Search Results for: Creativity

Kevin Smokler's Top 5 Deep Interviews of 2011

Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: Rereading Your Favorite Books from High School (Prometheus Books, 2013) and curator of Deep Interviews here on Longreads. 

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Here on Longreads, I’m curating Deep Interviews (#deepinterviews)—lengthy interviews with interesting people—a format I’ve grown to love. It’s not quite original reporting but certainly more than transcription, a showcase for at least three of my favorite art forms—conversation, listening and set decoration. A great interview not only brings us inside the mind of an interesting person but inside the room where the conversation happened. And while many of the best presenters of interviews (The Paris Review, Playboy, Bomb) use an iterative process—the final interview emerging from several sessions like portrait painting—many others, equally loved, are on-the-spot reporting while all the action sits in hotel room club chairs. We the reader are invited in but are not the important person. We’re probably leaning uncomfortably against the bathroom door and trying to stay out everyone’s way. 

For this best-of list, I’ve chosen only interviews that you can read right now, no subscription required, from 5 different publications, at five different points in the trajectory of a culturally-known person. If the Deep Interview is a butterfly, below we’ve got pupae to pretty flying thing, though in no order biology would understand. 

2012 is looking to be a denser, dizzier time for the Deep Interview. More publications are opening their archives and the Charles Foster Kane basement of the genre (explained below). The hashtag #deepinterviews will keep you up to date on all these developments starting right now. 

I. William Gibson, The Paris Review Interview (Summer 2011 Issue)

Gibson knocks ‘em dead here—funny, smart, but plain and practical. A line like “We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination,” which left me thinking for a solid 40 minutes, is tossed off without pause. There’s also plenty for those of us who know science fiction much more as cultural phenomenon than by the particulars of the author’s worlds. I’m also guessing that even the diehards will be pleased by Gibson calling Neuromancer, his most famous novel, “a soap box derby car.” 

II. Scott Shepherd and Richard Maxwell: Bomb Magazine (Summer 2011 Issue)

BOMB has featured artist-on-artist interviews as its signature offering since 1981. About 90% of the time I have no idea who the subjects are and that’s just the way I like it. I read BOMB to unearth areas of creativity. Their interviews are my miner’s helmet. 

Scott Shepherd is an actor with the New York theater company Elevator Repair Service. ERS was profiled last year in the New Yorker as they were putting up GATZ, a six-hour word-for-word retelling of The Great Gatbsy. Richard Maxwell is an experimental theater director. Of them, I know The Great Gatsby, the New Yorker and that’s it. These guys don’t have a bunch of old war stories but rather experience collected as the raw material of the future, of projects yet conceived and horizons yet crossed. I don’t understand a fair amount of the theorizing about theater that they do. But the conversation is open enough for curiosity and learning and in that way, is the creative process itself in miniature. 

III. tUnE-yArDs: Pitchfork Interviews (April 25, 2011)

I loved Merrill Garbus (TY is her project) after reading this interview. She’s funny, self-aware, thoughtful. She’s also exactly the kind of musician you want big sloppy success for, which is what makes this piece such a great example of a type: The interview that catches a star on the rise. 

Pitchfork catches Garbus right before a tour, when she’s “doing a lot of boring and wonderfully domestic things.” Read the rest and you’ll think “I don’t think Merrill Garbus will be doing her own laundry much longer unless she wants to.” Also the interviewer both acknowledges that TY does not fit a current musical trend yet nonetheless insists on asking if Garbus went through a “punk phase” (nothing in her afro-pop-inspired-vocal-heavy songs would indicate this. The interviewer seems to think that any musician not wearing glitter must have had a punk phase) and rushing past Garbus’s narration of her musical salad days in the uncool 1980s to get to her time spent in the more culturally approved 1990s. 

Garbus is having none of it. She is straight with the journalist but firm that her story not fit any convention but her own. 

I wish only great things for Merrill Garbus after reading this. And I hope she also files it away as capturing a moment before all those big things happened. 

IV. Giancarlo Esposito: The Onion AV Club Interview (Oct. 7, 2011)

Read enough interviews and you thank 18 different gods when someone with a criminally underrated career is given room to talk about themselves. Such is the case with Giancarlo Esposito, a character actor who makes everything he appears in better just with his presence. 

