Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Most Wicked Face of Theda Bara

The origins of one of Hollywood’s earliest femme fatales:

“Theodosia Goodman grew up in Cincinnati, the child of middle-class Jewish immigrants. Her father was a tailor; her mother kept house. She went to high school, she went to two years of college. She was a middling actress with middling looks, age 30, stuck in the Yiddish theater circuit, with a bit role in the occasional film. She was wholly unremarkable — one of hundreds of women working toward the same end.

“And then, in 1915, totally out of nowhere, she became THE BIGGEST SEX SYMBOL IN THE WORLD. As the star of A Fool There Was, she embodied the cinematic ‘vamp’ — the evil, predatory woman who seduces men with her dark ways, sucks him dry, and leaves him for ruin. Her name was no longer Theodosia Goodman, but Theda Bara — an anagram, naturally, for ‘ARAB DEATH.'”

Source: The Hairpin
Published: Jan 9, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,322 words)

The Lion Smokes Tonight

The writer lights up with Snoop Dogg, now known as Snoop Lion:

“I must pause here for a moment to point out that we are about to cross the threshold into Snoop’s Narnia. And in Snoop’s Narnia, ideas and concepts that many of us might find dubious, or unscrupulous, feel natural, even kind of innocent. By now, Snoop has joined the ranks of Keith Richards and Jack Nicholson—artists whom we have exempted from the standard rules of society because they’re so widely beloved. So in Snoop’s Narnia, it’s perfectly normal to smoke weed everywhere, all the time, at any hour of the day. In Snoop’s Narnia, it’s perfectly acceptable to look forward to teaching your kids how to pick seeds out of your stash or how to roll a blunt. ‘It’s not that I would ever push weed on our kids,’ says Snoop, who has three children, ranging in age from 12 to 18, ‘but if they wanted to, I would love to show them how, the right way, so that way they won’t get nothing put in their shit or overdose or trying some shit that ain’t clean.'”

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 8, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,537 words)

Richard Burton Was a Great Writer

A glimpse inside the actor’s personal diaries:

“So what sort of actor was he? On the one hand, he was tormented by the job. This is August 4, 1969: ‘I loathe loathe loathe acting. In studios. In England. I shudder at the thought of going to work with the same horror as a bank-clerk must loathe that stinking tube-journey every morning and the rush-hour madness at night. I loathe it, hate it, despise, despise, for Christ’s sake, it.’ That was the year he made Anne of the Thousand Days, on which he at least flirted with Geneviève Bujold, and the year in which Where Eagles Dare (an adventure film that has many enthusiasts) earned him around $7 million. Yet he could also rejoice in the way ‘Burton-and-Taylor’ had become their own film studio, able to do whatever they liked. In fourteen years under contract, he had enjoyed only Alexander the Great and Look Back in Anger.”

Published: Dec 20, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,836 words)

Into the Unknown

In December 1912, 30-year-old Douglas Mawson lost most of his supplies while exploring uncharted territory in Antarctica. The story of his survival:

“For three hours, Mawson and Mertz called into the depths, hoping against hope for an answering cry. They had far too little rope to lower themselves into the crevasse to search for their companion. At last they accepted the inevitable. Ninnis was dead. Gone with him were the team’s most valuable gear, including their three-man tent, the six best huskies, all the food for the dogs, and nearly all the men’s food.”

Published: Jan 1, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,431 words)

What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?

A classic story of a Red Sox baseball legend, by Richard Ben Cramer, who died January 7:

“It was forty-five years ago, when achievements with a bat first brought him to the nation’s notice, that Ted Williams began work on his defense. He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America’s dust.

“Ted was never the kind to quail. In this epic battle, as in the million smaller face-offs that are his history, his instinct called for exertion, for a show of force that would shut those bastards up. That was always his method as he fought opposing pitchers, and fielders who bunched up on him, eight on one half of the field; as he fought off the few fans who booed him and thousands who thought he ought to love them, too; as he fought through, alas, three marriages; as he fought to a bloody standoff a Boston press that covered, with comment, his every sneeze and snort. He meant to dominate, and to an amazing extent, he did. But he came to know, better than most men, the value of his time. So over the years, Ted Williams learned to avoid annoyance. Now in his seventh decade, he had girded his penchants for privacy and ease with a bristle of dos and don’ts that defeat casual intrusion. He is a hard man to meet.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Jun 1, 1986
Length: 58 minutes (14,746 words)

But Never a Lovely So Real

On the life and career of writer Nelson Algren, one of the most prolific—yet underappreciated—writers of the last century:

“For my money, no book more elegantly describes the world of men and women whom the boom years were designed to pass by. In the decades after Golden Arm, the country obsessed over the behaviors and fates of women and men like Algren’s characters—and dedicated millions to altering them through wars on poverty and drugs—but in 1949 Algren was nearly alone in reminding the country that having an upper class requires having a lower class. For the skill and elegance of its prose, its compassion, and its prescience, I’d rank Golden Arm among the very best books written in the twentieth century. Before Algren’s fall from favor and the onset of his obscurity, many people agreed with that assessment. The book received glowing reviews from Time, the New York Times Book Review, the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune, even the New Yorker. Doubleday nominated it for the Pulitzer, and Hemingway, who had declared Algren the second-best American writer (after Faulkner) when Never Come Morning was published, wrote a promotional quote that went too far for Doubleday’s taste but pleased Algren so much he taped it to his fridge:

Into a world of letters where we have the fading Faulkner and that overgrown Lil Abner Thomas Wolfe casts a shorter shadow every day, Algren comes like a corvette or even a big destroyer… Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful… Mr. Algren, boy, are you good.

Source: The Believer
Published: Jan 1, 2013
Length: 35 minutes (8,997 words)

Semi-Charmed Life

On understanding the lives of twentysomethings:

“Allowing for a selective, basically narrow frame of reference, then, it’s worth noting that much of what we know about the twentysomething years comes down to selective, basically narrow frames of reference. Able-bodied middle-class Americans in their twenties—the real subject of these books—are impressionable; they’re fickle, too. Confusion triumphs. Is it smart to spend this crucial period building up a stable life: a promising job, a reliable partner, and an admirable assortment of kitchenware? Or is the time best spent sowing one’s wild oats? Can people even have wild oats while carrying smartphones? One morning, you open the newspaper and read that today’s young people are an assiduous, Web-savvy master race trying to steal your job and drive up the price of your housing stock. The next day, they’re reported to be living in your basement, eating all your shredded wheat, and failing to be marginally employed, even at Wendy’s. For young people with the luxury of time and choice, these ambiguities give rise to a particular style of panic.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 7, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,818 words)

Suds for Drugs

Tide detergent is known as “liquid gold” on the black market, and is being stolen from stores by the cases in exchange for drugs:

“As the cases piled up after his team’s first Tide-theft bust, Thompson sought an answer to the riddle at the center of the crimes: What did thieves want with so much laundry soap? To find out, he and his unit pored over security recordings to identify prolific perpetrators, whom officers then tracked down and detained for questioning. ‘We never promised to go easy on them, but they were willing to talk about it,’ Thompson says. ‘I guess they were bragging.’ It turned out the detergent wasn’t ­being used as an ingredient in some new recipe for getting high, but instead to buy drugs themselves. Tide bottles have become ad hoc street currency, with a 150-ounce bottle going for either $5 cash or $10 worth of weed or crack cocaine. On certain corners, the detergent has earned a new nickname: ‘Liquid gold.’ The Tide people would never sanction that tag line, of course. But this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product.”

Published: Jan 6, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,848 words)

Biological Mother Makes Mission of Contesting Adoption after 31 Years

Did Joy Hunley give away her daughter, or was the baby taken from her?

“Something happened in July of 1981. It triggered a process at the end of which Joy no longer had custody of her toddler daughter. For more than a quarter century, she convinced herself she had made an awful mistake, had signed something she shouldn’t have signed. Over the last few years, though, she had learned new information. She believed she had been the victim of a fraud.

“This was last year, the afternoon of June 26, just before 5. Her attorney brought the records into a small side room and put the papers on the table.

“Somewhere on the consent form in front of her, Joy thought, was going to be the truth — proof of an incomprehensible crime. The other possibility was terrible, too, in its own way — that she had signed it, and had spent more than half her life telling a lie.

“Victim or liar? Wronged or deluded?

“She took another breath.

“She looked at the consent.”

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: Jan 6, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,383 words)

Tales from the World Before Yesterday

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA, recalls his adventures in New Guinea, including his discovery of the long-lost golden-crested bowerbird:

“So, the New Guinean with me made a trail up as high as we could go. He managed to get a trail up to 4,600 feet. I bird-watched there every day. It was utterly magical, because this is an uninhabited range. The birds were tame. The tree kangaroos were tame. I was there alone. It was just me and the mountain. I followed the same trail every day. It was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve had in my life in New Guinea.

“I knew that it was probably too low for the bowerbird. On the day which I got to the highest elevation, I looked up, and there, over my head, was a bowerbird of this group, the amblionus bowerbirds. Oh my God, here’s the bowerbird.”

Source: Edge
Published: Dec 31, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,102 words)