Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words) Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS […]
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Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Where the Spirit Meets the Bone: A Memoir by Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams, with Benjamin Hedin | Radio Silence | March 2014 | 11 minutes (2,690 words) Radio SilenceFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a first-time-ever memoir by the great Lucinda Williams from Radio Silence, a San Francisco-based magazine of literature and rock & roll. Subscribe, and download the free iOS […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why Hollywood Will Never Look the Same Again on Film
After Michael Mann set out to direct Collateral, the story’s setting moved from New York to Los Angeles. This decision was in part motivated by the unique visual presence of the city — especially the way it looked at night. Mann shot a majority of the film in HD (this was 2004), feeling the format […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Grief Has No Deadline
She spent two decades as a local reporter covering L.A.’s grisliest crimes. But when the victim is a member of her own family, she learns what hard news feels like from the other side: Memories of that night are a mosaic: the flashing lights, police cars, yellow tape, and Lil Bit’s car, stopped in the […]
Posted inNonfiction
The Cost
“I want to tell you something: it is nearly impossible for a young black man to stay out of trouble in a country where skin color is the marker for suspicion and violence and grief.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Northridge Earthquake: ‘Like a Punch Delivered from Below’
Revisiting the Northridge earthquake two decades later. Before Hurricane Katrina, it was considered “costliest natural disaster in U.S. history”. As recalled by Richard Andrews, director of California’s Office of Emergency Services at the time: I took a turboprop plane with Wilson and the head of the California Highway Patrol from Sacramento to Los Angeles. We […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Surgeon Races to Save a Life in L.A.’s Shooting Season
Inside an operating room at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center during L.A.’s “shooting season”: “The season of shootings has begun on time. Last year, from July through September, this Torrance hospital treated 107 gunshot victims, the highest number in the county. “This year, four GSWs — medical shorthand for gunshot wounds — arrived on the first day […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Cost
“I want to tell you something: it is nearly impossible for a young black man to stay out of trouble in a country where skin color is the marker for suspicion and violence and grief.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Where It Hurts: Steve McQueen on Why ’12 Years a Slave’ Isn’t Just About Slavery
Dan P. Lee on the director and Oscar contender: I’d seen 12 Years the night before, at the huge cineplex in downtown L.A. My friend sobbed quietly through a good portion of it. At least one black couple left midway. As we walked out of the theater, no one seemed to be speaking; breaking the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘The pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin.’
On Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and an oral history of the “outlaw country” movement that coalesced in Austin as a reaction to the polished “countrypolitan gloss” in Nashville, led by RCA executive Chet Atkins: “Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning […]
