Stuff Julian Schnabel Told Me In His Ex-Wife’s Living Room Last Night

“he touches Dan Colen’s painting with his fingers, moving his fingers over the birdshit lumps, and looks unimpressed. he asks me if i’ve heard of Dan Colen and i say ‘yeah because i read a lot about Dash Snow after he died.’ as we’re standing next to the bird shit painting, i tell Julian Schnabel about the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru, which is the fattest country in the world (97% of men and 93% of women are overweight or obese), because, re: the birdshit painting, the island’s chief export is guano, which is the excrement of bats, birds, and seals. the island got really rich off selling this shit to the rest of the world for fertilizer, and then the rest of the world repaid Nauru by making it the fattest country. Julian Schnabel is entertained”

Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 30, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,397 words)

Cannibals Seeking Same: A Visit To The Online World Of Flesh-Eaters

While it was shut down with a Denial of Service attack by the German authorities in late 2002, the website for the Cannibal Café can still be viewed online thanks to the Wayback Machine. Nine years is an eternity when it comes to the Internet and, suspended there in history, the website is a time capsule of early website-design features and flourishes, down to a .gif of dripping blood and the flashing “WARNING” sign. Its forum messages also carry the whiff of a different era; written at a time when people, unaware and unafraid of consequences, were more open with their identities online.

Author: Josh Kurp
Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 16, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,437 words)

Meet the Heroes of Early Scientology Reporting

Then came the six-part expose published June 24th through 29th, 1990, in the Los Angeles Times, a story that conclusively divided the wheat from the chaff where Scientology rumors were concerned. Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos spent five years on the story and it was, and still is, a corker. The other day Sappell told me that the Times’ Scientology investigation began when he learned that a former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant had become a private investigator for the Scientology organization, after having been fired by the department in 1981 for allegedly running a house of prostitution and alerting a drug dealer to a planned raid. (He was acquitted of all criminal charges in a later trial.) Soon enough it became clear that this former officer was using his LAPD contacts on behalf of his new bosses at Scientology. Sappell’s editor scented a bigger story, and the game was afoot.

Source: The Awl
Published: Feb 16, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,922 words)

Leaving Egypt, with Regrets: The Evacuated Students of Cairo

Through the dense fog, Gunnar saw a lone old man stand in the middle of a deserted street, berating a fearsome wall of police. Then the helmeted officers began charging, firing a hail of bullets. Gunnar dove behind a car. His pants split. He couldn’t tell if the police were firing high or if the old man had been hit. He was a block from his apartment, but he couldn’t get home. He ducked into a shop, where eight people were hiding among the safety of bolts of cloth. “Take those off,” said the shop owner, a tailor, pointing to Gunnar’s pants. “I’ll sew them for you.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Feb 7, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,524 words)

Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun

The 1970s saw the next wave of pronoun debates—not coincidentally, in the wake of a second women’s movement. There was a volley of new pronouns, despite the fact that none of the 19th-century ones had gotten anywhere. By the end of the 1970s over eighty new gender-neutral pronouns had been coughed up, including en, thon, hir, hesh, hizer, hirm, sheehy, and sap. As well, the currently fashionable “she” was proposed around this time.

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 8, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,835 words)

Gordon Likes to Think He Is the Most Underrated of All Mythical Heroes

Gordon was 19 when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Friends, family, and professionals have told him he’s mentally ill, but he can’t see any of the symptoms. To him, it’s all real. When he takes his prescribed medication, the apocalypse doesn’t vanish; the pills simply give him another day to prepare, and he feels like a coward for delaying the imminent confrontation.

Source: The Awl
Published: Dec 14, 2010
Length: 13 minutes (3,421 words)

Ellen Ripley Saved My Life

On female sci-fi heroines. “So it’s a mercy we have Ripley. David Foster Wallace may not have agreed with his date that The Terminator was one long story about the evils of abortioning—but I do! Girl, call me!—but I find it not at all unreasonable to suggest that the entire Alien franchise is about people who are dealing with unplanned pregnancies, and would very much like the possibility of a safe and legal abortion, if only to keep their rib cages from exploding.”

Author: Sady Doyle
Source: The Awl
Published: Dec 7, 2010
Length: 15 minutes (3,834 words)

A Q&A with a Vacuum Cleaner Salesman

Darrell did not cry when the mortgage crisis killed new home construction, putting him out of work. Instead, he packed up his bags and joined his girlfriend in South Florida, where he found a new job as an in-home salesman, pushing expensive vacuum cleaners and air purifiers to snowbirds and other crazy Floridians. While Darrell is but one of hundreds of such salesman in the South Florida area, we have obscured the city in which he works and changed his name to protect his identity.

Author: Mike Riggs
Source: The Awl
Published: Nov 24, 2010
Length: 25 minutes (6,342 words)

My Summer on the Content Farm

Remember that “I Love Lucy” episode where Lucy and Ethel take jobs in the chocolate factory and the conveyor belt starts pumping out candy faster than they can pack it in the wrappers so they start stuffing their faces and cleavage with the excess, cowering from the intimidating factory matron? That’s kind of what it’s like to work for Demand Media, as I found out during a brief, ill-fated stint as a freelance copy editor at the 17th largest web property in the U.S. this summer.

Source: The Awl
Published: Nov 4, 2010
Length: 12 minutes (3,040 words)

Cherayla Davis, Amateur

All six of the contestants at the Apollo Amateur Night semifinals had already advanced through two rounds. Of them, only Cherayla Davis had won first place in both of her appearances. When James Brown competed in Amateur Night, he was booed. Luther Vandross and Lauryn Hill were also booed. Dave Chappelle: booed. Cherayla Davis had never been booed. And this night, she was going out first.

Source: The Awl
Published: Oct 26, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,477 words)