Esposito has been acting since the 1980s and I became aware of him from starring roles in Spike Lee’s early films. If you’re around my age (38) you probably remember him as Buggin’ Out in Do the Right Thing or as Cab Driver YoYo in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. The AV Club’s got him here for his role as Gustavo Fring, the newest addition to the acclaimed series Breaking Bad, unseen by me. But I still say “thank god” and “about time.” Fifty more like this with Mr. Esposito please and at least that many actors like him. 

V. Martin Luther King Jr: The Playboy Interview (January, 1965, republished Oct. 21, 2011)

I’ve got this one here as a representation of where the availability of Deep Interviews is going. Playboy has taken to republishing from its 50-year archive of interviews via reader requests on the magazines Facebook page. Martin Luther King Jr.’s is here by reader demand, a rebuke to the idea that no one reads Playboy for the articles. 

Beyond that, Playboy’s efforts are an indicator of reader demand for this kind of journalism. And with any luck, more availability, more openness, at whatever rate, is where we’re headed. BOMB and The Paris Review already have their complete interview archives available on line and free. I’d love to see more publications head that way. 

An even bigger interview drop is coming in the next two years. The Library of Congress is in the process of digitizing the entire collection of interviews by Studs Turkel, perhaps America’s greatest interviewer. The first of those nearly 7,000 conversations is due to be made publicly available sometime next year. 

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Jodi Ettenberg: My Top Longreads of 2011

Jodi Ettenberg is a frequent Longreader, ex-lawyer and founder of Legal Nomads, which documents her travels (and food adventures) around the world.

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2011 was a banner year for long-form journalism and storytelling on the web, and correlatively a time to appreciate people like Mark who have propelled the Longreads movement forward. I love how this site started as a hashtag on a soundbite-filled medium like Twitter, pulling away the noise to highlight the words and weightier pieces that engaged us all. It has never been easier to find something good to read.

And as I travel, I find myself connecting the dots between disparate countries or foods, drawing parallels within the stories I digest as I go. It’s extremely hard to whittle down the many fantastic pieces this year to a short list, but the pieces I’ve picked below are ones that had a significant impact, and are now baked into my memories of the places where they were read.

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1) The Man who Sailed His House (GQ): This piece could have been written matter-of-factly or reported as the news that it was at its base level: a man, lost at sea after Japan’s devastating tsunami, is finally rescued days later. Instead, Michael Paterniti’s beautiful prose turns this astonishing tale into the surreal, raising it above anything else I’ve read about Hiromitsu Shinkawa. Through the patchwork of photos from the tsunami and its vast scale of destruction, the sincere humanity of this story is not something you want to miss. [Read it in: Casablanca, Morocco] 

2) In the New Gangland of El Salvador (New York Review of Books): I’ve been a fan of Alma Guillermoprieto’s ability to tell a heartbreaking story with grace for quite some time, and her longread about El Salvador is no exception. Returning to El Salvador after 30 years, the piece swings between descriptive travelogue and somber reporting, digging into the history of the country’s ferocious gangs and why they are so prevalent. [Read it in: Montreal, Canada]

3) The Possibilian (The New Yorker): I first discovered David Eagleman when I read Sum, 40 short stories about an imaginary afterlife. At times funny, at times sad and each packing a punch in a short two-page read, I’ve been foisting Sum on those learning English as the creativity and short chapters make it an ideal learning book. So it was fascinating to learn more about Eagleman and his own brush with death, how he has collected hundreds of stories like his, and how “they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down.” In Burkhard Bilger’s wonderful profile of the quirky neuroscientist, not only do we get insight into how and why Eagleman writes the way he does, but we learn about the philosophies behind his prose and how his own history naturally braids in, pushing him further to take risks beyond most of our comfort levels. [Read it in: Chiang Mai, Thailand]

4) Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert (The Awl)I have Wikipedia bookmarked on both mobile and laptops, and it’s an argument-solver, fact-checker (with a pinch of salt) and using the random article generator, a great way to learn about new things you had no idea existed.  In her Awl piece, the talented Maria Bustillos discussed the pros and cons of the service, noting that “Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic.” Instead of being told how it is, you’re given the facts to make your own editorial decision. Great read. [Read it in: Bangkok, Thailand]

5) Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of an Octopus (Orion Magazine): One of the more unusual and vaguely discomfiting pieces of the year (“Am I really sympathizing with the brain of an octopus? Yes, yes I am”), Sy Montgomery’s loving investigation of animal we often eat but rarely personify was a wonder to read. Whether talking about the study of octopus intellect, the description of octopus behaviour or Montgomery’s awe as he spends time with a 40-pound giant Pacific octopus, I couldn’t put it down. I’ll never look at octopuses the same way again. [Read it in: Istanbul, Turkey]

Bonus reads (hard to pick only five!)

1) Breaking Caste (The Globe and Mail): Veteran journalist Stephanie Nolen reports on Sudha Varghese, the remarkable woman who built a school for the Dalit girls (India’s Untouchable caste), giving them new hope. Nolen’s writing style and obvious research make the piece that much more interesting to read and her background section on Varghese’s life gives the story an additional human connection. [Read it in: London, England] 

2) When Irish Eyes are Crying (Vanity Fair): With Moneyball‘s marketing campaign in full force and Boomerang on the shelves, Michael Lewis is everywhere these days. However back in March when Vanity Fair published his longread on the Irish financial crisis, his buzz had yet to crescendo. The piece sets out the background and confluence of factors that led to the Irish economic crash, as well as some unpopular opinions on how it could have been avoided. Very interesting read. [Read it in: Mae Hong Son, Thailand]

3) My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant (The New York Times): Brave piece from Jose Antonio Vargas “coming out” as someone who has worked as a journalist and award-winning writer for years, all while hiding that he was not legally permitted to do so in the United States. Living this otherworld reality meant that Vargas went about his days in fear of being found out, something he had spent years trying to avoid. Vargas attributes his decision to share the true story after reading about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to lobby for the Dream Act. [Read it in: New York, NY]

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New York Times Writer Jenna Wortham: My Top Longreads of 2011

Jenna Wortham is a technology reporter at The New York Times. In her spare time she makes zines and stalks former America’s Next Top Model contestants in Brooklyn. She can be found on Twitter and Tumblr.

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SO many of my favorites have already been called out—Mindy Kaling’s “Flick Chicks,” Dan P. Lee’s “Travis the Menace” and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s everything, plus Doree flagged that amazing Kolker piece and Michelle laid claim to Paul Ford’s staggering essay on IVF. But these are the stories that I sent to my Kindle and the links that recurred with the most frequency in my drafts/Gchats folders on Gmail, so I think it’s safe to say that they are my top picks of 2011.

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• Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble is Different.” (Businessweek, April 14, 2011)

A cutting, high-level look at the current boomlet in the tech biz—the kind that makes you kick yourself till the end for not being smart enough to have pitched it yourself. Ashlee takes a step back from the funding frenzy, sky-high valuations and feverish IPO rumors to examine the current ad-think consuming the tech world. He asks, what if instead of focusing on getting people to click on ads, buy group coupons and digital goods for their virtual farms, our engineers and entrepreneurs were trying to solve big problems in health and science?

• Lev Grossman, “The Boy Who Lived Forever.” (Time, July 7, 2011) 

I adored this piece because it shed light on a very particular corner of the Web—fanfic—without falling into the clichéd trap of portraying the more obscure recesses of the Internet as a place only inhabited by cr33p3rs and neckbeards. Instead, Lev lightly celebrates the creativity of the subculture and the communities and alternative realities people craft around their favorite characters and books.

• Jessica Pressler, “A Holly Golightly for the Stripper-Embezzlement Age.” (New York Magazine, Sept 18, 2011)

I couldn’t get enough of the vivid, and at times lurid, details in this profile of Diane Passage, Ken Starr’s fourth wife. I mean, this phrase alone: “when she laughs, her grapefruit-tree physique bounces merrily,” hooked me, line and sinker. Plus who doesn’t love a sordid glimpse into an underbelly, especially one in New York? The sharp observations and imagery from the first few grafs make you feel like a fly on the wall of a party you didn’t want to go to in the first place but can’t wait to see how it all shakes out.

