“As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes. So as a crew, how do you stay focused, and how do you not get paralyzed by the fear of it?
“And the way we do it is to break down what are the risks. And a nice way to keep reminding yourself is, ‘What’s the next thing that’s going to kill me.’ And it might be five seconds away, it might be an inadvertent engine shutdown, or it might be staging of the solid rockets coming off, or it might be, you know, some transition or some key next thing.
“It’s not like astronauts are braver than other people. We’re just, you know, meticulously prepared. We dissect what it is that is going to scare us and what it is that is a threat to us, and then we practice over and over again so that the natural, irrational fear is neutralized.”
In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Chuck and Josh discuss the history of hip-hop, from The Sugar Hill Gang to the present. They add their own personal history, which includes stories of attempted breakdancing and well-intentioned clothing choices.
Co-authors Jeff Weiss and Evan McGarvey speak with host Colin Marshall about their book 2pac vs. Biggie: An Illustrated History of Rap’s Greatest Battle. They talk about the artists’ rivalry, their beginnings, how their styles differed, and why you’re missing out if you only listen to one and not the other.
The drummer for The Roots talks about his influences growing up, how he listens to music, and his favorite part of Soul Train. (Bonus: Also check out Terry Gross’s classic 2010 interview with Jay-Z.)
Dan Charnas, a veteran hip-hop journalist and one of the first writers for The Source, talks with Jesse Thorn about the history of the hip-hop music business and how executives and entrepreneurs turned an underground scene into the world’s predominant pop culture.
Andrew Rice, contributing editor for New York magazine, spoke about his article on Jay-Z’s business acumen with James Braxton Peterson, director of Africana Studies, professor of English at Lehigh University, and founder of Hip Hop Scholars. Together they delve into the financial side of Jay-Z’s career.
If you were around in the ’90s, you might recognize Michael Rapaport from movies like Zebrahead, Poetic Justice, and Higher Learning. In 2011, he came out with a documentary on A Tribe Called Quest. He talks to The Treatment’s Elvis Mitchell about his love of hip-hop, his childhood in New York City, and his experience filming his favorite artists.
Got a favorite podcast episode on hip-hop? Share it in the comments.
Gabrielle Gantz (@contextual_life) is the blogger behind The Contextual Life. She’s a frequent longreader and also a big podcast fan, so we asked her for some recommendations.
For a while now we’ve been hearing about the rise of television, how shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones have surpassed the film industry when people think of quality viewing experiences. Gone are the days where writers and actors dreamed of making it big in pictures, now talent is flocking to small screen.
Here are some recent interviews that will be of interest to those who like to dig deeper:
This is a panel discussion featuring Lynda Obst, a film and television producer whose credits include “Sleepless in Seattle” and whose recent book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, chronicles the recent changes in the movie industry—with big blockbusters more common and smaller films barely getting made. Alongside Obst, sometimes arguing, sometimes agreeing, was Sharon Waxman, CEO and EIC of TheWrap.com.
Despite the industry’s changes, Coppola is still making “small films,” including her latest, The Bling Ring, a film based on the real-life events (chronicled by Vanity Fair’s Nancy Jo Sales) of a group of California teenagers obsessed with celebrities; so much so that they break into stars’ homes.
Mad Men just wrapped up its sixth season and has one more to go before it’s off the air for good. Terry Gross spoke with Elisabeth Moss (aka Peggy Olson) about the evolution of her character and how much she knows about the show’s direction before shooting an episode. (Read the transcript here.)
Here’s Hunnam, who plays Sons of Anarchy‘s “Jax” Teller, with Chris Hardwick on being approached by real bikers and his life growing up in a working-class town in North East England.
Nerdist Writer’s Panel host Ben Blacker sits down with the people behind The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a web series that’s a modernized adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with the story told primarily through the lead character Lizzie Bennet‘s video diary entries. The episode includes co-creator Bernie Su, writers Margaret Dunlap, Rachel Kiley, and Kate Rorick, and writer/transmedia guy Jay Bushman.
An interview with the humorist and essayist about his book, Half Empty, his Academy Award-winning short film, and his recurrence of cancer:
GROSS: You were diagnosed with cancer in your 20s. Now you’re in your 40s and have a cancer diagnosis again. Are you dealing with it emotionally differently now in your 40s than you did in your 20s?
