Search Results for: TV

Comedy and the Single Girl

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Armstrong’s book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, on how Treva Silverman helped create TV’s most memorable characters:

One night in 1964, Silverman was playing at a piano bar in Manhattan’s theater district—it was another one of those dark, smoky places, but this one had a well-tuned baby grand. She took her requisite set break, listening to the glasses clink and the patrons murmur in the absence of her playing. Still energized from her performance, she struck up a conversation with an intense, bearded, hippie-ish guy and his girlfriend sitting near her at the bar. Soon they were chatting about their mutual love of F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger. Beards were only just on the brink of acceptable mainstream grooming at the time, a signal of a certain kind of rebelliousness that endeared this guy to Silverman. Guys with beards tended to smoke weed, be creative, listen to cool music. They were Silverman’s people. Even more so when they could talk Fitzgerald and Salinger. It figured that he was there with a woman, though. Those guys were always taken.

The guy, Jim Brooks, worked at CBS as an assistant in the newsroom.

Published: Jun 10, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,714 words)

The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey Into His Father’s Life

Stephen Rodrick | The Magical Stranger | 2014 | 11 minutes (2,779 words)

Below is the first chapter from The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick’s memoir about his father, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick. Our thanks to Rodrick for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

The Pun-derful World of Competitive Punning

In L.A. Weekly, Zachary Pincus-Roth profiles 38-year-old Ben Ziek, a world pun champion titleholder:

In the first round, Ziek faces Adam Bass, a writer for Groupon in Chicago. For Bass’ whole life, he says, whenever he hears a word like scarf, he thinks immediately of both neckwear and voracious eating: “People say, ‘You were born to do this.'”

His dad, Mike Bass, took him to the Pun-Off as a 30th-birthday present. The former sports editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press used to pun — but when his sons started doing it, he realized its effect. “My head would be spinning and I’d go, enough was enough,” he says. “I had to stop. I had to be the adult.”

The category is “art and artists,” and Bass’ college art classes come in handy. “I gotta get out of here, I have a Weegee,” referencing the famous photographer as he reaches back toward his underwear. But Ziek is always quick to respond — “I’m excited for this competition. That’s why I Rodin to town early” — and eventually outlasts him.

Bass is satisfied. “It’s like that boxer who wants to go five to 10 minutes with the heavyweight champion,” he says.

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Photo: Meme Binge

Miss American Dream

Longreads Pick

How Britney Spears went to Vegas and became a feminist role model. No, really.

Fifty stories above all this, Britney Spears was working. She didn’t know about the wind or the dancers or the fire-breather or about the old lady whose day she had fucked up immeasurably, the one who might be the Queen of England. She was sitting in a room in the semi-dark, slightly hunched over, a little bored, at the tail end of a daylong junket in which TV journalists asked her questions like “What do people not know about you?” (“Really that I’m pretty boring.”) and “What was the craziest rumor you ever heard about yourself?” (“That I died.”) and who her secret famous crush is, a question that she’s been asked for years and years and that she’s been giving the same answer to for years and years (“Brad Pitt”).

Source: Matter
Published: Jun 9, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,111 words)

Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)

 

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community. 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

 

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Author John Green on the Problem With 'Twilight'

John Green is the author of the wildly popular young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, which remained No. 1 on Amazon in the U.S. and Britain two years after its release. Guardian writer Emma Brockes profiled Green for Intelligent Life this month, and here Green discusses what is problematic about another wildly popular series: Twilight.

Green has firm moral views about the influence of teen fiction and the responsibilities that rest on its authors, particularly around the subject of sexual politics. “Twilight” bothers him a lot. Although impressed by the “world-building” in the story, he is “troubled by some of the relationships, and certainly troubled by the gender politics of that novel.”

In what way?

“I wanted a stronger, more defined Bella and I wanted an Edward who hadn’t been around for a century. I find it very problematic that you have a century to accrue experience of life and then you seduce a teenager.”

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See also: Emily’s reading list, “The Fault in Our Canon”

Photo: Genevieve

The Good Girls Revolt

Lynn Povich | The Good Girls Revolt, Public Affairs | 2012 | 14 minutes (3,368 words)

 

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“Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint”

On March 16, 1970, Newsweek magazine hit the newsstands with a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement titled “Women in Revolt.” The bright yellow cover pictured a naked woman in red silhouette, her head thrown back, provocatively thrusting her fist through a broken blue female-sex symbol. As the first copies went on sale that Monday morning, forty-six female employees of Newsweek announced that we, too, were in revolt. We had just filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging that we had been “systematically discriminated against in both hiring and promotion and forced to assume a subsidiary role” simply because we were women. It was the first time women in the media had sued on the grounds of sex discrimination and the story, irresistibly timed to the Newsweek cover, was picked up around the world:

• “‘Discriminate,’ le redattrici di Newsweek?” (La Stampa) “Newsweek’s Sex Revolt” (London Times)
• “Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint” (Newsday)
• “Women Get Set for Battle” (London Daily Express)
• “As Newsweek Says, Women Are in Revolt, Even on Newsweek” (New York Times)

The story in the New York Daily News, titled “Newshens Sue Newsweek for ‘Equal Rights,’” began, “Forty-six women on the staff of Newsweek magazine, most of them young and most of them pretty, announced today they were suing the magazine.”

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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Why Microsoft, Google, and Apple Are Working With Science Fiction Writers

Science fiction writer Eileen Gunn recently wrote in Smithsonian magazine about how the science fiction genre informs the way we think about the real world. Here, Gunn writes that big tech companies like Microsoft have hired science fiction writers to do “design fiction”—coming up with new technology ideas through imaginative works:

Microsoft, Google, Apple and other firms have sponsored lecture series in which science fiction writers give talks to employees and then meet privately with developers and research departments. Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the close tie between science fiction and technology today than what is called “design fiction”—imaginative works commissioned by tech companies to model new ideas. Some corporations hire authors to create what-if stories about potentially marketable products.

“I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow, whose clients have included Disney and Tesco. “There is nothing weird about a company doing this—commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.” Doctorow, who worked in the software industry, has seen both sides of the development process. “I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”

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Photo: Arthur Cugun

Dating in the 21st Century: A Reading List

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. “Love Me Tinder.” (Emily Witt, GQ, January 2014)

The denizens of Tinder in all their weird, wild, witty glory.

2. “Dating While Trans: The Doldrums.” (Audrey Arndt, The Toast, May 2014)

For a long time, Audrey openly described herself as transgender in her OKCupid profile.

3. “Forever Single: DATING WHITE PPL.” (Soleil Ho, Infinite Scroll, January 2014)

Or “11 Challenges of Having a White Partner” as a person of color.

4. “Dating on the Autism Spectrum.” (Emily Shire, The Atlantic, August 2013)

For many autistic teens and adults, the flirting, dating and the rest of the romance rigamarole don’t come easy. That’s where programs like PEERS come in.

Photo: David Goehring