Search Results for: City Journal

25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez on the set of 'Hustlers' in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

As more publications pursue blockbuster stories with film and television potential, producers in Hollywood and the magazine industry are taking their inspiration from successful article-to-film adaptations of the past that have achieved box office success.

Here are 25 gold-standard film adaptations of magazine articles, published over the course of half a century as cover stories, features, or breaking news, as well as direct links to read all 25 stories online.

Legacy magazines with well-known print editions dominate this list, as do the nonfiction writers that legacy magazines accept and champion. Many of these writers’ names will be familiar to readers, as will the majority of the magazines and films themselves, in many cases because celebrated journalists inspired these major motion pictures at the peak of their careers as writers and reporters. Name recognition in one industry reinforces name recognition in another, and — despite the incredible diversity of feature-length nonfiction being published today by new voices most mainstream audiences have yet to discover — institutional support still tends to elevate known veterans.

While the talents of all of the writers on this list are undeniable, there are also well-documented structural biases that account for why so many of the writers represented here are overwhelmingly male, white, or Susan Orlean. These stories belong on any narrative nonfiction syllabus on their own merit, but I hope these samples are still just the beginning, and that new filmmakers and magazine writers can start to work together far more often on a greater breadth of material, with sufficient editorial guidance and studio backing to support them.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ve limited this roundup to favor adaptations (loosely defined) based primarily on magazine-style features, including only a couple of films based on award-winning newspaper investigations. The list of new film and television adaptations based on popular books or podcasts, let alone reporting that has helped support the explosion in streaming documentary formats, would run even longer.

It takes time, access, imagination, and resources to be able to realize ambitious true stories like these in their original form as narrative magazine features. It would be a welcome change to see greater diversity in the production pipeline in the coming years: in the subjects of narrative stories, in the publications considered for exclusive source material, in the creative teams that are given studio support, in the agencies brokering deals, in the awards and recognition that elevate new work, and in the storytellers who are given the resources to write long.

Writers are the lifeblood of all of these industries, and will always play a pivotal role in any production that is based on a true story.

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

Based on Can You Say…Hero? by Tom Junod (Esquire, 1998)

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.”

Hustlers (2019)

Based on The Hustlers at Scores by Jessica Pressler (The Cut, 2015)

While evolutionary theory and The Bachelor would suggest that a room full of women hoping to attract the attention of a few men would be cutthroat-competitive, it’s actually better for strippers to work together, because while most men might be able keep their wits, and their wallets, around one scantily clad, sweet-smelling sylph, they tend to lose their grip around three or four. Which is why at Hustler, as elsewhere, the dancers worked in groups.

Beautiful Boy (2018)

Based on My Addicted Son by David Sheff (The New York Times Magazine, 2005)

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, “That was that.” It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, said that methamphetamine makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on meth he became unrecognizable.

Read more…

Miami: A Beginning

William Gottlieb / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Read an introduction to the series.

Jessica Lynne | Longreads | February 2020 | 10 minutes (2,737 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

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Much has been written about certain cities and their landscapes that conjure a particular sentimentality or feeling within those who live there or those who chose to visit. At times, the lore is so great that it overwhelms. New York, for instance, ignites a peculiar sense of inertia, a stagnancy that cannot be perfectly described even though when you are there, it presses itself onto you and it is hard to ignore. We have come to know Paris as a city of love; it seems impossible to escape a looming sense of romance. The poems and the essays and the paintings and the photography and even the songs have given to us this mirage. As any young, eager traveler to Paris might be inclined, I once searched, many years ago, hoping to find love in the first, sixth, or 13th arrondissement.

I did not, however, fall in love in Paris. I fell in love, instead, in Miami. 

When I tell people that I fell in love in Miami, I have noticed a reaction that first takes the form of surprise then quickly turns to intrigue. One friend responded with a smile and a curt, Sexy. I imagine, for most people unfamiliar with the vastness of  Miami-Dade County, when one hears love and Miami, one might be inclined to think of Miami Beach — a denizen of glamour, glitz, nightlife — and thus picture a scene incongruent with that which we dream up when we say love. This imagining does not include the walks I have taken throughout Opa Locka, ambling along without a plan. It does not include Adelita’s Café on NE 2nd Avenue where dear friends once took me to eat breakfast while Honduran music videos played in the background. It does not include the many concerns of climate catastrophe that hover. Perhaps, it is because I grew up in a region defined, in part, by swampland and coastline, beaches and a nebulous hurricane season — a region that in certain aspects of its topography reminds me of Miami — but I have never been surprised by what happened to me. I have always understood the water to carry forth potencies.

