Search Results for: movies

Breaking the Mold

A co-housing community. Photo: Tim Pierce

Jessica Gross | Longreads | August 2015 | 17 minutes (4,402 words)

 

Bella DePaulo, a Harvard-trained social scientist who is now a Project Scientist at UCSB, started her career researching deception. But it was when she delved into singlehood, her personal passion—she describes herself as “single at heart“—that she first felt enormous synchronicity with her research. “The singles work was something entirely different,” DePaulo told me over the phone. “It is really where I live in the literal and the figurative sense.” She has chronicled this work in scholarly papers, blogs for Psychology Today and PsychCentral, and written books including Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After and Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Stop It.

In her latest book, DePaulo continues to examine lifestyles that don’t quite fit cultural norms. For How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, she traveled around the United States, looking at alternative—that is, non-nuclear—ways of living. One example of this is co-housing, in which people live in separate dwellings but meet regularly in a shared common house. Another is Golden Girl Homes, an organization that helps “women of a certain age” live together. There’s also CoAbode, a registry for single mothers who want to live with other single-mom families. And there are even multigenerational homes, which function today in very different ways than we might imagine. Throughout, DePaulo stresses the balance between autonomy and community, and how our relative needs for each are so individual. The upshot is that, finally, no matter what our predilections, there is increasing space for us to create lifestyles that suit us.

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You’ve written a lot about being “single at heart” and knowing that you love being and living alone. Why were you drawn to study alternate living arrangements?

Well, part of the interest was other people’s interest: It was a topic that other people just really liked to talk about. There was a blog post I wrote, “Not Going Nuclear, So Many Ways to Live and Love,” that got a genuine response of people wanting to hear each other’s stories. I also noticed that it was a topic that was appearing not just in casual conversations, but in the media, too. It seemed to be something that was resonating.

As for me, I feel so, so committed, and always have, to living by myself. I wasn’t really exploring for myself—although I wonder if, at some level, I was wondering whether, if I ever really couldn’t continue to live by myself, there was some way out there that really would work for me. Read more…

Hollywood Gets Authenticity and the Pentagon Gets Publicity

Jamie Tarabay explored Hollywood’s relationship with the Pentagon in a recent piece for Al Jazeera America. The Pentagon has a devoted “entertainment-liaison officer” who acts as a Hollywood point person and helps decide which projects get Pentagon support (in the form of expertise, equipment, and locations). According to scholar Lawrence Suid, the Hollywood military relationship relationship dates back to 1910 and was “cemented” with the 1927 film Wings. Suid characterizes the relationship as one of “mutual exploitation”:

Suid coined the phrase “mutual exploitation” when he first stumbled onto the U.S. military-Hollywood connection. “I was teaching the history of the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t explain how we got into Vietnam. I could give the facts, the dates, but I couldn’t explain why,” he recalled. “And when I was getting my film degrees it suddenly occurred to me that people in the U.S. had never seen the U.S. lose a war, and when [President] Johnson said we can go into Vietnam and win, they believed him because they’d seen 50 years of war movies that were positive.”

Each side, Suid said, benefits from this arrangement. The U.S. military gets incredible publicity and recruitment advantages, and the film industry gets equipment, locations and authenticity.

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Our Sex Education: A Reading List

Here are nine stories about modern-day sex education and our history with bad sex ed classes.

1. “John Oliver Eviscerates American Sex Ed–But the Reality is Even Worse.” (Dianna Anderson, Rolling Stone, August 2015)

Ready to get angry? In a recent Last Week Tonight segment, John Oliver lambasted abstinence-only sex education, which features celibacy as the only method to prevent pregnancy. Dianna Anderson, feminist blogger and author of Damaged Goods, goes in-depth on the sorry state of sex ed in the United States. Thanks to Title V, tens of millions of dollars are funneled toward conservative teaching methods that do more fear-mongering than educating. Recently, the House of Representatives ratified a bill that will give even more money to abstinence-only “education.” This is federal and state funding, not private revenue. And parents who want their kids to have a holistic, comprehensive sex education in their schools face a bureaucratic nightmare. Read more…

A Moment of Zen: Seven Stories Looking Back at Jon Stewart’s Fake-News Legacy

Photo: Cliff

Tonight, Jon Stewart ends his 16-year run as host of “The Daily Show.” Here are seven stories looking back at how Stewart became the most influential fake-news anchor in the history of television:

1. Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America? (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, Aug. 15, 2008)

“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

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‘Gidget,’ John Hughes, and the Whitewashing of Jewishness in Pop Culture

Photo by Netflix

This whitewashing of Jewishness out of pop culture is an old, old story, and it isn’t specific to camp movies; it’s true of plenty of other Hollywood representations of American teens, too. The Czech Jew who wrote the novel that was the basis for Gidget (1959) was inspired by his own surfing daughter, Kathy Kohner, who went on to marry a scholar of Yiddish literature—but that didn’t make it into the sequels. One could even argue that a substantial element of John Hughes’ magic was to take places and performers that could be read as specifically Jewish—Skokie, Illinois, in Sixteen Candles, say, or Matthew Broderick, who not long before becoming Ferris Bueller played Eugene Morris Jerome in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs—and render them approachably all-American, neither too WASPy nor Jewish per se.

