It’s Different for ‘Girls’

Writer-director Lena Dunham is following her breakthrough, 2010’s Tiny Furniture, with a new HBO series produced with Judd Apatow. Inside the making of the series:

“When a TV critic reports on a new show, it’s okay to say the series is promising, even the next big thing, but ideally, one shouldn’t go native. One should probably also talk in the third person. In this case, however, I’ll have to make an exception. Because from the moment I saw the pilot of Girls (which airs on April 15), I was a goner, a convert. In an office at HBO, my heart sped up. I laughed out loud; I ‘got’ the characters—four friends, adrift in a modern New York of unpaid internships and bad sex on dirty sofas. But the show also spoke to me in another way. As a person who has followed, for more than twenty years, recurrent, maddening ­debates about the lives of young women, the series felt to me like a gift. Girls was a bold defense (and a searing critique) of the so-called Millennial Generation by a person still in her twenties.”

Published: Mar 26, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,764 words)

The GOP’s Great Hope for Supreme Court Season

Paul Clement, a former solicitor general under George W. Bush, is representing state attorneys general in the Supreme Court fight against Obama’s health care law—and it’s just one of seven cases he’ll be arguing before the court:

“There are two ways to assess a Supreme Court argument. One is to view it as an act of persuasion. You can read Clement’s brief primarily as a letter to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who’ll likely be the deciding vote if the Court overturns Obama­care. Clement quotes Kennedy’s previous opinions throughout his brief, and he leans on broad themes rather than legalistic detail, which is a style that has worked to good effect on the justice in past cases. The other, more cynical way to view a Supreme Court argument is as an act of manipulation—to provide the justices with a plausible rationale for reaching a decision they’re already predisposed to make. If you believe that the Court’s conservative majority is itching to strike down Obamacare, then the task is to launder this decision of partisan motivation. And so Clement argues that there are, in fact, other ways to fix America’s health-care system without an individual mandate; it’s just that Congress chose not to avail itself of those means because they were politically unpopular.”

Published: Mar 19, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,362 words)

Those Fabulous Confabs

How the TED conference exploded in popularity—spawning a host of competitors, copycats and aspiring TED talkers:

“Until recently, the universal self-­actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them. There are people on YouTube who upload webcammed soliloquies about whatever and title them things like ‘My TED Talk.’ There’s now even a genre of meta–TED Talks. For a TEDActive talk in 2010, Sebastian Wernicke, a statistician, crunched the data of extant TED Talks to reverse-engineer both the best- and worst-possible talks. Elements common to the most popular TED Talks, he determined good-humoredly, included using certain words (‘coffee,’ ‘happiness’), feeling free to ‘fake intellectual capacity and just say et cetera et cetera,’ and growing your hair long. He created an app, the TEDPAD, a kind of TED-omatic that can generate ‘amazing and really bad’ TED Talks.”

Published: Mar 4, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,692 words)

Whitewashing Gay History

[Not single-page] Liberals’ history with regard to gay rights is not as progressive as some would like to remember:

“It was, after all, the trustees of the Smithsonian Institution, not a Bible Belt cultural outpost, who bowed to pressure from the militant Catholic League just fifteen months ago to censor the work of a gay American artist who had already been silenced, long ago, by AIDS. It was a Democratic president, with wide support from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who in 1996 signed the Defense of Marriage Act, one of the most discriminatory laws ever to come out of Washington. It’s precisely because of DOMA that to this day same-sex marriages cannot be more than what you might call placebo marriages in the eight states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized them. DOMA denies wedded same-sex couples all federal benefits—some 1,000, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ programs—and allows the other 42 states to ignore their marriages altogether.”

Author: Frank Rich
Published: Feb 26, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,479 words)

The Lost Party

How the 2012 GOP primary became such a mess—and what it means for the future of the party:

“That Mitt Romney finds himself so imperiled by Rick Santorum—Rick Santorum!—is just the latest in a series of jaw-dropping developments in what has been the most volatile, unpredictable, and just plain wackadoodle Republican-nomination contest ever. Part of the explanation lies in Romney’s lameness as a candidate, in Santorum’s strength, and in the sudden efflorescence of social issues in what was supposed to be an all-economy-all-the-time affair. But even more important have been the seismic changes within the Republican Party. ‘Compared to 2008, all the candidates are way to the right of John McCain,’ says longtime conservative activist Jeff Bell. ‘The fact that Romney is running with basically the same views as then but is seen as too moderate tells you that the base has moved rightward and doesn’t simply want a conservative candidate—it wants a very conservative one.'”

