Search Results for: New York magazine

The Misunderstood Genius of Russell Westbrook

Sam Anderson of the New York Times Magazine reports on Russell Westbrook, the Oklahoma City Thunder guard and the best player in the NBA. What’s extraordinary about this piece isn’t just Anderson’s insight (he wrote about the Thunder for the NYTM in 2012), or how his vivid descriptions of the utter ferocity and skill with which Westbrook plays—it’s that Anderson was likely allowed 10 or so minutes to spend actually interviewing Westbrook, a famously taciturn subject. The piece is a marvel of observational reporting.

With just under three minutes left and the [Oklahoma City] Thunder trailing by 3 points, [Russell] Westbrook dribbled hard at the basket and, without any apparent shadow of self-doubt, stopped to rise for a pull-up jumper — precisely the shot I had watched him clank so many times before the game. Now, however, he made it, and then with around a minute left he did it again, giving the Thunder the lead, and in the end, as the crowd gurgled on its own disappointment, the Thunder won by 6 points. Westbrook’s final stat line was dangerously overstuffed: 32 points, 12 rebounds, nine assists. He should probably have had closer to 15 assists, but that stat depends largely on the skill of the players around you, and with this group, nine seemed like a minor miracle.

After the game, Westbrook sat at his locker wearing only a towel, with the veins bulging out of his legs so hard he looked like a map of the human circulatory system. (Joe Sharpe, the Thunder’s head trainer, told me that Westbrook could probably be a bodybuilder if he wanted to.) Slowly, while the media watched in silence, Westbrook started getting dressed. He put on underwear covered with the words “Why Not?” — Westbrook’s personal slogan, which he invokes to justify everything from his fashion choices to his shot selection. (As he tweeted once, apropos of nothing: “WHYNOT?!!! #whynot #whynot”) He pulled on a pair of skinny black jeans, ripped at the knees, then a bright yellow sweatshirt that said, on the front, “Paranormal: Out of the Ordinary.” Over this he put on a denim jacket.

It was, I thought, an interesting outfit.

But there was one more piece, and it was the coup de grâce: Over his jeans, Westbrook pulled on a kilt.

He rubbed some Vaseline on his face and turned to face the media for an official round of questions. As usual, he spoke to the reporters without ever looking at them. It was as if he were being interviewed by the locker-room door, with which he maintained fierce eye contact, with occasional follow-up questions from the ceiling tiles or the carpet.

Why are you wearing a kilt? someone asked.

“Why not?” Westbrook said.

And so began life after Kevin Durant.

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Exxon, Rex, and Russia: A Deep Drilling

Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil and recipient of Russia’s Order of Friendship, has become our new Secretary of State. I took a deep dive into the archives, and, like all the amateur Kremlinologists and power-hungry oilmen who’ve tread this ground before me, I’ve learned that the deeper you drill, the bigger the risk. Stop somewhere around point #10 if you start to feel like you’re on shaky ground, or like you’re one nesting matryoshka doll short of a shell company. Read more…

Robert Caro on Understanding a President Through the Rooms He Occupied

Photo: AP Images

There are facts in journalism, but there are other truths hidden in the room. In this 2016 Paris Review interview with James Santel, Robert Caro, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson, gives a masterclass on how to report on a subject’s behavior, his environment, his breath, and the cushiness of his couch:

There is no one truth, but there are an awful lot of objective facts. The more facts you get, the more facts you collect, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. The base of biography has to be facts.

That’s especially true when it comes to describing Johnson, whom I met only once, only very briefly. With Johnson, if you went around on my interviews with me, in every interview probably, I’m asking—let’s say Joe Califano, one of Johnson’s aides—So if I were standing next to you in this scene in the Oval Office, Joe, what would I see? They never understand. They kind of hesitate—they don’t know what I mean. And I would say, Was he sitting behind the desk or was he getting up to walk around? And they might say—and this actually happened—Well, he jumped up from that desk all the time because he had the wire tickers over there. He had these three wire tickers, and he’d go over to them every few minutes to look.

So I would ask, But what were you seeing? How would he look at the wire tickers?

“Well, you know, it was interesting, it was like he couldn’t wait for the next lines to come, so he’d open the lid, and he’d grab the paper with two hands, as if he was trying to pull it out of the machine.”

So you keep saying, What would I see? Sometimes these people get ­angry because I’m asking the same question over and over again.

