Search Results for: The Nation

Finalists for the 2016 National Magazine Awards

Longreads Pick

Congrats to the 2016 Ellies finalists! ASME has provided a list of nominees with links to stories.

Author: Editors
Published: Jan 14, 2016

A Profile for #BachelorNation

Photo: ABC

Last January, the massively talented Taffy Brodesser-Akner profiled Chris Harrison, the longtime host of The Bachelor, for GQ. The brilliance of a Brodesser-Akner profile is in the way she treats her subjects: with steadfast humanity, even (and especially) in situations where a lesser writer might mock or ever so slightly sneer. Which is not to say that she sacrifices an ounce of humor in her refusal to condescend; the piece is often hilarious, but honestly so.  To borrow a phrase from Bachelor parlance, she’s there for the right reasons. Anyway, as The Bachelor enters its 20th season, the time seems right to revisit her profile. A brief taste:

Later, when Chris and I meet up with Gwen for salad—amicable, amicable—she tells me that he was born knowing exactly what to say and how to say it. I can’t attest to how far back this skill of his stretches, but I can confirm that he’s still got it. Chris Harrison is one of the smoothest motherfuckers I’ve ever met. On-screen he is able to do something that I believe men are generally not wired for: He can sit there and listen to a woman, allow her to emote and cry, and never interrupt, never try to shut her down or clean her up. Sure, it’s good television to let the tears flow, but still, it’s rare to find a man who can allow himself to allow it. When it’s time to ask a contestant to leave, his face is the face you want: lips mashed mournfully together, eyebrows up, big sigh.

Even off-camera, he speaks in crisp sentences. He doesn’t stumble. He doesn’t stammer. You should see my interview transcript; it came back from the transcriber as if it had already been edited. Gwen says Harrison is just as he appears on TV, “but funnier. People don’t realize how funny he is.”

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We’ll All Float On: An Examination of the Sensory Deprivation Tank

Photo: Jon Roig

Onstage at the 2013 Float Conference—Float On’s annual gathering of float tank researchers, manufacturers, owners, and enthusiasts—next to a humongous pile of salt, a man asked the audience a simple question: “What do you think of Justin Bieber floating?”

—It’s called “floating.” Not just colloquially. There are franchises, retreat centers, books and consulting companies, all dedicated to the physical (and sometimes the New Age/metaphysical) benefits of a quick dip in an isolation tank. Proponents of floating say it’ll reach the ubiquity of yoga, massage or chiropractic, and soon. Luke Stoddard Nathan lampoons the typical first-person exploration of sensory deprivation and goes deep at The Awl.

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Terry Gross, National Interviewer: 40 Years of Fresh Air

Photo by Will Ryan

This fall, Gross marks her 40th anniversary hosting “Fresh Air.” At 64, she is “the most effective and beautiful interviewer of people on the planet,” as Marc Maron said recently, while introducing an episode of his podcast, “WTF,” that featured a conversation with Gross. She’s deft on news and subtle on history, sixth-sensey in probing personal biography and expert at examining the intricacies of artistic process. She is acutely attuned to the twin pulls of disclosure and privacy. “You started writing memoirs before our culture got as confessional as it’s become, before the word ‘oversharing’ was coined,” Gross said to the writer Mary Karr last month. “So has that affected your standards of what is meant to be written about and what is meant to maintain silence about?” (“That’s such a smart question,” Karr responded. “Damn it, now I’m going to have to think.”)

Gross is an interviewer defined by a longing for intimacy. In a culture in which we are all talking about ourselves more than ever, Gross is not only listening intently; she’s asking just the right questions.

In The New York Times Magazine Susan Burton profiles “national interviewer” Terry Gross, who celebrates 40 years behind the microphone as the host of NPR’s Fresh Air.

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The Fears of Our Nation: President Obama Interviews Marilynne Robinson

The President: How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them?

Robinson: Well, I don’t know how seriously they do take their Christianity, because if you take something seriously, you’re ready to encounter difficulty, run the risk, whatever. I mean, when people are turning in on themselves—and God knows, arming themselves and so on—against the imagined other, they’re not taking their Christianity seriously. I don’t know—I mean, this has happened over and over again in the history of Christianity, there’s no question about that, or other religions, as we know.

But Christianity is profoundly counterintuitive—“Love thy neighbor as thyself”—which I think properly understood means your neighbor is as worthy of love as you are, not that you’re actually going to be capable of this sort of superhuman feat. But you’re supposed to run against the grain. It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be a challenge.

The President: Well, that’s one of the things I love about your characters in your novels, it’s not as if it’s easy for them to be good Christians, right?

Robinson: Right.

At The New York Review of Books, President Obama interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, a conversation he requested to have after becoming a fan of her novels. As a companion to this interview, read her recent essay, “Fear,” a rumination on American history, religious history, guns, violence, war, and her deeply held Christian beliefs.

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Seven Hikers’ Descent into Doom at Zion National Park

Longreads Pick

The Los Angeles Times reconstructs the final hours of the seven experienced hikers who lost their lives last week in a flash flood at Zion National Park.

Published: Sep 20, 2015
Length: 9 minutes (2,265 words)

‘Firsts,’ ‘Lasts,’ and ‘Onlys’ at the International Music Feed

Over at Noisey, Lisa Mrock has written a wonderfully personal requiem for a short-lived TV channel called the International Music Feed. The music video-based television network in question only existed for three years (from 2005 to 2008), but it made quite an impact during its brief tenure:

In an age where hardly anything is original, the International Music Feed claims a significant number of “firsts,” “lasts,” and “onlys.” It’s still the only music video network created by a music corporation, Universal Music Group. It’s the first and only music video network that focused on incorporating foreign artists into its rotation. It’s also the last American music video network that played music videos 24/7. Not even Palladia, MTV’s apology for being an abomination to intellect and mental development, can say that.

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Start Your Own Micronation

Liberland is one of Europe’s newest would-be countries. Czech politician Vit Jedlicka and two fellow libertarians founded it in mid-April, claiming about 2.7 square miles of no man’s land between Croatia and Serbia. The idea is to create a “European Singapore,” where taxes are voluntary, Jedlicka told Bloomberg Business recently. Writing for the BBC, Rose Eveleth took a look at an older self-proclaimed sovereign state, the Principality of Sealand.

Since 1967 there have been all kinds of debates over whether or not Sealand is in fact a nation. Here’s what Michael told me when I asked: “We have never asked for recognition, and we’ve never felt the need to ask for recognition. You don’t have to have recognition to be a state, you just have to fulfill the criteria of the Montevideo Convention which is population, territory, government and the capacity to enter into negotiation with other states. We can and we have done all these things. We’ve had the German ambassador visit at one point to discuss something: that was defacto recognition. We’ve had communication with the president of France many years ago, but we have never asked for recognition and we don’t feel we need it.”

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On Our Fascination with Twins

Longreads Pick

A brief history of twins in literature.

Source: Literary Hub
Published: Jul 14, 2015
Length: 7 minutes (1,893 words)

Canada’s National Magazine Award Winners: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

Guest reading list from Eva Holland: “This year’s awards were up for grabs among 326 nominees from 80 publications, spread across 43 categories. ‘Gold’ and ‘silver’ winners get awards, and the balance of the nominees receive honorable mentions. That spawns the occasional joke about how in Canadian magazines, everyone gets a medal for participation, but—go ahead, call me biased (I was a nominee/honorable mention in the ‘society’ category, for ‘The Forgotten Internment’)—I like the way our format lets us celebrate many different sorts of work, not just the ‘biggest,’ most ambitious features.”

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 10, 2015