Search Results for: The Guardian

‘If Both of You Don’t Grow Up, One of You Is Going to Die’

It never fully leaves. Years later, you find yourself at a New Year’s party and idly ask a friend a question about dads, and after 10 minutes’ conversation you realize both of you are on the verge either of insensate bawling, or else ready to throw a chair through a window. Or you find yourself back in the old hometown at Christmas, talking a drunk high school buddy into getting back in the car because the house he asked you to stop at – one you didn’t recognize – is his dad’s new house, with his new family, and your friend is talking about how much he wishes he could just ring the doorbell and beat his father’s face into a gory smear, until it looks like someone dropped a tray of lasagna out a fifth-story window.

Or you find yourself at a college football party last weekend, and Adrian Peterson comes up, and a woman from out of town asks, “Do people in the south really do that still? How does it stop?” And a dude in his early thirties who looks like a 6ft-3in brick wall says, “Everyone on my block did that. It stops as soon as they realize you might be able to beat their ass just as good.” And without thinking about it, you kill the party for the next two minutes by saying, “It’s not just the south. I grew up in San Francisco. Sometimes nobody winds up bigger or stronger. Sometimes it stops because you move out. Or because you realize that if both of you don’t grow up, one of you is going to die.”

Jeb Lund in The Guardian on corporal punishment.

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Photo: theirhistory, Flickr

Can Time Inc. Save Itself By Becoming the Next Facebook?

When [Joe] Ripp first discussed taking the CEO job with Bewkes, he said that Time Inc. needed to stop thinking of itself as a magazine company. But what exactly Time Inc. will become depends on who is talking. Ripp tells me it will be a significant player in video. (The company has backed the online channel 120 Sports and has rolled out channels for sports, celebrity news, and business.) Ripp also wants to branch into e-commerce, conferences, and events. Pearlstine praises Forbes’s user-generated content model. He supports “native advertising,” the practice of running sponsored content that looks similar to editorial content, and also said his dream acquisition is LinkedIn. M. Scott Havens, a digital executive Ripp hired from Atlantic Media, recently told The Guardian that Time Inc. needs to build “the next Gilt, the next Facebook.”

None of this talk has eased skeptics’ doubts. “What is this company?” one recently departed editor asked me. “They’ve declared print dead and hastened the end of the magazine business. But they don’t have an idea of what the company is instead.” Given the crushing debt load, roughly two and a half times earnings, that has to be serviced somehow, many inside the company anticipate extreme budget cuts. And Ripp’s finance background has triggered speculation that Time Inc. is being gussied up for a sale. “Private equity could drain the cow until there’s nothing left,” speculated another longtime Time Inc. executive.

Ripp shoots down that idea. “I would not come back to a company that would be bled and drained,” he tells me. “I didn’t want any part of that. This company defined my life.”

— Time Inc., the storied company behind publications like People, Sports Illustrated, and its flagship TIME magazine, is searching for new revenue models after the decline of print-ad revenues in recent years. In New York magazine, Gabriel Sherman talked to Time Inc CEO Joe Ripp to assess what the future of the company might look like.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

‘She’s Good, With a Capital G’: A Roxane Gay Reading List

A reading list could never do author Roxane Gay justice. For one thing, she’s incredibly prolific. She writes, edits, teaches and tweets. Within the past few months, she’s garnered acclaim for her intense novel, An Untamed State, and her collection of essays, Bad FeministThese are just the facts.

I don’t remember discovering Gay’s work. I remember requesting to follow her on Twitter and the elation I felt after receiving her approval. I remember reading her stark personal essays for The Rumpus. I remember reading one my favorite stories of hers out loud to an ex while he listened obligingly. He didn’t love it, but I did. I had never read anything like it in my life. I was obsessed. Her commentary on current events, her appreciation of pop culture, her honesty and nuance—she’s Good, with a capital G.

If you haven’t had the privilege of reading Gay before, let this be a primer. She has written dozens and dozens of essays and short stories, many of which she lists on her website. I’ve included two wonderful recent interviews, a smattering of short stories and more. Longreads recently featured an excerpt from Gay’s novel, An Untamed State. If that doesn’t hook you, nothing will.

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The Power of 'Confessional' Writing

Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, a book of essays, writes in the Guardian about the power of confessional writing:

Confession doesn’t just allow – it incites. Someone tweeted about my essays: “After reading this book, I want to write about my hidden pain until my fingers bleed, and then I want to write about my bleeding fingers.” One woman wrote to me to say that as she was writing, her mother was collecting her things from her ex-boyfriend’s house: “I don’t know how to hold this hurt inside,” she said. “But I’m mortified at the thought of talking about it or writing about it or painting it – somehow that seems so much more embarrassing than drunk-dialling him, or falling off a bar stool and breaking my wrist, or whatever ways used to seem like options.”

Another woman wrote to say that one of my essays had made her turn down sex with a guy who didn’t love her. “As low as that sounds,” she said, as if it didn’t matter much. But it mattered to me. It didn’t sound low at all. It sounded like something I might have needed – at several points in my life – to hear. She told me she was writing drunk. She’d needed to get drunk to find the courage to write at all.

