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Scandals of Classic Hollywood: That Divine Gary Cooper

Longreads Pick

Cooper played heroic cowboys and espoused all-American values while the studio system helped hide his offscreen affairs:

“Cooper became a hero to many, even as he developed a reputation as one of the most notorious philanderers in Hollywood. He had stiff competition — Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, the list goes on — but Cooper may or may not have slept with EVERY. SINGLE. CO-STAR. No matter his age, no matter their age, he was insatiable, before and during his marriage. How to reconcile his moral righteousness onscreen with his philandering offscreen? That was the work of Fixers, gossip magazines, and the studio system at large, which ensured that Cooper was never caught, never denounced, and held up as a paragon of American values. Of course, the way he looked in pants didn’t hurt.”

Source: The Hairpin
Published: Jun 8, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,845 words)

[Not single-page] A look back at one of Apple’s most beloved failures, starting with a purchase of the original Newton on eBay:

Once I’d put four AAA batteries and a watch-battery backup into the MessagePad for the first time, powering it up felt like bringing it out of cryogenic suspension. Newtons, it turns out, begin their lives believing that it’s 5am on January 1, 1993. And the only way to set the year to 2012 is to flip the calendar forward, one month at a time. I tapped the MessagePad’s screen 230 times to set the date, watching the months flutter by like pages falling off a calendar to indicate the passage of time in some old movie.

As I did, I was already struck by a fact about the PDA’s screen: It’s terrible. Terrible.

“Newton, Reconsidered.” — Harry McCracken, Time

More from Time magazine

A blind journalist and his brother go to a rattlesnake roundup in central West Texas:

We finally bolted for the nearest exit, heading past the coliseum’s fountain. Its gushing water, almost like a sizzle, was loud enough that it touched every corner of the room, though it failed to cool us to any degree. Then, about ten yards away, my ear distinguished the first edges of its rattling.

‘Is that—?’ was all I could muster.

It was. A plywood pen, chest-high, teeming with diamondbacks. The Snake Pit. Mykol had come closer for a look, not knowing I’d misheard it as a fountain. We pushed toward its wall of noise. 

The sound had a startling physics. It had mass. A tangible weight and effect on the air. I was immediately reminded that, at its essence, noise is vibration. To listen is actually to receive our most subtle form of touch. How easily we forget that.

“The Twitch.” — Ryan Knighton, VICE

More from VICE Magazine

Image: Winston Smith

A look at the work of Craig Venter, one of the first scientists to map the human genome. Venter’s work in synthetic biology could one day change the world by producing clean fuels and biochemicals:

Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond and soak up sunlight and urinate automotive fuel. He is thinking of a bug that could live in a factory and gobble exhaust and fart fresh air. He may not appear to be thinking about these things. He may not appear to be thinking at all. He may appear to be riding his German motorcycle through the California mountains, cutting the inside corners so close that his kneepads skim the pavement. This is how Venter thinks. He also enjoys thinking on the deck of his 95-foot sailboat, halfway across the Pacific Ocean in a gale, and while snorkeling naked in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by Portuguese men-of-war. When Venter was growing up in San Francisco, he would ride his bicycle to the airport and race passenger jets down the runway. As a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he spent leisurely afternoons tootling up the coast in a dinghy, under a hail of enemy fire.

“Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World.” — Wil S. Hylton, New York Times Magazine

More from Hylton

Why was New York Times CEO Janet Robinson fired? A look inside the political battles and financial troubles that led Arthur ­Sulzberger to let Robinson go (with a $24 million exit package):

Interviews with more than 30 people who are intimately familiar with different aspects of the Times’ business (none but a spokesperson would speak for attribution—this is the paper of record, after all) have made it clear that Gonzalez’s rise and Robinson’s fall, and the ensuing leadership vacuum inside the paper, were symptomatic of larger forces at work. Even as a new pay wall was erected on the Times’ website last spring to charge customers for access, the company’s performance, including an alarming dive in print advertising when other media companies were beginning to recover, was faltering, and Sulzberger was under pressure both financial and familial to throw Robinson overboard. “As the paper’s stock price has declined in recent years, there has been increasing unease among the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, who control the paper through a special class of shares. Three years ago, facing huge debt problems, the company suspended the lucrative stock dividend that once flowed quarterly to the family’s 40-plus members, intensifying the need to solve the intractable advertising problems of the newspaper in the digital age and figure out a way to turn the family’s cash spigot back on. Janet Robinson, the company’s advertising brains, found herself caught between her increasingly remote boss and a frustrated family worried over the future of its 116-year-old fortune.