Mr. RAKOFF: Yes, I think I am. I think – well, first of all, the cancer that I had in my 20s was, I even referred to it as the dilettante cancer. You know, it was Hodgkin’s lymphoma, eminently curable and just a whole different ballgame from what I’ve got now.
And I was a little less interested in knowing about the cancer back then in my 20s. I was sort of like, well, do whatever you need to do. I’m just going to sit here and lie back and think of England.
Inside the rock star’s Nashville home and the headquarters for his growing company, Third Man Records:
White walked back to a room called the Vault, which is maintained at a constant 64 degrees. He pressed his thumb to a biometric scanner. The lock clicked, and he swung the door open to reveal floor-to-ceiling shelves containing the master recordings of nearly every song he’s ever been involved with. Unusually for a musician, White has maintained control of his own masters, granting him extraordinary artistic freedom as well as truckloads of money. ‘It’s good to finally have them in a nice sealed environment,’ White said. I asked where they’d been before, and he laughed. ‘In a closet in my house. Ready to be set on fire.’
White said the building used to be a candy factory, but I had my doubts. He’s notoriously bendy with the truth — most famously his claim that his White Stripes bandmate, Meg White, was his sister, when in fact she was his wife. Considering the White Stripes named themselves for peppermint candies, the whole thing seemed a little neat. ‘That’s what they told me,’ he insisted, not quite convincingly. I asked if I needed to worry about him embellishing details like that, and he cackled in delight. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
I’ve read a lot of great longreads this year, but I know that a longread is truly special when I become its biggest cheerleader. I’ll casually slip the story into conversations, teasing out some of its best bits to wheedle the person into reading it later on his or her own. Here are five of those stories:
Although this story wasn’t published in 2011, it was one of my favorites from the 2011 Pen/O. Henry Prize winners published in an anthology earlier this spring. The set up is terrific:
“Something wrong with the window,” he said. “Or not the window exactly but the number of windows.” She was smiling, waiting. “The problem is the number of windows. There’s one more window on the outside than on the inside.” He covered his mouth with his hand.
Most of our casual conversations occur over e-mail threads or instant messenger, rather than the telephone. This happens so frequently that we rarely go back to read those threads and chats. In this heartbreaking longread, a woman remembers a relationship through a series of chats archived in her Gmail inbox. It compelled me to go through my own archives.
Already on many people’s Top 5 lists, this is one of the most exciting stories I’ve read. Schmidle was able to make you feel like you are with the 23 Navy SEALs who were on the ground in Abbottabad the night we got Bin Laden, even though he was only able to piece the story together by interviewing a number of people directly involved in the raid. I love how he focused on all the minute details — including a bit where the White House ordered sandwich platters from Costco before turning the Situation Room into a war room.
I write about money for a living, so I read everything about the financial crisis. Michael Lewis is one of the best financial journalists of our time, and he has pointed out time and again how terrible countries and its people can be with money (the U.S. in “The Big Short,”Iceland in a V.F. longread published in April 2009, and Greece in a V.F. longread published in Oct. 2010). Lewis continues his “financial disaster tourism” with Ireland this year, and, once again, leaves us shaking our heads.
I know. JJS is clearly the Ryan Gosling of longreads this year. This essay was published last fall, but I didn’t get a chance to read it until I picked up Sullivan’s collections of essays, Pulphead. Sullivan recalls a time when he served as a houseboy for Andrew Lytle, a revered Southern author. The way Sullivan unfolds his story is just: magical. Other readers agree — the essay won a National Magazine Award in May.
The great thing about radio longreads — otherwise known as #audiofiles — is that producers get some poor intern to transcribe the entire broadcast so it doubles as a longread. I love the part where Terry and Jay-Z discuss the story behind “99 Problems” — really just the idea that Terry sat down to listen to Jay-Z’s records for this interview is perfect.
This piece just blew me away, and I’m not even a DFW devotee (I’ve yet to tackle any of his books). To go to his library, to transcribe notes from his journals and books, to make it all make sense — incredible. I was as in awe of Maria’s devotion to her subject as I was of the subject itself.
I’m a Sugar devotee; her columns have been such a help to me during a rough year. This one, in which five women ask Sugar what to do about their relationships that aren’t working, is particularly great (that last line slays).
Anne’s “Scandals of Classic Hollywood” series is top notch. I was reared on old films and tend to long for “the good old days,” so it’s a good splash in the face to have the veneer ripped off. I love Petersen’s style; her combination of fact and colloquial candor is so much fun. (Behold: “At this point, Hudson looked very much as he would for the rest of his life, which is to say he looked like a Ken doll with a dye job. The same classic good looks, the same soft, inviting smile. But dude could not act FOR SHIT.”)
