At the time of Mel Gibson’s July 2006 arrest for driving under the influence, he had just come back from shooting Apocalypto in Mexico, where he’d apparently started drinking again. According to one source, his first reaction when he was pulled over (before going off on the Jews), never reported in the press, was “My life is over. I’m fucked. Robyn’s going to leave me.” The couple’s daughter Hannah was getting married that September, and Robyn had reportedly given him an ultimatum, something like “Don’t do anything to embarrass us before this wedding. I don’t want you in trouble, otherwise it’s over.”
According to a friend who knows Gibson well, she had already left him. He had told her he was going to be on location in the jungle near Veracruz for two months, but he ended up being away for nine. It was a tough shoot under primitive conditions with many non-actors speaking Mayan with English inflections. Toward the end he reportedly fell off the wagon again. “Everybody knew that he hadn’t been drinking in a really long time, so there was gossip about it,” says Stacy Perskie, the second assistant director on the film. According to Adrian Grunberg, “There were crew dinners. People were saying, ‘I know that wasn’t water he was drinking, it was vodka.’ It came from a number of people, and there was no reason to doubt it.”
The Longreads Blog
Tales from the Essay Test-Scoring Business
Tales from the Essay Test-Scoring Business
Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: “What are the qualities of a good leader?”
One student wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader.” With artfulness far beyond the student’s age, the essay delved into King’s history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the key moments that had shown his leadership.
There was just one problem: It didn’t fit the rubric. The rubric liked a longer essay, with multiple sentences lauding key qualities of leadership such as “honesty” and “inspires people.” This essay was incredibly concise, but got its point across. Nevertheless, the rubric said it was a 2. Puthoff knew it was a 2.
He hesitated the way he had been specifically trained not to. Then he hit, “3.”
It didn’t take long before a supervisor was in his face. He leaned down with a printout of the King essay.
“This really isn’t a 3-style paper,” the supervisor said.
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The idea that men will be turned off by ambition or success is just another part of the big lie. It is meant to scare you and keep you from questioning the system. The only men who are turned off by ambition and success are men that are insecure about their own talents and success or lack thereof. You don’t really want to know those guys anyway, because they suck and they will constantly attempt to undermine you, and even if you are secure enough in yourself not to care it’s still really fucking annoying.
The Stutterer: How He Makes His Voice Heard
The Stutterer: How He Makes His Voice Heard
Today, I am still being jolted, and the jagged terrain behind bears the track marks of my own innumerable small humiliations. In the seventh grade: A substitute asks the class to read out loud, and when I stumble over my first sentence, she inquires of the other students whether I’m “OK” and “always like this,” and while I continue fighting with a “pr” sound, my ears tune in to every judging shudder in the room—the creaking chairs, the restless exhalations, the uncomfortable shifting, in the desk beside me, of a girl with many colored pens who seems to me in some way very beautiful. In high school: A medical assistant taking down my charts asks whether I just have a problem with my speech or whether there is mental retardation, too.
By Nathan Heller, Slate
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: By the Time We Got to Woodstock '99
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: By the Time We Got to Woodstock ’99
After losing money on the first Woodstock sequel in 1994, Scher told reporters at Woodstock 99 that he was determined “to try and make a profit on this one.” Organizers were later criticized for charging $150 a ticket ($180 at the gate) and $5 for beer, though those prices now seem comparable to festivals of similar size and stature. Less excusable was how decisions vital to the functionality of Woodstock 99 were made according to the tightest of tightwad standards. According to an exhaustive on-site report by Spin, Scher and his partners dutifully cut every corner to save money. Vendors weren’t provided with proper plumbing, so they were forced to create their own makeshift set-ups. Teenagers hired to pick up the garbage quit after the first day when they weren’t given water; the detritus rapidly overflowed out of trash bins when nobody was hired to replace them. Worst of all was the site itself, a former toxic waste dump located about 200 miles from the original Woodstock site. Griffiss was a stark, treeless, triangle-shaped terrain composed mostly of concrete and formed by two runway strips lined with junk-food stands and corporate hawkers of youth-oriented crapola.
(via shoplifteroftheworld)
The People V. Football
She had no idea, back then, that he was sick. She had no idea he was losing his mind. Something neurological, the doctors are now saying, some kind of sludge blocking pathways in his brain. Would it have made a difference if she knew? Of course it would have. But you can’t think like that. And you can’t give a shit about people whispering behind your back. You hear about Fred McNeill? Star linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings back in the ’70s and ’80s. Ended up going crazy, and his wife, Tia, couldn’t handle it, so she walked out. It’s not like that, not even close, but whatever. People can think what they think.
Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America
Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America
“As a couples therapist, I tell people that we take things so personally,” he says as we near the Whitestone Bridge, on the first dedicated bike path we’ve seen in more than two hours. It’s easy, when a car edges too close or cuts him off, to “go to that paranoid place where they’re just trying to fuck with me. We’re so worried that someone else can steal our sense of self that we fight for it at every turn.” But it could have been just that the driver didn’t see him. Under the spell of what’s called “inattentional blindness,” people have been known to miss obvious things simply because they’re not looking for them. Either that or what seems inconsequential in a car—passing by within a foot or two—can be terrifying to someone on a bike.
The Truth About Sex Addiction
Within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 years, he told me about the time in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at the Los Angeles airport so he could purchase a service from a prostitute. Afterward, he noticed what he thought was red lipstick on himself. It turned out to be blood from the woman’s mouth. He washed in a gas-station bathroom, met his girlfriend at the airport and then, in the grip of his insatiability, had unprotected sex with her as soon as they got home—in the same bed he said he had used to entertain three other women in the days before.
By John Cloud, Time
The Loneliness of the American College Transfer Student
The Loneliness of the American College Transfer Student
I don’t usually bother telling people I went to Michigan for a single semester anymore. There isn’t much point because I’m at the age where people don’t give a shit where you went to school. They just ask you that question as a way of passing the time. But I also don’t mention it much because frankly, I’m still somewhat embarrassed by it. I transferred from Michigan, and while being a transfer student isn’t that big of a deal if you happen to be a D-I athlete shuttling between programs, it means something quite a bit different when you’re just a plain old kid.
By Drew Magary, Deadspin
Taming the Wild
Mavrik, the object of Trut’s attention, is about the size of a Shetland sheepdog, with chestnut orange fur and a white bib down his front. He plays his designated role in turn: wagging his tail, rolling on his back, panting eagerly in anticipation of attention. Trut reaches in and scoops him up, then hands him over to me. Cradled in my arms, gently jawing my hand in his mouth, he’s as docile as any lapdog. Except that Mavrik, as it happens, is not a dog at all. He’s a fox. Hidden away on this overgrown property, flanked by birch forests and barred by a rusty metal gate, he and several hundred of his relatives are the only population of domesticated silver foxes in the world.
By Evan Ratliff, National Geographic
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