Time is a mysterious phenomenon because when I fell in love in Miami, I was floating through a period of depression and having difficulty communicating this to friends and loved ones. I had traveled to the city for a research residency hoping to read or write or work myself out of it. That moment in my life feels as though it was decades ago and also as though it just happened last week. It, in actuality, unfolded in the middle of a Lenten season about two years ago. As I packed my suitcase, anxious to leave a still winter New York, I texted the person with whom I would eventually fall in love a selfie of me wearing a wool winter coat, frowning in the back of a taxi, on my way to JFK airport. When I look at that photo now (I have not been able to, not wanted to delete it), I wonder if that Jessica knew what awaited her.

Miami humidity is a familiar sensation to me, comforting in fact. It reminds me to move slowly. To breathe deeply. It reminds me that water, in each of its three states, has something to teach us about how we should be in our bodies, what we should do to best care for ourselves. There are those who loathe the excess of moisture in the air. I revel in the stickiness. 

It is possible that as I texted the person with whom I would fall in love on my way from Miami International Airport to the residency home in Little Haiti where I would spend the week, I said something like this to them about the city. It is possible that they responded back to me with an affirmation of sorts, because though they did not live in Miami either, they too were from a place of humidity and hurricanes. They too understood the ways in which those forces rumble through the body. Maybe this is why, on that night, the night that feels like it occurred both decades ago and just last week, as we settled into a nervous then tranquil video chat, I knew that love was happening to us.

As I packed my suitcase, anxious to leave a still winter New York, I texted the person with whom I would eventually fall in love a selfie of me wearing a wool winter coat, frowning in the back of a taxi, on my way to JFK airport.

Isn’t love just as mysterious as time? I am not sure how to recount the beginning except to say that our beginning was cliché even if I knew it was special: We met on social media. Isn’t this how it tends to go nowadays? They think you’re cute. They follow. You think they’re cute. You comment. The dance ensues until that first encounter or touch or night spent together. That night, the person with whom I would fall in love and I laughed through our screens because we did not yet know what or when that first encounter would be and somehow that was alright for the moment. Even then, I recognized that serendipity rarely shows up in relationships of distance. So instead, we talked about other things: sargassum, the sea, salt-water, roosters, the moon. 


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This is another thing I have come to love about Miami when I visit: the moon. Though Miami is a big city and it is sometimes difficult to see the stars, the moon that night was a waning crescent. In this phase, the moon is most visible right before sunrise as it points eastward. A waning crescent moon is seen right before a new moon which is in itself, a time for clarity, rebirth, revision. During the new moon, the gravitational pulls of the sun and moon are aligned and if you are near coastline, you will notice the extremities of high and low tides. That night, we were both, quietly, preparing to receive each other, in spite of the distance — moon, water, heart in dialogue. 

En Route

On February 12, 2019, as NASA’s Mars rover, Opportunity, died, the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory effectively gave the robot a resting tribute by playing Billie Holiday’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Opportunity first landed on Mars in 2004 as the search for water on the red planet began in earnest. Engineers last received a communication from the robot during a dust storm on the planet in the summer of 2018. According to one NASA dispatch from that June, high amounts of dust prevented Opportunity from receiving the solar power necessary for recharging: 

NASA engineers attempted to contact the Opportunity rover today but did not hear back from the nearly 15-year-old rover. The team is now operating under the assumption that the charge in Opportunity’s batteries has dipped below 24 volts and the rover has entered low power fault mode, a condition where all subsystems, except a mission clock, are turned off. The rover’s mission clock is programmed to wake the computer so it can check power levels.

If the rover’s computer determines that its batteries don’t have enough charge, it will again put itself back to sleep. Due to an extreme amount of dust over Perseverance Valley, mission engineers believe it is unlikely the rover has enough sunlight to charge back up for at least the next several days.

