The Longreads Blog

In celebrity journalism, what do we really know? Absolutely nothing, argues the writer, who constructs a counter-narrative that Katie Holmes has played everyone: 

They compare the pap-friendliness of various celebrities. Among the best are Cruise, in fact, and Hugh Jackman. Scarlett Johansson, who always runs, scowling, is ‘the worst.’ They scoff at the hypocritical attention-seeking of celebrities (‘Why do you think Alec Baldwin tweets his location?’). A middle-aged woman with curly gray hair, tinted granny glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt wanders over. She’s pet-sitting for someone in the building, and she wants to know why the media won’t pay this kind of attention to the problem of puppy mills. Craigslist has really become lax, she says. There’s a ‘secret kill site’ on 110th Street. There’s also—

‘Katie! Katie! Katie!’

Holmes, accompanied by a bald, burly off-duty police officer, has emerged from Whole Foods and begun the half-block walk back to the entrance of her building. She’s wearing a salmon blouse and blue jeans, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The puppy-mills lady is left talking to the air as eight paparazzi swoop in front of Holmes, forming a solid wall of jutting lenses that moves furiously backward, calling her name as their legs backpedal and their shutters snap, keeping a few feet ahead of her as she proceeds up the sidewalk, eyes down, her crooked half-smile fixed on her face, and then ­disappears inside the building.

“An Inquiry Into the Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise.” — Benjamin Wallace, New York magazine

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Long after the 1960s, a researcher into the effects of LSD makes the case for a return to studying it:

On a Saturday last October, 45 years after dispensing those last legal doses, James Fadiman stood on stage inside the cavernous hall of Judson Memorial Church, a long-time downtown New York incubator of artistic, progressive, and even revolutionary movements. High above him on a window of stained glass, a golden band wrapped Escher-like enigmas around the Four Evangelists. Fadiman appeared far more earthly: wire frames, trim beard, dropped hairline, khakis, running shoes—like a policy wonk at a convention, right down to lanyard and nametag.

A couple hundred people sat before him in folding chairs and along the side aisles of the hall. He adjusted his head microphone, then scrolled his lecture notes and side-stepped the podium. He felt fortunate to be there for many reasons, he said, including a health scare he’d had a few months back—a rather advanced case of pericarditis. ‘Some of you, I know, have experimented with enough substances so that you’ve “died.” But it’s different when you’re in the ER.’ He chuckled. ‘And you’re not on anything.’

“The Heretic.” — Tim Doody, The Morning News

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A look behind the scenes of Texas’s decision last year to cut funding for family planning and wage “an all-out war on Planned Parenthood”—and what that may mean for the future of women’s health care:

It was a given that reasonable people could differ over abortion, but most lawmakers believed that funding birth control programs was just good policy; not only did it reduce the number of abortions, but it reduced the burden on the state to care for more children.  

That changed dramatically after 2010, when Republicans won 25 seats in the House, giving them a supermajority of 101 to 49 and total control over the law-making process. (The male-female split is 118 men to 32 women.) As the Eighty-second Legislature began, a freshman class of right-wing legislators arrived in Austin, determined to cut government spending—a.k.a. ‘waste’—and push a deeply conservative social agenda. At the same time, Governor Perry was preparing to launch his presidential bid, burnishing his résumé for a national conservative audience. It wasn’t a good time to be a Democrat, but it wasn’t a great time to be a moderate Republican either. Conservative organizations turned out to be as skilled at social media as your average sixteen-year-old, using Twitter and Facebook to chronicle and broadcast every move of the supposed RINOs. A climate of fear descended on the Capitol. ‘Most people in the House think we should allow poor women to have Pap smears and prenatal care and contraception,’ an aide to a top House Republican told me. ‘But they are worried about primary opponents.’ 

The result, in Texas and beyond, was a full-scale assault on the existing system of women’s health care, with a bull’s-eye on the back of Planned Parenthood, the major provider of both abortions and family planning in Texas and the country. As Representative Wayne Christian told the Texas Tribune, in May 2011, ‘Of course it’s a war on birth control, abortion, everything. That’s what family planning is supposed to be about.’

“Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives.” — Mimi Swartz, Texas Monthly

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A sportswriter tries his hand at singing the national anthem at a baseball game:

The anthem is designed to humble you. The anthem is designed to ruin your shit if you get too haughty, and that’s a good thing. In fact, it’s ready to challenge you from the very beginning:

O say can you see …

That ‘see’ is tricky. That’s your first high note, and you have to sustain it for a second. You can tell whether or not an anthem is gonna suck usually by the time the singer has finished with just this line.

By the dawn’s early light / What so proudly we hailed …

Again, we have another trap. That high note on ‘proudly’ sneaks up on you, forcing you to jump up higher than many people are comfortable with.

“What’s It Like To Sing The Anthem At A Baseball Game? The Story Of One Man’s Perilous Fight.” — Drew Magary, Deadspin

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[Not single-page] A young football player kills himself after he sustained a concussion on the field:

Heading home, the Trenums stopped at the Chuck Wagon, a restaurant around the corner from their house, where the Brentsville High players gathered after games. Austin’s teammates recounted his sideline exchange with Scavongelli.

Scavongelli: “Do you know where you are?”

Austin: “Yeah. This is my field!”

Scavongelli: “No. Do you know what school you are at?”

Austin: “Yeah. My school!”

Scavongelli: “Do you know who you’re playing against?”

Austin: “No.”

“Did Football Kill Austin Trenum?” — Patrick Hruby, Washingtonian

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The story of Olympian Hope Solo, the U.S. women’s soccer star whose childhood and difficult relationship with her father—who spent time in jail for kidnapping her and her brother—shaped who she would become:

Solo’s last childhood memory of her father is from the following year. One day he reappeared in Richland, begging to take Hope and her older brother Marcus to a nearby baseball game. ‘Then we just kept driving, over the mountains, all the way to Seattle,’ she recalls. ‘We got a hotel room with a pool. We felt like we were living the life. Then I remember waking up one morning, and my dad is like, “Baby Hope, your mom just called, and she said you can stay another three days.” And I remember being like, “I didn’t hear the phone ring.” Right then, I knew that something wasn’t right.’

A day or two later, a SWAT team surrounded Solo in a downtown Seattle bank, ‘put him in the back of a police car, and hauled him off,’ leaving Hope and Marcus ‘alone and scared on the streets of a big city,’ she recalls. Before long, Child Protective Services showed up, and Judy wasn’t far behind. But Hope refused to forgive her mother for alerting the authorities. ‘I remember not talking to her the whole ride home,’ she says. ‘My dad was sitting in jail. I was a confused little girl.’

‘It Takes a Lot to Rattle Me’ — Andrew Romano, The Daily Beast

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[Not single-page] What is Mitt Romney’s true personality? And can joining the press on his campaign bus for five months shed any light on it?

When the speech winds down, I talk with a woman named Pam DeLong, who is a Tea Partier here in Laurens. She is for Newt because he’s for real, he’s a smarty, and because of stuff like the Jordan Cash moment. ‘When that little boy came over, he stopped and talked to him, and he was so natural, and then he just went back into his speech without missing a beat. Romney couldn’t do that. Newt knows what he’s talking about. He doesn’t let things fluster him, which is why I think he’d be the best guy to take on Obama.’

In other words, Newt is an ideal candidate because when an infant pestered him, he hacked it, took it like a man, a pro. If it were Romney? And an infant started fucking with him? You know it would be bad, some pediatric version of the time he sang ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ to black teens in Florida. ‘Hello, little organism different from myself. I will now make noises that I believe are comprehensible to your kind.’

