Oprah’s Highest Hurdle
The Oprah Winfrey Network’s three-year gestation has been unusually arduous. Early on, Ms. Winfrey’s partner in the joint venture, Discovery Communications, grew frustrated, and as boardroom tensions boiled over early last year she considered backing out altogether. The relationship has improved markedly since then. But as recently as late November, some producers working with OWN still doubted that the channel would actually come to life in January.
‘We Let a Wolf In’
A church discovers its minister’s murder conviction. “Harlow, co-chair of the church board, was sitting beside Drumheller. Harlow was unfazed, he recalled in an interview. ‘I turned to Bill and said, “Are you a man of repentant heart?” He replied, “Yes.” I looked back at Shane and said, “What’s your problem?”‘ Harlow said the revelation was ‘nothing but a character tear-down’ and had ‘nothing, nothing’ to do with church business. Most of Drumheller’s supporters, after their initial shock, agreed.”
The Odyssey of Captain Beefheart
Cover story, 1970, on Don Van Vliet, who died Dec. 17, 2010. “Beefheart stubbornly continues what he’s doing and waits patiently for everyone else to come around. He has steadfastly refused to leave the Magic Band or to abandon the integrity of his art. ‘I realize,’ he says, ‘that somebody playing free music isn’t as commercial as a hamburger stand. But is it because you can eat a hamburger and hold it in your hand and you can’t do that with music? Is it too free to control?'”
Vanishing Act
The story of Barbara Follett, a child-prodigy author who mysteriously disappeared in 1939. “Some prodigies flourish, some disappear. But Barbara did leave one last comment to the world about writing—a brief piece in a 1933 issue of Horn Book that earnestly recommends that parents give their own children typewriters. ‘Perhaps there would simply be a terrific wholesale destruction of typewriters,’ she admits. ‘An effort would have to be made to impress upon children that a typewriter is magic.'”
Winona Forever
Winona Ryder has this problem, and as problems go it’s pretty solidly in the first-world category, she knows, but it’s a problem, still: She’ll be having a conversation with somebody—an interesting conversation, the kind two regular people have when they discover a mutual admiration for, like, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral or something. And then suddenly the person she’s having the conversation with will say something to her that reminds her that (a) she is Winona Ryder, the famous actress, and (b) nearly everyone she meets already has “this whole idea” of who she is, already thinks they know everything there is to know about her, more or less. And inevitably when this happens, she starts thinking about what it is people think they know about her, which is never a good idea, and the conversation never really recovers.
Not All Smurfs and Sunshine: Profile of Esquire’s Chris Jones
“I wanted to do right by Joey,” Chris Jones now says of “The Things That Carried Him” which Esquire published in May 2008. In 17,000 words, he told the story of one soldier’s return home, structured backward from his funeral to the moment an IED broke his body. He sprinkled details—a girl in a flowered dress and the two yellow ribbons tied to a tree on Elm Street—that act as emotional cues and lend lyricism to the writing. The piece won the 2009 National Magazine Award for feature writing.
The Physiology of Foie: Why Foie Gras is Not Unethical
“Foie gras is an easy target. There are only three foie farms in the country, and none of them have the money or government clout to defend themselves the way that the chicken or beef industry does. It’s a food product that is marketed directly at the affluent, and the rich are always an easy target. As an occasional delicacy, it’s also a food that’s relatively easy for most people to give up.”
Gordon Likes to Think He Is the Most Underrated of All Mythical Heroes
Gordon was 19 when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Friends, family, and professionals have told him he’s mentally ill, but he can’t see any of the symptoms. To him, it’s all real. When he takes his prescribed medication, the apocalypse doesn’t vanish; the pills simply give him another day to prepare, and he feels like a coward for delaying the imminent confrontation.
The Goat Boy Rises
On October 1st, 1993, the comedian Bill Hicks, after doing his twelfth gig on the David Letterman show, became the first comedy act to be censored at CBS’s Ed Sullivan Theatre, where Letterman is now in residence, and where Elvis Presley was famously censored in 1956. Presley was not allowed to be shown from the waist down. Hicks was not allowed to be shown at all. It’s not what’s in Hicks’ pants but what’s in his head that scared the CBS panjandrums.
In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm
Though they offer different messages, idea entrepreneurs have plenty in common. Quite a few of them have published books with the word “innovation” in the title. All of them hate to be called consultants. “I like to position myself as a thought leader,” says Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and co-author of “The Other Side of Innovation.” “A consultant solves problems,” Govindarajan says. “That is not my role. What I want is for companies to self-diagnose their problems and self-discover their own solutions through my thought leadership.”
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