By February, it had become clear that Opportunity’s data transmission from the summer of 2018 would be its last. Holiday’s voice became the voice of final goodbye. 

I was in New Orleans, another coastal ecology always contending with the water, when I read this news. Away from this person I now loved as Valentine’s Day crept up, I had never considered Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” to be a song of farewell. It has always been, for me, an amorous sonic epistle, a way of saying, here, you are where my heart belongs. Away from this person I loved as Valentine’s Day approached, unable to figure out how to be in person together, separated still by an ocean and time, I played this song if only to remind myself that distance would not become a permanent impasse. By that February, we had almost perfected a system: one month here, one month there. There being, at first, the small island where the person I loved was born, a short trip from my Brooklyn home. This was our rhythm soon after Miami. Then, as the person I loved relocated for school, there became a big, gray European City. Here morphed into a series of different cities in which I took up residence after moving out of Brooklyn. I had decided I needed to travel as I figured out the terms of a book project I wanted to take on. 

And so, guided by the desire to sharpen ourselves, we leapt in different directions as we still attempted to hold onto each other, transience best understood as the context for our love.

* * *

If you have heard “I’ll Be Seeing You” at any point in your life (and chances are that you have), you have most likely listened to the version Holiday recorded in 1944 — the version played for Opportunity, in fact — though it was not originally her song. Composer Sammy Fain and songwriter Irvin Kahal wrote the song in 1938 and as WWII began, it gradually personified the ache and hope of a generation that watched their loved ones leave without an assurance of return. Fain and Kahal’s tune was a hit; Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra each recorded their own renditions. Yet, it took a Black woman to lend the song its gravitas. 

If Aretha Franklin is the singer who first taught me how to see God, it has been Holiday who has taught me how to name a kind of romantic love. 

I was a few months shy of 14 when I first heard Holiday’s version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” It was summer 2004 and the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s novel The Notebook had just been released in the U.S. The film tells the story of an unlikely pairing of two white South Carolinians — Allie and Noah — in the 1940s who, in spite of their class differences, fall in love one summer against the backdrop of the Second World War. We learn of the drama of their romance via flashbacks of an older couple eventually revealed to be the elder Allie and Noah. 

That night, we were both, quietly, preparing to receive each other, in spite of the distance — moon, water, heart in dialogue.

In the scene I found most striking, the scene that defines the film for me, Noah and Allie are on their first date and begin to dance in the middle of the street. Slowly, they move as Holiday starts to croon. I did not know anything profound about romance then as a teenager, but I knew that I had never heard a love song like that before. I’d heard few voices that hummed through me like Holiday’s did that afternoon. 

Kahal’s lyrics embody the familiar longing that occurs between lovers separated. As Holiday’s voice eases into that opening horn melody, steady and deliberate, each lyric pronounced and clear, she carries those words into a significant emotional, poetic plane.  Holiday’s lento performance stands in for all of us who have just as slowly and tenderly opened that anticipated letter with “I love you,” or “I am always thinking of you,” awaiting. And in the distinctive fortitude that defined a hallmark era of jazz and the blues as musical genres, it was Holiday who offered an unmatched vocal rhythm and inventiveness. Perhaps she has taught us all how to love: her 1956 rendition of Vernon Duke’s “April in Paris,” evoking sentiments I once hoped to find in that very city but could not quite grasp at the time. Her version of Duke’s similarly classic standard, “Autumn in New York,” conjuring the lurking beauty of the fall season in a city that can be hard to embrace in moments. To listen to Holiday is to listen to a woman who has lived and loved, and that acute transmission of heartache, of a resolute knowing, is her potency, like the water. 

“I’ll Be Seeing You” is not about one city. It is about the moon; it is about everywhere. It is about all the locations in which we have yearned. When I think of the person I loved, I fold myself inside of Holiday’s transmission. 

