Search Results for: Slate

A writer of made-for-TV movies reflects on his middling successes and near-misses from a career of steady but not spectacular work in Hollywood:

On occasion during my 30-year screenwriting career, the amount on these checks has been life-changing, enough money to buy a car or temporarily pay off our credit cards. But I don’t really expect to see that kind of windfall again. I haven’t had a movie made in eight years, and my current career status is somewhere between emeritus and irrelevant. Still, the check that came yesterday was a nice surprise. The total was $2,588.95. Included with the check was an itemized list of movies for which I had received sole or shared screenwriting credit and that had been shown again and again around the world. The biggest amounts were for Cleopatra ($716.41), a lavish and maybe-just-a-little-bit-cheesy ABC miniseries, and for King of Texas ($854.30), a Western retelling of King Lear with Patrick Stewart and Marcia Gay Harden that had originally aired on TNT. A half-dozen other movies were on the list. They included a few boilerplate TV movies like In The Line of Duty: Blaze of Glory (56 cents), an ‘inspired by a true story’ bank heist movie starring those then-titans of the small screen Bruce Campbell and Lori Loughlin; a steamy Lifetime murder mystery called Widow on the Hill ($341.60), which remains the only thing I’ve ever written that my mother implied she would just as soon I hadn’t; andThe Colt ($122.53), a nicely rendered little Civil War movie that aired on the Hallmark Channel that I had adapted from a seven-page short story by Mikhail Sholokov. The Guild statement provided scant information about which parts of the world embraced these movies most fervently, but I doubt that I’m far off the mark in imagining an unwatched TV screen in the back of a kebab stand in Kota Kinabalu.

“I Was an A-List Writer of B-List Productions.” — Stephen Harrigan, Slate

More from Slate

Ethan Imboden is founder of Jimmyjane, a Bay Area company that is aiming to bring design standards and mainstream acceptance to a product that has long been hidden away from the public: 

Within Sharper Image, that neck massager became known jokingly as ‘the Sex and the City vibrator,’ but in 2007, Imboden approached the company with the Form 6. Literally the sixth in a series of vibrator sketches — Imboden believes in minimalist names — the Form 6 has a curved, organic shape that is suggestive without being representational. It is wrapped completely in soft, platinum silicone, making it completely water-resistant, and charges on a wall-powered base station through a narrow stainless steel band, a novel cordless recharging system that Imboden patented. For these features, the Form 6 earned an International Design Excellence Award, the first time a sex toy had earned such a distinction. It comes in hot pink, deep plum or slate—non-primary, poppy colors that he believes convey sophistication. It is packaged in a hard plastic case inside a bright white box — ‘literally and figuratively bringing these products out of the shadows,’ Imboden said. And it has a 3-year warranty (this may not seem remarkable, but is for a sex toy).

“Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex?” — Andy Isaacson, The Atlantic

More #longreads from The Atlantic

Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex?

Longreads Pick

Ethan Imboden is founder of Jimmyjane, a Bay Area company that is aiming to bring design standards and mainstream acceptance to a product that has long been hidden away from the public:

“Within Sharper Image, that neck massager became known jokingly as ‘the Sex and the City vibrator,’ but in 2007, Imboden approached the company with the Form 6. Literally the sixth in a series of vibrator sketches — Imboden believes in minimalist names — the Form 6 has a curved, organic shape that is suggestive without being representational. It is wrapped completely in soft, platinum silicone, making it completely water-resistant, and charges on a wall-powered base station through a narrow stainless steel band, a novel cordless recharging system that Imboden patented. For these features, the Form 6 earned an International Design Excellence Award, the first time a sex toy had earned such a distinction. It comes in hot pink, deep plum or slate–non-primary, poppy colors that he believes convey sophistication. It is packaged in a hard plastic case inside a bright white box — ‘literally and figuratively bringing these products out of the shadows,’ Imboden said. And it has a 3-year warranty (this may not seem remarkable, but is for a sex toy).”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 14, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,130 words)

A writer adopts the Choose Your Own Adventure book format to write a story about a disastrous love affair: 

“The answer, of course, is that you should dump Anne before it’s too late. But the absurd options the book gives ‘you’— later ‘choices’ include dueling with an Ant-Warrior, or attacking the Evil Power Master—simply highlight the completely screwed-up perspective of the co-dependent. When I was stuck in one of those terrible relationships, and friends told me it was time to break it off, I looked at them as if they were crazy—as if the options they were offering had so little to do with my actual situation they were functionally useless.

