Search Results for: TV

How Comics Helped Me Face My Diagnosis

Let me break my situation down for you in a way my doctor did not. Not much is known about my autoimmune disease, except its associations with other diseases and the antibody marker for it, anti-Jo1. Antisynthetase Syndrome is incredibly rare. One to ten people in every million have it. For comparison, according to the Lupus Foundation of America, approximately 1.5 million people in the U.S. have lupus. Whereas approximately 318 to 3,180 people in the U.S. have Antisynthetase Syndrome. I felt very alone…

Doctors give characters in tv shows, movies, and comics a moment to let the news sink in. Doctors in real life have other patients waiting to be told different news. They talk straight through all of the things you should now know about your situation, ask if you have any questions and then rush you on your way. Maybe this isn’t true everywhere. Maybe somewhere there are doctors who really say, this is serious, take your time, I’ll let you have your moment of silence.

— For years, unhelpful doctors and misdiagnoses plagued Al Rosenberg’s life. At Women Write About Comics, she discusses the validation she found in graphic novels and comics.

Read the story

Looter to Who? James Baldwin on Racism in America

In 1968, essayist, novelist and activist James Baldwin spoke with Esquire about racism in America, Dr. Martin Luther King, poverty and police brutality. In our current era of high profile police violence in communities like Ferguson, Missouri, and protests in Baltimore, Maryland, Baldwin’s words sound as prescient and, unfortunately, fresh as they did forty-seven years ago, proving the slow pace of progress in America, and how much hard work we have left to do. Below is an excerpt from the interview:

Q. How would you define somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?

BALDWIN: Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word “looter”. On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene.

Read the story

The Art of Running from the Police

Photo by Joe Thorn

Alice Goffman | On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City | University of Chicago Press | May 2014 | 45 minutes (12,478 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from On the Run, by sociologist Alice Goffman, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Goffman spent six years living in a neighborhood in Philadelphia. In her groundbreaking book, she explains how the young black men in her neighborhood are ensnared in a Kafkaesque legal system which makes running from the police their only option, and how these men have made running into an art. Read more…

‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His First Encounter with Michael Cera

“Michael Cera, I had seen him in a pilot and I reached out through the casting director, like, ‘there was this kid in this pilot, can you please try to track him down.’ Two weeks went by, and we’d seen all these — you know, kid actors in Hollywood, a lot of them come up through that Disney channel, or through — back then it was Barney. So you get really, like, these hammy kids. Precocious, you know. So I’m waiting to hear, and finally the casting director says to me, ‘great news, Michael Cera likes the script.’ And I’m like, ‘who’s Michael Cera?’ ‘The kid that you wanted us to get.’ ‘That was Michael Cera? We’ve been waiting to see whether this 12-year-old likes the material? Good, uh, I’m glad he likes the material.’ And, you know, that’s Michael Cera — you know what I mean? Only Michael Cera would be as a 12-year-old, ‘Yeah, I like this. This is good.’ It’s such an important part — television is so much about continuing to work with people, and I mean, that was just fortune. All of them.”

Mitch Hurwitz, creator of Arrested Development, in a conversation with New York magazine (2013).

Read the story

Four Stories About Disordered Eating

(TW: eating disorders, weight loss, body image.)

No woman I know has a 100 percent healthy relationship with food, with eating. Our childhoods deny us. We see the furrowed brows of our moms and our sisters; we hear the offhand comments about the women on TV or read headlines in Impact font on the magazines at the grocery checkout. Even in the most well-intentioned comments, there is a veiled threat. “You look so thin.” “I could never wear that.” “Have you lost weight?” You don’t always look this good. Careful, or you might not be able to wear that one day. You were fat before, and fat is the enemy. I’ve met many people who would say they’ve had experiences with “disordered eating”—I’m one of them. I never binged or purged, I never purposefully starved myself, but in college, eating fell by the wayside. I was depressed and overworked, and food didn’t seem important.

I think many of us have experiences with disordered eating, subconsciously or not. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), 95% of those with eating disorders are between 12 and 25 years old. That’s middle school, high school, and college, right there. That’s the first few years out of college when many of us (myself included) are negotiating how to cook, what snacks to bring to our office jobs, where we can afford to buy groceries despite thousands of dollars in student debt.

I’ve gained weight. Even though I identify as a body-positive feminist, I lament my fat rolls to my boyfriend. I cry and tell him I’m the fattest one in my friend group (as if there was something wrong with that!). As though my body is quantifiable through a number on a scale or the fit of my old jeans. I can buy new jeans. I can learn to love my body. Read more…

Theorizing the Drone

Grégoire Chamayou | A Theory of the Drone | The New Press | January 2015 | Translated by Janet Lloyd | Originally published in France as Théorie du Drone by la Fabrique Editions, Paris, 2013 | 28 minutes (7,693 words)

 

Below are four chapters excerpted from the book A Theory of the Drone, by French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

 

* * *

1

Pattern-of-Life Analysis

Enemy leaders look like everyone else; enemy combatants look like everyone else; enemy vehicles look like civilian vehicles; enemy installations look like civilian installations; enemy equipment and materials look like civilian equipment and materials.

