moved to the Bronx with his family as a child and soon started hosting parties as DJ Kool Herc. Here, Herc describes the moment he started experimenting with isolating the break in certain songs:

Herc carefully studied the dancers. “I was smoking cigarettes and I was waiting for the records to finish. And I noticed people was waiting for certain parts of the record,” he says. It was an insight as profound as Ruddy Redwood’s dub discovery. The moment when the dancers really got wild was in a song’s short instrumental break, when the band would drop out and the rhythm section would get elemental. Forget melody, chorus, songs— it was all about the groove, building it, keeping it going. Like a string theorist, Herc zeroed in on the fundamental vibrating loop at the heart of the record, the break.

He started searching for songs by the sound of their break, songs that he would make into his signature tunes: the nonstop conga epics from The Incredible Bongo Band called “Apache” and “Bongo Rock,” James Brown’s “live” version of “Give It Up Turn It Loose” from the Sex Machine album, Johnny Pate’s theme to Shaft in Africa, Dennis Coffey’s “Scorpio”— Black soul and white rock records with an uptempo, often Afro-Latinized backbeat. Then he soaked off the labels, Jamaican style. “My father said, ‘Hide the name of your records because that’s how you get your rep. That’s how you get your clientele.’ You don’t want the same people to have your same record down the block,” Herc says. Here was one source of hip-hop’s competitive ethic and beat-this aesthetic.

In a technique he called “the Merry-Go-Round,” Herc began to work two copies of the same record, back-cueing a record to the beginning of the break as the other reached the end, extending a five-second breakdown into a five-minute loop of fury, a makeshift version excursion. Before long he had tossed most of the songs, focusing on the breaks alone. His sets drove the dancers from climax to climax on waves of churning drums. “And once they heard that, that was it, wasn’t no turning back,” Herc says. “They always wanted to hear breaks after breaks after breaks after breaks.”

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Bona-Fide Celebrities: Nikki Finke on the Late ’80s ‘Literary Brat Pack’

Cover image from Bright Lights, Big City via jaymcinerney.com

In 1987, a young Nikki Finke profiled the “Literary Brat Pack” (choice Brat Pack members included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, of Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City fame, respectively) for The Los Angeles Times. Read more…

The Newman’s Own Origin Story

In 1982 actor Paul Newman and his friend, writer A.E. Hotchner, started the Newman’s Own food company and made the decision to donate all profits to charity. Here’s the company’s origin story, from Mark Seal’s account in Vanity Fair of how the company is doing today:

Hotchner recalled how, a few days before Christmas in 1980, Newman phoned to say, “How about coming over and giving me a hand with something?” Hotchner did, only to find his friend drinking beer in his barn, with “a big washtub of vinegar and olive oil and condiments and a lot of dirty wine bottles. It was ridiculous, but it was fun. We drank beer and we mixed up the stuff.”

“The stuff” was Newman’s soon-to-be-famous salad dressing, which he had bottled for years and given away. Newman and Hotchner tied ribbons around the wine bottles, gathered their kids, and went Christmas caroling, distributing the bottles along the way. One of Newman’s neighbors then was a young caterer named Martha Stewart, who held a blind taste test. Newman’s was voted No. 1. Calling it Newman’s Own, Newman allowed his face to be put on the label. In 1982 the dressing went on sale in local gourmet shops and groceries.

Recalled Hotchner, “To our absolute disbelief, we banged quite a profit that first year”—$920,000, in fact. “Paul said, ‘We can’t be in the business of making money off of it! You’re a writer and I’m an actor and this isn’t what we do. Let’s give it all away to charity.’ ”

Seal’s story focuses on the feud over Paul Newman’s food empire and charitable foundation after his death.

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