The Longreads Blog

When Mitch McConnell Met Roger Ailes: An Early Lesson in Winning At All Costs

Photo by gageskidmore

Alec MacGillis | The Cynic | September 2014 | 13 minutes (3,241 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from The Cynic, a book by The New Republic writer Alec MacGillis about U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. Our thanks to MacGillis for sharing this with the Longreads community.

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The Story, and Sounds, of a Chapel Hill Church: Our College Pick

In her story about a tiny church for locals in a student neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Megan Cassella merges the best of traditional journalism with the tools of today. Her narrative parallels a Sunday service, built on the familiar structural lessons of strong feature writing. She published the story on Creatavist, a publishing platform that allows journalists to create lush-looking multimedia pieces with limited technical resources. Cassella doesn’t use a ton of multimedia in the piece, but the strong photos and musical interlude complement her narrative without detracting from it.

The Little Church That Could

Megan Cassella | Synapse Magazine | November 3, 2014 | 13 minutes (3,285 words)

Defining ‘Rurbanista’ as a Lifestyle Brand

Modern Farmer appeared in the spring of 2013. After three issues, it won a National Magazine Award; no other magazine had ever won so quickly. According to Gardner, though, Modern Farmer is less a magazine than an emblem of “an international life-style brand.” This is the life style of people who want to “eat food with a better backstory”—from slaughterhouses that follow humane practices, and from farmers who farm clean and treat their workers decently. Also, food cultists who like obscure foods and believe that fruits and vegetables taste different depending on where they are grown. Also, aspirational farmers, hobby farmers, intern farmers, student farmers, WWOOFers—people who take part in programs sponsored by the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms movement—and people who stay at hotels on farms where they eat things grown by the owners. Plus idlers in cubicles searching for cheap farmland and chicken fences and what kind of goats give the best milk. Such people “have a foot in each world, rural and urban,” Gardner says. She calls them Rurbanistas, a term she started using after hearing the Spanish word rurbanismo, which describes the migration from the city to the countryside. Rurbanistas typify the Modern Farmer audience.

Alec Wilkinson, writing in The New Yorker about upstart magazine Modern Farmer. 

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Photo: Yuntian Wong

Tom Magliozzi, 1937-2014

Tom Magliozzi, the popular co-host of the public radio show Car Talk, passed away today at the age of 77. In 1999, Tom and his brother Ray gave a commencement address at MIT. Tom talked to the graduating class of engineers about a Latin mantra, non impediti ratione cogitatonis, which means “unencumbered by the thought process.”

TOM: I was once trapped by the scientific, logic, left brain life. I graduated from here and I went to work as an engineer. And I will tell you about my defining moment. I was driving — I lived in Cambridge at the time — I was driving from Cambridge to my job in Foxboro, Massachusetts, and I was driving in a little MG. It weighed about 50 pounds and on Route 128 I was cut off by a semi and I almost, as they say, bought the farm. And as I continued my drive, I said to myself, if I had in fact bought the farm out there on Route 128, how ticked off would I be that I spent all my life — that I can remember at least — going to this job, living a life of quiet desperation. So, I pulled into the parking lot, walked into my boss’s office and I quit, on the spot.

RAY: See, now most people would have just bought a bigger car.

TOM: [LAUGHTER] See, those people would have been using their left brains. I had been saying my mantra in the car. That’s why the guy cut me off. I think I cut him off. In any event, I quit my job. I became a bum. I spent two years sitting in Harvard Square drinking coffee. I invented the concept of the do-it-yourself auto repair shop and I met my lovely wife. None of which would have happened if I had been using my left brain.

My second great defining moment came also showing the power of the mantra, unencumbered by the thought process. I was having an argument with my lovely wife one day. I mean how can you argue with such a wonderful person. Well, left brain people do that because all they can think of is: this is an argument. This person is over here and I am over here and I am going to use every ounce of logic and skill that I have so that I can win this argument, and my wife says to me, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Holy shit, says I! [LAUGHTER] I wanted to be happy. So now I have reached nirvana and my brother and I can help you to reach it. If you want to repeat after me, unencumbered by the thought process. Say it.

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Photo: YouTube

‘Why Can’t You Be a Kindhearted and Good Individual Like Stephen Colbert!?’

You helped launch The Colbert Report. ­Stephen is going to drop the character when he moves to The Late Show, so what will he bring that people haven’t seen?

A raging drug habit.

Excuse me?

People have no idea. It’s going to be Breaking Colbert.

I will tune in for that.

Stephen’s talent is very apparent to everybody, but if you’d been to his 50th-birthday party and you saw the love bomb he was surrounded in — I said to my wife, “I will guarantee you this party spawns a thousand arguments on the drive home.” Everybody got in the car that night with their spouse and it was, “Why don’t you love me like people love Stephen?!” Or, “Why can’t you be a kindhearted and good individual like Stephen Colbert!?” It was one of those magical nights, filled with the warmth and affection of friends and family. I just think viewers are really going to enjoy getting to know Stephen.

That’s strange, because I had heard Colbert’s birthday party was at Scores.

I didn’t say it wasn’t at Scores.

— From Chris Smith’s in-depth conversation with Jon Stewart.

