The Han Solo Comedy Hour!

The night The Star Wars Holiday Special broadcast on CBS, Lenny Ripps threw a party. “I had lots of people over, and lots of food, and lots of anticipation,” he recalls. “And we sat in front of the TV, and after the first commercial, I turned it off and I said, ‘Let’s eat.’”

The special is not easy to sit through by any stretch of the imagination, but fans of old-school comedy or show-business carnage will find some guilty pleasures. As a karmic reward for his reluctance to participate, Harrison Ford gets to open the show in a scene where his and Chewbacca’s efforts to get back to Kashyyyk are stymied by a dogfight with Imperial forces. As the Millennium Falcon’s cabin is rocked by what seems to be a tired, off-screen Teamster, Ford gets to say lines like “That’s the spirit! You’ll be celebrating Life Day before you know it!” This leads into the special’s opening credits, where, if you look closely at the insert shot of Ford when he is introduced, you can actually see him fuming.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 24, 2008
Length: 17 minutes (4,292 words)

The Good Seed

In her mind, she told me, there was one overwhelming thought: She wanted—she needed—Nik’s sperm.

Outside the hospital, at the picnic table, she acknowledged how crazy the idea likely sounded. She said they could get an egg donor and a surrogate. No one said anything at first. They stared at her.

She went on. She told them how the last time she’d seen him, a little more than two weeks ago, he’d spoken again of his longing for children; she reminded them that they’d all had similar conversations with him. They’d decided to donate his organs anyway; why not take something from him that would otherwise go to waste? She spoke of making “Nikki’s dream come true.”

Author: Dan P. Lee
Source: GQ
Published: Dec 24, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,428 words)

Six to Eight Black Men

In Holland the children receive presents on December 5, in celebration of Saint Nicholas Day. It sounded sort of quaint until I spoke to a man named Oscar, who filled me in on a few of the details as we walked from my hotel to the Amsterdam train station. … The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as “six to eight black men.” I asked several Dutch people to narrow it down, but none of them could give me an exact number. It was always “six to eight,” which seems strange, seeing as they’ve had hundreds of years to get a decent count.

Source: Esquire
Published: Dec 1, 2002
Length: 7 minutes (1,893 words)

Novels From the Edge: For Helen DeWitt, the Publishing World Is a High-Stakes Game

Lightning Rods is about a salesman named Joe who fails to sell a single Encyclopedia Britannica and sells exactly one Electrolux vacuum cleaner. He realizes the problem isn’t with him. The problem is with other people. He needs to sell “something people knew they needed anyway.” He sets up a business of contracted female administrative assistants—nicknamed Lightning Rods—that have anonymous sex with the male employees in an office through a glory hole in the bathroom. He says he can convince people that this is a substitute for ordinary sex, and a way of guarding against workplace sexual harassment. The idea sweeps the nation and changes everything. Ms. DeWitt gives the last word of her novel to George Washington: “In America anything is possible.”

Published: Dec 21, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,070 words)

The Struggle For The Occupy Wall Street Archives

Bold said he had this sense early on in his involvement in OWS. And inspired by a presentation he’d seen at NYU about the collection of artifacts after the September 11th attacks, he decided to get serious about collecting immediately. He told people he knew in the movement to save their writings and signs. He began carrying stuff home himself.

But—and this he says he took from Derrida too, who wrote a book called Archive Fever—he thought it was essential, if the movement wanted to have some degree of control over how it was recorded and interpreted by historians, to collect their own documents. “So I was like, we have to have our own house, and if we’re going to talk about creating our own history, doing all this stuff ourselves, we have to have our own archives. So I was like, all right, let’s do it.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Dec 22, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,706 words)

Stories to Live With

The story of my brother’s life is complicated by the fact that in my earliest memories there is no such thing as him or me. My brother was born one year and nine days after me, and although I was older, I have no recollection of life before he arrived. Growing up on a small family farm, we were alone in our play, and before the age of five it was always Dan and me together, sneaking strawberries from the garden, building snowmen in the yard until the darkness fell and our cheeks stung from the cold, whispering in our bunk beds at night. We were more than accomplices, much more even than friends; we were all the other had.

Published: Dec 22, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,999 words)

The Stations of the Sun

[Fiction] According to Chinese mythology, the goddess Nugua formed the first mortals from yellow mud. An artist, she carefully sculpted each limb, pressed closed each fingertip, contoured each nose, creating individuals. But at some point she became impatient with the demands of craftsmanship and dipped a vine in darker soil, flung it every which way. Lumps of mud fell from the skies, and became human.

And so the land was divided into two races: the hand-formed pale-skinned nobles, and the darker commoners who had never known the goddess’s touch.

Chinese people, Annabel’s mother said, shaking her head. Such snobs. But in the lamplight, her mother’s face shone paler than the moon.

Author: R.O. Kwon
Source: Kenyon Review
Published: May 1, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,119 words)

Being Babe Ruth’s Daughter

Julia Ruth Stevens, his sole surviving daughter, calls him Daddy. Odd as it is to hear a nonagenarian refer to a man 60 years gone as Daddy, it is also a tender reminder of the limits of hyperbole, how grandiose honorifics obscure the messy, telling details of an interior life.

To others he is a brand, an archetype, a lodestar. His shape is ingrained in our DNA. His name recognition, 96 percent, is higher than any living athlete. (His Q score, a measure of how much the people who know him like him, is 32 percent compared to 13 percent for today’s average major leaguer.) And yet, as well-known as he is, the most essential biographical fact of his life, one that demands revisiting what we thought we knew, one that Julia assumed everybody knew, remained unknown.

Author: Jane Leavy
Source: Grantland
Published: Dec 19, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,906 words)

Weight Watchers Revamps Its Magic Formula

The transformation required a radical, stealth operation. The company’s more than 12,000 leaders, the emcees who guide the local meetings, were put on PointsPlus so they’d have it mastered before the switch. This meant they were practicing one program while preaching another. Meanwhile, marketing and brochures needed to be updated, new smartphone apps, calculators, and cookbooks had to be developed, and the website needed to be overhauled. Miller-Kovach’s team compiled a new database of some 47,000 foods. All while, even in the executive ranks, people were questioning such a wholesale change. “Do I think at least 90 percent of the people who worked for Weight Watchers regretted Dave asking me that question? Yes,” says Miller-Kovach, referring to the initial meeting with Kirchhoff. “The business had at least quadrupled since the introduction of Points, and very few people in areas of responsibility had been through a program transition. When reality hit, it was big.”

Just after Thanksgiving 2010, Weight Watchers flipped the switch. Says Kirchhoff: “It was as though we went from dollars to euros overnight.”

Source: Wired
Published: Dec 16, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,285 words)

The Collector

On a warm Saturday in early July, an employee at the Maryland Historical Society placed a call to the police. He had noticed two visitors behaving strangely—a young, tall, handsome man with high cheekbones and full lips and a much older, heavier man, with dark, lank hair and a patchy, graying beard. The older man had called in advance to give the librarians a list of boxes of documents he wanted to see, saying that he was researching a book. At some point during their visit, the employee saw the younger man slip a document into a folder. When the police arrived, they found 79 documents in a laptop bag and took the two men into custody.

The younger man was Jason Savedoff, a 24-year-old Canadian-American dual citizen and aspiring model who had attended McGill University. But it was the older man whose identity quickly attracted national attention. He was a 63-year-old presidential historian named Barry Landau, who for many years had moved in the most rarefied circles of American life.

Author: Eliza Gray
Published: Dec 14, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,206 words)