Search Results for: TV

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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When a Child Becomes Aware of Death and Mortality

The following is from Rachael Maddux, who wrote about contemplating the idea of death and mortality at a young age. Maddux wrote this essay for The Paris Review last June:

For almost as long as I’ve been alive I have known that I am going to die. This awareness came to me when I was five, going on six, and since I was a child then, selfish and self-orbiting, I assumed a certain universality. At the time, and for years after, it seemed to me that the awareness of death—and therefore the fear of death, because I couldn’t fathom that a person could know of it without fearing it—was something that dawned early in every human life. It was not quite so fundamental as breathing or hair growth or digestion but more innate than learning the alphabet or the order of the days of the week, though soon enough it came to seem just as familiar.

That death was not often talked about in any open or direct way did not seem to make it any less real. As a kid, I intuited that there were certain subjects that were not for me to hear of, and later I came to understand that discussions of those same subjects were best tempered with shrugged shoulders and sideways insinuations. Death was among them, like pooping and menstruating and masturbating. Other times the topic seemed not gauche so much as just too foregone to speak of in any useful way—too vast, too apparent, like the very presence of the sky.

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Photo: Liz West

Mission To Mars

Longreads Pick

How Rob Thomas—creator of the beloved TV series Veronica Mars—used Kickstarter to bring his show to the big screen:

On the morning of March 13, 2013, Thomas hit the “Launch Project” button on his laptop screen. He’d also installed the Kickstarter app on his iPhone, with the notifications option turned on. For the next several hours, his phone vibrated continuously, never pausing long enough for him to change the settings on the app—a new backer was joining the project literally every second. About an hour in, Thomas realized what was happening. “I finally felt absolutely like we were going to get to make the movie,” he says. “That’s when I got hit by just a tidal wave of endorphins or adrenaline. I felt woozy.”
They raised $1 million in four hours. By the end of the first day, they had $2.5 million and had set several Kickstarter records, becoming the fastest project to reach $1 million and the fastest project to reach $2 million (eleven hours). In the end, they raised $5,702,153, making Veronica Mars the third-largest Kickstarter ever and the highest-funded film or video project (the previous record was $808,341, for a web TV series).

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Mar 1, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,230 words)

Television vs. the Novel

Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, writing in The New York Times Book Review, about television vs. the novel:

Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel.

In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness. At this point in our technological evolution, to read a novel is to engage in probably the second-largest single act of pleasure-based data transfer that can take place between two human beings, exceeded only by sex. Novels are characterized by their intimacy, which is extreme, by their scale, which is vast, and by their form, which is linguistic and synesthetic. The novel is a kinky beast.

Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.

Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence: One is to look out at the universe and see yourself, the other is to look within yourself and see the universe. Their destinations may converge, but television and the novel travel in opposite directions.

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Photo: medhius, Flickr

On Aging and the Memories We Look Back On

What I’ve come to count on is the white-coated attendant of memory, silently here again to deliver dabs from the laboratory dish of me. In the days before Carol died, twenty months ago, she lay semiconscious in bed at home, alternating periods of faint or imperceptible breathing with deep, shuddering catch-up breaths. Then, in a delicate gesture, she would run the pointed tip of her tongue lightly around the upper curve of her teeth. She repeated this pattern again and again. I’ve forgotten, perhaps mercifully, much of what happened in that last week and the weeks after, but this recurs.

Carol is around still, but less reliably. For almost a year, I would wake up from another late-afternoon mini-nap in the same living-room chair, and, in the instants before clarity, would sense her sitting in her own chair, just opposite. Not a ghost but a presence, alive as before and in the same instant gone again. This happened often, and I almost came to count on it, knowing that it wouldn’t last. Then it stopped.

People my age and younger friends as well seem able to recall entire tapestries of childhood, and swatches from their children’s early lives as well: conversations, exact meals, birthday parties, illnesses, picnics, vacation B. and B.s, trips to the ballet, the time when . . . I can’t do this and it eats at me, but then, without announcement or connection, something turns up.

