College Longreads Pick: ‘A Canine in a Cummerbund,’ Peter Kaplan (1977)
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
Longreads Best of 2013: Favorite New Writer Discovery
Ross Andersen is a Senior Editor at Aeon Magazine. He has written extensively about science and philosophy for several publications, including The Atlantic and The Economist.
What Would Jesus Film?
How North Texas became the production hub for Christian entertainment:
And as North Texas grew, the region—with its affordable acreage to site large-scale production facilities and its mostly conservative and religious-minded population—proved attractive to faith-based entrepreneurs. It helped, too, that in the 1980s, a film- and television-production tradition was established here, with secular fare like JFK, RoboCop, and Walker, Texas Ranger.
The early ’90s also saw a flurry of production activity in Dallas. In 1988, the family-friendly, Allen-based Lyrick Studios (originally known as Lyons Group) was born and began turning out the TV series Barney and Wishbone, and distributing the Christian-themed cartoon VeggieTales. Five years later, Trinity Broadcasting Network, which later became the first major network to air T.D. Jakes’ sermons, bought a 50,000-square-foot studio in Irving. Then competing Christian-based Daystar Television Network was founded in Dallas by Joni and Marcus Lamb.
Put all of these elements together—a filmmaking infrastructure; oil, gas, and real estate wealth; religiosity; the eternal, irresistible allure of the silver screen—and you can see how Dallas wound up at the center of the modern faith-based entertainment market.
Susan Cox Is No Longer Here
A group of volunteers helps make sure people are not alone when they are dying:
I sat in the room with the volunteers. Every three hours one of them would leave, and someone else would appear in the doorway. Amanda, Denise, Martha, and others. Noon, midnight, 2 a.m., 6 p.m., a rhythm.
They had found NODA in various ways. Amanda Egler read about it in a news app on her phone. Her grandmother had died the previous year, and it was fresh in Amanda’s mind that the death had been something of beauty, that her grandmother had been conscious until the very end, thankful that a constant flow of people were in her presence, sitting with her, the room never empty. Amanda read about NODA and considered what it might be like to die alone. “This is something very simple, but so important,” she said. “Because everyone is going to die, and to give three hours of your life, at the end of someone else’s, seems like the right thing to do.” She went to the first NODA volunteer meeting, just to listen.
The Passion of Dan Choi
A profile of Dan Choi, a gay Iraq combat veteran who became a media star after his public push to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Since the victory, Choi has found it difficult to figure out what to do next:
In late August, I was on my way to interview Dan at his apartment when he messaged me that a big protest was shaping up at the White House. President Barack Obama had just announced that he would ask Congress for authorization to use force in Syria. I raced to meet him at the north entrance, but all I found were tourists snapping photos and Dan circling around on his bike. He hung out for a while, texting a friend to ask for an update. She didn’t respond. After 20 minutes of scouring his contacts for people who might have more information, he looked up from his phone and gave me a sideways grin. He was being a good sport, but he looked crestfallen. I sensed—or maybe I just imagined it—he was asking himself the same question I had been: Who is Dan Choi without “don’t ask, don’t tell”?
Longreads Best of 2013: The Most Surprising Piece of Cultural Criticism of the Year
Elizabeth Hyde Stevens is author of the book Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career.
The Big Sleep
With suvorexant, Merck thinks it has created a better sleeping pill—one that could supplant Ambien as the drug of choice for insomniacs. But getting it to market is a long slog, and then there’s the question of dosage:
The committee was asked to vote on the question: Would a ten-milligram dose require additional studies before it could be approved by the F.D.A.? It voted no. Paul Rosenberg, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, said, “I’m convinced that it maybe works.” Clancy said, “I feel like I’m stuck in an old episode of ‘The Twilight Zone.’ The company’s arguing their drug doesn’t work, and the F.D.A. is arguing, ‘Yes, it does.’ ” He said that he needed a sleeping pill.
My Life As a Jonas Brother
What it’s like to grow up in the Disney machine, according to Joe Jonas:
Disney made us more famous than we ever knew we could be. During concerts, when we’d want to play a new song or have an intimate moment, the screaming could be so overwhelming that we’d have to tell the crowd to calm down and enjoy the moment. It could get scary, too: We did a meet-and-greet in Spain, and like 100,000 people showed up and we ended up being chased through a shopping mall. It felt like a zombie apocalypse.
There were the moments when I’d walk into my hotel room only to find a girl I didn’t know standing there. For the record, we didn’t have the traditional rock-and-roll experience. We were kids working with Disney, so finding a girl in our hotel room didn’t feel like an open invitation. This isn’t 1986, and I’m not in a hair-metal band. It felt like a problem we had to solve without it getting us into trouble. There was this time in South America where a hotel staff member snuck his kid into my room. I don’t know what they were hoping would happen, but security showed her out.
Ground Control
What will it look like when drones (like those envisioned by Amazon’s Prime Air) come to U.S. airspace?
In this property-rights-obsessed nation, it turns out you actually don’t have a clear right to shoot down a drone hovering low over your backyard unless it’s putting you in imminent physical danger.
“You have to acknowledge in this day and age that stuff flies over your house,” Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in robotics and the law, told me. That puts him at odds with conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, who voiced a more typical reaction on Fox News last year: “The first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s been hovering over his house is going to be a folk hero in this country.”
Gretchen Molannen’s Legacy: Suffering, Suicide And A Journalist’s Responsibility
A reporter grapples with the suicide of a source:
The reporter-source relationship is a complicated one that defies easy description. It borrows a little from the salesman-buyer relationship, the therapist-patient relationship, the police officer-witness relationship, sometimes even the growing intimacy of a friendship. We work hard to gain access and trust, and generally we avoid doing anything that stops a source from talking once she gets started.
“How are you now?” I asked at the time.
“I’m suffering horribly . . . but I’m not suicidal,” she said. “It’s a soothing thing. I don’t really want to do it. But it helps me calm down, it helps me sleep to think about the possibilities to end the suffering.”
If I had possessed some sort of device that could peer inside her brain and pick up some biological trace amongst the billions of nerve cells and circuits that would indicate she was likely to commit suicide, would I have stopped the interview?
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