Haunts
[Not single-page] The writer, from Brooklyn, explores the still rapidly changing borough—preparing for the arrival of the Nets and discovering his daughter is a hipster:
“Didn’t like to disagree with Adam, whom I love. But these were my kids we were talking about, them and their friends. They weren’t the ones building high-rises in Williamsburg, the big arenas. They were just looking for a place to be young. Who knew why perfectly normal-seeming people get tattoos, drink so weirdly much, make fetishes out of various food groups like cupcakes, and adopt the diffident poses of actors in Wes Anderson movies? Youth occurs in a time of its own, immune to criticism from those claiming to have had better youths. As idiotic and privileged as it might seem on the surface, growing up remains no easy thing. Every passage to adulthood is a hero’s journey, to be respected, in its own way.
“So it was a good thing these people lived here now, sold their overpriced sodas at Smorgasburg, downloaded from Pitchfork. What else were they supposed to do? Work on the docks, like some Arthur Rimbaud figure? Fly off into space? Brooklyn, of ample context, was a good place to spend a youth, better than South Beach, on the Jell-O-shot diet. Besides, most of them would soon be gone, back to wherever they came from. The ones who stay would be subsumed into the giant swirl of time and place that is the true Brooklyn Brand.”
The New New Girl
Mindy Kaling has quickly progressed from a writer and cast member on NBC’s The Office to a best-selling author and star of her own new sitcom:
“To people who know her, it makes perfect sense that she would now have her own sitcom. It was simply a matter of course, on par with how, at 30, she decided to write a book of memoirish essays and observations called Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). What’s interesting is that the book exists at all. In the introduction, Kaling apologizes for its not being Tina Fey’s Bossypants, anticipating that the two will be compared, even though Fey published her book amid huge anticipation as the fortysomething lead and creator of 30 Rock who was also starring in movies and thriving off her Sarah Palin impersonation. Kaling wrote hers amid demand from herself and her publisher. One of the chapters is a detailed breakdown of just how famous she’d like to be, which is to say, famous enough that teenagers will copy her look and, when she’s old, she’ll be used as a sight gag on TV shows.”
31 Shocks Later
[Not single-page] A young man with developmental problems develops post-traumatic-stress disorder after receiving 31 shocks at the Judge Rotenberg Center, shedding light on the school’s controversial behavior-modification program:
“At first there were no electric shocks. Israel and his workers relied instead on other ‘aversive treatments’: pinching the soles of their feet, squirting them in the face with water, forcing them to sniff ammonia. One student’s punishment for biting: ten spanks on the buttocks, a cool shower, ten ‘rolling pinches’ on the arm, and a time-out wearing a ‘white-noise helmet.’ New York State sent its first student to Israel in 1976.
“A few years later, New York State officials did an inspection. ‘Superficially … the program is very impressive,’ they wrote in a subsequent report. ‘Children, who are obviously handicapped, are engaged in activities and are seldom exhibiting inappropriate behaviors.’ But, they concluded, ‘the children are controlled by the threat of punishment. When that threat is removed, they revert to their original behaviors.’ Ultimately, the officials found the program’s effect on its students to be ‘the singular most depressing experience that team members have had in numerous visitations to human-service programs.'”
Jane Pratt’s Perpetual Adolescence
The founding editor of Sassy and Jane brings a new cast of characters to her site xoJane:
“Jane Pratt has been 15 for an awfully long time now.
“She calls that her ’emotional age,’ and she thinks we all have one: It’s the time in our past that we can’t entirely let go, because of something that happened to us then. Ask her and she’ll guess yours, along with your birthday (this is a trick she sometimes does with callers to her Sirius satellite radio show). You see, she describes herself as being “psychic-intuitive,” which is something like having ESP. Not long ago, she tells me, she guessed the emotional age of one of her employees and it turned out that was the year she’d been raped. After we talked in her office for two hours, at her latest venture—an online women’s magazine called xoJane—she told me that she’d put mine at 13. And maybe she’s right, and I’ll always be that lonely kid in a new school.
“Or just as likely, Pratt knows that a lot of us have felt that way and don’t really get over it, but form ourselves around that hoarded trauma. Whether or not this comes by way of paranormal talent, it’s a great insight, and the reason why Sassy, the nonconformist’s teen magazine she was hired to edit when she was just out of college, in 1987, was so beloved. Her Sassy understood.”
He & He & He
[Not single-page] On the lives of three gay men who live as a “throuple”:
“It is important, perhaps, that each pair within the throuple has a private bond: Jason and Adrian have their history, Jason and Benny work together, and Benny and Adrian are close in age. Benny tells me there is zero jealousy among the three. ‘That’s probably the thing that leaves people the most incredulous,’ he says. ‘It just doesn’t exist with us. If it did, then our relationship sure as hell would not have lasted as long as it has.’ Sometimes there are pangs of jealousy over guys outside of the relationship. But that, Benny says, is rare.
“Most of the men’s parents are not aware of the arrangement (and so I have agreed not to include Jason’s and Adrian’s full names). In a way, they’ve eloped.”