If you just keep doing it, it’s amazing what comes out of people. Eventually, a lot of people tell you about his bad breath. And the couches—if he wanted something from you in the Senate cloakroom, Johnson would take you over to sit on the couches. So I’d ask, What was it like sitting on those couches? And people would say something like, He’d be towering over you, leaning over you.

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Further reading:

Iraqi Special Forces Fight to Liberate Mosul

Jawad’s body was put in a bag and placed on the patio, by Thamer’s feet. Thamer looked as if he wanted to move away from it but was too tired to get up. More swat-team members had arrived. I spotted Bashar, the policeman who’d saved the video of his brother Salem’s beheading. Blood stained his ammo vest. When Thamer told him that the body bag contained Jawad, Bashar wept silently. A policeman unzipped the bag and removed a silver bracelet from Jawad’s wrist. He handed the bracelet to Bashar, who fastened it on his own wrist.

Another Humvee arrived, and a second dead swat-team member was carried out. The corpse, set down beside Jawad, was coated in gray dust. I recognized him as a young man with whom I’d stayed up talking in the abandoned house the previous night. He’d scrolled through his phone, showing me pictures of his father and brother, both of whom were in an isis prison in Mosul. He feared for his mother, he’d told me, now that she was alone.

Bashar sat down and covered his eyes with his scarf. No one spoke. Mortars, tank cannons, air strikes, small arms, and high-calibre machine guns continued sounding up the road. After a few minutes, Bashar said, “We need to go back.”

In this The New Yorker piece, Luke Mogelson embeds himself with the Nineveh Province swat team. For these tireless special forces, defeating ISIS in Iraq’s most contested city is not just strategic, it’s personal.

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Xenu’s Paradox: The Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard and the Making of Scientology

Illustration by Pat Barrett

Alec Nevala-Lee | Longreads | February 2017 | 28 minutes (7,744 words)

 

I.

L. Ron Hubbard published over four million words of fiction in his lifetime, but his most famous story consists of just a few handwritten pages. Before their contents were leaked in the early ’70s, they could be viewed at the Advanced Organization Building of the Church of Scientology, a hulking blue edifice off Sunset Boulevard where visitors were handed a manila envelope to open in a private room. Most had paid thousands of dollars for the privilege, which made it by far the most lucrative story Hubbard, or perhaps anyone, ever wrote—a spectacular rate for a writer who spent much of his career earning a penny per word.

The story itself, which has become more familiar than Hubbard or any of his disciples ever intended, revolves around the figure of Xenu, the tyrannical dictator of the Galactic Confederation. Millions of years ago, Xenu, faced with an overpopulation crisis, threw hordes of his own people into volcanoes on the planet Earth—then known as Teegeeack—and blew them up with atomic bombs. Their spirits, called thetans, survive to the present day, clinging to unsuspecting humans, and they can only be removed through dianetic auditing, a form of talk therapy that clears the subject of its unwanted passengers.

One of the church members who read this account was screenwriter and director Paul Haggis, who was a devoted Scientologist for over three decades before resigning in an ugly public split. Haggis told Lawrence Wright, the author of the seminal New Yorker piece that became the exposé Going Clear, that after finishing the story, he got the wild idea that it was some sort of insanity test—if you believed it, you were kicked out. When he asked his supervisor for clarification, he was informed: “It is what it is.” Haggis read it again, but the same thought continued to resound in his brain: “This is madness.” Read more…

Serena Williams and Roger Federer: The Greatest of All Time

This weekend, Serena Williams and Roger Federer each won their respective singles titles at the Australian Open, the first major tennis tournament of 2017. The achievement by two of the greatest tennis players of all-time was remarkable for several reasons: Serena Williams set an Open Era record with 23 Grand Slam singles titles under her belt. Roger Federer extended his record as the male tennis player with the most Grand Slam titles with his 18th win. And both players, at the ripe old tennis age of 35, demonstrated athletic excellence in a sport dominated by 20-somethings (I should also note that the Australian Open women’s final also featured Serena’s sister, Venus Williams, 36, who is also excelling at an age when most other players have chosen to retire). To celebrate these achievements, I’d like to share two of my favorite profiles of Serena and Roger. Read more…

Apocalypse Shopping List: Guns, Motorcycles, and… Bitcoin?

