Alfred Hitchcock made Tippi Hedren into a star—and then sabotaged her career when she rejected his advances: It started at the end of The Birds. To depict the notorious final sequence, when Melanie is attacked by dozens of birds on her own in an upstairs bedroom, Hedren was reassured that mechanical birds would be used. […]
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A look at the rights of same-sex parents after a mother abducts her daughter and heads to Nicaragua after a civil union dissolves: Isabella’s tumultuous life has embodied some of America’s bitterest culture wars — a choice, as Ms. Miller said in a courtroom plea, shortly before their desperate flight, ‘between two diametrically opposed worldviews […]
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A memoir of “growing up black, on parole, in Mississippi”: I enroll at Jackson State University in the Spring semester, where my mother teaches Political Science. Even though, I’m not really living at home, everyday Mama and I fight over my job at Cutco and her staying with her boyfriend and her not letting me […]
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For centuries, humans who were infected with the rabies virus had a fatality rate of 100 percent. A new treatment is providing hope, but its effectiveness is being called into question: Not long ago, the medical response to this grim situation would have been little more than ‘comfort care’: administration of sedatives and painkillers to […]
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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, The Rumpus, Financial Times, Newsweek, fiction from Boston Review, plus a guest pick from Brian Kahn.
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A review of new book Demon Fish and the truth about sharks—from their mating rituals to the real odds of being attacked: There were 75 verified shark attacks last year, and 12 fatalities. Even in the US, a global hotspot, you are forty times more likely to be hospitalised by a Christmas tree ornament than […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]