* * *

There is so much about a long-distance relationship that can seem fleeting, and because the moments of physical togetherness and intimacy become planned in a meticulous manner, it always feels as if you are chasing time. Trying to get it to not just slow down, but to stop. Trying to extend a day into a week, a week into a month. In a long-distance relationship you are constantly grappling with the tension between aloneness and loneliness because the threat of being overwhelmed by nostalgia feels palpable. That night in Miami, under the waning crescent moon, when I knew that I would indeed love the person who I loved, in spite of a distance that I could not yet see reconciled, I thought to myself, Billie will steady us. 

I carried that song with me everywhere. On the New York City subway, at the Acropolis in Athens, in a quiet bar in Bonn, at the Souk of Marrakech. I learned how to find the person I loved in the poetry section of a New Orleans bookstore, that vintage shop in Baltimore, a Lisbon pastelaria. Each new place, Lady Day in my head, on my heart, reminding me to look at the moon before sleep, that I would always find a reflection of the person I loved there, too, until the next visit. 

An Ending

I keep coming back to three lines in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

When you travel everything goes with you, even the things you do not know.
They travel; they take up space; they remain the things you do not know;
they become the things you will never know.

I tell myself that when you are in a long-distance relationship, especially one that requires crossing water as commute, travel can become burdensome and exhausting and the last thing you want is to carry excess. Brand does not speak of romantic love, I know, but recently, I cannot read these words without thinking about the unknown excesses that traveled with me as love took me back and forth across an ocean. I only knew, instead, how to name what was becoming my loneliness. I am sure the person I loved was unraveling in this way too. 

Here are some items that I would regularly pack: a raincoat, two books, a comfortable pair of sneakers, a laptop, a purple caftan, five T-shirts, a few sweaters, three pairs of jeans, multiple love notes. 

Even now, I am worried that I have exposed too much. 

I didn’t know what to do with myself after the person I loved and I decided that it had become too heavy to carry the distance anymore, so I went back to Miami. 

Greeted by friends at the airport, I temporarily swallowed the lump in my throat that had swelled as I stepped off the plane that August morning. Even in my delusional attempts to not think about my last visit — the visit when I fell in love — my body remembered the humidity which meant it wouldn’t let me forget what this city held for me. I wasn’t ready to divulge the details of the breakup, so I smiled my widest smile and let my friends take me to Jimmy’s Diner for breakfast. The entire conversation, an exercise of restraint for me. When you travel, heartbreak travels with you, whether you want it to or not.  

I didn’t unpack my suitcase when I arrived at my hotel later that day. A storm was lurking, I knew, but I wanted to wander about Little Havana for a moment, even if it meant getting caught in the rain. I grabbed my clutch, my phone, my headphones. I greeted the older women having lunch in the lobby before exiting and turning left on SW 9th Street. I pressed play and let Billie wash over me, and I walked and walked and walked.

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Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Believer, BOMB Magazine, The Nation and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about love, faith, and the American South.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Fact checker: Matt Giles

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

 

“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom

Sylvie Rosokoff / Hachette Books

Jacqueline Alnes | Longreads | February 2020 | 21 minutes (5,966 words)

 
Am I a journalist?” I found myself asking Emma Copley Eisenberg. On a sunny day in mid-October, Eisenberg sat adjacent to me at the dining room table in her West Philadelphia home, a spread of sliced tomatoes, chicken, and perfectly steamed asparagus she prepared on a plate between us. I am certainly not a journalist in any meaningful sense of the word — outside of an MFA in creative nonfiction, during which I learned to conduct research, I have no formal schooling or training — but Emma and I are both infatuated with the boundaries between subject and writer, research and lived experience, and how we classify it all. How does who we are and our own lived experiences affect the types of research we reach for? Is there such a thing as objectivity, or do we land closer to the truth if we expose our own flaws and biases and complicated histories on the page? And what is truth, after all? 

Eisenberg, in her debut book, The Third Rainbow Girl, wrestles meaningfully with these questions and many others. Though her book is marketed as true crime, and though a major thread within the narrative is the murder of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero, two women on their way to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering, Eisenberg undermines many features of the subgenre by centering place as a major subject. Her descriptions of Pocahontas County, both in memoir sections, in which Eisenberg relays her time living in Appalachia, and reported sections, in which Eisenberg offers insight into the ways in which the murders of Durian and Santomero brought to the surface harmful stereotypes perpetuated against the region, complicate perceptions rather than flatten them into any packageable or easy narrative. In prose that brims with empathy, and through research that illuminates narratives that have long been hidden by problematic representation, Eisenberg exposes the kinds of fictions we tell ourselves often enough that we believe them to be true.  

