Drunk History

From an elderly artist living inside a rock club to a foodie who headbutted a winery employee and insulted California chefs before a brawl, Willamette Week gathered 10 of Portland’s best bar stories for your reading and drinking pleasure.

Source: Willamette Week
Published: May 22, 2018
Length: 17 minutes (4,426 words)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Comes to Terms with Global Fame

MacFarquhar’s long profile of MacArthur Fellow Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the novelist’s legacy and the torments of fame in Nigeria and America.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 4, 2018
Length: 47 minutes (11,883 words)

Digital Jukeboxes Are Eroding the Dive-Bar Experience

The times they are a-changin’, sang Bob Dylan way back when people could smoke inside airplanes. Now digital jukeboxes are changing the vibe at America’s bars, but is that a bad thing?

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 8, 2018
Length: 8 minutes (2,179 words)

André Leon Talley’s Next Act

Friedman profiles Talley, the former creative director of Vogue, upon the release of “The Gospel According to André,” a documentary about his life.

Published: May 24, 2018
Length: 13 minutes (3,330 words)

NYT Magazine’s Rita Dove on What Poetry Might Grant Unsuspecting News Readers

Brendan Fitzgerald interviews Rita Dove on how she plans to approach her upcoming one-year stint as poetry editor at New York Times Magazine. Taking over for Terrance Hayes this summer, Dove has free rein to select a poem that will appear in the magazine each week, along with her short introduction. Dove is the fourth poet to hold the poetry editor position.

Published: May 25, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,794 words)

Vanity Foul

After a hundred years of performing the so-called “hand job” of journalism, the puff piece is giving way to a more enlightened form called the power piece. The successful power piece acknowledges the white cis male status quo and can help reshape the world its subjects and readers inhabit. When it fails, it perpetuates the same old same old it claims to subvert, puffing up activism instead of celebrity.

Source: The Baffler
Published: May 22, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,641 words)

Under The Skin: Why That ‘Arrested Development’ Interview Is So Bad

“But maybe it was this interview because the disrespect felt so benign in the delivery and so destructive in the effect.”

Source: NPR
Published: May 24, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,343 words)

Sarah Silverman Is the Troll Slayer

Sarah Silverman is “on a campaign to neutralize her haters with a weapon more powerful than a million burns: empathy.”

Source: GQ
Published: May 23, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,863 words)

A Blast. Then Chaos.

On the scene of the Sante Fe High School shooting.

Published: May 19, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,637 words)

How An Inner-City Minnesota High School Built a Girls’ Badminton Dynasty

The St. Paul Johnson High School’s varsity badminton team — 20 girls, almost all Hmong — is the winningest team in the school’s history.

Source: Deadspin
Published: May 22, 2018
Length: 12 minutes (3,032 words)