Search Results for: TV

What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?

Longreads Pick

From Detroit: A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America’s middle class.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Nov 9, 2010
Length: 31 minutes (7,927 words)

Grand Theft Cattle

Longreads Pick

John Suther’s investigations have involved a never-ending litany of 21st-century weirdness: thugs stealing dairy calves at knifepoint; a guy hauling stolen and hog-tied calves in the back of a Volkswagen Jetta; organized criminal operations laundering drug money through trade in stolen livestock; illegal immigrants running barbaric underground rodeo circuits; and, in one of the largest cattle scams in American history, a missing $865,000 from one of the highest-paid actors on TV.

Source: Outside
Published: Jun 1, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,331 words)

Jersey Jetsam

Longreads Pick

MTV goes to the beach.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 18, 2010
Length: 7 minutes (1,834 words)

Hitting Bottom

Longreads Pick

Dr. Drew is a TV doctor seemingly engineered for this moment. Unlike talk-show therapists whose go-to prescription is “get real,” he commands an unusual blend of medical credentials and pop-culture savvy — he is fluent in textese, neuroscience, nitrous hits and psychodynamics, which he combines with a cool, eloquent charisma honed over 25 years in the media.

Published: Dec 30, 2009
Length: 5 minutes (1,384 words)

Glenn Beck: The Renegade Running the Opposition to Obama

Longreads Pick

Glenn Beck is a TV host, bestselling author and the most influential voice on the rightwing Fox channel. Now, even some Republicans worry that the extreme and maverick views of Beck and his supporters will make their party unelectable. Is the TV tail wagging the political dog?

Author: Gaby Wood
Source: The Guardian
Published: Nov 29, 2009
Length: 43 minutes (10,991 words)

Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective

Longreads Pick

Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cezanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg-O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in “Whole Lotta Love”? Neither had I, until I began this collection by the indefatigably curious journalist Malcolm Gladwell.

Published: Nov 7, 2009
Length: 17 minutes (4,357 words)

Blood, rage & history: The world’s first terrorists

Longreads Pick

We think of jihadism as a modern creation, but a major new TV film reveals how the 19th-century anarchist movement was equally nihilistic – and equally deadly.

Source: Independent
Published: Oct 12, 2009
Length: 24 minutes (6,069 words)

The Last Days of the Polymath

Longreads Pick

The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leo­nardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a brainy actor, writer, director and TV personality, it is at once presumptuous and banal. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it. “Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity.”

Published: Jan 10, 2009
Length: 18 minutes (4,569 words)

High-Wire Act

Longreads Pick

Neil Patrick Harris used to be an underage doctor on TV. Now he’s another Hollywood first: an out gay actor who can host award shows, play a womanizer, walk the red carpet with his boyfriend, and then get cast in movies as a straight dad. Neat trick.

Published: Sep 13, 2009
Length: 21 minutes (5,283 words)

Interview with Heart’s Nancy Wilson

Longreads Pick

The lightning bolt came out of the heavens and struck Ann and me the first time we saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. My family was living on the marine base in Camp Pendleton, California, and we’d all gathered around the little black-and-white TV at our grandmother’s in La Jolla. Most people didn’t have color sets at home back then. There’d been so much anticipation and hype about the Beatles that it was a huge event, like the lunar landing: that was the moment Ann and I heard the call to become rock musicians. I was seven or eight at the time.

Source: The Believer
Published: Aug 28, 2007
Length: 23 minutes (5,893 words)