During the course of our sprawling conversation, one punctuated only by friendly interruptions from a gray house cat named Gabriel, Eisenberg and I talked about what it means to seek truth in nonfiction, and how writing the personal can allow for more complicated realities to emerge; how undermining conventions of genre can impact the way a book is both marketed and read; and what it means to find clarity — or at least community — while writing into murky, and often traumatizing subject matter.  Read more…

Novelist Charles Portis Was a True Original

True Grit, poster, John Wayne, Kim Darby, Glen Campbell, 1969. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

For many people, Charles Portis will forever be remembered as the author of the 1968 book that became the 1969 film adaptation with John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn and then the Coen Brothers’ 2010 version. True Grit is a masterpiece. I mean that. It’s a perfect book. I feel the same about his first novel Norwood, which is a hilarious, weird road trip story. Portis’s third novel, The Dog of the South, is almost as good. I rarely say anything is perfect, but Portis’s first two novels strike me as completely satisfying, self-contained worlds that reveal greater wonders on repeat readings and are beyond improvement. I also rarely reread books, but when I’ve reread both of these, their facets only sparkle more brightly, and reveal greater finesse. Portis only published five novels in his lifetime, but by only five, I mean “only.” His legacy lies not in his total output but in his pages. These novels are dense with wit, a distinctive voice, and warped comic vision of the world, with plots driven by bumbling protagonists on long journeys that reward readers with constant laughs and endless surprises.

Portis died on February 17, 2020, at age 86. For The New Yorker, writer Wells Tower examines the author’s literary achievements, paints a brief portrait of a person who revealed little about himself, and celebrates a writer he believes was more than a comic, but a philosopher. Every fan Portis has their favorite passages, but part of his legacy is a tone that Tower calls “a shrug of quiet amusement.” His privacy also shaped his legacy. Portis avoided publicity. He dodged interviewers and kept to himself. Tower writes:

It’s hard to know whether Portis’s work ushered much comfort into his own life. My sense is that he was lonely. I imagine he had a fair bit in common with Jimmy Burns, described in “Gringos” as a “hard worker,” “solitary as a snake,” and, yes, “punctual.” Portis never married and had no children. He never published another novel after “Gringos,” from 1991. The closest he gets to self-portraiture comes in his short memoir “Combinations of Jacksons,” the essay published in The Atlantic. Toward the essay’s close, the author spots an “apparition” of his future self in the form of a geezer idling his station wagon alongside Portis at a traffic light in Little Rock. He wore “the gloat of a miser,” Portis writes. “Stiff gray hairs straggled out of the little relief hole at the back of his cap. . . . While not an ornament of our race, neither was he, I thought, the most depraved member of the gang.”

In his vision of himself at the wheel of the phantom station wagon, Portis goes on to write what feel like fitting instructions for how we ought to cope with this great and overlooked writer’s exit from the scene: “I could see myself all too clearly in that old butterscotch Pontiac, roaring flat out across the Mexican desert and laying down a streamer of smoke like a crop duster, with a goatherd to note my passing and (I flatter myself) to watch me until I was utterly gone, over a distant hill, and only then would he turn again with his stick to the straying flock. So be it.”

After reading Norwood, I fell in love with his narrative voice and wanted to know more about the person who created it. Information was scant.

Portis started his writing life as a journalist, eventually working beside future novelist Tom Wolf. By the time Portis published Norwood in 1966, he’d left the newsroom for what turned out to be forever. True Grit’s 1969 screen adaptation won John Wayne the only Oscar of his career, and generated so much money – $14.25 million at the box office – that Portis could lead a simple, quiet life in Little Rock, Arkansas, writing and frequenting local watering holes, where he was just another regular who smoked cigarettes and wet the four corners of his napkins so they didn’t stick to the bottom of his beer glass and make him look like an idiot. That’s the kind of detail Portis would have included in his books had he not been living it.

