Search Results for: Tim Murphy

Sponsored Longreads: Read an Excerpt from 'The Children,' by David Halberstam

The following is a free excerpt from Open Road Media’s The Children, the acclaimed book by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Halberstam on the early days of the civil rights movement. The below excerpt focuses on Diane Nash and the Nashville sit-ins, which started on this day, February 13, in 1960. Buy the book now.

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Hollywood Elementary

Longreads Pick

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc on the Oakwood Toluca Hills, a vast complex of temporary rental apartments that hundreds of aspiring Hollywood families call home:

Each year, between mid-January and May, when some 100-odd pilots are being cast, one-quarter of the Oakwood’s 1,151 furnished units are filled by families of child actors. “Home to the Famous, and Almost Famous,” a billboard at the front gate reads. Located near Burbank, it’s conveniently close to most of the major studios. The Oakwood’s orientation for “newbies,” the first-timers who make up about 80 percent of the families staying there each year, is also a draw: lectures about the entertainment business; connections to people like Simmons, who give complimentary classes to enlist new students; a show-biz-kid expo that displays all the tertiary industries: diction tapes, head shot photography and packaging, marketing-strategy DVD’s. On-site tutoring — unaccredited, held weekday mornings in the conference room — can be paid for weekly to allow children to come and go, given their unpredictable work schedules. Units at the Oakwood start at $2,000 a month for a studio with a Murphy bed.

Published: Jun 4, 2006
Length: 31 minutes (7,938 words)

Reading List: Interviews with Awesome Women Authors

Margaret Atwood with her first Italian publisher Mario Monti. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The best interviews with authors make you want to read—not just their work, but read in general, and read all the time, and read with a new fervor.

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1. “The Art of Not Belonging: Dwyer Murphy Interviews Edwidge Danticat.” (Guernica, September 2013)

Danticat gives a beautiful interview, discussing her book Claire of the Sea Light and what it’s like living on the hyphen between American and Haitian.

2. “‘Who survives, who doesn’t?’ An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” (Isabel Slone, Hazlitt, August 2013)

The “wise witch” of Canada discusses technology, military history, and the reception of Canadian literature.

3. “One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Malinda Lo.” (Julie Bartel, YALSA, June 2013)

Lo didn’t dig her teenage years, yet she’s a successful YA author. She calls two of her books “love letters to the X-Files.” She co-directs a website about diversity in YA literature and believes in honoring each letter of LGBTQ. Read more about this genre-bending maven.

4. “An Interview with Disability Activist and ‘Good Kings Bad Kings’ Author Susan Nussbaum.” (Caitlin Wood, Bitch Magazine, August 2013)

Nussbaum’s debut novel is a fine work of intersectional storytelling, relating the experiences of differently disabled Chicago teens. In this interview, Nussbaum talks about a new vocabulary for disability politics, the importance of sexually active disabled characters, and research for Good Kings Bad Kings.

For centuries, humans who were infected with the rabies virus had a fatality rate of 100 percent. A new treatment is providing hope, but its effectiveness is being called into question:

Not long ago, the medical response to this grim situation would have been little more than ‘comfort care’: administration of sedatives and painkillers to ease the suffering. Untreated, this suffering can be unbearable to watch, let alone experience. That telltale difficulty in swallowing, known as hydrophobia, results in desperately thirsty patients whose bodies rebel involuntarily whenever drink is brought to their lips. Soon fevers spike, and the victims are subject to violent convulsions as well as sudden bouts of aggression; their cries of agony, as expressed through a spasming throat, can produce the impression of an almost animal bark. Eventually the part of the brain that controls autonomic functions, like respiration and circulation, stops working, and the patients either suffocate or die in cardiac arrest. A decade ago, the only choice was to sedate them so their deaths would arrive with as little misery as possible.

But today, after millennia of futility, hospitals have an actual treatment to try. It was developed in 2004 by a pediatrician in Milwaukee named Rodney Willoughby, who, like the vast majority of American doctors, had never seen a case of rabies before. (In the US, there are usually fewer than five per year.) Yet Willoughby managed to save a young rabies patient, a girl of 15, by using drugs to induce a deep, week-long coma and then carefully bringing her out of it. It was the first documented case of a human surviving rabies without at least some vaccination before the onset of symptoms.

“Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery.” — Monica Murphy and Bill Wasik, Wired

More Wired

The blue-collar temp industry is booming, which doesn’t bode well for people searching for long-term, full-time jobs. A look at Labor Ready, which wants to be “the McDonalds of the temp industry”:

In the two weeks that I spend working out of Oakland’s Labor Ready branch, my ‘honest pay’ tops out at $8.75 an hour. I’ll clean a yard for a trucking firm, scrape industrial glue from cement floors for a construction company, and screw on the caps of bottles at an massage oil company whose “Making Love” line is a bestseller. I’ll also move heavy tools for a multinational corporation that repairs boilers on ships and be asked to serve food at Oakland A’s games for Aramark, a $13 billion powerhouse. I wasn’t able to take that one, but if I had, I would have been earning $8 an hour next to unionized workers making $14.30.

