Longreads Pick
Profile of new New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson. “Abramson put her purse down on a white Formica desk that she occupies in the middle of the third-floor newsroom. Someone had left her a sealed envelope with ‘Congratulations’ written on the front. It contained a cover note from a female editor at the paper along with a laminated letter passed down from that editor’s father. The letter was from a nine-year-old girl named Alexandra Early, who wrote that she got mad when she watched television: ‘That’s because I’m a girl and there aren’t enough girl superheroes on TV.’ The cover note to Abramson said, ‘Wherever Alexandra Early ended up, I hope that she heard about your new job.'”
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Published: Oct 17, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,777 words)
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Adam Horovitz: He was a kid. He had the classic early eighties b-boy look: tight Lee jeans, adidas shell toes, fat laces going up the leg, a Kangol, Cazals, a Le Tigre shirt. And LL was just like, “Who are these people? What’s up with these white boys?” Not only that, but Rick was in this weird dorm room. I’m assuming LL expected it to be an office with a secretary and coffee—like on TV. He was just shocked. It was really funny.
LL Cool J: When Rick came downstairs, the first thing I said was, “Yo, you Rick?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I thought you was black.” He said, “Cool.”
“The Arrival of LL Cool J.” — Bill Adler and Dan Charnas, GQ
See more #longreads from GQ
(Photo Credit: Janette Beckman)
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Longreads Pick
Adam Horovitz: He was a kid. He had the classic early eighties b-boy look: tight Lee jeans, adidas shell toes, fat laces going up the leg, a Kangol, Cazals, a Le Tigre shirt. And LL was just like, “Who are these people? What’s up with these white boys?” Not only that, but Rick was in this weird dorm room. I’m assuming LL expected it to be an office with a secretary and coffee—like on TV. He was just shocked. It was really funny.
LL Cool J: When Rick came downstairs, the first thing I said was, “Yo, you Rick?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I thought you was black.” He said, “Cool.”
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Published: Oct 4, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,170 words)
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Longreads Pick
Harmon calls his circles embryos—they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story—and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on , from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see if the theory is airtight. “I can’t not see that circle,” he says. “It’s tattooed on my brain.”
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Published: Sep 22, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,446 words)
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Longreads Pick
The intense pressure to convert Twitter into a profitable business, and before a tech bubble pops, is palpable here. And it’s happening as the company struggles with an interlocked set of existential questions, starting with the most basic one possible: What is Twitter? Initially, the idea was of a kind of adrenalized Facebook, with friends communicating with friends in short bursts—and indeed, Facebook rushed to borrow Twitter’s innovations so it wouldn’t be left behind. But as Twitter grew, it finally became clear to Twitter’s brain trust that the relevant analogy was not a social network but a broadcast system—the birth of a different sort of TV.
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Published: Oct 3, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,151 words)
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“PAUL RUDD: When I talk to people who went to camp and they’re like, “Dude, that movie totally gets it,” I don’t know how to respond to that. Which part? The part of going into town for heroin? Or your chef humping a fridge?”
“The Ultimate Oral History of ‘Wet Hot American Summer.’” — Whitney Pastorek, Details magazine
Also see another of Pastorek’s #longreads: “The Complete Oral History of ‘Party Down’” Feb. 2011
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Longreads Pick
(Fiction) My son, Douglas, loves to play with toy guns. He is thirteen. He loves video games in which people get killed. He loves violence on TV, especially if it’s funny. How did this happen? The way everything does, of course. One thing follows another, naturally. Naturally, he looks like me: shorter than average, with a fine build, hazel eyes, and light-brown hair. Like me, he has a speech impediment and a condition called “essential tremor” that causes involuntary hand movements, which make him look more fragile than he is.
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Published: Feb 14, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,629 words)
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Longreads Pick
“I guess I’d call Rick Perry’s campaign ghostly, because he was not the main character. (Karl) Rove, who recruited him to switch parties and run against me, directed the effort. Perry was not any good at campaigning; he had no idea how to deal with Houston and Dallas and San Antonio and South Texas and all that, though I don’t know of any inappropriate comments that he made, because he wasn’t really getting any media. Rove got frustrated with him and sent him out to West Texas to attend Farm Bureau county meetings while Rove raised, I think it was about $3 million, and threw it into TV ads against me. They ran ads of me endorsing Jesse Jackson—ran that in East Texas. One ad showed a hippie setting a flag on fire and throwing it on the ground, and my picture came up out of the flames. So I had supporters in Dallas and Houston and East Texas who said, ‘Well, I liked ol’ Hightower but I didn’t know he burned flags.'”
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Published: Aug 14, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,427 words)
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Longreads Pick
At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to—only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29% of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes—though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.
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Published: Aug 9, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,933 words)
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