The Hollywood Blockbuster’s ‘Save the World’ Problem

Screenwriter-producer Damon Lindelof reveals the formula—and challenges—facing big Hollywood movies: How do you escalate with any shred of originality?

“‘Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world,’ explains Lindelof. ‘And when you start there, and basically say, I have to construct a MacGuffin based on if they shut off this, or they close this portal, or they deactivate this bomb, or they come up with this cure, it will save the world—you are very limited in terms of how you execute that. And in many ways, you can become a slave to it and, again, I make no excuses, I’m just saying you kind of have to start there. In the old days, it was just as satisfying that all Superman has to do was basically save Lois from this earthquake in California. The stakes in that movie are that the San Andreas Fault line opens up and half of California is going to fall in the ocean. That felt big enough, but there is a sense of bigger, better, faster, seen it before, done that.'”

Published: Aug 6, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,391 words)

Street-Beat Confidential

A profile of New York Daily News reporter Juan González, who has been working in journalism for more than 30 years, and was an activist during the late ’60s and early ’70s:

“‘Some of the editors started quashing my columns,’ says González. ‘They killed two of them and relegated the others to the back pages. So I went to Ed Kosner, the editor in chief, and said, “Ed, why are you holding up my columns?” And he said, “Well, the EPA says the stuff that you’re writing isn’t accurate, and so does the Giuliani administration, and besides, the Times isn’t writing anything about it.” And I said, “Since when do we decide what we’re going to write based on what the Times decides to write? You have to trust my reporting.” So we went back and forth, and I finally said, “Ed, you don’t know me well. And I don’t know you well because you’ve only been here a couple of years. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to keep writing on this topic. I think it’s important, and when a lot of people start getting sick ten or fifteen years down the line, I don’t want it to be on my conscience that I didn’t do what I needed to do as a reporter.”‘

“Five years later, as people started getting sick, the paper, under different editors, ran editorials exposing the problem. For this, the Daily News won a Pulitzer Prize.”

Author: Paul Hond
Published: Aug 1, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,034 words)

Reading List: A Brief History of ‘It’ Girls

“It isn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just ‘It’.”

—Rudyard Kipling

A new reading list from Julia Wick, a native Angeleno who writes about literature, Los Angeles, and cities. She is currently finishing an Urban Planning degree at USC.

Author: Julia Wick
Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 5, 2013

Taken: The Use and Abuse of Civil Forfeiture

Now happening in America: Police are using civil forfeiture laws to take money and property from people who haven’t been charged with a crime—and police even allegedly threatened to take their children away if they didn’t comply. In the Texas town of Tenaha, police pulled over drivers and used the roadside seizures to fund an assortment of unrelated items:

“More revelatory was a nine-page spreadsheet listing items funded by Tenaha’s roadside seizures. Among them were Halloween costumes, Doo Dah Parade decorations, ‘Have a Nice Day’ banners, credit-card late fees, poultry-festival supplies, a popcorn machine, and a thousand-dollar donation to a Baptist congregation that was said to be important to Lynda Russell’s reëlection. Barry Washington, as deputy city marshal, received a ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus from the fund. (His base salary was about thirty thousand dollars; Garrigan later confirmed reports that Washington had received a total of forty thousand dollars in bonuses.)”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 5, 2013
Length: 45 minutes (11,405 words)

The Last Hike of David Gimelfarb

On August 11, 2009, 28-year-old David Gimelfarb disappeared while hiking in Costa Rica’s Rincón de la Vieja National Park. His remains have never been found. His parents have spent more than $300,000 searching for him and are still holding out hope:

“‘We believe David is alive,’ said Roma, 66, his eyes searching mine to gauge a reaction.

“They told me that there continued to be sightings of a man who resembled their slight, red-headed son. The latest report had come last October from Limón, on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, a five-hour drive from the national park. A man who was dirty, disoriented, and unable to speak had walked into a minimart there and gestured that he needed something to drink. Recognizing him from a newscast they’d seen on TV about David’s disappearance, a family took the stranger to a local police station. But after a brief interview, the police let him go without even snapping a photograph. The minimart’s owners insisted that the man was the missing American hiker.

“Was this David Gimelfarb? Or just another false glimmer of hope for two grief-stricken parents desperate for good news?”

Published: Aug 1, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,896 words)

Reading List: ‘What’s in an Ally?’

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter who blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. This week’s picks include stories from New York magazine, The Toast, and Medium.

