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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Inquiry, The London Review of Books, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Nicholas Jackson.
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Inquiry, The London Review of Books, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Nicholas Jackson.
In situations where girls are showing signs of puberty as early as age 6, should parents fight it with drug treatments, or figure out ways for their child to accept what is happening?
‘I would have a long conversation with her family, show them all the data,’ Greenspan continues. Once she has gone through what she calls ‘the process of normalizing’ — a process intended to replace anxiety with statistics — she has rarely had a family continue to insist on puberty-arresting drugs. Indeed, most parents learn to cope with the changes and help their daughters adjust too. One mother described for me buying a drawer full of football shirts, at her third-grade daughter’s request, to hide her maturing body. Another reminded her daughter that it’s O.K. to act her age. ‘It’s like when you have a really big toddler and people expect the kid to talk in full sentences. People look at my daughter and say, “Look at those cheekbones!” We have to remind her: “You may look 12, but you’re 9. It’s O.K. to lose your cool and stomp your feet.”’
“Puberty Before Age 10: A New ‘Normal’?” — Elizabeth Weil, New York Times Magazine
See also: “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” — Lori Gottlieb, The Atlantic, June 13, 2011
A blow-by-blow account of a political negotiation gone wrong. President Obama and Republican House speaker John Boehner came close to a deal last July that would cut federal spending and bring in billions in new revenue. But a series of missteps led to its demise:
From Boehner’s perspective, it’s not hard to see why he came away feeling Obama betrayed him. ‘He had to have known that this was going to set my hair on fire,’ Boehner told me when we sat together in his office on the first day of March. He was seated in a leather chair by a marble fireplace, his cigarette smoldering in an ashtray at his side. Three aides sat nearby.
‘You have to understand,’ he went on, ‘there were hours and hours of conversation, and he would tell me more about my political situation than I ever would think about it, all right? So when you come in and all of a sudden you want $400 billion more — he had to have known!’ Boehner shook his head, as if he was still puzzled by it all.
“Obama vs. Boehner: Who Killed the Debt Deal?” — Matt Bai, The New York Times Magazine
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
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… . ‘
See also: “Just Kids.” — Evan Hughes, New York magazine, Oct. 10, 2011
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.
Inside the social media factory created by former Huffington Post cofounder Jonah Peretti—how they’ve cracked viral content, invested in original content, and made money:
At around 5 p.m., Stopera published ‘48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the ’90s’ on BuzzFeed. ‘These pictures are all that and a bag of chips!’ he wrote at the top of the list. A BuzzFeed visitor with an appetite for ’90s nostalgia could scroll down, gawk at the 48 retro images, read the deadpan captions, recall Bob Saget, Tipper Gore, and Scottie Pippen, laugh at the crazy fashion, and resurface to the present day in a matter of minutes. It racked up 1.2 million page views.
“BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?” — Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek
Inside the making of a hit pop song—or hundreds of them. Stargate and Ester Dean are a producer-“top-liner” team that helps write hits for stars like Rihanna:
“The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—’taking control … never die tonight … I can’t live a lie’—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been ‘writing’ in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.
10 Great Reads About the Senses
tetw:
A Tetw reading list
The Blind Man Who Learned To See by Michael Finkel – A fascinating profile of a man who is helping other blind people to see using echolocation.
Mixed Feelings by Sunny Bains – How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses, and build new ones.
Sense and Sensitivity by Andrea Bartz – Is it possible that some people are wired to take in more sensory information than others, and that are our attitudes towards sensitivity are misguided?
Double Vision by Lawrence Weschler – A classic article about a pair of twins whose art unlocks the secrets of perception.
The Sniff of Legend by Karen Wright – “Human pheromones? Chemical sex attractants? And a sixth sense organ in the nose? What are we, animals?”
The Taste Makers by Raffi Khatchadourian – This trip to the heart of the flavour industry is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how modern food gets its taste.
You’ve Got Smell by Charles Platt – DigiScent is here. Will it take off, and if it does, will it be a fad or a technological revolution?
Seeing by Annie Dillard – An excellent essayist takes a personal, often abstract look inside the world of vision.
Master of Illusion by Ed Yong – How a neuroscientist from Stockholm can use mannequins, rubber arms and virtual reality to transport you outside your own body.
The Smelliest Block in New York by Molly Young – Deep in the Lower East Side, a terrible odor lurks. Where is it coming from?
Paul Clement, a former solicitor general under George W. Bush, is representing state attorneys general in the Supreme Court fight against Obama’s health care law—and it’s just one of seven cases he’ll be arguing before the court:
There are two ways to assess a Supreme Court argument. One is to view it as an act of persuasion. You can read Clement’s brief primarily as a letter to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who’ll likely be the deciding vote if the Court overturns Obamacare. Clement quotes Kennedy’s previous opinions throughout his brief, and he leans on broad themes rather than legalistic detail, which is a style that has worked to good effect on the justice in past cases. The other, more cynical way to view a Supreme Court argument is as an act of manipulation—to provide the justices with a plausible rationale for reaching a decision they’re already predisposed to make. If you believe that the Court’s conservative majority is itching to strike down Obamacare, then the task is to launder this decision of partisan motivation. And so Clement argues that there are, in fact, other ways to fix America’s health-care system without an individual mandate; it’s just that Congress chose not to avail itself of those means because they were politically unpopular.
“The GOP’s Great Hope for Supreme Court Season.” — Jason Zengerle, New York magazine
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