28 Years With Weird Al

“‘Everyone else is here for the Monkees,’ dad said. ‘But we’re a Weird Al family.'” Bex Schwartz looks back on her long-time obsession with singer-songwriter and parodist Weird Al Yankovic.

Source: The Awl
Published: Jul 18, 2014
Length: 7 minutes (1,854 words)

The Tortured History of ‘Entertainment Weekly’

How Time Inc. created the entertainment magazine 24 years ago, and how it was soon haunted by a quest for corporate synergy:

EW’s rise, scattered identity, brilliant heyday and slow, gradual decline mirrors the same journey of Time Warner’s conglomerate hopes and dreams. The leading magazine company weds a film and television giant? It all looked so great on paper. But here we are with the EW of today, and it’s clear: Just because it looks pretty in a business plan doesn’t mean it’s a good idea at all.

Source: The Awl
Published: Jun 10, 2014
Length: 33 minutes (8,339 words)

How to Be a Writer

A handy guide to becoming a true professional:

At 6 a.m., I quit email because that’s what writers do if they want to get some motherfucking writing done. But I have to go on Twitter for a second to favorite a few of my editor’s tweets so he’ll know that I’m not mad or anything. It’s so easy for people to think that you’re full of rage when you’re a woman and a writer and oldish and you never, ever get paid! Ignorant dummies. Then I reply to a youngish writer who just moved to LA and hates her job and hates LA and is panicking. “Remember you’re having an adventure!” I tell her, because she’s young and she probably doesn’t have dogs with health problems yet. So then I end up scrolling through my Twitter feed, probably just to remind myself that all of these other writers don’t have 8,204 followers like I do, because I’m so fucking esteemed and accomplished after having done this for almost two decades. I’m a professional, is the thing. I know my fucking shit. I just keep producing high-quality work. That’s why I have 8,202 followers.

Source: The Awl
Published: May 12, 2014
Length: 13 minutes (3,339 words)

It’s Adventure Time

The writer spends some time with the creators of “Adventure Time”—a wildly popular animated TV series on the Cartoon Network—to discuss what makes the show so magical:

We began by talking about humor. Children’s humor, I suggested, is commonly thought of as a kind of “diversion” from fear or sadness. But Adventure Time confronts very dark themes head on: The apocalypse, the possibility of loss and pain, grief and mortality. Yet somehow it makes these grave things seem so simple, unthreatening, even hilarious.

“It’s funnier when you’re sad, I think,” he said. “I’ve heard laughter is releasing stress from your body, like when you go, ’HA! Haaaa!’—you know, you get it out of you. My favorite kind of humor is dark comedies, because I think, mmm… I guess that’s my personality, maybe I’m more cynical about things, so I laugh stuff off easily, and life is really scary?”

Source: The Awl
Published: Apr 15, 2014
Length: 45 minutes (11,383 words)

Inside The Barista Class

A former barista examines service work and the difficult transition into the creative class:

My kind of service work is not the kind of service work that puts you in the back room washing dishes for 12-hour shifts for dollars because you are considered completely expendable. But my kind of service work is part of the same logic that indiscriminately razes neighborhoods. It outsources the emotional and practical needs of the oft-fetishized, urban-renewing “creative” workforce to a downwardly mobile middle class, reducing workers’ personality traits and educations to a series of plot points intended to telegraph a zombified bohemianism for the benefit of the rich.

Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 11, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,621 words)

Showtime, Synergy

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is now free for everyone: Matt Siegel’s love story about identity, sex and finding companionship:

It was an acquaintance and former editor of one of those gay lifestyle magazines who advised twenty-year-old me to tone it down if I ever wanted to find a boyfriend. This coming from a man obsessed with anything Disney-related; the walls of his West Hollywood condo adorned with carefully framed Snow White and Fantasia animation cels. “You don’t need to tell them how much you love Belinda Carlisle on your first date,” he said. “But I do love Belinda Carlisle! That quavering vibrato!” I whined. “Well,” he said, “they’ll find out eventually, and by that point they will love you, Belinda and all.” While I hate(d) him for saying it, I understood the algorithm: gay men are attracted to men, so the more you resemble a man, the more desirable you will be to a gay man. [Insert frowny face emoticon.]

Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 4, 2014
Length: 29 minutes (7,343 words)

I Was A Love-Letter Ghostwriter

The writer on working on art piece called the “Love Letter Project,” in which she ghostwrote love letters fro strangers:

I listened until he was finished talking. Then I arranged the sentences he’d spoken on the page. It was more like transcribing than writing.

I will never in my life not regret that we didn’t work things out. I will never let go. I don’t want to.

At the front of the room was a small table with a printer, envelopes, pens and stamps. “You may sign your letter,” Jana told him and he did. “Would you like a stamp so you can mail it? Or we can mail it for you.” He took the stamp and addressed the envelope, but wasn’t quite committed enough to let us mail it. His feelings had been so close to the surface. We had happened to catch him at the perfect moment.

But it kept happening like that.

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 30, 2014
Length: 8 minutes (2,040 words)

Why Is America Turning To Shit?

A look at the culture and politics of something we all do: poop:

Consider the difficulties of your everyday life if you had to wade through wet fields or even an idyllic garden to get to a leafy area to shit or to an outhouse to take a crap, and if you couldn’t simply flush it away with a quick movement of the hand but had to worry about the sanitary requirements of seeing that the shit didn’t simply turn into a disease-harboring pile or smear your clothes or return with you into the home.

Consider what your day would look like if you had to go in a bucket, constantly rake over your own shit and that of others, being careful to cover it with enough composting material so that it didn’t simply turn into, well, a pile of shit that, again, spread disease amongst everyone in your household.

For many millions of people, shit is not something you hold on to but rapidly want to get away from, as soon as you’re done. For the eager shit activists in cities like Chicago and New York, composting is a way to prove their fealty to the planet or their credibility.

Source: The Awl
Published: Oct 30, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,409 words)

Short Read: Rape Joke, A Poem By Patricia Lockwood

“The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

“The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

“The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

“Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. ‘Ahhhh,’ it thinks. ‘Yes. A goatee.‘”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jul 25, 2013
Length: 5 minutes (1,312 words)

The Other Person Is You

Can one find clarity at a Kundalini Yoga retreat? A first-person account from the Summer Solstice Sadhana Celebration:

“Japji was written sometime in the 16th century by Guru Nanak, the first of the ten Sikh gurus. It was written in Gurmukhi. It takes about twenty minutes to recite and what it mostly says is A. it is good to chant God’s name and B. you can’t comprehend how great God is so you need to chant his name and C. doing so is the only way you will really make any headway in life, so don’t bother trying to figure life out, really, it’s too complicated, so you should just chant God’s name.

“I don’t believe in God, really, or maybe I do. Either way, metaphorically, that all makes a lot of sense to me.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jul 10, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,637 words)