—American Defense Science Board

 

Read more…

Inside the Kris Jenner Playbook

Kris and her children didn’t do much press for Season 10, unheard-of for this family or anyone promoting a TV show, really. Call it an educated guess to say that perhaps they didn’t want to be asked about Bruce’s transition. But not because they were shielding Bruce, whom they love. It was not because he needed his privacy during this sensitive time, which was the reason so often cited in articles about the rumors that preceded the ABC special. Bruce picked up some lessons from Kris over the years: He has signed on to do a “docuseries” with the same production company that produces their show (though Kris is not involved in it). Bruce has no privacy; none of them do. That’s the deal they made with one another. When they’re silent on Bruce, they aren’t protecting him from the judgments of a cruel world; they are protecting Bruce’s exclusive. “I learned a lot from her,” Bruce said about his marriage to Kris, during the ABC interview. And so he did: He didn’t reveal how he looks dressed in women’s clothing in the interview or what his new name is. You’ll have to tune in to his show to see that. In the Kris Jenner playbook, you don’t give anything away.

And that right there is the hustle. What matters is not the revelation of secrets; who can keep secrets in this modern tabloid culture anyway? It’s the reaction to recently surfaced information — a father’s transition, a sex tape, a new husband’s crack addition, a boyfriend’s drinking problem — that are most valuable in this world. Kris Jenner doesn’t care that you know everything. What secrets can you “discover” from a woman who airs her daughters’ discussion of the size of their labia? Kris only cares that you heard them when and where she decided you should.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner writing about Kris Jenner in the New York Times Magazine.

Read the story

Where Would the Kardashians Be Without Kris Jenner?

Longreads Pick

The matriarch of reality TV’s most famous family has done more than just create a strange new form of family business—she’s changed the nature of celebrity.

Published: May 8, 2015
Length: 17 minutes (4,250 words)

When Adjunct Professors Bag Groceries to Get By

Photo: Megan Byrd

The day in January I brought my job application back to the grocery store, I assumed I’d just be dropping it off…

Scott flipped the application over again, looked at my info, then back up at me. “How many hours are you hoping for?”

I was teaching two three-credit undergraduate courses at one college near my home in Connecticut and a three-credit class at another, along with a private writing workshop Tuesday nights. I also write weekly reviews for a TV website and do private editing work when it’s available. I’m 44 years old. My wife and I have two teenagers. The town we live in is one of the most expensive in the country.

“As many as you can give me,” I said.

— Matt Debenham, adjunct professor and grocery store employee, for BuzzFeed.

Read the story

The Man Who Became Big Bird

Photo courtesy of Debra Spinney

Jessica Gross | Longreads | May 2015 | 13 minutes (3,430 words)

 

Caroll Spinney has performed Big Bird and Oscar on Sesame Street since the show launched in 1969, almost half a century ago. A new documentary, I Am Big Bird, follows Spinney’s journey from a somewhat difficult childhood—his father had abusive tendencies, and he was picked on in school—to becoming a childhood icon, not to mention a man in an almost absurdly happy marriage. Spinney’s wife, Debra, sat nearby (laughing and interjecting sporadically) as we discussed the film, the physical and emotional reality of playing these characters, and what kind of guy a grouch really is. Big Bird and Oscar made cameo appearances.

* * *

The film features a lot of old footage that you and your wife, Debra, gathered over the years. What was it like to go through all those old tapes?

We didn’t look at any of it, although Deb had categorized it all. We gave the filmmakers many boxes of videotapes, literally hundreds of hours of television, because we’ve been taking videos since 1978. Before that, starting in 1954, I was taking eight millimeter movies, which is that blurry stuff in the film. An eight millimeter picture is just a little more than a quarter inch wide, so you can imagine when that’s blown up a million times it looks pretty soft. But it kinda makes nice footage for the story.

What was it like for you to watch the film after all that time?

It was interesting to see what they had picked out. We first watched it at home on the flat screen. But the next time I watched it, we were in Toronto in a theater with 300 people on a 60-foot-wide screen, and it’s a very different experience to watch it with other people than with just the two of us. You could hear their emotions, and you could tell they were using Kleenex at certain times. There’s about three moments in the thing that are quite emotional, I think partly due to the wonderful music that was composed for it. Read more…