His love of beer joints made him sound accessible, so I tried to contact him back in April 2010.

Before Portis’s nonfiction miscellany Escape Velocity was published, I dug up every piece of his short nonfiction and fiction that I could in old issues of magazines like The Atlantic and Oxford American. They provided a biography, but they also generated more questions. I started piecing it all together in an essay about him and his work, where I tried to understand how his masterpieces existed in a biographical information vacuum, generating questions and speculation, what I called “a string of maybes.” His was just such a striking career turn: a lowly journalist sells his first novel to Hollywood and makes huge money, then takes increasing numbers of years to write each subsequent novel, before quiting publishing all together. Whatever his feelings about this transition from journalism to fiction, he seemed to have shared none of them with his fellow reporters. As Tom Wolfe says in The New Journalism, “One day [Portis] suddenly quit as London correspondent for the Herald Tribune. That was generally regarded as a very choice job in the newspaper business. Portis quit cold one day, just like that, without a warning.” And, after writing his first two novels, Portis “actually went on to live out the fantasy,” Wolfe says. “Portis did it in a way that was so much like the way it happens in the dream, it was unbelievable. …He sold both books to the movies…He made a fortune…A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was. Which is to say that the old dream, The Novel, has never died.”

Knowing Portis refused most interviews, I decided to increase my chances of a response by asking the most pressing question I had: why, after six years as a reporter, did he decide to try writing novels for a living? I was curious about what factors went into his decision to write fiction, what his hopes were, his career concerns or frustrations with reporting, and what effect, if any, that era of literary publishing (at the dawn of the “new journalism”) had on his thinking. The most detailed treatment of the subject appeared in a rare Q&A Portis gave to the University of Arkansas in 2001. In it, he makes his decision seem simple: “As I say, the Tribune people had always treated me very well, but I wanted to try my hand at fiction, so I gave notice and went home.” He just decided to try his hand and went? Just like that? No way, I thought, rereading that; nothing is that simple.

Three months later, the literary agency kindly sent me Portis’s response to my question. It read: “I simply wanted to try my hand at fiction, and if it hadn’t worked out I would have gone back to journalism.”

I laughed out loud reading that: “try my hand at fiction.” He’d used nearly the exact same phrase in that 2001 interview. It was the phrase I was trying to get away from by emailing him. Oh well. Like everything he wrote, even his one-line email amused me. His mystery remained intact.

Read the story

Between Russell Simmons and The World and Oprah

Longreads Pick

Russell Simmons moved to Bali to avoid the legal fallout from a litany of #metoo accusations, but that didn’t stop him from spending time, recently, in New York City. Veteran journalist Kevin Powell conducted many interviews with him there, attempting to understand his one-time idol’s perspective. In the wake of Oprah Winfrey’s withdrawal from producing On the Record — a documentary about Russell’s many alleged abuses — Powell wrestles with many difficult things: Russell’s attitude toward his accusers; the intersection of sexism and racism: toxic masculinity in hiphop; his own past mistakes; and Oprah’s mysterious choice to back out of the film.

Published: Feb 19, 2020
Length: 45 minutes (11,471 words)

House of the Century

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Daisy Alioto | Longreads | February 2020 | 16 minutes (3,903 words)

“A house is the physical manifestation of the ego”

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, “My Very Own Dream House”

I. Security

I have always harbored suspicions about fire escape windows. When my mother was living in Boston in the 80s, her TV set sat across from the window that opened onto her fire escape. One night she woke up to a hairy leg entering the window and screamed loudly enough to wake her neighbors and scare away the television thief. An acquaintance who lives in Park Slope listened to an intruder pop the glass out of her fire escape window and watched their iPhone light sweep closer to the bedroom as she silently tried to shake her boyfriend awake. After an eternity, he sprung up and chased the intruder out with a hockey stick.

My boyfriend does not harbor suspicions about fire escape windows, so when he moved to a one bedroom apartment, security considerations became my own research project. The acquaintance in Park Slope sent a link to a $20 window alarm on Amazon. I watched a short video about the installation process and began to read the reviews. The top review was 5/5 stars, written by Mary in Florida and it broke my heart more than any thief ever could.

