Search Results for: new york times

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

Mail Supremacy

Longreads Pick

“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?'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 26, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,540 words)

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

A couple’s personal experience dealing with Texas’s new sonogram law, which requires a woman to have a sonogram and hear a doctor describe her child before moving forward with an abortion:

“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.

“‘We Have No Choice’: One Woman’s Ordeal with Texas’ New Sonogram Law.” — Carolyn Jones, Texas Observer

See also: “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy.” — Ruth Padawer, New York Times, Aug. 20, 2011

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, GQ, The New York Times, Forbes, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Sujatha Santhanakrishnan.

The story of the Polgar sisters, chess whizzes who were trained by their father from an early age:

When Susan was the age of many of her students, she dominated the New York Open chess competition. At 16 she crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. The tournament was abuzz not just with the spectacle of one pretty young powerhouse: Susan’s raven-haired sister Sophia, 11, swept most of the games in her section, too. But the pudgy baby of the family, 9-year-old Judit, drew the most gawkers of all. To onlookers’ delight, Judit took on five players simultaneously and beat them. She played blindfolded.

“The Grandmaster Experiment.” — Carlin Flora, Psychology Today

See also: “Game of Her Life.” — Tim Crothers, ESPN, Jan. 10, 2011

Photo: Nestor Galina/Flickr

The Grandmaster Experiment

Longreads Pick

The story of the Polgar sisters, chess whizzes who were trained by their father from an early age:

“When Susan was the age of many of her students, she dominated the New York Open chess competition. At 16 she crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. The tournament was abuzz not just with the spectacle of one pretty young powerhouse: Susan’s raven-haired sister Sophia, 11, swept most of the games in her section, too. But the pudgy baby of the family, 9-year-old Judit, drew the most gawkers of all. To onlookers’ delight, Judit took on five players simultaneously and beat them. She played blindfolded.”

Published: Jul 1, 2005
Length: 18 minutes (4,643 words)

A group of teenagers in a small town mysteriously fall ill, suffering from uncontrollable twitching. Was the cause environmental, or psychological?

Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question after question, Katie Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleader from Le Roy, N.Y., woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Her chin was jutting forward uncontrollably and her face was contracting into spasms. She was still twitching a few weeks later when her best friend, Thera Sanchez, captain of one of the school’s cheerleading squads, awoke from a nap stuttering and then later started twitching, her arms flailing and head jerking. Two weeks after that, Lydia Parker, also a senior, erupted in tics and arm swings and hums. Then word got around that Chelsey Dumars, another cheerleader, who recently moved to town, was making the same strange noises, the same strange movements, leaving school early on the days she could make it to class at all. The numbers grew — 12, then 16, then 18, in a school of 600 — and as they swelled, the ranks of the sufferers came to include a wider swath of the Le Roy high-school hierarchy: girls who weren’t cheerleaders, girls who kept to themselves and had studs in their lips. There was even one boy and an older woman, age 36.

“What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy.” — Susan Dominus, New York Times Magazine

More #longreads from Dominus

David Kushner’s new book explores the origins of the infamous videogame, which began as a straitlaced driving simulation:

By casting the player as the cop, they realized, they had cut out the fun. Some dismissed it as Sims Driving Instructor.

When an unruly gamer tried to drive his police car on the sidewalk or through traffic lights, a persnickety programmer reminded him that the stop lights needed to be obeyed. Were they building a video game or a train set? Even worse, the pedestrians milling around the game created frustrating obstacles. It was almost impossible to drive fast without taking people down, and, because the player was a cop, he had to be punished for hit-and-runs.

“Excerpt: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto.” — David Kushner, Gamespot

See also: “Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?” — Joshuah Bearman, New York Times, Nov. 13, 2009