Labor Ready’s Oakland workforce is nearly entirely black, excepting the branch manager, who is white. Most of the workers I talk to are searching for stability but finding it elusive. They include homeowners in foreclosure, apartment-dwellers who are being evicted, and residents of motels negotiating for a few more days. And many express hope they can parlay a temp gig into something permanent. ‘I’ve been with Labor Ready for over a year now and still haven’t had any luck,’ says Stanley, who resembles a young Eddie Murphy. We’re standing in a dusty lot in Hayward, 15 miles south of Oakland, surrounded by 300 cars that have seen better days. ‘Most jobs are like this one, not looking to hire anyone full time.’

“Everyone Only Wants Temps.” — Gabriel Thompson, Mother Jones

More from Mother Jones

Everyone Only Wants Temps

Longreads Pick

The blue-collar temp industry is booming, which doesn’t bode well for people searching for long-term, full-time jobs. A look at Labor Ready, which wants to be “the McDonalds of the temp industry”:

“In the two weeks that I spend working out of Oakland’s Labor Ready branch, my ‘honest pay’ tops out at $8.75 an hour. I’ll clean a yard for a trucking firm, scrape industrial glue from cement floors for a construction company, and screw on the caps of bottles at an massage oil company whose “Making Love” line is a bestseller. I’ll also move heavy tools for a multinational corporation that repairs boilers on ships and be asked to serve food at Oakland A’s games for Aramark, a $13 billion powerhouse. I wasn’t able to take that one, but if I had, I would have been earning $8 an hour next to unionized workers making $14.30.

“Labor Ready’s Oakland workforce is nearly entirely black, excepting the branch manager, who is white. Most of the workers I talk to are searching for stability but finding it elusive. They include homeowners in foreclosure, apartment-dwellers who are being evicted, and residents of motels negotiating for a few more days. And many express hope they can parlay a temp gig into something permanent. ‘I’ve been with Labor Ready for over a year now and still haven’t had any luck,’ says Stanley, who resembles a young Eddie Murphy. We’re standing in a dusty lot in Hayward, 15 miles south of Oakland, surrounded by 300 cars that have seen better days. ‘Most jobs are like this one, not looking to hire anyone full time.'”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jul 16, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,255 words)

Ben Cohen's Top Longreads of 2011

Ben Cohen writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he also published a Kindle Single and wrote for Grantland, The Classical, Tablet, The Awl and Yahoo! Sports. You can follow him on Twitter at @bzcohen.

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I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled me to re-read them, over and over, but I do know that you’ll find yourself doing the same. In any case, you don’t need me to explain how to enjoy these stories, or why you should adore them. They speak for themselves. So, in the spirit of the season: gifts that keep on giving!

“‘It’s Too Bad. And I Don’t Mean It’s Too Bad Like “Screw ‘Em”,’” Jessica Pressler, New York: Lloyd Blankfein goes to a diner.

“Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference,” Wells Tower, GQ: Starbury goes to China.

“The Hangover Part III,” Brett Martin, GQ: Aziz Ansari, David Chang and James Murphy go to Tokyo.

“The History and Mystery of the High-Five,” Jon Mooallem, ESPN The Magazine: Hand goes high.

“Why John Calipari Can’t Catch a Break,” S.L. Price, Sports Illustrated: Coach goes to Kentucky.

“It’s The Economy, Dummkopf!” Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair: Michael Lewis goes to Germany.

“Danny Meyer on a Roll,” Sean Wilsey, The New York Times Magazine: Restauranteur goes… everywhere?

“Jennifer Egan on Reaping Awards and Dodging Literary Feuds,” Boris Kachka, Vulture: Jennifer Egan goes to Brooklyn.

“The Confessions of a Former Adolescent Puck Tease,” Katie Baker, Deadspin: Teenager goes to the Internet.

“American Marvel,” Edith Zimmerman, GQ: I’m not sure who goes where, or when, or why, but what!

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What ever happened to your signature laugh, by the way?

I don’t laugh like that anymore, somehow it doesn’t come out. It’s weird to change something that’s as natural as that. But it started out as a real laugh, then it turned into people laughing because they thought my laugh was funny, and then there were a couple of times where I laughed because I knew it would make people laugh. Then it got weird. People came up to me and said, “Do that laugh,” or if you laugh, someone turns around and goes, “Eddie?” I just stopped doing it.

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview.” — Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone

See more #longreads from Rolling Stone