In the New Yorker, Roger Angell discusses what life is like at 93 years old. More stories from The New Yorker.

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Photo: Elliott Brown

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The True Cost of Our Almond Addiction

The global almond boom is being fueled in part by sleek marketing campaigns that have made almonds the nut of choice for consumers. Subway stations in China are blanketed with billboards proclaiming almonds to be a heart-healthy snack that makes people “perpetually feel good” (almond exports to China have more than doubled in the past five years). In Korea, California almonds have been integrated into the storyline of a popular prime-time television show. And in Europe, French and British TV personalities have lauded almonds as a healthy alternative to processed foods.

In the United States, almonds have become a staple for many health-conscious consumers. In its raw form, the “power food” is said to lower cholesterol, spur weight loss, and provide powerful antioxidants such as Vitamin E and manganese. Products like almond butter and almond milk have also become increasingly popular in health food stores.

But growing almonds in an arid climate requires lots of water. In fact, Westlands’ almond orchards suck up nearly 100 billion gallons of water a year. Cotton, by contrast, needs 40 percent less water per acre, and tomatoes require about half as much water as almonds.

Also, unlike cotton and tomatoes, almonds are a “permanent” crop, meaning the land they’re grown on can’t lie fallow when water is scarce. “It means farmers really do need to get a hold of water in dry years in order to keep the trees alive,” explained Ellen Hanak, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and an expert on water.

Joaquin Palomino, in the East Bay Express, on what the California drought means for the almond business. Read more on agriculture.

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Photo: healthaliciousness, Flickr

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David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact

Josh Roiland | Literary Journalism Studies | Fall 2013 | 23 minutes (5,690 words)

Josh Roiland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and a CLAS-Honors Preceptor in the Honors College at the University of Maine. Roiland is a cultural historian of the American news media, who researches and teaches classes on the cultural, political, and literary significance of American journalism. This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Literary Journalism Studies. Our thanks to Roiland for allowing us to reprint it here, and for adding this introduction:

David Foster Wallace saw clear lines between journalists and novelists who write nonfiction, and he wrestled throughout his career with whether a different set of rules applied to the latter category. In the years after his death, he has faced charges of embellishment and exaggeration by his close friend Jonathan Franzen and repeated by his biographer D.T. Max. Their criticisms, however, do not adequately address the intricate philosophy Wallace formulated about genre classification and the fact/fiction divide. This article explores those nuances and argues that Wallace’s thinking about genre was complex, multifaceted, and that it evolved during his writing life.

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Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he jotted in very fine print 13 questions. After three innocuous ice breakers, Wallace turned his attention to perhaps the most prominent theme in all his writing: consciousness. Acknowledging the abnormal interview approach, Wallace prefaced these next nine inquires with a printed subhead: “Non-Journalist Questions.” Each interrogation is a paragraph long, filled with digressions, asides, and qualifications; several contain superscripted addendums.  In short, they read like they’re written by David Foster Wallace. He asks Roger Federer if he’s aware of his own greatness, aware of the unceasing media microscope he operates under, aware of his uncommon elevation of athletics to the level of aesthetics, aware of how great his great shots really are. Wallace even wrote, “How aware are you of the ballboys?” before crossing the question out.

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A Brief History of PR Disasters By Abercrombie & Fitch

In many ways, Jeffries’s most impressive accomplishment was not the signature Abercrombie style but the signature Abercrombie attitude, with its bluntly brash appeal. As one former employee put it, “The only bad news was no news. Controversy was what you wanted.” Consequently, the list of PR disasters past and present is too lengthy to fully detail, but the more notable flare-ups include the following: the quickly recalled line of Asian-themed T-shirts, which featured men in rice-paddy hats and cartoonishly slanted eyes; a line of thongs, marketed to girls as young as 10, with the words wink-wink on the crotch; an issue of A&F Quarterly that included a user’s guide to having oral sex in a movie theater; and the disingenuous joke-apology to critics that appeared in the same periodical in 2003: “If you’d be so kind, please offer our apologies to the following: the Catholic League, former Lt. Governor Corrine Wood of Illinois, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Stanford University Asian-American Association, N.O.W.”

