You Listen to This Man Every Day
Rick Rubin has produced some of the biggest hits of the past 30 years, from LL Cool J to Black Sabbath. He explains the secrets of the creative process:
“We worked on [the Beastie Boys’] debut album, Licensed to Ill, for a long time, two years in all, which is part of the reason the record is as good as it is. Each song really has a life of its own, because it might be a month between writing two songs. It wasn’t like ‘OK, we have six weeks to make an album.’ It was natural—the natural flow of making a really good piece of work. I can remember at one point getting a call from Mike D really upset, like, ‘What’s going on? Why isn’t our record done yet?’ I just said, ‘I don’t really have control over that. It comes when it comes.’
“NEWSWEEK: Usually young people are in a rush. Why did you feel like you could take so much time?
“From the beginning, all I’ve ever cared about is things being great. I never cared about when they were done. Because I also feel like I want the music to last forever. And once you release it, you can’t go back and fix it, so you really have to get it right. And that takes time.”
Los Infiltradores
Three undocumented activists from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance intentionally get arrested to expose injustices in immigrant detention centers:
“Before they stood up and announced they were undocumented, before they started putting themselves on the line and getting arrested, before they started making plans to infiltrate detention centers, Abdollahi, Saavedra, and Martinez were like hundreds of thousands of other Dreamers across America: scared of admitting to anyone they were undocumented. But when they hit their late teens and early twenties, they’d begun to run up against the limits that their status placed on their future. The only way to get their lives on track would be to fight to change immigration policy.”
Reading List: 18 Deep Interviews with Great Writers
Kevin Smokler is the author of Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books you Haven’t Touched Since High School, an essay collection on the year he spent rereading 50 canonical texts from high school English class as a 39-year-old adult:
“Out of everything shared in the #Longreads community, I particularly love the interviews. I even created my own hashtag (#deepinterviews) and you can find my most recent picks here.
“And when it comes to authors, a great interview can completely reframe a book that you’ve read a thousand times, or give you the onramp into an writer’s work you haven’t yet experienced. Here are five of my favorite sources and recent discoveries for outstanding author interviews.”
Black Plank
An essay about art and family:
“I had thought its blackness would be that of a black hole, whose point of no return sucks in color and light never to be seen again. But the ceiling lights shone in it like an assembly of suns, and the reflected hues of a Frank Stella collage in the room behind me gave it a bit of cheer. I felt awkward standing directly in front of it, unable to look at Black Plank without seeming to look at myself. You actually look into it, not at it, and therefore into yourself. This illusion of depth reminded me of Thoreau’s lake-as-earth’s-eye, ‘looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.’ Maybe our mirrors should be like this, I thought—a vehicle for soul-searching, just dark enough to be useless for applying lipstick or plucking gray hairs. The plank cast long, overlapping shadows on the wall behind it, narrow at the top and wider at the bottom, like an inverted paper fan beginning to open.”
The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis
How corruption inside the ratings agencies played a critical role in the financial crisis:
“In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.
“‘Lord help our fucking scam . . . this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at,’ writes one Standard & Poor’s executive. ‘As you know, I had difficulties explaining “HOW” we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it,’ confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. ‘If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value,’ complains another senior S&P man. ‘Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters,’ ruminates one more.”
A Coach’s Painful Farewell to a Rugby Program He Built and the Players He Loves
The coach of one of the only all-black rugby teams in the nation says goodbye to his team:
“‘Rugby, to me, is life,’ said Cecil, who hopes to play in college and for the U.S. national team. ‘All I dream about is rugby, all I play is rugby, all I think about is rugby, all I watch is rugby.’
“Bayer wasn’t ready to tell Cecil and his teammates that he was leaving. Not yet.
“‘There are moments in this office where it’s a lump in my throat. Kids are talking about next year. I want to tell them,’ he said, ‘but it’s not the right time. I don’t want kids to go, “Screw it, if he’s leaving, I’m done. I’m not coming back to school next year.”‘”
The Lyme Wars
Infection rates for Lyme disease are growing, and there’s still debate on how exactly to treat it:
“Nearly everything else about Lyme disease—the symptoms, the diagnosis, the prevalence, the behavior of the borrelia spirochete after it infects the body, and the correct approach to treatment—is contested bitterly and publicly. Even the definition of Lyme disease, and the terminology used to describe it, has fuelled years of acrimonious debate. The conventional medical assessment is straightforward: in most cases, the tick bite causes a skin rash, called erythema migrans, which is easily identified by its bull’s-eye. If left untreated, the bacteria can spread to muscles, joints, the heart, and even the brain. Public-health officials say that a few weeks of antibiotic treatment will almost always wipe out the infection, and that relapses are rare. In this view, put forth in guidelines issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Lyme is normally easy to treat and easy to cure.”
Reading List: Wread About Writing
Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps. This week’s picks include stories from The Rumpus, The American Scholar, Bomblog, and the Poetry Foundation.
Share your favorite stories in the comments.
Paradise Regained
Restoring Howard Finster’s visual art site in Summerville, Ga. Finster died in 2001 at the age of 84 and left behind more than 46,000 pieces of artwork and a garden of attractions:
“Fueled by Coca-Cola, spoonfuls of instant coffee granules, and King B Sweet Twist tobacco, Finster started feverishly creating what would become 46,991 numbered works of art. He perfected an iconography of angels, demons, animals, spaceships, inventors, presidents, Marilyn, and Elvis—mostly painted on wooden cutouts covered over with Bible verses and sermons rendered in urgent all caps.
“Tipped off by Esquire, UGA art professor Andy Nasisse asked Finster to give a talk about his work. The Georgia State Botanical Garden in Athens also invited him to do a show. ‘He blew everyone’s mind at the university,’ recalls Nasisse. ‘Some described that one lecture as a year’s worth of education.’ Other university professors were soon visiting Pennville, from schools like Wake Forest, Lehigh, and Virginia Tech.”
Child Mortality
The writer on contemplating death at an early age:
“For a time I thought that if I ignored death it would ignore me. At school, I tried not looking out across at the cemetery; I shielded my eyes when I was driven past it in the mornings and afternoons, turned my face away any time I was made to go outside during the day. But the grounds and the graves were always there on my blurred periphery. Even tucked away inside the school building, sitting in class or walking the halls, I felt a dark, sickly pull, like death had me in its sights, like it was daring me, just daring me, to look it in the eye.
“I wasn’t even safe at home, or asleep. That fall I began to dream of death—or perhaps I had always dreamed of death but it was only then that I was able to remember the dreams in any detail when I woke. I was so much a child then that it is almost hard to comprehend. I feel like I never possibly could have been so small, so new. When things happened then, they happened for the first time. They had never happened before.”
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