Search Results for: TV

The Non-Mysteries of the Female Orgasm

“My initial forays into oral sex were a crutch, a way of compensating for my sexual inadequacies, and they were approached with the assumption that cunnilingus was a poor man’s second to the joys and splendors of ‘real sex’–like many, I took it for granted that intercourse was the ‘right way’ for couples to experience orgasms. But, to my surprise, I discovered that the ‘way of the tongue’ was by no means inferior to intercourse; if anything, it was superior, in many cases the only way in which women were able to receive the persistent, rhythmic stimulation, outside of masturbation, necessary to achieve an orgasm. I quickly learned that oral sex is real sex, and later in life, when I happened to come across a copy of the seminal Hite Report on Female Sexuality, I was reassured to find that women consider oral sex to be ‘one of their most favorite and exciting activities; women mentioned over and over how much they loved it.’ When it comes to pleasure, there is no right or wrong way to have an orgasm–the only thing that’s wrong is to assume that women need or value them any less than men do.”

-From She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman, by Ian Kerner, Ph.D.. Read more in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: ranieldiaz, Flickr

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A Very Dangerous Boy

Longreads Pick

On the trial of Joseph Hall, who murdered his neo-Nazi father when he was 10 years old. (For more background on the story, see Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Feb. 2013 piece.)

Did an atmosphere of hate drive Joseph to kill? Did his stepmother? Or was it his childish misreading of a TV show? Or a complicated amalgam of factors, tangled together in a damaged brain? Was Joseph confused or deranged, a victim or a victimizer? Had he simply changed his story and implicated Krista because he was tired of being locked up? Or did he finally find the strength to tell the truth, months after the killing, because he was no longer under her sway? There were many questions, but Judge Leonard focused on one: Did Joseph know when he pulled the trigger that what he was doing was wrong?

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 4, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,279 words)

The Secret to Every Episode of 'Maury,' in Three Acts

“Producers think of every Maury segment as a three-act play. Tiffany’s suspicions were the subject of Act I. ‘We haven’t had sex in over a month,’ she complained. Harrison-Hall turned to us with her mouth open and we yelled, ‘Ohhhhh!’ Tiffany’s neighbor, Candice, rose from the front row to say she’d seen women entering Cornelius’s studio at night. We applauded.

“After a time, Tiffany’s boyfriend, Cornelius, appeared from backstage. This was Act II. Cornelius wore the expression of a lot of Maury men — guilty but defiant. He found himself confronted not only by Tiffany but by Maury’s in-house private investigator, Wendy Kleinknecht. Kleinknecht is a tall blonde who looks like Erin Brockovich. She had taped Cornelius with another woman — the decoy. We watched Cornelius ask the decoy, ‘You want to get fucked tonight?’

“This was fun but it could have aired 20 years ago. We’ve seen a thousand talk shows with a thousand Tiffanys and Corneliuses. It’s in Act III that Maury shows how it has mastered the 21st century. What Act III of every Maury segment requires now is a denouement. Reality shows call this moment the ‘reveal’; Maury producers call it ‘truth.’”

Bryan Curtis and Grantland go behind the scenes of Maury Povich’s daytime show. Read more on TV from the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: mauryshow.com

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An Encounter With a Serial Killer

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“You blink. You look again. You look at other photos. You wonder if you’re being melodramatic, if your memory is faulty. You wonder if people will believe you, or simply think your imagination has run away with you. You wonder if there is a class of neurotic people who make up false accounts of run-ins with serial killers. You realize that to be true to your story and yourself, you can’t let what you are reading create false memories.”

– In Orange Coast Magazine, a former Marine describes what it’s like to come to the realization that he may have met a notorious serial killer many years ago. See also: Vanessa Veselka’s 2012 GQ story about her possible run-in with a serial killer.