Published: Feb 25, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,192 words)

His. Hers.

[Not single-page] Tory Burch’s ex-husband Christopher Burch has a new fashion line called C. Wonder. But some in her circle wonder if it draws a little too much inspiration from her own brand:

“To Chris Burch, C. Wonder is the realization of a long-held dream to provide low-to-mid-price retail in a luxury setting. To Tory Burch, he might as well have erected a giant lacquered middle finger in the front window, directly facing the orange-lacquered doors of her eponymous store a few blocks away. ‘It’s a rip-off, Tory knows it, and everyone knows it,’ says someone we will refer to as a Friend of Tory. ‘The interior is blatantly plagiarized. Then there’s the snap bracelets. The wallets. The buttons … '”

Published: Feb 13, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,045 words)

The End of Wall Street as They Knew It

[Not single-page.] Financial reform has been more successful at changing Wall Street’s business than many imagined—and the public outcry from Occupy and elsewhere has led to some soul-searching:

“For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. ‘After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?’ an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. ‘I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.’ ‘If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,’ says a hedge-fund executive. ‘You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.'”

Published: Feb 6, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,777 words)

The Lonely Battle of Wael Ghonim

[Not single-page] The Google engineer who became a symbol of the Egyptian revolution grapples with what’s next for the country:

“A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo. His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. ‘Isn’t enough enough?’ the man asked. ‘What are you doing to this country?’ The executive turned out to be an engineering consultant whom Ghonim pegged at around 50; he might have been Ghonim himself born twenty years earlier. Ghonim is both an interested listener and not great at getting out of conversations, and so he spent the flight absorbing his seatmate’s story: The older man had supported the protests at Tahrir Square and experienced ‘the epitome of happiness’ when Mubarak had been forced down on February 11. But as the revolution had barreled on, some of its demands seemingly extreme, and the country continued to falter, the consultant had come to resent all of it.”

Published: Jan 24, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,546 words)

The Life and Death of Pvt. Danny Chen

[Not single-page] Chen, a 19-year-old who grew up in New York’s Chinatown, joins the Army. Nine months later, he’s found dead in Afghanistan from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, after facing constant abuse from his superiors:

“The Army recently announced that it was charging eight soldiers—an officer and seven enlisted men—in connection with Danny Chen’s death. Five of the eight have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and negligent homicide, and the coming court-martial promises a fuller picture of the harrowing abuse Chen endured. But even the basic details are enough to terrify: What could be worse than being stuck at a remote outpost, in the middle of a combat zone, tormented by your superiors, the very same people who are supposed to be looking out for you? And why did a nice, smart kid from Chinatown, who’d always shied from conflict and confrontation, seek out an environment ruled by the laws of aggression?”

Published: Jan 7, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,999 words)

A Monster Among the ‘Frum’

[Not single-page] Levi Aron remained single for the bulk of his twenties, a sign that he was considered by both his family and the neighborhood shadken to be of lesser stock. For companionship, he turned to a group of like-minded Jews, most of them also single men. They called themselves rebels, one friend remembers. They raged against the strictures of the frum, or pious, world and gathered at restaurants and bars around South Brooklyn—their go-to spot was a dimly lit kosher Japanese steakhouse called Fuji Hana. Aron could be a hard person to talk to, by turns aggressively chatty or heavy-­lidded and silent. “His head would just drop down and his face would go blank,” one former friend remembers. “We’d ask him if he was okay, and he’d lean over and show us the scar from the bike accident.” He seemed to have trouble “distinguishing emotional distance,” one acquaintance said. “He could tell you if he knew someone, but he couldn’t tell you who’s a friend, who’s just some guy he barely knows.”

Published: Dec 4, 2011
Length: 27 minutes (6,908 words)