The Longreads Blog

Memories of an early pioneer in New York public access television: 

By all accounts, public access television is dead, or dying, or just living an anonymous existence in the lesser-trolled channels of cable. But despite its decrepit state, I became mildly obsessed with, and then fully addicted to, The Grube Tube—a live talk show on Time Warner Cable New York’s channel 35. The show followed a simple and well-known format: a number was displayed on the bottom of the screen, and callers were instructed to dial in. The host answered these calls from a landline phone on his desk. The caller, who was now being broadcast live on air, could say anything he or she pleased. It was the host’s decision to converse with said caller or hang up. That host was Steve Gruberg. The callers were a mix of eccentric Manhattanites, adolescents with an unusual fondness for the c-word, and longtime viewers who refused to let the program lose relevance. I fell somewhere in between.

“Steve Gruberg and the ‘Grube Tube’.” — Jeremy Elias, VICE

See also: “Live Television Is ‘a High-Wire Act with No Safety Net’.” — Jon Henley, Guardian, Sept. 3, 2011

Featured Longreader: Iain Manley, travel writer at Old World Wandering. See his story picks from SF Weekly, Al Jazeera English, The Daily Beast, plus more on his longreads page.

Writer-director Lena Dunham is following her breakthrough, 2010’s Tiny Furniture, with a new HBO series produced with Judd Apatow. Inside the making of the series: 

“When a TV critic reports on a new show, it’s okay to say the series is promising, even the next big thing, but ideally, one shouldn’t go native. One should probably also talk in the third person. In this case, however, I’ll have to make an exception. Because from the moment I saw the pilot of Girls (which airs on April 15), I was a goner, a convert. In an office at HBO, my heart sped up. I laughed out loud; I ‘got’ the characters—four friends, adrift in a modern New York of unpaid internships and bad sex on dirty sofas. But the show also spoke to me in another way. As a person who has followed, for more than twenty years, recurrent, maddening ­debates about the lives of young women, the series felt to me like a gift. Girls was a bold defense (and a searing critique) of the so-called Millennial Generation by a person still in her twenties.”

“It’s Different for ‘Girls’.” — Emily Nussbaum, New York magazine

See also: “The HBO Auteur: David Simon.” — Wyatt Mason, New York Times, March 17, 2010

“The most powerful newspaper in Great Britain.” A history of the Daily Mail, founded in 1896 as reading material “by office-boys for office-boys,” as a former prime minister said dismissively. Its daily readership is now four and a half million, and its website recently surpassed the New York Times in traffic, with 52 million unique visitors per month: 

On January 25th, the model Kate Moss went to some parties in Paris. The next morning’s Mail read, ‘The Croydon beauty had very obvious crow’s feet and lines beneath her eyes as well as blemished skin from years of smoking and drinking.’ Another journalist, interviewing her that day, asked why she thought the Mail was so focussed on her aging.

‘I don’t know. ’Cause it’s the Daily Mail ?’ Moss replied. ‘They just get on everyone’s tits, don’t they?’

“Mail Supremacy.” — Lauren Collins, New Yorker

See also: “Zell to L.A. Times: Drop Dead.” — Laurie Winer, Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 9 2011

[1934] A look back at the wine industry in the United States shortly after the end of Prohibition. Wine consumption was growing, but it was unclear whether American companies could compete: 

Since repeal became imminent the U.S. has been flooded with wine propaganda. In every metropolitan newspaper, experts have conducted daily columns on the art of wine drinking. Makers of the variously shaped glasses from which one drinks hock and Sauternes and Burgundy have done a boom-time business. The Marquise de Polignac, whose husband makes French champagne, has been repeatedly interviewed. The propaganda has been paid for by the French wine interests and by California’s. (The French are now feeling pretty glum about their quota.) But however it started, it has made the drinking and serving of wine, for the moment, as much a fad as was the cross-word puzzle or mah jong. So U.S. wines have a market worth competing for, an opportunity which may not come again for many, many years.

