How to Be a Writer

A handy guide to becoming a true professional:

At 6 a.m., I quit email because that’s what writers do if they want to get some motherfucking writing done. But I have to go on Twitter for a second to favorite a few of my editor’s tweets so he’ll know that I’m not mad or anything. It’s so easy for people to think that you’re full of rage when you’re a woman and a writer and oldish and you never, ever get paid! Ignorant dummies. Then I reply to a youngish writer who just moved to LA and hates her job and hates LA and is panicking. “Remember you’re having an adventure!” I tell her, because she’s young and she probably doesn’t have dogs with health problems yet. So then I end up scrolling through my Twitter feed, probably just to remind myself that all of these other writers don’t have 8,204 followers like I do, because I’m so fucking esteemed and accomplished after having done this for almost two decades. I’m a professional, is the thing. I know my fucking shit. I just keep producing high-quality work. That’s why I have 8,202 followers.

Source: The Awl
Published: May 12, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,339 words)

Earthquakes and the Texas Miracle

A stunning rise in tremors connected to fracking:

All along, the Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, maintained it had “not identified a significant correlation between faulting and injection practices.” But when the shaking didn’t stop, it tweaked its stock statement in December to say that the correlation was not “definitive.” Yet it remained at odds with everything else McKee had heard, not just from folks at church, but from the USGS.

Finally, she read in the Azle News that Railroad Commissioner David Porter would host a town hall meeting in the Azle High School auditorium on January 2. McKee resolved to go, determined to win back her quiet country life.

Source: D Magazine
Published: May 12, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,172 words)

I Placed a Jar in Tennessee

“A case of reinvention through preservation.” Sullivan’s friend leaves the celebrity world to go back to his roots to work in canning:

These days when you say someone becomes “obsessed” with something it usually means they spent four hours reading about it on the Internet last night, but it seems accurate to say that Kevin became obsessed with preserves. It gradually became not the only thing he talked about, but the thing you could tell he was always thinking about. He started making cross-country trips to track down fruits that supposedly “put up” well. He tried to preserve things he’d never seen preserved, stuff that would have made his grandmother have to lie down and fan herself. He sent me a picture of a Buddha’s hand citron one time. It was an unearthly yellow and looked like a squid. If one of the ghosts in Pac-Man had been bright yellow and was preserved in a specimen jar, where it got all distended over time, it would have looked like this thing. “Found this last night at the Altadena farmer’s market,” he wrote. “My first thought was, I wanna get that, I wanna preserve it.”

Source: Lucky Peach
Published: May 12, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,779 words)

Schooled

What happened when Mark Zuckerberg, Cory Booker and Chris Christie pledged to reform Newark’s schools? A lot of money spent on consultants, and some very hard lessons about enlisting community support for change:

One mother shouted, “We not having no wealthy white people coming in here destroying our kids!” From aisles and balconies, people yelled, “Where’s Christie!” “Where’s Mayor Hollywood!” The main item on the agenda—a report by the Newark schools’ facilities director on a hundred and forty million dollars spent in state construction funds, with little to show for it—reinforced people’s conviction that someone was making a killing at their children’s expense. “Where’d the money go? Where’d the money go?” the crowd chanted.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 12, 2014
Length: 46 minutes (11,617 words)

Drink, Edit, Repeat

For a young expat writer, strange days at a Thai newspaper:

Some background is in order. I was 25 at the time, and several months before my arrival in Thailand, I wouldn’t have been able to identify its elephantine outline on a map. But I wanted to move to Thailand to soak up some of the fellow-feeling and goodwill I had experienced on an earlier holiday visit. The country had a strengthening democracy and an economy that was gradually righting itself after being upended in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It felt to me like my own silliness and incompetence wouldn’t be punished because everything was going to be all right. I was going to fit right in. And I was going to try something I had never done before: work in the newspaper business.

Published: May 1, 2014
Length: 27 minutes (6,833 words)

The Unmothered

An essay about losing a mother and dealing with grief:

When I returned to New York in late October, only two days after the Shiva, I threw myself right back into school as though nothing had happened. The trees were undressing for winter, and I walked down the chilly streets of Morningside Heights squinting against a nonexistent sun. What I kept hearing from friends during that time was that I looked “good” and “strong.” That I seemed “fine.” I didn’t feel fine, but I also had no idea what to do except carry on. “I don’t know how you manage,” an old friend told me. “If it had been my mother, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.” She thought she was paying me a compliment, not realizing that that’s about the worst thing you can say to someone in mourning—as though by merely starting my days I was betraying my mother. Am I? I started to panic. But then I came across Roland Barthes’s “Mourning Diary,” which he kept immediately following the death of his mother. In it, he writes, “No sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.” I remember reading this and experiencing a physical spasm of recognition.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 9, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,712 words)

How the Father of Claymation Lost His Company

The story of Will Vinton’s Vinton Studios, which found success in the 1980s with commercial hits like the California Raisins, then struggled to keep up with its massive growth before getting sold to Nike CEO Phil Knight:

In the course of two years, a severely mismanaged Vinton Studios blew through more than $7 million in funding, largely due to their unwillingness to scale back the team even more. There was only one hope to salvage the company, and it came with a swoosh.

Farnath, Vinton Studios’ new CEO, approached Phil Knight “with his tail between his legs,” and asked the businessman to put in more money – just a few years after Knight had put up $5 million. This time, Knight had leverage to be a controlling shareholder.

Source: Priceonomics
Published: May 10, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,113 words)

The Accidental Grunge Masterpiece

Twenty years ago, Alice in Chains scored an unlikely No. 1 hit with the acoustic EP Jar of Flies. A look back at the making of the album:

But more than anything, Jar Of Flies provided a much-needed glimpse into the true personality and talent of Alice In Chains. Considering how Staley left listeners on Dirt, it was nice to hear him still alive and in slightly better spirits. Those days, however, were short-lived. Staley’s habit and unreliability forced the band to drop out of their ensuing summer tour with Metallica along with Woodstock ’94, providing a point of contention among the band members for years. They re-enlisted Wright to record their full-length self-titled follow-up, but the experience would be vastly different.

Author: Tim Karan
Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: May 9, 2014
Length: 8 minutes (2,212 words)

Confidentially Yours

Petersen traces the history of the celebrity profile:

Confidential was by no means the first publication to suggest that its subjects lived secret, salacious lives—the tabloid press had thrived, in various iterations, for years. But Confidential’s dirt was richer: publisher Robert Harrison developed a web of informants crossing the continent. More important, he understood what titillated: miscegenation, homosexuality, unbridled female sexuality, and communism.

Source: The Believer
Published: May 9, 2014
Length: 27 minutes (6,937 words)

The Day I Started Lying to Ruth

A cancer doctor on losing his wife to cancer:

One day she stumbled on the stairs and told me it was nothing. Then she stumbled the next day and dismissed my concerns when I gasped. “I’m totally fine, I just wasn’t paying attention.” Then the whites of her eyes, the sclera, turned yellow. I didn’t manage it well.

We were sitting at a coffee shop when the light caught her just right and I saw it. I tried for a few moments to keep talking about whatever topic we had landed on, but I discreetly texted a friend of mine from college, also a doctor, in medicalspeak to share the terrible news—“scleral icterus.”

I couldn’t hold it in anyway. “Your eyes are yellow,” I blurted out.

Published: May 6, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,012 words)