The Longreads Blog

The newly minted Grammy winner’s lows and highs—from throat surgery and heartbreak to the biggest-selling album of last year:

Every singer knows the List: citrus, vinegar, mint, dairy, spicy or fried foods, fizzy drinks, caffeine, cigarettes, and alcohol. These are the vocal cords’ enemies. And when one has a five-octave contralto as dynamic, award-winning, money­making, and record-breaking as Adele Laurie Blue Adkins does, one figures out how to avoid these things. Some require less effort than others. Mint? Vinegar? Feh. Cigarettes? Not so easy. Over the few days that I spend around Adele, I see her sneak a fag here and there. No one is perfect. But alcohol? For a once hard-drinking South London pub girl who has admitted that she has written some of her best songs after a few belts, I would have thought this might present something of a challenge. Not so much, it turns out. Adele hasn’t had a drink since last June.

“Adele: One and Only.” — Jonathan Van Meter, Vogue

See also: “Come Party With Lady Gaga.” — Caitlin Moran, The Times (U.K.), May 24, 2010

Quanitta Underwood and her sister suffered years of sexual abuse from their father. She’s now an Olympic contender in boxing, and a public voice for other survivors:

Underwood, of course, covets a gold medal and the fame that would come with it. “I want to take that ride,” she says. “I want to be a household name.”

But beyond that, she wants to be a symbol of hope to anyone who has ever been sexually abused, though to do so requires something harder for her than a thousand hours of hitting the heavy bag. She has to talk about what happened.

“Quanitta Underwood: A Contender for Olympic Gold and a Survivor.” — Barry Bearak, New York Times

Featured Longreader: Leo Lincourt’s #longreads page. Leo is a woefully under-published nonfiction writer, and technologist, who enjoys investigating eclectic arcana, time travel, and a good scientific street brawl. See his story picks from CBS News, Chicago Magazine, Dissent Magazine, plus more.

[Not single-page] Tory Burch’s ex-husband Christopher Burch has a new fashion line called C. Wonder. But some in her circle wonder if it draws a little too much inspiration from her own brand:

To Chris Burch, C. Wonder is the realization of a long-held dream to provide low-to-mid-price retail in a luxury setting. To Tory Burch, he might as well have erected a giant lacquered middle finger in the front window, directly facing the orange-lacquered doors of her eponymous store a few blocks away. “It’s a rip-off, Tory knows it, and everyone knows it,” says someone we will refer to as a Friend of Tory. “The interior is blatantly plagiarized. Then there’s the snap bracelets. The wallets. The buttons … ”

“His. Hers.” — Jessica Pressler, New York magazine

See also: “Forever 21’s Fast (and Loose) Fashion Empire.” — Susan Berfield, Businessweek, Jan. 21, 2011

The Battle for Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston, 1988

Two years later, Griffith got a call from a friend. Had he ever heard of Whitney Houston? She asked him. He remembered her name immediately from the show he’d seen and said so. “You better move fast,” she cautioned. “She’s negotiating with Elektra for a deal.” The news shook him up. “I said, ‘Uh-oh – I better check this out,’” he recalls. As it turned out, Houston was performing that very weekend at another New York club, Seventh Avenue South. Griffith called Houston’s manager, Gene Harvey, and had his name put on the guest list.

“So I went down, and I was completely floored,” Griffith says now. “She was mesmerizing. I couldn’t believe she had grown so much in that two-year period. She went from a teenager to a woman. She had a mature look, her voice was more mature, she had obvious star quality. It took no genius to see it – all you had to do was just see her and you knew. I’ll never forget, she sang the song ‘Tomorrow’ from [the musical] Annie, and it was a showstopper. After I got up off the floor, I just knew that I had to bring her to the label.”

From Billboard in 1986, the story of how Clive Davis and Arista won the battle to sign Whitney Houston—then went searching for songs for her debut.

Read the story

The search for an amateur philosopher who anonymously paid university professors thousands of dollars to review his work:

The institute’s letter claimed that a “very substantial sum” had been earmarked to help contribute to “the revival of traditional metaphysics.” Given the number of philosophers involved, that sum was at least in the neighborhood of $125,000. Who could afford to spend that much money on philosophy? And of those who could, who would want to? No one had a clue.

To judge from both the reviewer’s contract and “Coming to Understanding” itself, the institute meant business. For one thing, the manuscript, signed by one A.M. Monius, suggested the handiwork of a serious thinker—not a prankster. “It didn’t seem like a joke,” Zimmerman says. ‘“t wasn’t that funny. It was clearly the work of a fairly able writer—a smart person, one capable of making some gross philosophical errors while at the same time having some clever ideas.”

“The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician.” — James Ryerson, Lingua Franca (2001)

See also: “Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us.” — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Times, May 13, 2010

How an unplanned pregnancy during college changed the life and worldview of Maggie Gallagher, now one of the leading voices against gay marriage:

On a mild November day, Gallagher and I are upstairs at City Bakery, near Union Square in Manhattan, where after months of requests she has agreed to meet me. As Gallagher tells it, she and the baby’s father were close; they had been together “on the order of one year,” she says, so he might have been expected to stand by her. “My son’s father was my boyfriend at Yale,” is how she describes their relationship. But when she told him she was pregnant, right before spring break in 1982, he vanished on her. “I was in his room and he had to go do something, and I was going to fly out in a couple of hours, had to get to the airport. And the last thing he said to me was, ‘I’ll be back in 30 minutes.’ And then he wasn’t.”

He just left her sitting in his room. And that was the end of them. When summer came, Gallagher moved home to Oregon and took some classes to finish her degree. In the fall, she gave birth to a baby boy, Patrick.

“The Making of Gay Marriage’s Top Foe.” — Mark Oppenheimer, Salon

See more #longreads about gay marriage

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Salon, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, Nature, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Emily Keeler.

How one night at Rupert Murdoch’s London townhouse changed the course of the phone-hacking scandal:

Red wine in hand, Rupert Murdoch chatted with guests at his London townhouse on what would be one of the most important nights to the future of his company. Gathered for cocktails were Rupert’s son James, heir apparent to the family media empire; Rebekah Brooks, the chief­executive of News Corp.’s U.K. unit; and Chase Carey, the New York-based president and chief operating officer. Joining the executives were a pair of legal heavyweights: Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor, and Brendan Sullivan Jr., the well-connected Washington lawyer brought into the Murdoch fold at Klein’s request.

It was May 19, 2011. The senior Murdoch had flown in two days earlier for a whirlwind of meetings with his top London executives. He had called the dinner party to hash out once and for all how to handle the phone-hacking scandal that had been hanging over the company for months and was suddenly spinning out of control.

“Dinner at Rupert’s.” — Greg Farrell, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Hack Work.” — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, Aug. 1, 2011

An analysis of the presidency, in historical context:

I spoke with current and past members of this administration, officials from previous administrations, current and past members of the Senate and the House, and some academics. Compared with the last two times a Democrat was in the White House—during Jimmy Carter’s administration in the late 1970s and Bill Clinton’s in the 1990s—I found Democrats much more careful about criticizing their own party’s president during an election year. It’s not that Democrats have become so much more disciplined, nor, obviously, that they have no complaints, but rather that they seem more worried about the risks of helping the other side. I asked someone who has been close to Obama if I could interview him about his experiences. He said, “I’m not going to say anything that might hurt during the campaign.”

“Obama, Explained.” — James Fallows, The Atlantic

See more #longreads about Obama