“Can Wine Become an American Habit?” — Staff, Fortune, March 1, 1934

See also: “The Beer Archaeologist.” — Abigail Tucker, June 24, 2011

His best-known novel, Et Tu, Babe, was published 20 years ago, but now the writer has returned (with a new book, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack) to a world that matches the absurdity of his pre-Internet work: 

On Charlie Rose [in 1996], Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Mark Leyner sat together in the familiar round table, infinite-void-of-nothingness that is the Charlie Rose set. Each responded to Rose’s questions about the state of fiction more or less in character: Franzen, who had a wavy pageboy haircut that frizzed out untempered to nearly chin level, defended the classical novel as an oasis for readers who feel lonely and misunderstood. Leyner, wearing a robust, Mephistophelian goatee — perhaps fitting for the man Wallace once accused of being “a kind of anti-Christ” — said simply: ‘My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.’ Wallace looked much as we picture him now, posthumously chiseled into Mount Literature: the ponytail, the bearish features, the rough scruff on his jaw. He played the part of a calming, Midwestern-inflected mediator, saying, ‘I feel like I’m, if you put these two guys in a blender… . ‘

“Mark Leyner, World-Champion Satirist, Returns to Reclaim His Crown.” — Adam Sternbergh, New York Times

See also: “Just Kids.” — Evan Hughes, New York magazine, Oct. 10, 2011

Most attention has been on the Supreme Court fight over The Affordable Care Act’s mandate to expand health insurance to 30 million more Americans. But what’s overshadowed is what the rest of the law is doing to change the business model for health care:

The program launched in June 2009 with a checklist of quality metrics. To earn a bonus, surgeons would, among other things, need to ensure that antibiotics were administered an hour before surgery and halted 24 hours after, reducing the chances of costly complications.

Only three doctors hit the metrics that first month, but their bonuses caught the attention of others. “There was a lot of, ‘Why are those doctors getting more, and I’m not?’” Zucker says. Eight doctors got bonus payments in July; two dozen got them in August. Compliance with certain quality metrics steadily climbed from 89 percent to 98 percent in three months.

“Health Reform at 2: Why American Health Care Will Never Be the Same.” — Sarah Kliff, Washington Post

See more #longreads on health care

Researchers study a small group of patients who underwent surgery that split their brains:

Through studies of this group, neuroscientists now know that the healthy brain can look like two markedly different machines, cabled together and exchanging a torrent of data. But when the primary cable is severed, information — a word, an object, a picture — presented to one hemisphere goes unnoticed in the other. Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the godfather of modern split-brain science, says that even after working with these patients for five decades, he still finds it thrilling to observe the disconnection effects first-hand. ‘You see a split-brain patient just doing a standard thing — you show him an image and he can’t say what it is. But he can pull that same object out of a grab-bag,’ Gazzaniga says. ‘Your heart just races!’

“The Split Brain: A Tale of Two Halves.” — David Wolman, Nature

See also: “A Piece of Their Mind.” — Ken MacQueen, MacLean’s, Nov. 2, 2010

Four Western journalists and a former Army Ranger-turned-counterinsurgency expert arrange a paintball game with members of the Shiite militant group, with the hopes of learning more about what motivates them:

It took nearly a full year to pull together this game, and all along I’d been convinced that things would fall apart at the last minute. Fraternizing with Westerners is not the sort of thing Hezbollah top brass allows, so to arrange the match I’d relied on a man we’ll call Ali, one of my lower-level contacts within the group.

Ali had sworn that he’d deliver honest-to-God trained fighters for an evening of paintball, but when the four-man Hezbollah team first walked into the building, I was dubious. In the Dahiyah, the southern suburbs of Beirut controlled by Hezbollah, every macho teenager and his little brother consider themselves essential members of ‘the Resistance.’ And one of the fighters—a tall, lanky, 20-something with a scruffy beard and the spiked-and-gelled hairdo favored by secular Beirut kids—seems like a wannabe. Especially after he introduces himself as Coco.

“Paintballing with Hezbollah.” — Mitchell Prothero, VICE

See more #longreads from VICE

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The Guardian, Deadspin, Smithsonian magazine, New Yorker, Vela Mag, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Maggie Calmes.