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Photo: matryoshka

On Watching a Person Deteriorate

In the Guardian, an adaptation of The Iceberg, a memoir by Marion Coutts about her husband’s last months after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. She writes: “There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part.”

13 April 2010

The operation went well. Tom is sitting up, talking, eating, reading. He looks extremely good. All praise to the surgeon.

Tom is home within 10 days but straight away there are fresh difficulties. He has trouble saying the name of the hospital or the name of the friend who came yesterday. He calls me to the study where he is looking up something in the thesaurus. The word is disaster. “They can’t have got rid of it!” he says. “Maddening!” As he has spelled it distaster, he cannot find it. Physically there is a lot of strain. Weakness and muscle failure is starting to sting him and creep again around the joints, fingers and calves and in parts of his arms. This is steroids at their warring work.

Tom is speaking to me less. The way his intellect is made manifest through language is being destroyed. Great chunks of speech are collapsing. Holes are appearing. Avenues crumble and sudden roadblocks halt the journey from one part of consciousness to the other. He strings words together like ropes across voids. He never panics. What would it be like if he did?

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Photo: Joris Louwes

The Culture of Video Games: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from The Guardian, Kotaku, Leigh Alexander, Polygon, and Kill Screen.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 15, 2014

The Culture of Video Games: A Reading List

Videogames fascinate me. I’m not very good at the majority I’ve tried to play, but, like kickball and baking, I still play, because they’re fun, and I don’t have to be good at everything. (Except Pac-Man World 2 for PS2. I rule that. Especially the ice-skating levels.) Friends have helped me play Bioshock Infinite and introduced me to Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? I like to read How Games Saved My Life. In these voices, I hear passion. Not defense or argument, but thoughtfulness and joy. It’s the same joy I express when I rant about a particular book or marvel at a stunning piece of longform journalism. I am not going to be the person who ranks media’s promise or power or worth, who turns up her nose at YA literature or One Direction or Zelda.

1. “Video Games: The Addiction.” (Tom Bissell, The Guardian, March 2010)

Don’t let the cliched title fool you. This isn’t an indictment of video games. Tom Bissell is a fantastic writer, whose pieces I’ve included in the past, but his past includes a cocaine addiction and a Grand Theft Auto IV addiction. “Any regrets? Absolutely none.”

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The 2014 Pulitzer Prize Winners

This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners are outThe Washington Post and The Guardian shared a Pulitzer for public service for their reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks and widespread NSA surveillance, the Boston Globe was honored for its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity won for his black lung investigation, and Will Hobson and Michael LaForgia received a Pulitzer for the Tampa Bay Times’ investigation of a homeless housing program. Read more…

Charlie Chaplin's Lost Novel

“What happened?”

“A nervous breakdown. I almost died.”

“And you’re still drinking?”

“Occasionally, when I think of things.” He smiled, “The wrong things, I suppose. However, I’ve talked enough about myself. What would you like for breakfast?”

“What a sad business, being funny,” she said thoughtfully.

The table was laid and now he was ready to cook breakfast. He stood a moment, deep in thought. “But it has its compensations … It’s a great thrill to hear an audience laugh. Now let me see,” he said, opening the door of the larder, “We have eggs, salmon, sardines … ” He snapped his fingers. “That’s broken my dream! I dreamt we were doing an act together! That’s the trouble, I get wonderful ideas in my dreams, but when I awake, I forget them. This morning I found myself shaking with laughter. Then I got up and rushed to the desk and wrote five pages of screams. Then I awoke and found I hadn’t written a line.”

From Charlie Chaplin’s novel, Footlights, excerpted in the Guardian. At just over 30,000 words, it’s the only work of fiction ever written by Chaplin, and it traces the same narrative as his film Limelight. The work was in Chaplin’s archives for decades, and is now being published by the Cineteca di Bologna and will be available on both Amazon and the publisher’s website. Read more about Chaplin in the Longreads Archive.

Russell Brand on What It’s Like to Be an Addict

Drugs and alcohol are not my problem, reality is my problem, drugs and alcohol are my solution.

If this seems odd to you it is because you are not an alcoholic or a drug addict. You are likely one of the 90% of people who can drink and use drugs safely. I have friends who can smoke weed, swill gin, even do crack and then merrily get on with their lives. For me, this is not an option. I will relinquish all else to ride that buzz to oblivion. Even if it began as a timid glass of chardonnay on a ponce’s yacht, it would end with me necking the bottle, swimming to shore and sprinting to Bethnal Green in search of a crack house. I look to drugs and booze to fill up a hole in me; unchecked, the call of the wild is too strong. I still survey streets for signs of the subterranean escapes that used to provide my sanctuary. I still eye the shuffling subclass of junkies and dealers, invisibly gliding between doorways through the gutters. I see that dereliction can survive in opulence; the abundantly wealthy with destitution in their stare.

—Comedian and actor Russell Brand, writing in The Guardian  in 2013. His essay explores his past as a heroin addict, and how he has stayed sober for the past 10 years.

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