She writes that she debated buying a door alarm but never did, despite the fact that the rest of the house was baby proofed for two children under two years old. One day, after feeding a bird outside, the younger one slipped back out without her noticing — probably to chase the bird, she says. In a few minutes she sensed the lack of noise in the house, the too quietness. She found him in the pond across the street and he died the next day.

The review continues. “I am a good mom,” she writes, listing the other ways she baby-proofed the home. “I am a good mom.” I’ve forgotten why I’ve come to Amazon. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke, a manufacturer’s enthusiastic review of their own product gone too far but no… with a little Googling, I find Mary and the local reporting on the tragedy.

I want to reach through my screen and hold Mary. To tell her yes, you are a good mom. It’s not your fault that doors open and babies look at birds. Of course you are a good mother, there’s just so much that can go wrong with a home.

According to Robert Lee’s A Treatise On Hysteria (1871), Greek physician Aretaeus was one of the first thinkers to link hysteria to the female body. “In the middle of the flanks of a woman lies the womb, a female viscus closely resembling an animal.” The womb wanders the body, leaving a slew of undesirable symptoms in its wake. “On the whole it is like an animal within an animal,” Aretaeus writes.
Read more…

Shelved: Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk

Frans Schellekens / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,966 words)

 

On the evening of May 29, 1997, singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley and his roadie Keith Foti picked their way down the steep, weedy bank to Wolf River Harbor in Memphis, Tennessee. Buckley, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and heavy Doc Martens boots, waded into the water singing Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” After about 15 minutes, a boat passed. Concerned about their boom box getting wet, Foti moved it out of harm’s way. When he turned back around, Buckley was gone with the undertow. His body wouldn’t be found for days. He was 30 years old.

Jeff Buckley had mastered that most singular of instruments: his own voice. Possessing the same incredible range as opera icon Pavarotti, his phrasing could be anguished or exquisite; his breath control was phenomenal. Beyond that, he was the soul of eclecticism: Raised on prog rock, he dabbled in hair metal, gospel, country, and soul. Once, during a live performance, he improvised in the ecstatic style of Qawwali devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — someone Buckley once described as “my Elvis” — over the riff from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

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The Danger of Befriending Celebrities

Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Michael Musto | Longreads | February 2020 | 8 minutes (2,000 words)

Meryl Streep doesn’t call me every week to go bowling. In fact, she doesn’t call me at all. And that’s a good thing. I honestly can’t recommend becoming friends with celebrities, especially if you’re a long running journalist like I am. It simply will not lead to a Hollywood ending.

As appealing as they are, celebrities are used to being the center of attention, so you’d have to subvert your ego and go into full-blown ass-kiss mode in order to even be vaguely tolerable to them. Stars live for the spotlight, and in many cases, it’s all about them, even when they pretend it’s about you. (And I like things to be about me, thank you.) What’s more, as a journalist, I’d be blurring all sorts of lines and throwing away objectivity in order to snuggle up to my famous “friends.” And they’d only be nice in return because I’m press — and/or an ass kisser — so they’d have to feign some kind of kinship while pretending that all of my hideously annoying quirks are absolutely adorable. Yes, they’d be good at acting the part, but it’s so much better for both parties to just avoid this potential landmine and don’t go there. Don’t call me, Meryl! Don’t even text!
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The Poke Paradox

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Adam Skolnick | Longreads | February 2020 | 22 minutes (6,125 words)

I. The Poke Sampler

“When there’s a bowl of popcorn in the middle of the table, we think, I’m gonna eat two bites. Then we eat the whole bowl,” said Jennifer Bushman, founder of Route To Market and director of sustainability at the Bay Area seafood chain Pacific Catch. “That is human. That’s how we consume.”

Seconds later, we order the poke burger (among other things). Because of course we do.

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Remembering the Things That Remain

Illustration by Adam Forster

Amos Barshad | Longreads | January 2020 | 20 minutes (4,985 words)

In the spring of 2019 I start getting emails from a guy in Poland named Grzegorz Kwiatkowski. He’s a poet and a musician from Gdansk, a midsize town on the north coast of Poland, on the Baltic Sea. His band is called Trupa Trupa. Read more…