“You Are Very Cold, and This Feels Like an Adventure.” — Dan Kois, Slate

More #longreads from Kois

How psychedelic drugs are helping terminally ill patients face death:

Norbert Litzinger, [Pam] Sakuda’s husband, explained it this way: “When you pass your own death sentence by, you start to wonder: When? When? It got to the point where we couldn’t make even the most mundane plans, because we didn’t know if Pam would still be alive at that time — a concert, dinner with friends; would she still be here for that?” When came to claim the couple’s life completely, their anxiety building as they waited for the final day.

As her fears intensified, Sakuda learned of a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths.

“How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death.” — Lauren Slater, New York Times Magazine

How did pedestrians become an endangered species in the United States—and why is the word “pedestrian” wrong anyway? First in a four-part series: 

A few years ago, at a highway safety conference in Savannah, Ga., I drifted into a conference room where a sign told me a ‘Pedestrian Safety’ panel was being held.

The speaker was Michael Ronkin, a French-born, Swiss-raised, Oregon-based transportation planner whose firm, as his website notes, ‘specializes in creating walkable and bikeable streets.’ Ronkin began with a simple observation that has stayed with me since. Taking stock of the event—one of the few focused on walking, which gets scant attention at traffic safety conferences—he wondered about that inescapable word: pedestrian. If we were to find ourselves out hiking on a forest trail and spied someone approaching at a distance, he wanted to know, would we think to ourselves, ‘Here comes a pedestrian’?

“The Crisis in American Walking.” — Tom Vanderbilt, Slate

See more #longreads from Tom Vanderbilt

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Slate.com, New York Magazine, Inc. Magazine, The Awl, The New York Times Magazine, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Shellee O’Brien.

What happens when a grizzly bear kills a human being in Yellowstone National Park? An examination of a special criminal justice system designed to protect endangered bears, while giving leeway to euthanize bears that kill humans in ways that are deemed “unnatural”:

It’s a squirrely notion, that a team of government biologists might be able to figure out why a bear does the things it does, or whether any bear behavior could truly be described as “unnatural.” But whatever its shortcomings, the grizzly justice system has been mostly successful over the years since it was introduced, and is reasonably popular. People seem to like the fact that a female bear can kill someone while protecting her cubs and be acquitted of the crime. According to a poll conducted by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in 2001, more than 70 percent of Wyoming residents believe that grizzly bears are a benefit to the state and are an important component of the Yellowstone ecosystem. They want grizzlies to have the benefit of the doubt.

“A Death in Yellowstone.” — Jessica Grose, Slate

See also: “Taming the Wild.” — Evan Ratliff, National Geographic, Feb. 18, 2011

Life on the job with a team of nuclear divers. As nuclear power plants age, they require more upkeep—and much of that work can happen underwater:

Last March, a tsunami hit Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, leading to a disastrous series of reactor meltdowns. The consequences were immediate. Germany vowed to phase out nuclear power, and other countries spoke of following suit. In the U.S., the nuclear-energy renaissance was left suspended in time. But even as its future remains uncertain, nuclear energy remains an indisputable part of our present. And as our power plants continue aging with no viable replacements, the challenges facing the nuclear industry will only continue to grow. So will the potential for another disaster. The threat of radiation poisoning hangs over everyone who works at or lives near a nuclear plant, but no one more than the divers, who literally swim in the stuff.

“Swimming on the Hot Side.” — David Goodwillie, Popular Science

See also: “The Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age.” Ron Ronsenbaum, Slate, Feb. 28, 2011

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Slate.com, The Atlantic, The Texas Observer, n+1, Guernica, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Marcus Sortijas.

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