Apparently, New Zealand is the new go-to destination for the end of the world. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos talks with tech titans who are snapping up property in the far-flung nation “just in case.” Those staying in the US are stocking up on suitable transportation — you’re going to want more than 30 to the gallon in the after times — weapons, and crypto-currency.

Oh, pro tip? Stop putting off that Lasik surgery you’ve been thinking about; you’re not going to be able to get new glasses when the apocalypse hits.

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter.

What’s in YOUR go bag?

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The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s Feminist Struggle

Photo: AP Images

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong | Longreads | January 2017 | 8 minutes (1,800 words)

 

Mary Tyler Moore died this week at the age of 80, leaving what might be the most important feminist legacy in television history: Her Mary Richards, the main character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, inspired generations of women just by being among the first single, professional, over-30 women depicted on TV when the show premiered in 1970. Her iconic beret toss and theme song—”you’re gonna make it after all!”—encapsulated the Women’s Lib moment perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, that Mary’s character was the subject of fierce debate among feminist leaders at the time. Like any “first” of an underrepresented group to break through in mainstream culture, Mary was attacked from all sides. While many male fans wrote letters voicing their disappointment when Mary stayed out all night on a date, feminist leaders voiced disappointment that Mary called her boss “Mr. Grant” while everyone else called him “Lou.” This conflict came to a head when one of the show’s co-creators, James L. Brooks, participated in a panel discussion at a women’s conference in 1975, as described in this excerpt from my book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, a history of the show. Read more…

Author John Edgar Wideman on Isolation

Photo via Charlie Rose

In the New York Times MagazineThomas Chatterton Williams profiles John Edgar Wideman, MacArthur genius and author of more than 20 books including his latest, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, about the father of Emmett Till.

Wideman’s own life has been marked by tragedy:

If they knew any of that about Wideman the writer, they would also have to know this about Wideman the person: He is the older brother of a man convicted of murder, serving a life sentence without the chance of parole; the uncle of a young man shot execution-style in his own home; the father of a boy who, at age 16, woke up one night while traveling with a group of campers, got out of bed and stabbed his roommate to death while he was sleeping. The drama of Wideman’s personal history can seem almost mythical, refracting so many aspects of the larger black experience in America, an experience defined less by its consistencies, perhaps, than by its many contradictions — the stunning and ongoing plurality of victories and defeats.

Now 75, Wideman is noticeably gentler-looking than the severe ice-grill that has glared from dust jackets for so many years. After Bahaj left, he confessed to me that he had been reading reviews of his newest book, “Writing to Save a Life,” published in November. He noted that critics tend to write about him as an isolated and haunted figure, an idea he has resisted but has been coming to accept about himself. “I mean, if everyone tells you your feet stink, after a while, you may think you washed the boys, but everybody can’t be wrong.” He laughed at himself but then soberly conceded, “I always felt extremely isolated.” That loneliness Wideman speaks of is twofold: both peculiar to him and quintessentially black, especially for more talented men of his era. I have seen this loneliness, too, in my father, a man of Wideman’s generation and the first in his family to break out of the segregated South and get a college education, a dual triumph that simultaneously freed him and left him a consummate outsider.

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How Family Tragedy Shaped Steve Kerr’s Worldview

Steve Kerr

Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr — along with other NBA players and coaches — hasn’t shied away from speaking freely about President Trump’s rhetoric, including, this week, cracks about the “alternative facts” espoused by press secretary Sean Spicer.

As John Branch reported for the New York  Times Magazine in December, Kerr’s personal experience is unique: His family spent time in Beirut and his father, Malcolm Kerr, was assassinated while serving as the president of American University of Beirut in 1984:

Kerr also knows that sports are an active ingredient of American culture. He knows, as well as anyone, that players are complicated, molded by background, race, religion and circumstance.

And Kerr is, too: a man whose grandparents left the United States to work in the Middle East, whose father was raised there, whose mother adopted it, whose family has a different and broader perspective than most. The Kerrs are a family touched by terrorism in the most personal way. Malcolm Kerr was not a random victim. He was a target.

That gives Steve Kerr a voice. His job gives him a platform. You will excuse him if he has a few things to say.

“It’s really simple to demonize Muslims because of our anger over 9/11, but it’s obviously so much more complex than that,” he said. “The vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people, just like the vast majority of Christians and Buddhists and Jews and any other religion. People are people.”

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