In 2010, Michael Stephen Bustin, a former pilot of the Abercrombie corporate jet, filed a lawsuit against Abercrombie in a Philadelphia federal court, claiming he’d been unfairly dismissed because of his age. (He is in his mid-fifties.) Abercrombie & Fitch settled with Bustin, but not quickly enough to prevent the disclosure, by Bustin’s lawyers, of a 40-plus page Abercrombie “aircraft standards” manual, a copy of which leaked online.

Included in the manual are rules on crew apparel (the male staff, hand-selected by a New York modeling agency, were to wear a “spritz” of Abercrombie 41 cologne and boxer briefs under their jeans), the specific song to be played on return flights (“Take Me Home,” by Phil Collins), and the way the toilet paper in the aft lavatory should be rolled (never exposed; end square neatly folded). If Jeffries makes a request, the crew is always to respond with “No problem” instead of “Yes” or “Sure.”

It’s Fashion Week in New York, and in New York magazine, Matthew Shaer looks at the rise and fall of retailer Abercrombie & Fitch, which is attempting to reposition itself in a the current market, where stores like H&M have found success. A+F CEO Mike Jeffries helped rebrand the company in the ’90s to much success, but has unable to keep the company up with a changing consumer market. Read more business stories at Longreads.

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Photo: Daniel Spills

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Why Abercrombie Is Losing Its Shirt

Longreads Pick

In the early ’90s, Mike Jeffries gave struggling retailer Abercrombie and Fitch new life by selling a specific kind of lifestyle to teenage shoppers who “wanted to belong.” Times have changed, and the retailer needs to as well:

Until relatively recently, Abercrombie’s numerous press scandals followed a predictable pattern: a flood of petitions and angry phone calls; an army of talking heads on cable TV complaining about the pernicious influence of the brand; and then silence. Consumers seemed to accept that Abercrombie’s gleefully offensive vibe was part of the package, and the company’s bottom line was never truly threatened.

But sensibilities have since evolved; casual prejudice is not as readily tolerated. Today’s teens are no longer interested in “the elite, cool-kid thing” to the extent that they once were, says Gordon, the Michigan professor. “This generation is about inclusiveness and valuing diversity. It’s about not looking down on people.” And with the help of social media, for the first time critics have succeeded in putting Abercrombie on the defensive. Last year, blogger Jes Baker drew blood with her spoof photo series “Attractive & Fat,” which satirized the iconic Bruce Weber images. A video of activist Greg Karber distributing Abercrombie clothing to homeless people has been viewed upwards of 8 million times on YouTube.

Published: Feb 9, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,213 words)

The Book That Inspired Your Favorite Twitter Bots

After graduating from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Kazemi entered the world of video game development, building programs that could systematically test new games for bugs. Kazemi also designed his own games—like many game designers, he considered games an art form as much as a technical accomplishment—until one day in 2012, he decided that the medium was holding him back from what he really wanted to express. It was around this time that Kazemi read a book of philosophy called “Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing” by Ian Bogost, a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In the book, Bogost advanced a concept that greatly appealed to Kazemi: that it was possible to be a philosopher who didn’t write down ideas, but instead made objects that embodied them.

The “objects” Kazemi was moved to make after reading Bogost’s book were Twitter bots, a class of digital beings typically associated with irritating spam accounts that automatically send advertising messages to any Twitter user who mentions a particular word or brand name. Kazemi was hardly the first person to realize the potential in programming conceptually interesting Twitter bots—for example, Adam Parrish had already made the popular @everyword, which has been working its way alphabetically through the English language, tweeting one word every 30 minutes, since 2007. But Kazemi quickly became one of the medium’s most inventive practitioners.

Leon Neyfakh, in the Boston Globe, on the work of Darius Kazemi. Read more from Ian Bogost’s book, and from the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Flickr

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