Josh Lambert writing for Tablet Magazine about Wet Hot American Summer and its recent Netflix revival. According to Lambert, unwhitewashed Jewishness and its humor remain at the heart of both versions of Wet Hot American Summer.

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The Wandering Years

Lawrence Ferlinghetti | The American Scholar | Summer 2015 | 23 minutes (4,685 words)

Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a series of travel journal entries adapted from poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s forthcoming book, Writing Across the LandscapeIt first appeared in The American Scholar’s Summer 2015 issue (subscribe here!).

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I was part of that Greatest Generation that came of age at the beginning of the Second World War. As I worked in San Francisco, the days and years fell away into the great maw of time. America went through a sea change after that. San Francisco, which had been a small provincial capital, grew up. So did I, and I started voyaging. I was usually traveling to some literary or political event or tracking down some author whose undiscovered masterpiece I could publish at City Lights Books. I didn’t keep journals consistently, so some literary capers went unrecorded, such as when I visited Paul Bowles in Tangier to pry from him his Moroccan tales in A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. This was agreed to, and then we sat dully in his high-rise apartment near the American Embassy. And when Jane Bowles suggested we turn-on, Paul said he didn’t have any hash. I was clean-shaven in a white suit, and I imagine he thought I was a narc. Paranoia, the doper’s constant companion! I wrote these peripatetic pages for myself, never thinking to publish them. It is as if much of my life were a continuation of my youthful Wanderjahr, my walk-about in the world. Rereading them now, I see a wandering figure in momentous times. …The war ends, decades whir by, there is a rumble in the wings, the scene darkens, and Camelot lost! Read more…

The Mysteries and Truths of Illness: A Reading List

Photo: NVinacco

In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work.” What happens when that long work is disrupted, when an irregularity appears? What if the irregularity is chronic, terminal, fatal? Here, I’ve collected 10 stories about authors reckoning with illnesses—some without cause or cure. Read more…

The Romantic Comedy Spectrum: A Reading List

Seems like the first movie I ever watched was a romance. It was a Disney movie; obviously, there’s a tortured love and a singalong. The most recent film I’ve seen, Trainwreck, is also a romance. What I’m interested in: the boundaries of the romantic comedy. Romantic comedies can be teen dreams (Clueless), homages to Shakespeare (She’s The Man), stunt-filled action romps (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), or cruel tearjerkers (P.S. I Love You). I’ve been inspired by romantic comedies before to Get My Shit Together, and I think that’s really cool. They can be timeless or comforting or really terrible, or all three. Romantic comedies—the best of them—allow us to project and to process. Here, I’ve collected a handful of stories centering on the creators and aficionados of the romantic comedy. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Matt

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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John Waters on TV, Bad Taste and Going Undercover

When I’m not frantically blogging for Longreads, I can be found with the writers of The Last Hurrah, a free comedy show in Frederick, MD (hosted by my boyfriend–disclaimer!) In honor of John Waters’ newest book, Carsick, the Last Hurrah team created a video of their attempts to “hitchhike” to Baltimore, Waters’ hometown. Kevin uploaded the video; it got a few hits. Then, silence. Last week, he received an email from an address he didn’t recognize. Guess who? John Waters sent us a video response. His hitchhiking sign says “The Last Hurrah.” That’s us! A weirdo comedy crew from a random Maryland city! We couldn’t believe it, and we still can’t, and all of these events have inspired me to (re)visit the not-so-underground filmmaker’s work. Luckily, Guernica published a new interview with The People’s Pervert just last week:

Guernica: You mentioned in your new book, Carsick, that you wouldn’t make a movie for under ten million now.

John Waters: It’s not that I wouldn’t—it’s that I couldn’t. Because what they want is movie stars. I’m not going to go ask movie stars to work for nothing. I’ve made nineteen movies, I have three homes, what am I going to say to them? “I don’t have any money”? And I’m not going to beg in public. To me, you know, I’ve made all these movies, they’re out there, they’re easy to get. Maybe I’m not going to make another movie. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s not like I haven’t spoken. I think it’s very easy to get my films; I think I was understood right from the beginning. And my books do great. So as long as I have a way to tell you another story—and I’m working on a TV project right now that I’m not allowed to talk about—but maybe it’ll be on TV. TV’s better today—there’s just way more people. So, who knows what’s going to happen? I always have a way to tell stories. That’s the only thing I can pass on: always have a backup career that is equally as important to you. Nothing lasts forever.

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