An Inquiry Into the Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise
In celebrity journalism, what do we really know? Absolutely nothing, argues the writer, who constructs a counter-narrative that Katie Holmes has played everyone:
“They compare the pap-friendliness of various celebrities. Among the best are Cruise, in fact, and Hugh Jackman. Scarlett Johansson, who always runs, scowling, is ‘the worst.’ They scoff at the hypocritical attention-seeking of celebrities (‘Why do you think Alec Baldwin tweets his location?’). A middle-aged woman with curly gray hair, tinted granny glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt wanders over. She’s pet-sitting for someone in the building, and she wants to know why the media won’t pay this kind of attention to the problem of puppy mills. Craigslist has really become lax, she says. There’s a ‘secret kill site’ on 110th Street. There’s also—
“‘Katie! Katie! Katie!’
“Holmes, accompanied by a bald, burly off-duty police officer, has emerged from Whole Foods and begun the half-block walk back to the entrance of her building. She’s wearing a salmon blouse and blue jeans, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The puppy-mills lady is left talking to the air as eight paparazzi swoop in front of Holmes, forming a solid wall of jutting lenses that moves furiously backward, calling her name as their legs backpedal and their shutters snap, keeping a few feet ahead of her as she proceeds up the sidewalk, eyes down, her crooked half-smile fixed on her face, and then disappears inside the building.”
Leopold’s Ghost
[Not single-page] Goucher, a small liberal-arts college, hired a French professor from Rwanda named Leopold Munyakazi through The Scholar Rescue Fund, an organization devoted to providing asylum to intellectuals whose lives and work are threatened in their home countries. Sanford J. Ungar, the president of the college, is contacted by investigative reporters at NBC, and Goucher is subsequently accused of harboring a war criminal:
“The details of the accusations were horrifying, and I sat reading the documents while my visitors watched. Between April and July 1994, Leopold had been part of a ‘joint criminal enterprise,’ the indictment alleged, and had ‘trained, indoctrinated, encouraged, provided criminal intelligence to, transported and distributed arms to members’ of the armed forces and civilian militias, who in turn ‘murdered, caused seriously [sic] bodily and mental harm, raped and pillaged Tutsi group members.’ It said he had attended meetings of Hutu in the Kayenzi commune, where he and others allegedly complained that the killing was ‘lagging behind.’ Possibly he had planned or even chaired those meetings. At one such gathering at the Kirwa primary school, Munyakazi ‘took the floor to address more than 2,000 residents,’ it claimed, ‘and publicly incited the masses to commit genocide.’ He had, according to the indictment, personally turned over to the militia a woman who had taken refuge at his home, so that she could be killed.
“I was incredulous, filled with a mixture of anger and self-doubt. As their Rwandan companion nodded quietly in agreement, the producers from NBC demanded to know how Goucher could have sheltered such an evil man. They wanted to film me reacting to the indictment, but I refused. I hid behind the Scholar Rescue Fund, protesting that Leopold had been screened and certified, and that was all we knew. Later, in a New Republic story that was part of the flurry of early, short-lived interest in Leopold’s case, the producers were even quoted as describing my attitude as ‘flippant.'”
The Money-Empathy Gap
[Not single-page] Does having more money make a person have less empathy?
“Earlier this year, Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled ‘Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,’ it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. ‘While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,’ Piff says, ‘the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.'”
‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out with Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit
A lost weekend, or several weeks, with Fiona Apple:
“A week later, my phone beeped. It was a heavily pixelated video. She was wearing glasses, looking straight at me:
“‘Hi, Dan. It’s Fiona. [She moves the camera to her dog.] This is Janet. [She moves it back.] Um, are you coming out here tomorrow? Um, I, I, I don’t know—I’m baffled at this thing that I just got, this e-mail shit, I don’t know what these people—are they trying to antagonize me so that I do shit like this, so that I start fights with them? I don’t understand why there are pictures of models on a page about me. Who the fuck are they? What? What?’
“The text attached read: ‘And are you western-bound? And hi there! F’
“I had no idea what she was talking about. Two days later, I landed at LAX.”
A New York Times Whodunit
Why was New York Times CEO Janet Robinson fired? A look inside the political battles and financial troubles that led Arthur Sulzberger to let Robinson go (with a $24 million exit package):
“Interviews with more than 30 people who are intimately familiar with different aspects of the Times’ business (none but a spokesperson would speak for attribution—this is the paper of record, after all) have made it clear that Gonzalez’s rise and Robinson’s fall, and the ensuing leadership vacuum inside the paper, were symptomatic of larger forces at work. Even as a new pay wall was erected on the Times’ website last spring to charge customers for access, the company’s performance, including an alarming dive in print advertising when other media companies were beginning to recover, was faltering, and Sulzberger was under pressure both financial and familial to throw Robinson overboard.
“As the paper’s stock price has declined in recent years, there has been increasing unease among the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, who control the paper through a special class of shares. Three years ago, facing huge debt problems, the company suspended the lucrative stock dividend that once flowed quarterly to the family’s 40-plus members, intensifying the need to solve the intractable advertising problems of the newspaper in the digital age and figure out a way to turn the family’s cash spigot back on. Janet Robinson, the company’s advertising brains, found herself caught between her increasingly remote boss and a frustrated family worried over the future of its 116-year-old fortune.”