In Conversation: Antonin Scalia
The Supreme Court justice on his legacy, gay rights, his belief in the Devil, and the TV show “Duck Dynasty”:
“Maybe the world is spinning toward a wider acceptance of homosexual rights, and here’s Scalia, standing athwart it. At least standing athwart it as a constitutional entitlement. But I have never been custodian of my legacy. When I’m dead and gone, I’ll either be sublimely happy or terribly unhappy.
“You believe in heaven and hell?
Oh, of course I do. Don’t you believe in heaven and hell?
“No.
Oh, my.
“Does that mean I’m not going?
[Laughing.] Unfortunately not!”
Reading List: Stories From the Working Class
This week’s reading list from Emily Perper includes stories from The Kenyon Review, The Billfold, This Ain’t Livin’, Forbes, The Washington Blade, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Failure Is Not an Option
As head coach for women’s track and field at the University of Texas, Bev Kearney won six NCAA championships and coached athletes who later competed at the Olympics. An affair with a student forced her to resign and her legacy is being tarnished:
“She was a magnetic, inspiring presence, and not only because of her success in Austin. In a near-fatal car accident in 2002, Kearney had been paralyzed from the waist down, and yet she now walked with two canes, like a mountain climber in a blizzard. Added to her already impressive life story—she had risen from a poor and rootless childhood, overcoming countless obstacles—the accident made her a formidable role model and a universal symbol of perseverance. ‘Failure is not an option,’ she liked to say, and she was living proof of her own maxim.
“That is, until this past spring, when Kearney was nowhere to be found at the 2013 Texas Relays. She didn’t ride onto the track on her burnt-orange scooter. No Divine Divas or Gents of Distinction were honored by her Pursuit of Dreams Foundation. At the parties held that weekend, there was no sign of the woman who had inspired so many people. That’s because right after Christmas, to the shock of many in the world of track and field and beyond, UT and Kearney had bitterly parted ways.”
And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’
An excerpt from Vogelstein’s new book Dogfight, inside the making of the iPhone—a story of clashing egos, technical risks, secrecy and a big bet by Steve Jobs and Apple about where the company’s future would lie:
“Grignon and his team could only ensure a good signal, and then pray. They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. ‘If the radio crashed and restarted, as we suspected it might, we didn’t want people in the audience to see that,’ Grignon says. ‘So we just hard-coded it to always show five bars.'”
44 Million Ways to Say I’m Sorry
A profile of former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who spent time in prison for corruption and fraud charges. Abramoff is back in the public eye and wants to help with government reform, but it’s unclear if his intentions are completely sincere:
“Many who knew Abramoff in his past life view his reform efforts with skepticism. I could almost hear some of them rolling their eyes on the other end of the line when I called. A couple of them sighed loudly when I explained what I was working on. One suspected I was just a pawn in Abramoff’s comeback strategy, asking if he was ‘pushing’ me to do the story. (For the record, I approached Abramoff for this article, not the other way around.)
“‘Time will tell whether Jack’s doing this to get a seat at the big-boy table again in Washington,’ says Neil Volz, who worked with him at Greenberg Traurig. ‘He likes to win. He wants to engage in politics in probably the only issue that he currently can—and win.'”
Longreads Member Pick: ‘A Semester with Allen Ginsberg,’ by Elissa Schappell
This week we’re excited to feature Elissa Schappell‘s essay, “The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg,” as our Longreads Member Pick. Her recollections are an intimate window into the Beat legend. The piece originally appeared in the Summer 1995 issue of the Paris Review and was later anthologized in their 1999 collection Beat Writers at Work. Thanks to Schappell and the Paris Review for sharing it with the Longreads community.
Daniel Radcliffe’s Next Trick Is to Make Harry Potter Disappear
A profile of actor Daniel Radcliffe, who, despite becoming wildly famous at a young age after he starred in the Harry Potter films, has managed to stay earnest, self-aware, and out of the tabloids:
“Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley, Harry Potter’s best friend, recently described the long, drawn-out experience of appearing in the films as ‘quite suffocating.’
“Radcliffe, however, rarely betrayed any strain. ‘If he was feeling good, bad, indifferent or terrible,’ says David Yates, who directed the last four Potter films over six and a half years, ‘he carried the perception that everything was lovely and great, even though the pressures were really intense.’
“As Radcliffe explained it: ‘The second you seem down, everyone’s very concerned. It affects the set.’ Temporarily suppressing a mood was easier than bringing a crew of hundreds of people to a halt — it was just another skill he learned on the job, part of keeping the vast machinery around him moving smoothly. ‘If I ever was feeling ill,’ he said, ‘it was: “Get a doctor on set!” “No, I’m fine.” … That feeling makes me not want to worry people.'”
Ground Control to Mr. Meline
When a beloved teacher is killed, his students figure out a way to pay tribute to him by sending him into space. A story of loss, mental illness, and an inspiring educator:
“For as long as Nae’Ana Aguon could remember, she wanted Mr. Meline as a teacher. Her older brother had been in Mr. Meline’s class years earlier, and she had visited the classroom, a classroom like no other at Spanaway’s Camas Prairie Elementary: telescopes, models of NASA shuttles, Star Trek posters, a mobile of the solar system. And every year Meline’s class built a comet—rocks, dirt, dry ice—then studied the comet with the intensity of a science team in a sci-fi film who’d discovered it in some exotic location.
“Mr. Meline didn’t disappoint when Nae’Ana reported to room 33 on the first day of school in early September 2012. He handed out a word search, a jumble of letters from which the students excavated NASA-related terminology. And then the launch: not of a rocket, but of the man.”
Voice & Hammer
The story of Harry Belafonte:
“Belafonte was first. First black man to win a Tony; one of the first to star in an all-black Hollywood hit (Carmen Jones, 1954); first to star in a noir (Odds Against Tomorrow, 1959—’best heist-gone-wrong movie ever made,’ says James Ellroy); first to turn down starring roles (To Sir, With Love ; Lilies of the Field ; Porgy and Bess ; Shaft) because, he said, he’d play no part that put a black man on his knees or made of him a cartoon. We’re here in this screening room to watch a forgotten hour of television for which he won the first Emmy awarded to a black man for production, for being in charge.
“When I found the show in the archive, I thought it would be more of what I believed I already knew about Belafonte. The albums I’d bought were labeled ‘easy listening’ or ‘folk,’ as in harmonizing trios who wore matching sweaters. Then I watched. My eyes went wide. I started shaking my head in disbelief. I think I gasped. I was wearing the archive’s cheap headphones, sitting at a monitor in a dark room. Other researchers hunched over screens, all our faces flickering blue. I laughed. I slapped the desk. My eyes watered. Goddamn. I felt like I was watching a different past, one in which the revolution had been televised. Goddamn. As if that was what TV was for. A signal. This, I thought, this.”
College Longreads Pick: ‘One Year Later: Christian Aguilar Remembered as Bravo Case Continues’ by Chris Alcantara, University of Florida
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
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