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Photo by: Dick Uhne

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What the Smartphone Is Doing to Fiction

“There’s nothing worse for plots than cellphones. Once your characters have one, there’s no reason for them to get lost or stranded. Or miss each other at the top of the Empire State Building. If you want anything like that to happen, you either have to explain upfront what happened to the phones or you have to make at least one character some sort of manic pixie Luddite who doesn’t carry one.”

Rainbow Rowell and other authors discuss the effect of technology on their work (New York Times). Read more on tech in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: nseika, Flickr

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“In the jargon of economics, the demand for therapeutic drugs is ‘price inelastic’: increasing the price doesn’t reduce how much the drugs are used. Prices are set and raised according to what the market will bear, and the parties who actually pay the drug companies will meet whatever price is charged for an effective drug to which there is no alternative. And so in determining the price for a drug, companies ask themselves questions that have next to nothing to do with the drugs’ costs. ‘It is not a science,’ the veteran drug maker and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer told me. ‘It is a feel.’”

– An examination of how pharmaceutical companies determine the price of drugs. Read more on medicine in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Rennett Stowe

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Reading List: The Culture of Cosplayers

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Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

For cosplayers, dressing up isn’t just once a year on Halloween. It’s part of a complex identity and community lifestyle.

1. “Cosplayers are Passionate, Talented Folks. But There’s a Darker Side to this Community, Too.” (Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku, January 2013)

The author interviews two (female) cosplayers who share why they cosplay and what motivates them, despite sexual harassment and other injustices.

2. “I’m a Black Female Cosplayer … and Some People Hate It.” (Chaka Cumberbatch, February 2013, Racialicious)

“After my pictures started making the rounds on deviantArt, Tumblr, and 4chan, it became pretty clear that my cosplay brings all the racists to the yard, and they’re, like, white cosplay is better than yours.”

3. “Meet the World’s Most Intense Disney Fans.” (Jordan Zakarin, Buzzfeed, August 2013)

A WHOLE NEW WOOOORRRRRRRLLLLLD of costly cosplay in California.

4. “Magical Girls, Heroines, and Anime Amazon: Field Notes from Otakon 2013.” (Rose, Autostraddle, August 2013)

Rose explores how women are represented in panels and treated in person at one of the most popular anime convention in the United States.

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Photo: Pat Loika

The Battle for Picasso’s Mind

Longreads Pick

[NSFW] Tom Braden launched CNN’s political talk show Crossfire and inspired the father figure on the TV show Eight Is Enough. In the 1950s, Braden also launched a CIA mission to use modern art to fight communism:

Braden’s operation was a success. One of the world’s most famous and influential painters, Gerhard Richter, would later attribute his defection from East Germany to his viewing of abstract expressionist art. In 1959, at documenta II, an art show started in 1955 by a West German artist and professor to display modern artwork suppressed by the Nazis, Richter viewed work by artists including Pollock. Afterward Richter realized, “There was something wrong with my whole way of thinking…expression of a totally different and entirely new content.” In a letter to his former art teacher in East Germany, Richter explained why he risked his life: “The reasons are largely due to my career.… When I say cultural ‘climate’ in the West offers me and my artistic endeavors more, that is more compatible with my way of being and my way of working than the East, I am pointing out the main reason behind my decision.”

Source: Playboy
Published: Oct 18, 2013
Length: 28 minutes (7,204 words)

“I’ve said this before, and it was said to me, but life is choice, and choice is loss. And it’s very easy I think when you’re a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what’s special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process. I will say, Arrested, I had to remind myself that it was a great joy, that even when we did it, we were both making fans and upsetting fans. It did sort of die, and like anything that dies young, nobody goes back and says, ‘You know who wasn’t a very good actor? James Dean.’ ”

Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz (via Vulture). Here are more TV stories from the Longreads Archive.

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‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jeff Sharlet | Sweet Heaven When I Die, W. W. Norton & Company | Aug 2011 | 37 minutes (9,133 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Quebrado,” by Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and bestselling author. The story was first published in Rolling Stone in 2008 and is featured in Sharlet’s book Sweet Heaven When I Die. Thanks to Sharlet for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…