“A New York Times Whodunit.” — Joe Hagan, New York magazine

More #longreasds from Joe Hagan

A writer who’s expecting meets one of the pioneers of the home birth movement, and considers whether to have her baby at home or in a hospital:

When I reached my due date, an ultrasound estimated that my baby weighed 9.4 pounds. I didn’t have gestational diabetes and had gained an average amount of weight, and fetal tests showed my baby was thriving. But the baby’s estimated size, combined with the fact that he hadn’t yet descended into my pelvis, worried my midwife.

She wanted the baby out by 41 weeks, and to my surprise, she suggested I consider going straight to surgery without labor. She sent me to be evaluated by a doctor she worked with. ‘One way or another, this baby will be a C-section,’ he said.

I wanted to avoid induction or surgery, so eight days postdate, I drank castor oil, said to be a homeopathic labor inducer, and it worked.

“Ina May Gaskin and the Battle for at-Home Births.” — Samantha M. Shapiro, New York Times Magazine

More New York Times #longreads

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, This Land Press, The New York Times, GQ, New York Magazine, a fiction pick from Five Chapters, plus a guest pick from Ester Bloom.

A reflection on a mother’s life, and how advancements in medicine have extended our life expectancy, and have made it more difficult for us to die:

ME: ‘Maybe you could outline the steps you think we might take.’

DOCTOR: ‘Wait and see.’

NEUROLOGIST: ‘Monitor.’

DOCTOR: ‘Change the drugs we’re using.’

MY SISTER: ‘Can we at least try to get a physical therapist, someone who can work her legs, at least. I mean … if she does improve, she’s left without being able to walk.’

NEUROLOGIST: ‘They’ll have to see if she’s a candidate.’

ME: ‘So … okay … where can you reasonably see this ending up?’

NEUROLOGIST: ‘We can help you look at the options.’

ME: ‘The options?’

SOCIAL WORKER (to my sister): ‘Where she might live. We can go over several possibilities.’

ME: ‘Live?’

“A Life Worth Ending.” — Michael Wolff, New York magazine

More from Wolff

[Fiction] A home-schooled minotaur enters high school and learns to adjust: 

At the mall a lady offers me a free sample of zit cream and I’m about to be all sarcastic, like “Look, lady— I’ve got a giant bull’s head. No one’s going to notice a few zits.”

But there’s something about the way she’s smiling at me, not a plastic fantastic artificial airbrushed smile like all the ladies on the magazines, that draws me up short and makes me smile back at her (have you ever seen a bull smile? It took me years of practice to get my lips to curl just right) and yeah, I know she’s been trained in the fine art of zit cream sales but either she’s the best actress in the world or she’s the nicest person in the world and either way my heart just melts. Zits or no zits, suddenly I know this year is going to be different.

“I Was a Teenage Minotaur.” — A.G. Pasquella, Joyland

See more #fiction longreads

I Was a Teenage Minotaur

Longreads Pick

[Fiction] A home-schooled minotaur enters high school and learns to adjust:

“At the mall a lady offers me a free sample of zit cream and I’m about to be all sarcastic, like “Look, lady— I’ve got a giant bull’s head. No one’s going to notice a few zits.”

“But there’s something about the way she’s smiling at me, not a plastic fantastic artificial airbrushed smile like all the ladies on the magazines, that draws me up short and makes me smile back at her (have you ever seen a bull smile? It took me years of practice to get my lips to curl just right) and yeah, I know she’s been trained in the fine art of zit cream sales but either she’s the best actress in the world or she’s the nicest person in the world and either way my heart just melts. Zits or no zits, suddenly I know this year is going to be different.”

Source: Joyland
Published: May 16, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,142 words)