“Desperately Seeking Mitt.” — Wells Tower, GQ

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Remembering the singer’s last days, her struggle with substance abuse, and her extraordinary talent:

[Mark] Ronson recognized the huge-voiced singer with a bad-girl look as part of a tradition stretching back to the Sixties. ‘The Shangri-Las had that kind of attitude: young girls from Queens in motorcycle jackets,’ he told ROLLING STONE at the time. ‘Amy looks fucking cool, and she’s brutally honest in her songs. It’s been so long since anybody in the pop world has come out and admitted their flaws, because everyone’s trying so hard to project perfection. But Amy will say, like, “Yeah, I got drunk and fell down. So what?” She’s not into self-infatuation and she doesn’t chase fame. She’s lucky that she’s that good, because she doesn’t have to.’

“Amy Winehouse: 1983 – 2011.” — Jenny Eliscu, Rolling Stone

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The rise and fall of one of China’s most powerful politicians:

At the opening of the annual Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on March 2, Bo showed up and put on a brave face for the 3,000 assembled delegates and journalists. But in internal government meetings, Bo was livid, haranguing Chongqing officials and telling them that Wang’s flight and the rumours swirling around him were all part of a ‘plot instigated by foreign reactionary forces’. Over the next two weeks, Bo appeared in public nearly a dozen times. In a typical final bout of showmanship, he even held a two-hour press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.

Appearing relaxed, Bo said that unspecified enemies had ‘formed criminal blocs with wide social ties and the ability to shape opinion’ and were ‘pouring filth’ on him and his family. He also dismissed suggestions he was being investigated or in any political trouble. Four days later, on March 14, Bo attended the closing ceremony of the National People’s Congress and sat alongside his politburo colleagues on the stage in the Great Hall of the People. Looking tired and distracted, at one point he stared up at the cavernous ceiling of the Great Hall as if saying a silent prayer. As the ceremony ended and China’s most senior leaders got up to leave, Bo rose quickly and strode off the stage. Waiting in the wings were officers of the elite Central Guard Unit charged with protecting China’s top leaders, who led him away, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Gu and more than a dozen of Bo’s close associates were detained at the same time and are currently being held in undisclosed locations around China.

“Bo Xilai: Power, Death and Politics.” — Jamil Anderlini, FT Magazine

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[Not single-page] Goucher, a small liberal-arts college, hired a French professor from Rwanda named Leopold Munyakazi through The Scholar Rescue Fund, an organization devoted to providing asylum to intellectuals whose lives and work are threatened in their home countries. Sanford J. Ungar, the president of the college, is contacted by investigative reporters at NBC, and Goucher is subsequently accused of harboring a war criminal:

The details of the accusations were horrifying, and I sat reading the documents while my visitors watched. Between April and July 1994, Leopold had been part of a ‘joint criminal enterprise,’ the indictment alleged, and had ‘trained, indoctrinated, encouraged, provided criminal intelligence to, transported and distributed arms to members’ of the armed forces and civilian militias, who in turn ‘murdered, caused seriously [sic] bodily and mental harm, raped and pillaged Tutsi group members.’ It said he had attended meetings of Hutu in the Kayenzi commune, where he and others allegedly complained that the killing was ‘lagging behind.’ Possibly he had planned or even chaired those meetings. At one such gathering at the Kirwa primary school, Munyakazi ‘took the floor to address more than 2,000 residents,’ it claimed, ‘and publicly incited the masses to commit genocide.’ He had, according to the indictment, personally turned over to the militia a woman who had taken refuge at his home, so that she could be killed.

I was incredulous, filled with a mixture of anger and self-doubt. As their Rwandan companion nodded quietly in agreement, the producers from NBC demanded to know how Goucher could have sheltered such an evil man. They wanted to film me reacting to the indictment, but I refused. I hid behind the Scholar Rescue Fund, protesting that Leopold had been screened and certified, and that was all we knew. Later, in a New Republic story that was part of the flurry of early, short-lived interest in Leopold’s case, the producers were even quoted as describing my attitude as ‘flippant.’

“Leopold’s Ghost.” — Sanford J. Ungar, New York magazine

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