Oh, gosh. Sady writes these vignettes of her life with such honesty, clarity, and insight, that it’s incredible to remember that she is a young woman and these moments aren’t that far gone. This one had me thinking for days, and I sent it to everyone I knew, pleading with them to read it.
Incredibly brave piece; it gives me chills to think all that Jose risked to write this. I can’t imagine anyone reading this and still arguing for the automatic deportation of undocumented immigrants. (Also: I consider Terry Gross’s Fresh Air Interview with Jose an essential companion piece to this one).
BONUS PRINT PICKS: The interviews that run in each issue of The Sun Magazine aren’t published in full online, but I love them and I’d like to tell you about them. I am a person who likes to learn things and think about stuff, and these interviews deliver. Full text is not available online (even to subscribers), but the excerpts are substantial enough that you should know if you need to go to the new stand and get educated (just do it).
GROSS: There was a meeting that you refer to in your article about Scientology, where people from the New Yorker staff met with representatives from Scientology. What was this meeting about?
Mr. WRIGHT: That was one of the most amazing days of my life. I had been out to Los Angeles to interview Tommy Davis over the Memorial Day weekend. And when he finally did come to meet with me, he said that he had decided not to talk to me.
But I asked him if he would agree at least to, you know, to respond to our fact-checking queries about the church. And he agreed to that. And over a period of time, we sent them 971 fact-checking queries, which alarmed them.
“Some man, 60 years old, that couldn’t take the business and went and killed himself. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with that when you’ve got a 16-year-old daughter who gets the call? Huh? And I’ll tell you how you deal with that. You go through it, and you make jokes about it, and you continue with it, and you move forward. That’s how you do it, or that’s how I do it. Everyone handles things differently. How do you make jokes about how to deal with bankruptcy? How do you deal with your fired from Fox when your numbers were still good, and you can’t get a job for a year and a half? You do it. And I do it by making jokes.”
You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them. Endangered species protections don’t apply to artificial breeds such as tiligers. Hybridization, however, has done nothing to quell Nova’s predatory instincts. For the umpteenth time during the past six minutes, she lunges at my face, claws splayed and mouth ajar — only to be halted mid-leap as her handler jerks her harness. Unphased, Nova gets right back to pouncing.
With her dusty blue eyes, sherbet-colored paws, and prominent black stripes, Nova is adorable. But she also weighs 30 pounds and has teeth like a Doberman’s and claws the size of jumbo shrimp. Nova’s handler, a woman with long brown hair who tells me she recently retired from her IT job at a South Dakota bank to live out her dream of working with exotic cats, scolds the rambunctious tiliger in a goo-goo-ga-ga voice: “Nooooo, nooooo, you calms down!” Nova is teething, the handler explains, so she just wants something to chew on. The handler reaches for one of the tatty stuffed animals strewn around the room — a substitute, I guess, for my limbs. In that moment of distraction, Nova lunges. She lands her mark, chomping into the bicep of my producer, Graham Lee Brewer.
“Ooo, she got me!” Lee Brewer grimaces as he attempts to pull away from the determined predator. Nova’s handler has to pry the tiliger’s jaws open to detach her. After the incident, the woman conveniently checks her watch: “OK, you guys, time is up!”
I paid $80 for the pleasure of spending 12 minutes with Nova, but I’m glad the experience, billed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is over. On our way out, we pass more than a dozen adult tigers yowling and pacing cages the size of small classrooms. Nearby signs solicit donations. You are their only hope. Sponsor a cabin or compound today! In the safety of our car, Lee Brewer rolls up his sleeve, exposing a swollen red welt. “Look at my gnarly tiger bite,” he chuckles. “I tried to play it off but I was like, this fuckin’ hurts!”
It’s not the first time I’ve seen this world up-close; I spent the better part of eight years investigating wildlife trafficking around the world. During my travels, I visited farms in China and Laos where tigers are raised like pigs, examined traditional medicine in Vietnam, ate what I was told was tiger bone “cake,” and tracked some of the world’s last remaining wild tigers in India. Almost everywhere I went, tigers were suffering and their numbers were on the decline because of human behavior. Until recently, though, I had no idea the United States was part of the problem. Read more…
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