• David Kushner, “Murder by Text.” (Vanity Fair, November 27, 2011)

A heartbreaking read about the gruesome murder of a 18-year-old girl named Kim Proctor and the two teenaged boys who killed her and then bragged about it on World of Warcraft, which ultimately led to their arrest. Kusher smartly weaves the role of technology and the concept of (im)permanence online into the piece for a compelling narrative.

• Jose Antonio Vargas, “My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant.” (The New York Times, June 22, 2011)

I thought this was one of the most important pieces published this year, along with “The Life of Illegal Immigrant Farmers,” for giving the touchy subject of immigration a living, breathing human face. I read this stunning graf at least a half dozen times:

“And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.”

Honorable Mention:

While I was waiting for my copy of Sullivan’s Pulphead to be delivered, I stumbled across the work of Matt Bell, and immediately devoured two of his Kindle shorts—“A Tree or a Person or a Wall” and “A Long Walk, With Only Chalk to Mark the Way” and could not put them down. For such a stark, minimalist writer, his pieces are so evocative and rich with imagery that its hard not to be sucked into them almost immediately.

I also thought that this year brought out some hilarious and clever writing that touched on the way we consume and use technology and how it’s shaping our interactions, culture and lives.

Here’s a quick n’ dirty rundown of a few faves:

• Katie Heaney, “Reading Between the Texts” (The Hairpin, June 16, 2011)

• Leigh Alexander, “Five Emotions Invented By The Internet” (Thought

Catalog, January 12, 2011)

• Frank Smith, “Will the Real Frank Smith Please Stand Up” (The Morning

News, March 25, 2011)

Clive Thompson, “On Secret Messages in the Digital Age” (Wired

magazine, Jan 31, 2011)

Jonah Lehrer, “How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect.”

(Wired.com, October 2011)

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[Not single-page.]

Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong answers to those problems will push the United States toward a future of too much government, too many taxes, and too much regulation. It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent. 

It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

“When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?” — David Frum, New York Magazine

See more #longreads from New York Magazine

When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page.] Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong answers to those problems will push the United States toward a future of too much government, too many taxes, and too much regulation. It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent.

It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

Author: David Frum
Published: Nov 20, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,243 words)

Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,”  the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) She dips Copenhagen tobacco and fights against wind farms. She e-mails stupid YouTube links to her old buddy Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.”

Barry reinvented herself as a creativity guru as the market for her comic strip dried up, publishing two boundary-blurring books on inspiration and teaching writing workshops for nonwriters. Barry’s advertising copy is clear: “THIS CLASS WORKS ESPECIALLY WELL FOR ‘NONWRITERS’ like bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on ‘being a writer’ but still wonders what it might be like to write.”

“Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself.” — Dan Kois, The New York Times Magazine

See more #longreads from Dan Kois

Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself

Longreads Pick

Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,” the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) She dips Copenhagen tobacco and fights against wind farms. She e-mails stupid YouTube links to her old buddy Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.”

Barry reinvented herself as a creativity guru as the market for her comic strip dried up, publishing two boundary-blurring books on inspiration and teaching writing workshops for nonwriters. Barry’s advertising copy is clear: “THIS CLASS WORKS ESPECIALLY WELL FOR ‘NONWRITERS’ like bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on ‘being a writer’ but still wonders what it might be like to write.”

Author: Dan Kois
Published: Oct 27, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,102 words)

How Great Entrepreneurs Think

Longreads Pick

What distinguishes great entrepreneurs? Discussions of entrepreneurial psychology typically focus on creativity, tolerance for risk, and the desire for achievement—enviable traits that, unfortunately, are not very teachable. So Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, set out to determine how expert entrepreneurs think, with the goal of transferring that knowledge to aspiring founders. She required that her subjects have at least 15 years of entrepreneurial experience, have started multiple companies—both successes and failures—and have taken at least one company public.

Source: Inc.
Published: Feb 1, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,895 words)