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Photo: Cliff

We Keep Testing, and Nothing Changes

It is worth noting that American students have never received high scores on international tests. On the first such test, a test of mathematics in 1964, senior year students in the US scored last of twelve nations, and eighth-grade students scored next to last. But in the following fifty years, the US outperformed the other eleven nations by every measure, whether economic productivity, military might, technological innovation, or democratic institutions. This raises the question of whether the scores of fifteen-year-old students on international tests predict anything of importance or whether they reflect that our students lack motivation to do their best when taking a test that doesn’t count toward their grade or graduation. …

Obama and Duncan used the latest international test scores as proof that more testing, more rigor, was needed. The Obama administration, acting out the script of “A Nation at Risk,” repeatedly treats our scores on these tests as a harbinger of economic doom, rather than as evidence that more testing does not produce higher test scores. Now, a dozen years after the passage of George W. Bush’s NCLB, it is clear that testing every child every year does not produce better education, nor does it raise our standing on the greatly overvalued international tests.

Diane Ravitch, in The New York Review of Books, on the politics of education reform and testing in America, and a review of Yong Zhao’s book on China’s history of testing: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World.

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Photo: rzganoza, Flickr

Reading List: The Witching Hour

Even as Starbucks switches to its Red Cup holiday menu and the radio plays Christmas music, Halloween tugs at the coattails of my subconscious. To honor our dearly departed All Hallows’ Eve, here are four pieces about witchcraft in the United States and abroad. Read more…

When Andy Warhol Screen-Tested Mama Cass

Andy is standing in a far corner, examining reels of film. His assistants begin arranging floodlights, setting up the movie camera, waving light meters around. A chair is set down in front of the movie screen.

Stephen Shore brings the word to Cass. “Pardon me, Cass. Andy would like you to sit in that chair.” “Sure,” she says. She walks to the chair, sits down, sits up, crosses her legs, uncrosses them, watches the preparations with curiosity and patience.

Everything is ready, and there is really nothing to be done except to start the film rolling. Warhol, who has not yet exchanged a word with Cass, emerges from the darkness to perform the ceremony. Standing behind the camera, he looks at Cass for a moment.

“Just look at the camera,” Andy tells Cass. He looks through the viewfinder and turns the switch. Three minutes later, it is done.

“Let’s do another one. The same,” he announces. Cass remains seated, Andy walks away, and the camera is reloaded and reset. Andy returns and shoots another three-minute test.

“That’s it,” Andy says, and walks away again. Cass follows him with her eyes, then approaches him.

“How was it?” she asks.

“Oh, fantastic,” Andy answers.

“By the way,” Stephen volunteers, “Cass, this is Andy. Andy this is Cass.”

Danny Fields, writing about introducing Mama Cass to Andy Warhol in the May 1967 issue of Hullabaloo. Fields’ piece was later reprinted by The Guardian.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Frank Sinatra’s Favorite Bookstore

You know who else loved Shakespeare and Company and who wasn’t a writer with skin in the game? Frank Sinatra—according, that is, to Ed Walters, a former pit boss at the Sands, in Las Vegas, who was taken under Sinatra’s wing in the 1960s and offered this account for a forthcoming history the store plans to publish:

What few Sinatra fans know is that he loved books, especially history books. He was in the casino at a 21 table, playing blackjack and talking with his friends. He told the guys, “I’m giving Eddie some books to educate him. He needs it.”

He asked about a book he’d given me, was I reading it. He said, “Eddie you must travel and when you do, go to Paris, go to the Shakespeare bookstore. I know the guy there… . Go see the guy George—he’s a guy that lives with the books.”

Bruce Handy, writing in Vanity Fair about the legendary Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Our Problem Might Not Be Gluten, After All

There is more to wheat than gluten. Wheat also contains a combination of complex carbohydrates, and the Australian team wondered if these could be responsible for the problems. Gibson and his colleagues devised a different study: they recruited a group of thirty-seven volunteers who seemed unable to digest gluten properly. This time, the researchers attempted to rule out the carbohydrates and confirm gluten as the culprit. Gibson put all the volunteers on a diet that was gluten-free and also free of a group of carbohydrates that he and his colleagues called FODMAPs, an acronym for a series of words that few people will ever remember: fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. Not all carbohydrates are considered FODMAPs, but many types of foods contain them, including foods that are high in fructose, like honey, apples, mangoes, and watermelon; dairy products, like milk and ice cream; and fructans, such as garlic and onions.

Most people have no trouble digesting FODMAPs, but these carbohydrates are osmotic, which means that they pull water into the intestinal tract. That can cause abdominal pain, bloating, and diarrhea. When the carbohydrates enter the small intestine undigested, they move on to the colon, where bacteria begin to break them down. That process causes fermentation, and one product of fermentation is gas. In Gibson’s new study, when the subjects were placed on a diet free of both gluten and FODMAPs, their gastrointestinal symptoms abated. After two weeks, all of the participants reported that they felt better. Some subjects were then secretly given food that contained gluten; the symptoms did not recur. The study provided evidence that the 2011 study was wrong—or, at least, incomplete. The cause of the symptoms seemed to be FODMAPs, not gluten; no biological markers were found in the blood, feces, or urine to suggest that gluten caused any unusual metabolic response.

Michael Specter, in The New Yorker, on the “gluten-free” craze and the science behind it.

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Photo: reid-bee, Flickr