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A rant about Grizzly Bear and writing with an audience in mind

A rant about Grizzly Bear and writing with an audience in mind

Moderately successful indie rock groups like Grizzly Bear have found it difficult to earn a living that would place them solidly in the middle class:

For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. ‘People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,’ says Droste. ‘Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.’ Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with ‘a nice little “Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.” ’ They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (‘Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage’), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. ‘I just think it’s inappropriate,’ says Droste. ‘Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.’

“Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012?” — Nitsuh Abebe, New York magazine

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Two cold case investigators uncover a serial killer’s trail in Colorado:

Yearling turned to his computer and pulled up a map. The site where Ramey’s body was dumped—an area southeast of East 56th Avenue and Havana Street—was now a jumble of loading docks, and strips of asphalt and concrete. The detective typed Ramey’s name into a Google search. After a few minutes clicking through different websites, Yearling stumbled upon a message board devoted to cold case investigations. In one comment thread dedicated to unsolved Colorado homicides, he found a simple who-what-when on a young woman who disappeared in August 1979. Her name was Norma Jean Halford. Yearling scrolled down the page and found a copied and pasted, 21-year-old newspaper story that included Ramey’s name on a list of women who were murdered or disappeared across the Denver metro area from 1979 to 1988. According to police at the time, the story said, one man might have been responsible: a man named Vincent Groves.

“Chasing A Ghost.” — Robert Sanchez, 5280 Magazine

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“My Life as a Replacement Ref: Three Unlikely Months Inside the NFL.” — Sean Gregory, TIME

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Texas Monthly, The Wilson Quarterly, Smithsonian Magazine, Chicago magazine, New York Magazine, fiction from Outlook India, and a guest pick from Jessica Misener.

“Haunts.” — Mark Jacobsen, New York magazine

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Thirty years after seven people in Chicago died after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol, investigators, law enforcement officers, health and public officials, and friends and family members recount how it all unfolded. The perpetrator was never found, and the case was recently reopened:

Nurse Jensen

The [Janus] family was all at Adam’s house, planning the funeral and mourning together. Adam’s younger brother, Stanley [Janus], had some chronic back pain. And he asked his wife—they had been married just a little while, and her name was also Theresa—to get him some Tylenol. And she came out and gave him two Tylenol, and then she took two Tylenol. And then he went down. And then she went down.

Charles Kramer

Lieutenant with the Arlington Heights Fire Department [to the Daily Herald]

When I arrived at the house, there were cars and people everywhere. All eight of my men were working, four on one man and four on a woman. Everything that would happen to the man happened to the woman a few minutes later.

Dr. Kim

As I was putting on my blue blazer to leave, around 5:30, a nurse told me that they were bringing the Janus family back. And I said, ‘Well, it’s probably the parents,’ because they were feeble and they might have been very upset. And the nurse said, ‘No, it’s his brother.’ I had been talking to this six-foot healthy guy. And I said, ‘Well, what happened? Did he faint?’ And she said, ‘They are doing CPR—and they are working on his wife too.’ That’s when I took my blazer off.

“Chicago Tylenol Murders: An Oral History.” — David Zivan, Chicago Magazine

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How filmmaker David Ayer’s early years in South Central Los Angeles has given him a distinct understanding of the LAPD:

‘I was feral,’ he recalls, ‘uncontrollable, did my own thing. Brushes with the law and all that stuff.’ He punctuates this with a gruff laugh. ‘It was a disaster.’ Most everyone who knew Ayer was predicting a future in prison for him. ‘It was just the expectation that a lot of people had of me. Because I was not a good kid, and the consequences were getting more serious.’ When he was 14, his mother sent him to live with cousins who were among the first urban homesteaders to move into a West Adams Craftsman, in the shadow of the 10 freeway. ‘The irony is, I was just a bush-league juvenile delinquent,’ Ayer says. ‘And I end up in fucking South Central. Now I’m around the professionals. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I quickly grew accustomed, though. You can get used to anything.’

“The Cop Whisperer.” — Ed Leibowitz, Los Angeles Magazine

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“The Great New England Vampire Panic.” — Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian magazine

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Member Exclusive: Working the Room

Our latest Exclusive comes from the editors of Lapham’s Quarterly. They’ve been longtime contributors to the Longreads community, and this week we’re thrilled to present “Working the Room,” a new essay on humor and the presidency by Michael Phillips-Anderson, from their latest issue, “Politics.” (If you like this, you can subscribe to their print edition here):

In 1848, as a young representative from Illinois, Lincoln took the House floor in support of the Whig presidential candidate, Zachary Taylor. He mocked his Democratic opponents for not gathering behind a single candidate by telling a curious anecdote:

I have heard some things from New York, and if they are true, we might well say of your party there, as a drunken fellow once said when he heard the reading of an indictment for hog stealing. The clerk read on till he got to, and through the words, ‘did steal, take, and carry away, ten boars, ten sows, ten shoats, and ten pigs’ at which he exclaimed, ‘Well, by golly, that is the most equally divided gang of hogs I ever did hear of.’ If there is any gang of hogs more equally divided than the Democrats of New York are about this time, I have not heard of it.

When Lincoln finished with a remark, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘He looks up at you with a great satisfaction, and shows all his white teeth, and laughs.’

“Working the Room.” — Michael Phillips-Anderson, Lapham’s Quartly