Matthew Weiner: The Art of Screenwriting
The Mad Men creator on his early inspiration and the making of Don Draper:
You know in Reds, when they’re interviewing the witnesses, and Henry Miller says, People today think they invented fucking? That kind of thing. The old people you’re looking at, they may have been more carnal than we are—drunker, less responsible, more violent. So many of those film noirs are about how soldiers reintegrate themselves into society. The private detective is haunted by the shadow of having killed people in the war. Don’t even get me started on The Best Years of Our Lives. The move to the suburbs, the privacy, the conservatism of the fifties—that’s all being driven by guys who, for two years, had not gone to the bathroom in privacy. I’m not the first TV person to be puzzled and fascinated by the fifties. The two biggest shows of the seventies are MASH and Happy Days. Obviously that moment is some sort of touchstone for culture. Is Hawkeye not related to Don Draper? He’s an alcoholic Boy Scout who behaves badly all the time. I just wanted to go back and look again.
Debunking the Bunk Police
An anonymous underground group is trying to make drug-testing kits widely available—everywhere from Coachella to the Phish tour. Can a $20 kit save lives?
We knew of the Bunk Police from Saratoga Springs, and also because they’d maintained a constant presence on the Phish tour all summer. They had been at other festivals, from the more mainstream Coachella, Bonaroo, and Wakarusa, to obscure electronic gatherings like Lightning in a Bottle and Firefly. The anonymous organization, run by volunteers, preaches harm reduction through education about misrepresented substances. The kits vary depending on the kind of drug you’re testing, but in principle they’re all the same: you dissolve a minuscule amount of your substance in the chemicals provided in your kit (one is good for about 50-100 tests), and depending upon the color change, you know what drug you’re dealing with. The test kits are essentially the same as what a cop would use if he were trying to test someone’s drugs. The Bunk Police sell kits for $20 apiece to drug users so that they can increase their safety and call out fraudulent (or simply ignorant) dealers.
Sudden Death: A Eulogy
On living in a world where dying suddenly has become uncommon:
“When I started as an intern,” an elderly colleague recently observed at a staff meeting, “most patients only stayed in the hospital for a day or two. Either you got better or you didn’t. Lingering wasn’t part of the protocol.” Today, in contrast, lingering is the norm. Insurance companies force you out of the hospital, not rigor mortis. Where a generation ago, the expectation was for men to retire at sixty-five and keel over at sixty-seven—the basis for the pension plans now bankrupting municipal governments—a massive myocardial infarction in one’s fifth or sixth decade is no longer inevitable. Stress tests and statins and improved resuscitation methods mean we are more likely to survive to our second heart attack, live beyond our third stroke. Life ends with a whimper, not a bang.
How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other
From Airbnb to Lyft to Tinder, the sharing economy is rewiring the way we interact with each other.
In about 40 minutes, Cindy Manit will let a complete stranger into her car. An app on her windshield-mounted iPhone will summon her to a corner in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, where a russet-haired woman in an orange raincoat and coffee-colored boots will slip into the front seat of her immaculate 2006 Mazda3 hatchback and ask for a ride to the airport. Manit has picked up hundreds of random people like this. Once she took a fare all the way across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito. Another time she drove a clown to a Cirque du Soleil after-party.
Working 9 to 5: A Reading List About the Way We Work
This week’s picks from Emily include stories from The Billfold, the Walker Art Center, The New Yorker’s Currency blog, and The New York Times.
The Tale of Two Schools
Students from University Heights and Fieldston are just six miles apart, but the students live very different lives from one another. They’ve come together to share their stories with each other:
MARIENELY: “People in my community have welfare and Section 8. My family doesn’t receive that aid anymore, but we once did, so I know how it feels to let people know you receive help from the government. Sometimes I get stressed just seeing my mother working so hard to get me what I want and need. The only thing she asks for is for me to do great in school, but I wish I could get a job to help her out. She’s my motivation in life.”
ASHLEY: “I am a TEAK Fellow at Fieldston. TEAK is an organization that helps low-income students gain admission to prestigious private high schools and colleges. I wish conversations about class and wealth would happen at Fieldston, but socioeconomic status is one of the hardest things to have open conversations about. How do you make people feel safe and included without being too vulnerable?”
‘OUT.’
Where would you take a $100,000 check that is also a suicide note — to the cops or to the bank?
Laradon’s director found the envelope in her mailbox when she returned to work four days later. On the back, in handwritten block letters, were six words: WAIT UNTILL YOU HEAR FROM CORONER. And below that, in parentheses: PLEASE DONT CALL EVERYTHING IS OK.
Despite the plea to wait, Green opened the envelope. Inside was the original of Beech’s Last Will and Testament, which left all his worldly goods to Laradon Hall.
The Power of Fat
The potential healing powers of stem cells from human fat:
We had set out hoping to convert fat stem cells into cardiovascular cells, but instead, we had identified what seemed like a potent new tool for regenerating the vascular system and healing the heart.
The 2014 National Magazine Award Winners: A Reading List
A collection of stories from Thursday night’s awards, including The New Yorker, Time and National Geographic.
‘There’s No Law for Me Here’
What happened to Naji Mansour and his family after Mansour refused to become an FBI informant:
Other members of Naji’s family have been targeted, too. In 2011, Naji’s sister, Tahani, was detained at the Nairobi airport for three days. “I’ve heard, ‘It’s your people'”—that the US is behind her family’s troubles with customs officials—”more times than I can count,” she told me. “I go to airports now and there’s this constant sense of trepidation. Am I gonna make it? Am I gonna get locked up again?”
“As a family we have always been mobile and traveling our whole lives, and as a result completely took it for granted,” she told me. “The removal of the liberty to travel was crippling.”
One of Naji’s brothers says he is frequently questioned about Naji when he crosses an international border. The other, a Marine veteran based in Virginia, was visited by members of the Navy’s criminal investigative service, who grilled him about Naji. The FBI even interviewed Naji’s uncle and aging grandmother in Rhode Island in 2009.
“They didn’t get to me, so they had to target my family,” says Naji.
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