Meet the man who created “Deep Thoughts” and “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer”—and who is about to release his first novel, The Stench of Honolulu:
“’A lot of comedy is going the extra step,’ Handey continued. ‘An unfrozen caveman was funny — but that’s not enough.’ Later, he e-mailed me a sheet of sketch ideas he typed up in 1991. The sketch seemed to be a combination of two ideas: ‘Too Many Frozen Cavemen,’ in which a surplus of frozen Neanderthals drive scientists crazy, and ‘Swamp Bastard,’ about a Swamp Thing-like creature who keeps stealing everyone’s girlfriends. ‘I guess my brain put these things in a blender,’ he wrote, ‘and out came Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.'”
“He never showed the slightest resentment when I published some of his ideas before he did. He told me that he avoided disputes about priority in science by following a simple rule: ‘Always give the bastards more credit than they deserve.’ I have followed this rule myself. I find it remarkably effective for avoiding quarrels and making friends. A generous sharing of credit is the quickest way to build a healthy scientific community.”
Feynman on his work on the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb: “So I want you to just imagine this young graduate student that hasn’t got his degree yet but is working on his thesis, and I’ll start by saying how I got into the project, and then what happened to me.”
An examination of the American Medical Association’s special committee that meets three times a year to determine how much Medicare should pay doctors for the medical procedures they perform:
In a free market society, there’s a name for this kind of thing—for when a roomful of professionals from the same trade meet behind closed doors to agree on how much their services should be worth. It’s called price-fixing. And in any other industry, it’s illegal—grounds for a federal investigation into antitrust abuse, at the least.
But this, dear readers, is not any other industry. This is the health care industry, and here, this kind of ‘price-fixing’ is not only perfectly legal, it’s sanctioned by the U.S. government. At the end of each of these meetings, RUC members vote anonymously on a list of ‘recommended values,’ which are then sent to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that runs those programs. For the last twenty-two years, the CMS has accepted about 90 percent of the RUC’s recommended values—essentially transferring the committee’s decisions directly into law.
“It might not constitute a genre, exactly, but my favorite sort of journalism dives into obscure subcultures with their own rules, etiquette, heroes and hacks. This story is one of my all-time favorites of that type. The main character is unforgettable, perfectly drawn with a few brilliant details and vernacular dialogue. And the writing just crackles—clever, cheeky and nimble, but never getting in the way. Read this snippet and just try not to smirk: ‘Reg pulled the now quite embittered-looking ferret out of his mouth and stuffed it and another ferret into his pants. He cinched his belt tight, clenched his fists at his sides, and gazed up into the gray Yorkshire firmament in what I guessed could only be a gesture of prayer.’ It would have been easy to go for the cheap laugh at the expense of the odd in a story like this, but Donald Katz’s obvious affection for his subject pushes this into a sublime little realm for me.”
Hotels provide guests with luxurious soaps and shampoos, but generally leave toothpaste out of their bundle of complimentary toiletries. An investigation into why:
“The first and most popular explanation for the missing toothpaste posits the existence of a giant vat—or several giant vats, really—located in the basement of each hotel. These are filled with shampoo, conditioner, and other cosmetic fluids. When the staff needs more toiletries, they tap their kegs to refill the bottles. So why is there no toothpaste in hotel rooms? Because you can’t refill a collapsible tube. One can poke a bunch of holes in this theory of the giant vat, but really one will do: There are no vats of lotion; the hotels buy their toiletries prepackaged, several hundred units to a case.”
Rustin Dodd is a sports reporter at The Kansas City Star. For the most part, he spends his time covering Kansas basketball and football, but he has also covered the Kansas City Royals for the last five years. He’s covered two Final Fours, two Major-League All-Star Games and The Masters. He resides in Lawrence, Kan., home of the best local music scene in the Midwest.
Every year or so, I find myself going back and reading ‘The Courage of Jill Costello,’ a Sports Illustrated story by Chris Ballard from Nov. 29, 2010. It’s often said that the best sports stories are not about sports — and that’s true, of course. But this story is an example of simple, rich storytelling, elegant and beautiful. Jill Costello is a coxswain on the Cal rowing team, diagnosed with cancer before her senior season. (Ballard retraces her final year on campus, letting his deep reporting do the work.) And at its core, Costello’s story is about youth and heart and determination and time, and the question we all ask ourselves: What would we would do if we only had a little bit of life left?
Organizers, demonstrators, and speakers remember one of the most significant political rallies in U.S. history:
“Rachelle Horowitz
“A. Philip Randolph gave a speech that is just ignored too much. He gave the speech for jobs and economic rights, and he did it with incredible power. Then my heart was in my mouth for John Lewis, the then 23-year-old SNCC leader from Troy, Alabama. If you look at that speech today, it was still the most radical. And then of course Dr. King was the culmination. Mahalia Jackson sang, not to be believed. If you look at clips of the march, you see Bayard running around and talking, he never stopped. He’s organizing everything except when Mahalia sings.”
The writer remembers her mother and the garden she loved:
“At the height of summer my mother would clip the most luxurious marigolds that she had successfully grown from seed, handfuls of intense yellow bobbing in the hot wind, reaching above her waist. She’d dip them in wax so that they would outlast the season, lighting her kitchen into dusky autumn. The marigold was the personal passion of David Burpee, the son of the company’s founder—who became a registered lobbyist in 1960 so that he could campaign in Congress to name the marigold the U.S. national flower. My mother bought seeds from the glossy catalogues Burpee pumped out during the years following World War II, showcasing a series of brand-new floral hybrids whose very names exuded drama and expectation: the Yellow Climax Marigold was followed by the Double Supreme Hybrid Snapdragon in 1960 and the Firecracker Zenith Hybrid Zinnia in 1963. When Burpee’s plants blossomed in my mother’s garden—luxurious flesh in pink, yellow, orange, white, and red—they transformed the day.”
An interview with Robin Nagle, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s Anthropologist in Residence who has spent most of her life studying trash:
“In its early days, the department didn’t really function at all. There are some photographs taken for Harper’s Weekly, before and after photos of street corners in New York in 1893 and then in 1895. And the before pictures are pretty astonishing, people were literally shin-high or knee-high in this muck that was a combination of street gunk, horse urine and manure, dead animals, food waste, and furniture crap.
“Put yourself back in the late 19th century and think about the material world that would have surrounded you in your home. When you threw something out, it wouldn’t go anywhere. It would be thrown in the street.”
Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.
“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995.Read more…
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