Search Results for: The Nation

Aftershocks: A Nation Bears the Unbearable

Longreads Pick

To geologists, earthquakes are a constant in the planet’s eternal becoming. To the Japanese, they are simply a constant. In a given year, there can be hundreds, usually barely discernible micro-events. They rattle the pictures on the wall, the china on the table, but they rarely stop the conversation. Donald Keene, a professor at Columbia and the dean of Japanese-literature scholars, said, “Very often, when I have been away from Japan for a while and come back, there will be a small earthquake, and I notice it and no one else in the room does. They laugh at me.” He added, “People expect this all the time, that they will be warned. But when a quake of great magnitude happens they are shocked. The world changes.”

Author: Evan Osnos
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 21, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,702 words)

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: By the Time We Got to Woodstock '99

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: By the Time We Got to Woodstock ’99

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: Woodstock ’99

Longreads Pick

Promoter John Scher insisted instead that the ugliness of Woodstock 99 reflected a larger moral chasm in the souls of the attendees. “I think, in some respects, the generation was irresponsible and they gave me and themselves the finger,” Scher told Spin. He wasn’t the only one who felt that Woodstock 99 amounted to a big “fuck you!” from legions of incorrigible kids. More than one writer likened Woodstock 99 to “The Day Of The Locust,” the 1939 Nathanael West novel about wanton sin and alienation in Los Angeles that ends with violent mob violence.

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: Feb 22, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,866 words)

‘Knifed’: Sargent Shriver and the 1968 VP Nomination

Longreads Pick

In the spring of 1968 Sargent Shriver—the founding director of the Peace Corps, the head of Johnson’s War on Poverty, and, as the husband of Eunice Kennedy, a brother-in-law of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy—was appointed U.S. ambassador to France. His appointment was not without controversy in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party—and in his own extended family.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 1, 2004
Length: 16 minutes (4,022 words)

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 7: The Death of Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 7: The Death of Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 7, 1996: The Death of Layne Staley and Bradley Nowell

Longreads Pick

There really is life after death in ’90s rock, provided you can retain enough of your old sound to convince people to move forward with you. But while the surviving members of Alice In Chains made sure to present their band as a newly evolved entity, Sublime’s Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson are trying to pick up where they were forced to leave off in 1996, when their lead singer, Bradley Nowell, died of a heroin overdose at age 28.

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: Jan 12, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,022 words)

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 3, 1992: Seattle and Pearl Jam

Longreads Pick

The perils of fame in grunge-era Seattle, and the trouble with avoiding it. “Still, the video for ‘Even Flow’ succeeded in doing for Pearl Jam what the ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ video had done for Def Leppard four summers earlier: It made you wish really hard that Pearl Jam would come somewhere near your town very soon.”

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: Nov 2, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,787 words)

Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 4, 1993: Chicago

Longreads Pick

After one of the headiest years in Chicago rock history—a time when the city usurped Seattle as the new alt-rock hotspot, thanks to Smashing Pumpkins going platinum with the colossal guitar symphony “Siamese Dream,” and Liz Phair and Urge Overkill releasing the critically acclaimed and demonstrably cool “Exile In Guyville” and “Saturation”—local music critic Bill Wyman stated an opinion that seems obvious now, but ended up being quite the shit-stirrer when he wrote it.

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: Nov 16, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,190 words)

National Security Inc.

Longreads Pick
Source: Washington Post
Published: Aug 1, 2010
Length: 20 minutes (5,103 words)

The Pleasures of Imagination

Longreads Pick

While reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose.

Author: Paul Bloom
Published: May 30, 2010
Length: 11 minutes (2,759 words)