Source: Longreads
Published: Aug 4, 2013

Vincent’s Final Days

A look at the last days of Vincent van Gogh. The painter was visiting his brother and sister-in-law in Paris weeks before he died of a self-inflicted gun wound:

“Vincent was thirty-seven now, an old thirty-seven. After his attacks during the last eighteen months, he had given up on many cherished dreams. In particular, he had given up on having the wife and children he had yearned for as a young man. Now he knew with certainty that he was too sick for marriage or for a regular domestic life. With that dream now just a memory, only a few things still mattered to him. He cared about his painting most of all and pursued it with a constant, unwavering, feverish intensity. He cared about the paintings of artists he admired, such as Gauguin and Bernard and, above all, Millet. He cared about literature and reading. He cared about Theo, and now he cared about the infant Vincent Willem. He cared to a degree about his sister Willemina and about his mother. He cared about a few friends, and he cared, in an abstract, sentimental way, about the mass of impoverished workers and miners and peasants. He cared about seduced and abandoned women and about prostitutes in the streets and their children. He thought that men who were not prepared to protect and rescue a woman were unworthy and should be ashamed. He could be charming and kind to small children, and he loved his pipe. He didn’t drink much anymore or go to the brothels. His religious beliefs, which had obsessed him when he was young, had lost their fervor, if they hadn’t evaporated entirely. An elderly couple out walking together or a pretty girl and her young companions in the countryside might produce longing reveries in him, but he knew those reveries were for a world beyond his embrace, except in his painting.”

Source: The Common
Published: Jun 28, 2013
Length: 27 minutes (6,943 words)

The Royal Prank: The Story Behind The Worst Radio Stunt In History

A prank call by two Australian radio DJs led a nurse in the U.K. to end her life. The story behind the “royal prank” and its tragic outcome:

“Southern Cross Austereo moved into damage-control mode upon learning of Saldanha’s death on the evening of Friday, Dec. 7. On Monday, the station released a media statement, citing a ‘deep regret for what has taken place’ and outlining four actions undertaken since ‘the events took place’: the suspension of all advertising on 2Day FM; the termination of the Hot 30 show; a company-wide suspension of ‘prank’ calls; and a ‘comprehensive review of relevant company policies and processes.’ Both Greig and Christian were to stay off the air until further notice. The pair had also deleted their Twitter accounts following torrents of abuse and death threats. A video addressed to the station supposedly from the hacker group Anonymous demanded Greig and Christian’s contracts be terminated: ‘You have one week to do so. I repeat: you have one week to do so.'”

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Aug 1, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,536 words)

What It’s Like to Be Half Chinese, Half White and Living in the U.S. in the Late 1800s

“Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” is a personal essay from 1890 by Sui Sin Far, a writer and reporter whose mother was Chinese and whose father was white:

“With a great effort I raise my eyes from my plate. ‘Mr. K.,’ I say, addressing my employer, ‘the Chinese people may have no souls, no expression on their faces, be altogether beyond the pale of civilization, but whatever they are, I want you to understand that I am—I am a Chinese.’

“There is silence in the room for a few minutes. Then Mr. K. pushes back his plate and standing up beside me, says:

“’I should have not spoken as I did. I know nothing whatever about the Chinese. It was pure prejudice. Forgive me!’

“I admire Mr. K.’s moral courage in apologizing to me; he is a conscientious Christian man, but I do not remain much longer in the little town.”

Source: Quotidiana
Published:
Length: 21 minutes (5,434 words)

Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

Programmer Sergey Aleynikov was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for downloading 8 megabytes of code he worked on from Goldman Sachs’s high-frequency stock-trading system. Financial journalist Michael Lewis investigates how Aleynikov was punished for something only a few people understand, and holds a “kind of second trial” for Aleynikov so he can be judged by some people who actually do:

“The story the F.B.I. found so unconvincing—that Serge had taken the files because he thought he might later like to parse the open-source code contained within—made complete sense to the new jurors. As Goldman hadn’t permitted him to release his debugged or improved code back to the public—possibly in violation of the original free licenses, which often stated that improvements must be publicly shared—the only way to get his hands on these was to take the Goldman code. That he had taken, in the bargain, some code that wasn’t open source, which happened to be contained in the same files as the open-source code, surprised no one. Grabbing a bunch of files that contained both open-source and non-open-source code was an efficient, quick, and dirty way to collect the open-source code, even if the open-source code was the only part that interested him. It would have made far less sense for him to hunt around the Internet for the open-source code he wanted, as it was scattered all over cyberspace. It was entirely plausible to them that Serge’s interest was confined to the open-source code because that was the general-purpose code that might be re-purposed later. The Goldman proprietary code was written specifically for Goldman’s platform; it would have been of little use in any new system he wished to build. (Two small pieces of code Serge had sent into Teza’s computers before his arrest both came with open-source licenses.) ‘Even if he had taken Goldman’s whole platform, it would have been faster and better for him to write the new platform himself,’ said one juror. Several times he surprised them with his answers.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Aug 2, 2013
Length: 46 minutes (11,593 words)